In light of recent news that three million Syrians have now fled their country, the article, entitled 'View on Migration: Divert spending away from refugees', draws on Omar Dahi's recent piece in which he argues that the most effective way to deal with the refugee crisis would be for Syria’s neighbours, Jordan and Lebanon, to ramp up their overall spending on infrastructure.
Asked how he had reached that conclusion and reflecting on his travels to the region, Professor Dahi says; 'The most obvious [trend] for me was that it was completely inefficient and unsustainable to keep up the process of reaching out just to refugees with aid...There are many villages that didn’t have electricity and running water. But there were widespread stories of water being trucked in just for the Syrian refugees. So you can imagine that these approaches were not just wasteful, they were exacerbating tensions between refugees and villagers.'
