The head of the World Bank has launched a thinly-veiled attack on Europe for its “xenophobic” response to the migration crisis that has seen millions of people flee Syria and other war-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Jim Yong Kim, the bank’s president, said Europe needed migrants to help offset its demographic time bomb and that countries that absorbed refugees as the US had done at the turn of the last century would be the ones that benefitted.
He made the criticism in an interview with Emerging Markets in which he outlined the bank’s radical new strategy for intervening to help fragile countries that were still in the middle of a conflict.
HSBC said that a million extra migrants a year could boost eurozone growth by 0.2% a year and add €300bn to GDP by 2025.
“Many advanced economies have increasingly advanced aged populations, a rapidly shrinking workforce and very low birth rates so they need migrants and it should be part of their economic strategy to recruit the kind of immigrants that will help them,” Kim told Emerging Markets. “It should be but it’s not.”
Asked about the response by European governments to the influx of refugees which many aid agencies have criticised as incoherent, Kim said he was speaking as an economic migrant himself who left then poverty-stricken South Korea for the US in 1964.
“We are saying to everyone ‘take a look at the economics, folks’. The advanced economies that are most open are likely to be the economies that grow most robustly.
“That’s my message and I hope I embody that message. Xenophobia is actually a very bad economic strategy and we are going to shout that to the rafters.”
Last night theWorld Bank Group and the Islamic Development Bank Group announceda joint initiative to scale up financing in the Middle East and North Africa to help countries hosting significant refugee populations, countries impacted by conflict
Conflict states
Referring to the war-torn countries where many of the estimated 10 million migrants had come from, Kim said that the bank was “retooling its approach”.
He said in the past the bank had waited until peace had been achieved or a political agreement made before moving in with financial assistance and advice.
“We are now saying we have to rethink this because the average life of a refugee as a refugee is 17 years so this is not an acute problem but a chronic problem and we have to think completely differently about refugees.”
Until now the bank has only given development aid to countries. “But what if you are a country and a quarter of your population are refugees who don’t have jobs and are living in camps?
“We have to rethink humanitarianism. It’s not just a short term ‘go in and give out food and blankets and get out’.”
He said the Bank had realised it needed to start thinking about its response at the beginning of a crisis. “The original intention was the World Bank and United Nations would be working hand-in-glove. We need to bring together these disparate pieces.”