By Karen Rubin, News & Photo Features

With even access to places that only last year were welcoming to desperate Syrian and Iraqi refugees now cut off, new solutions are essential.

Here’s a novel idea that emerged after my recent travels: Albania could be a player in solving the Syrian Refugee crisis, and help itself in the bargain. Here’s why:

Albania has a tradition of helping refugees. I was surprised to learn during my recent visit that during the Holocaust, Albania, a majority Muslim country, protected 200 of its own Jewish citizens and took in 2000 Jewish refugees, harboring them from the Nazis, sheltering them “in plain sight” by blending them into the local population, at grave danger to their own lives. At the end of WWII, Albania was the only European country with more Jews than it had at the start of the war.

Here’s another thing: Albania suffers from under-population. After 50 years of Communist dictatorship when people were imprisoned inside their own country, tens of thousands left the country left as soon as the shackles were released, causing a massive brain drain.

Albania’s economy is stagnant – there is virtually no manufacturing, no export of any kind, no technological development. The biggest industries are construction (roads) and agriculture. There are still unresolved issues of property ownership stemming from the shift from feudal society to Communist dictatorship (when private property was nationalized), back to a vaguely capitalist economy. My idea is that all those who have a solid claim should become “shareholders” or “partners” in property ownership. With the value of things at roughly one-fifth (the median income in Albania is $5,000), a foreign investor can pay off all the claimants, or the partners can share in new ventures. Meanwhile, Albania has plentiful water resources and vast tracts of land – granted much of it is mountainous, but I have seen many villages carved in to the hillsides. USAID has been looking for ways to bolster Albania’s economy.

Albania is a young country, a small country. As one young man tells me, it gets no respect in the world community, but for centuries has always been pushed around by larger powers – the Ottoman Turks for 500 years, the French and Italians minutes after Albania won its Independence from the Ottomans in 1912, the “Council of Ambassadors” who sliced and diced the country to half its size, the Communists after WWII up until 1992. This is a country so craving international attention, that when George W. Bush became the first sitting American president to visit (in 2007), they named a street in the capital city of Tirana for him.

Now here’s an idea: instead of US spending billions of dollars to keep people in horrible refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey where people are frustrated without any ability to work or get educated or have a productive life, how about funding a program to enable families to apply for a resettlement in newly created villages in Albania. The families would be selected based on the skills they bring – doctors, teachers, nurses, engineers, etc. etc., and they would build self-sufficient communities. They would have work visas, and opportunity to apply for citizenship at some point. They would have to follow Albanian law, would not be allowed to impose Sharia law (Albania is majority Muslim but is secular and tolerant of other religions).

The refugees would create their own towns, have their schools and clinics and city-services. They would be offered housing and some initial grant aid to resettle, but would have mortgages and business loans that they would repay – the funding to go back to the coordinating agency.

This would also be a major boon to Albania: the money spent to resettle the refugees would spark the economy. Moreover Albania needs the expertise and the consumer demand the new settlers would bring. The Syrian refugees are a closer cultural match than coming to Western Europe or US.

This is much the same as what was done to settle the American West, with land grants and such, and the American experience has proved over and over that immigrants are a boon to the economy and society – that’s why Germany has been so keen on bringing in hundreds of thousands a year.

For Albania, a tiny country of just 3.5 million population, the money would trigger consumer spending, which ripples through the economy, and create new jobs with new investments and ventures, new innovations and entrepreneurial endeavors. And it would make Albania a player on the world stage.

When I broached this idea to a young fellow whose brother works for the Prime Minister, he agreed it would be a good idea for Albania, but argued that the refugees wouldn’t want to come to Albania, they want to go to Germany where they think the streets are paved with gold. I responded that after years stuck in refugee camps, they would be more receptive, and the program would only take people who wanted this for their families.

The United States, through its involvement with various refugee agencies, might help develop the mechanism to relieve the suffering for at least some of the millions of people stuck in refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey and Greece, some for years, and provide the seed funding.

It would be in the United States’ interest as well, because the refugee problem won’t go away just because the US closes its eyes or its borders, declares undocumented immigrants, migrants and refugees persona non grata or non-persons. The problem will only get worse, possibly destabilize America’s allies and just as global warming impacting faraway places with droughts, floods, and sea level rise, and in the case of public health epidemics like Ebola and Zika, it will come back to hurt the US, as well.

Despite Republicans’ best efforts, the United States is on track to resettle some 10,000 Syrian refugees by October, the end of fiscal 2016, the number targeted by Obama. This is still a small fraction of the 65,000 Obama and Democrats had sought to resettle at the height of the publicity of the refugee crisis, last summer. The international outrage seems to have subsided this year, though the number of deaths of desperate migrants fleeing war and terrorism in Syria and Iraq has actually increased. But Europe – particularly Germany- has tightened entrances, sobered by the mounting political pressure that resulted in the Brexit vote in Great Britain; even Angela Merkel’s leadership has come under attack as right-wingers ascend.

This is the case in the US, as well, with Donald Trump hitching his prospects to become president to anti-immigration and particularly anti-Muslim policies. Trump issued a press release calling Hillary Clinton “America’s Merkel” and noting that Clinton has said she would target 65,000 refugees, then stated, “Assuming her goal is to admit 155,000 refugees each year during a hypothetical first term in office, a Clinton Administration would admit at least 620,000 refugees in just four years – a population roughly the size of Baltimore.. at a lifetime cost of over $400 billion.”

Trump’s despicable rhetoric is already having results in an uptick of violence against Muslims in this country, and very likely factored into the shooting deaths of an Iman and his assistant in Ozone Park, Queens, last weekend.

Many Republican governors have declared their states off-limits to any Syrian refugee resettlement, despite the fact they are powerless to stop the federal government if it chooses to resettle refugees in their state. One of them is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, where, in defiance,  a group from churches and synagogues have come together to actively support the resettlement of several Syrian families.

With the ability to receive Syrian and Iraqi refugees hampered, the United States’ main involvement in relieving the suffering of the refugees is by spending billions of dollars in aid to support the camps. But there is no life in those camps, where children are unable to go to school, young people can’t get a college degree; professionals are unable to work in their profession if at all. People are desperate, which is why so many are putting themselves in the hands of shady smugglers, launching themselves into unsafe boats to try to make the journey to Western Europe, ideally, the new Promised Land: Germany.

With even access to places that only last year were welcoming now cut off, new solutions are essential.

And for Albania, the US and the refugees, resettlement of families in Albania could be a win-win-win.

See also: Come to Albania Now to See Emergence of a Young Country

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