The Economist Who Wants to Put Refugees to Work

At the end of his first year at England’s Durham University, 19-year-old Alexander Betts faced, as he puts it, “a long summer with lots of free time and not much money.” To pass the hours, he took a gig volunteering at a reception center for refugees in the Netherlands. “What immediately struck me was that these people had something to offer,” he says. “A Bosniak lawyer taught me a bit of international law. An Iranian Olympian taught me a bit of table tennis.” The refugees, trapped in bureaucratic limbo and barred from working, had ample time to chat.

With this in mind, Betts returned to his studies in economics and discovered that idling refugees are the norm: Afraid of taking jobs away from their own citizens, countries accepting the world’s 21.3 million refugees typically ban them from seeking employment on arrival. Much research had been done on the negative effects of these policies, but alternative strategies remained elusive. Betts used his undergraduate dissertation to design more efficient ways to manage refugee populations, including a matching program that would align migrants’ location preferences with host countries’ workforce needs.