Social and Economic Impact of Large Refugee Populations on Host Developing Countries III

by: Ng Cheng Wei

The article “Social and Economic Impact of Large Refugee Populations on Host Developing Countries” is published by Executive Committee of High Commissioner’s Programme Standing Committee under United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),dated January 6th ,1997. UNHCR, also known as the UN Refugee Agency, is a United Nations agency mandated to protect and support refugees at the request of a government or the UN itself and assists in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. The article mainly addresses all reader have to well aware the impact of large scale of refugee populations.

The purpose of this article is to inform the readers about the impacts of refugees influx. The presence of refugees compounds the already prevailing economic, environmental, social and, at times, political difficulties in these countries. Moreover, the presence of refugees, and demands on the already severely strained economy, services and infrastructure add to the extreme hardship affecting the local populations. In many instances, refugees become an added impediment to, or risk jeopardizing, the development efforts of the host country. Moving on the language aspect of this article, throughout this whole article the writer uses simple and easily understandable language. There is not much usage of bombastic words. But the writer has good vocabulary as well as good command of English. In his/her writing the author is very straightforward. For example paragraph 2 from line 13 to 15,the author says “In many instances, refugees become an added impediment to, or risk jeopardizing, the development efforts of the host country.” and paragraph 3,line 3 to 5 ,the author says that “Over time, their presence leads to more substantial demands on natural resources, education and health facilities, energy, transportation, social services and employment”. I like the ways of author’s writing, because the author doesn’t beat around the bush but presents his/her point as it is without any sugar coating on it. Apart from that, the author is very informal in his writing.It can be seen when author wrote this article with subjective tone where he/she added on the words that describe feelings, judgements, or opinion such as “means that”, “may causes”, “they can”, “may be”. Moreover, from the line 16 to 18 in paragraph 2 , “While the international emergency aid in response to such an emergency does have some positive effects on the host society, this hardly compensates for the negative consequences of such large concentrations of refugees.” The tone is tolerant. The words “does have some positive effects” show that the writer accepts the situation while recognizing that it could be better. At line 15 in paragraph 2 too, author say that “Their negative aspects may be felt long after a refugee problem is solved”. The tone is optimistic. The writer is expecting the problems to be improved soon.

The author has an impudent choice of words. There are some using words that are impolite in the article.For example the author refers to the larger number of refugees as refugees compounds. The author is biased in his/her writing ,because he/she gives more preferences, example and discusses more precisely the bad impacts. There seem like did not have any good impacts about the large scale of refugees in his/her writing. But his/her article got a lot of supporting details, data and concrete evidence as there are hard facts and figures and the most importing ,it is not only purely based on the author’s emotions or experience. This can be prove at paragraph 1, for example in line 7 “For example, in Nepal, in the district of Jhapa, 90,000 refugees represent over 13 per cent of the local population”, and in line 9 “ there were some 700,000 refugees among a local population of 186,000.”.\

In a nutshell, this article is very good to read due to the solid case with proven facts, figures , data and the language used by author in his/her writing. The author also succeeded in inform the readers about the impacts of movement of large scale of refugees populations to the host’s country. We do agree that the bad impacts of that movement is more than its good impacts.