International Arbitration ♦ Fall 2025

Refugee Markets

Neha Jain

Recent years have seen millions of people displaced by major environmental and political upheavals around the world. Yet anti-immigrant sentiments have driven electoral results in the United States and Europe, resulting in hardline shifts in policy. Legal scholars confronting anti-immigrant backlash have advanced sophisticated market models as the next-best solution to the global crisis in refugee protection, on the thought that states in the Global South might be induced to take refugees, for a price, with humanitarian benefits. This Article advocates leveraging existing tools in domestic and international law to resist the normalization of market thinking in international refugee policy.