The Impact of Refugees on Cities

By Lam, Mercuri | January 13, 2026

Karen Jacobsen—

Between 2018 and 2024, I wrote a book that explored how refugees have transformed cities in the Middle East and Africa. I focused on Tripoli, a secondary city in Lebanon, and Cairo, Egypt’s megalopolis capital. Today, well over half the world’s 43 million refugees live in cities and towns in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as do almost all refugees in North America and Europe.

The growing number of refugees in cities has become a game changer for refugee protection—and for cities themselves. Humanitarian agencies and a global network of refugee activists and advocacy groups, such as the Mayors Migration Council, have come to recognize the importance of cities as hosts for refugees and migrants. And the private sector and city governments see the opportunities provided by refugees and migrants. International support for refugees is usually routed through national governments, but funders and agencies are acknowledging the importance of supporting city actors. Who are these actors, and what do they do for cities and for refugees?

Host-city actors include three important groups. The first is co-national migrants and refugees already living in the city. Most host cities have a history of in-migration, which means that well before a new influx there is an established population of co-nationals, whom we might call the disapora, usually with citizenship or permanent residence. There were thousands of Syrians, Sudanese, Eritreans, and Palestinians living in Cairo and Tripoli long before the most recent arrival of refugees from those countries.

This long-standing diaspora population is often the most important source of support for new arrivals, providing them with housing and food, helping them find health care and employment, investing in their businesses, and guiding them through the red tape of city government and humanitarian organizations. For the city, the diaspora boosts new refugee businesses, eases pressure on housing and employment markets, and generally helps new arrivals become absorbed into city life. Supporting the diaspora is thus a low-cost way to assist both refugees and city residents.

A second important group is the national residents engaged with refugees. Most cities have long-established local groups who sympathize with and want to help refugees. They open their hearts, wallets, and even their homes to refugees. (Of course, there are also many residents vehemently opposed to refugees.) Citizens welcome refugees for different reasons: some see themselves and their cities as part of a shared global humanity, with obligations to those fleeing desperate situations; some have themselves experienced displacement; some recognize that taking advantage of the economic, cultural, and commercial benefits that refugees bring serves their own interests more than does resisting or obstructing the newcomers.

Cities and towns that are close to international borders have long histories of cross-border movement for trade, shopping, visiting family, and so forth, and are therefore more used to and open to migrants. Many citizens support refugees through their churches, temples, mosques, or secular neighborhood associations. While citizens’ generosity might be taxed when the numbers get too high, there is still a strong and resilient norm of hospitality that city governments can draw on and support.

A third source of host-city support comprises community-based organizations led by refugees or host-city advocates. These organizations wax and wane, often struggling to find consistent funding and staff. Successful community organizations are wondrous groups of committed individuals able to withstand burnout, low pay, and lack of visibility and appreciation. They are an essential part of the support architecture for refugees and for host cities in general, as they have experience in how to manage city bureaucracies, legal issues, and the immediate needs of refugees. Without these groups, both the refugees and the neighborhoods they live in would be much worse off. Refugee-supporting community organizations are ubiquitous in host cities and should be supported by city governments, international organizations, and private donors.¹

Finally, the refugees themselves: a city’s refugee (and migrant) population, both long stayers and new arrivals, is composed of diverse groups, nationalities, education levels, wealth levels, and identities. Not everyone arrives in desperate need. Indeed, not all refugees have made long and perilous journeys; some have the resources to take a direct flight to their destination city, their experience of persecution and violence having occurred before they were able to leave. (A wonderful illustration is the Netflix show Mo, loosely based on the comedian Mo Amer’s family of Palestinian asylum seekers in Houston, Texas.)

Many refugees transfer their assets to their host city. These assets include human capital in the form of entrepreneurship, as well as the technical and professional skills brought by refugees trained as nurses, doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, technicians, farmers—the list is long. Most of all, refugees and migrants bring a strong work ethos based on the desire to rebuild their lives and the need to earn income. Many small and medium-sized towns need such human capital, whether it be health care workers, dentists, electricians, elder-care nurses, or restaurant servers. Resettled or formally recognized refugees are typically allowed to work, but they usually make up only a small proportion of a displaced population. In cities where asylum seekers (those not yet granted formal refugee status) face national regulations that prohibit them from working, they either confront enforced idleness or work anyway, under the table. This means cities lose the benefits of their work, including income taxes. In addition, workers’ unauthorized status contributes to a city’s lack of information about its workers and overall population.

Finding ways to support asylum seekers who want to work legally is a major boon to cities. For example, the city of Denver, Colorado, has created apprenticeship programs and public-private partnerships that take advantage of the influx of asylum seekers that occurred in 2023–24. WorkReady Denver is a job skills–building program that creates a pipeline for industries with labor shortages and connects job seekers with employers. The program provides training and certification for asylum seekers waiting to receive work authorization. Denver’s recent mayors have shown remarkable leadership in harnessing the potential of refugees and asylum seekers while working closely with the state of Colorado, the business community, and local institutions such as universities. Many cities all over the world actively support refugees; the Mayors Migration Council frequently showcases these cities.

Programs like WorkReady Denver offer models for a future in which cities are certain to hold more refugees and migrants than they do today. Such support goes well beyond designating “sanctuary cities” that offer safety to asylum seekers. Citizens who try to support refugees do so despite the current anti-immigrant political climate, where asserting pro-refugee, humanitarian values often conflicts with national policies. Most governments of destination countries in Europe and North America prefer to keep refugees out in the first place by creating walls and border restrictions, or by “resettling” them in other countries (as the United Kingdom tried unsuccessfully to do in 2023, sending asylum seekers to Rwanda).² Transit countries try to siphon migrants and refugees off their territory, often in collusion with smugglers, or seek to send them back to their origin countries. But such steps are unlikely to work, given other countries’ reluctance to take in both types of migrants.

These problems are unlikely to diminish any time soon, because migration is not going away. The millions of registered refugees in the world’s cities are just a small subset of the total unregistered population of migrants, especially those living in low-income neighborhoods. Many would probably qualify as refugees. Whether in smaller (but rapidly growing) border cities, or in the poor neighborhoods of giant capital cities, urban displacement will ramp up as climate change, conflict, and environmental disasters drive them from their homes. In the coming years, rising waters will threaten thousands of coastal cities. Loss of farmland and rangeland from lengthening droughts or catastrophic flooding will push millions to move. Conflict over loss of land and diminishing resources will displace even more people. Most will move to the cities of their own countries. But millions will also leave their countries to join their families in foreign cities.

The impact on cities depends on the responses of government agencies (city and national), of humanitarian agencies and their private-sector partners, and of civil society—including the media and politicians, the citizens, and the refugees themselves. These actors have different ideologies and agendas and varying abilities and willingness to work together. Their interactions have consequences for how refugees are received, what happens to them as their stay lengthens, and their overall impact on their host city. When city actors mobilize to address the problems and take advantage of the benefits refugees bring, they mitigate the negative impacts and maximize the positive effects of an influx for the entire city.

For a sampling, see the Refugees in Towns Project, Fletcher School, Tufts University, https://refugeesintowns.net ︎
Peter William Walsh, “Q&A: The UK’s Former Policy to Send Asylum Seekers to Rwanda,” Migration Observatory, July 25, 2024, https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/qa-the-uks-policy-to-send-asylum-seekers-to-rwanda/ ︎