Refugees are usually presented to the world at the moment when they have lost the most: homes, livelihoods, citizenship protections, family members and sometimes almost everything they possessed. 

Photographs capture border crossings, overcrowded boats, camps and food distributions. The vocabulary that follows is familiar: vulnerability, humanitarian assistance, protection and dependency.

All of this is real, but it is incomplete. What is much less visible is what refugees themselves do.

More than a decade ago, I wrote in Z about the dehumanization of African asylum seekers. More recently, at Africa at LSE, I have written about migration vulnerability and the political economy of combat recruitment and the political economy of refugee vulnerability. Those pieces concentrated largely on the structures that make displaced people vulnerable to exploitation.

Yet vulnerability should never be confused with passivity.

Refugees work, trade, organize, study, move, raise families and send money across borders. They create institutions and social networks. They rebuild lives in places that were never intended to become homes.

Resilience and agency overlap, but they are not quite the same thing. Resilience is the capacity to survive disruption and rebuild. Agency is the ability to make choices and act upon them. Neither should be romanticized. Refugees should not have to demonstrate extraordinary resilience simply to enjoy ordinary human rights.

What refugees build

Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns, reviewed in the Guardian, remains one of the clearest accounts of refugee agency.

Dadaab in northern Kenya was created as a temporary humanitarian space. Over time, however, its inhabitants created something resembling a city. Businesses emerged. Transportation systems developed. People traded, taught, borrowed money, communicated with relatives abroad and built networks of mutual assistance. People officially classified as recipients of aid were also shopkeepers, teachers, traders, employers and organizers.

I encountered the same issue years ago. In a 2017 Africa at LSE essay, I contrasted Uganda’s treatment of refugees with that of neighboring countries. Uganda gave refugees comparatively greater freedom to move, cultivate land and participate in economic life. Some became entrepreneurs and employers. Ethiopia and Kenya depended much more heavily on encampment and restrictions.

The refugees in Uganda did not possess more initiative. They simply had more room in which to exercise it.

That distinction matters because the language of “resilience” can become too comfortable. There is something admirable about people rebuilding after a catastrophe, but resilience can also become a convenient way for governments and humanitarian organizations to transfer responsibility onto displaced people themselves.

A person who survives inadequate housing, poverty, restrictions on employment and years of uncertain legal status may be praised for resilience when another question should also be asked: why were those conditions imposed in the first place?

The same applies to “self-reliance.” Governments routinely encourage refugees to become self-reliant while limiting their ability to work, move, open businesses or obtain an education. There is little meaning in telling people to support themselves while denying them the means to do so.

Sometimes, even when refugees succeed in helping themselves, the response is resentment rather than admiration.

When agency becomes a threat

South Africa is perhaps the most painful example.

Refugees and migrants from elsewhere in Africa have become part of the country’s economic life. They work in construction, agriculture, transportation and services. They operate restaurants, salons and repair businesses. Many run the neighborhood stores commonly known as spaza shops.

They are doing precisely what refugees and migrants are so often told they should do: work, trade and support themselves.

Yet their visibility can make them targets.

South Africa has experienced repeated waves of xenophobic violence against migrants and refugees. Z itself has covered the human cost of xenophobia and has more recently argued that expelling migrants will not create jobs.

The problem has again become acute. African migrants have faced attacks, looting and intimidation, while growing anti-immigrant mobilization has pushed many Zimbabweans, Malawians, Mozambicans and others to leave the country.

The explanation offered by those targeting migrants is familiar: unemployment, crime, competition for housing and pressure on public services.

Those problems are real.

But migrants did not create them.

Blaming a Somali shopkeeper, Ethiopian trader or Zimbabwean laborer is easier than explaining why, more than three decades after apartheid, one of Africa’s wealthiest countries still has such extraordinary unemployment, inequality and insecurity.

There is also something peculiar about who becomes the threatening foreigner.

A wealthy European executive, American professional or foreign investor rarely becomes the face of immigration in a poor South African community. The Zimbabwean worker, Somali shopkeeper, Nigerian trader or Mozambican laborer does.

That is why the term Afrophobia can sometimes be more illuminating than the broader word xenophobia.

Calling it simply self-hatred would be too easy. Apartheid left behind complicated hierarchies of race, class, status and belonging. People occupying the same precarious economic spaces are more easily imagined as competitors. The foreign shopkeeper encountered every day is more visible than the political and economic arrangements that may have far greater consequences for unemployment.

The result is a kind of horizontal resentment. People living with similar forms of insecurity are encouraged to direct their frustration sideways rather than upward.

This phenomenon is not unique to South Africa. There have also been tensions between some African immigrants and African Americans in the United States. That comparison needs care. African Americans are not generally hostile to Africans, any more than South Africans as a whole are hostile to migrants. There are also long histories of solidarity.

But shared experiences of racial inequality do not automatically erase differences in history, nationality, class or perceptions of economic competition. Marginalized people can still be encouraged to regard another marginalized group as a rival.

That is one reason scapegoating is politically useful. Conflict among people with relatively little power can divert attention from those with considerably more.

South Africa’s history makes this particularly tragic.

The struggle against apartheid was not South Africa’s struggle alone. The Frontline States supported South African liberation movements, provided sanctuary and endured economic pressure and military retaliation from Pretoria. Across Africa, opposition to apartheid became one of the few causes around which governments with very different political ideologies could agree.

Africans made sacrifices for South African freedom.

There is therefore something difficult to absorb about people from those same countries now being told that they do not belong in the country associated throughout the world with Nelson Mandela.

I was already writing in 2017 about refugees being burned alive by South African mobs. The underlying problem has not disappeared.

The irony has become even stranger in the United States.

The Trump administration sharply restricted ordinary refugee admissions while creating exceptional treatment for white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners. In 2026 the administration expanded the refugee ceiling specifically to facilitate further admissions of white South Africans.

At the same time, some South Africans who had spent years abroad have been returning because they prefer important aspects of life at home. Those returnees should not be confused with people admitted through the Trump refugee program, and individual claims of persecution should always be judged individually.

Still, the contrast is difficult to ignore.

Poor Black Africans can be treated as unwanted foreigners in South Africa while comparatively privileged white South Africans receive exceptional refugee consideration in the United States.

And that brings us back to agency.

Refugees are criticized when they depend on assistance. But they can also be resented when they successfully support themselves.

South Africa shows that self-reliance does not automatically produce acceptance. Under certain political and economic conditions, it can make refugees more visible and therefore more vulnerable.

Room to rebuild

Europe offers different variations on the same problem.

Germany faces demographic decline and persistent labor shortages. Refugees initially discussed largely in terms of humanitarian cost gradually become workers, taxpayers, colleagues and employers as they spend more time in the country.

Denmark offers an interesting Eritrean example. Eritrean refugees who arrived during the large migration movements of the previous decade attracted attention for comparatively strong labor-force participation. Their experience challenges easy assumptions about permanent refugee dependency.

Britain demonstrates what happens when governments constrain that agency themselves. Asylum seekers generally cannot work while their claims are being decided. Only after a lengthy delay can some apply for restricted permission to work. The British government’s own guidance sets out those restrictions.

A government can therefore create dependency and later complain about failed integration.

But work is only one expression of agency.

Sport makes other forms highly visible. Alphonso Davies was born in a refugee camp in Ghana after his Liberian parents fled the civil war. His family was resettled in Canada, where he became one of the country’s best-known footballers.

Nadia Nadim fled Afghanistan as a child and became an international footballer for Denmark while also training as a physician. Yusra Mardini fled Syria and competed for the Refugee Olympic Team. Eritrean refugee Tachlowini Gabriyesos also competed at the Olympics after an extraordinary journey out of Eritrea.

Their stories are inspiring, but that is not why refugees deserve protection.

Nobody should have to become an Olympian or football star to prove that giving refuge was worthwhile.

Intellectual and professional life provides equally important examples.

Timnit Gebru grew up in Ethiopia in an Eritrean family. During the Eritrea-Ethiopia war, remaining there became unsafe and she eventually reached the United States through the asylum system. She went on to become one of the most prominent researchers examining artificial intelligence, bias, power and accountability, and later founded the Distributed AI Research Institute.

Her story matters because refugee agency is not simply about finding a job. It can mean producing knowledge, challenging powerful institutions and helping shape an emerging field.

Asmait Merhatsion represents another kind of agency. She fled Eritrea as a young woman and sought asylum in Israel. Legal restrictions pushed her into cleaning work, but she eventually returned to health education, working in HIV prevention and supporting refugee communities.

The wider Eritrean diaspora also reminds us that refugee histories, migration and later generations cannot always be neatly separated. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, born and raised in Asmara, became a leading soil and climate scientist in the United States and served as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. She is better described as an immigrant scientist than simply labeled a refugee, but her career illustrates the broader intellectual contribution of African migration.

Political life provides perhaps the most dramatic transformation.

Ilhan Omar fled Somalia as a child, spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya and eventually became a member of the United States Congress.

Joe Neguse, the son of Eritrean refugees, also entered Congress.

In New Zealand, Ibrahim Omer went from being an Eritrean refugee and low-paid worker to trade-union activism and eventually Parliament.

And Colorado now offers another emerging example. Melat Kiros, who came to the United States from Tigray as a young child, defeated a long-serving incumbent in the 2026 Democratic primary for Denver’s congressional seat and is now the party’s nominee for Congress.

There is something profound about these transitions.

A refugee or immigrant begins by waiting for governments to determine whether a border may be crossed, where one may live and whether one may remain. Years later, that same person, or sometimes their children, may participate in writing the laws of the country that received them.

The movement is from being governed to governing.

Yet these exceptional examples should never become another burden imposed on displaced people.

Refugees do not need to become members of parliament, scientists, physicians or international athletes. Some are elderly. Some are traumatized. Some are disabled. Some will flourish economically and others will struggle for the rest of their lives. Protection should not depend upon the economic or cultural return a host country expects.

Agency is not the same thing as success, and resilience does not mean invulnerability.

Agency is often mundane.

A refugee who learns a new language interprets for someone who has just arrived. Someone who finds employment tells another person where jobs are available. Families pool money. People send remittances across borders. Someone with a car provides transportation. Parents help one another navigate unfamiliar school systems. Established refugees help newcomers find housing, doctors, legal assistance or work.

These activities rarely become international news.

Yet much of refugee life consists precisely of these efforts to make ordinary life possible again.

Dadaab shows people creating social and economic worlds inside confinement. Uganda demonstrates what can happen when refugees are given greater freedom. South Africa shows that economic initiative can generate resentment rather than acceptance. Germany demonstrates how the person initially portrayed as a burden may become part of the workforce an ageing economy needs. Britain shows how governments can obstruct the self-reliance they later demand.

Timnit Gebru and Asmait Merhatsion show something else: people do not stop carrying intellectual ambitions, professional identities and obligations to others merely because a government or international organization has classified them as refugees.

Refugees have always helped themselves. They also help one another.

A refugee is neither simply a helpless victim nor an inspirational symbol required endlessly to demonstrate resilience.

A refugee is a human being trying to recover ordinary control over a life subjected to extraordinary disruption.

The question is not whether refugees possess agency.

The question is how much room the rest of us give them to exercise it.

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