The Trouble With Being Useful

Imagine being welcomed with a list of everything you might become. A doctor. An entrepreneur. A taxpayer. Someone whose work will more than repay the help you receive.

It is a hopeful picture. It is also worth asking what happens if none of it comes true.

A welcome built around future achievements can feel provisional. Beyond questions of legal status, there is the everyday question of whether a person who receives help must keep earning their acceptance in a community. Arguments about refugees bring that uncertainty into focus.

The economic argument for helping people has an understandable appeal. It suggests that one person's security need not come at another's expense. In debates about refugees, it also challenges a diminishing picture of a person as nothing more than a collection of needs.

Alexander Betts's The Wealth of Refugees emphasizes the skills and aspirations of displaced people and the importance of including them in the economies of receiving countries. In his account of that research, education and employment offer opportunities for purposeful lives beyond meeting immediate needs. The focus shifts from what people receive to what they can do.

There is something important in that shift. Being able to work can mean earning money one does not have to request from someone else. It can mean making choices, practicing a skill, or becoming known for something other than having needed help. To dismiss those possibilities as mere economics would miss how closely material independence can be connected to dignity.

The trouble begins when the opportunity to contribute becomes the price of being accepted.

Giving someone the chance to use their abilities expands their options. Making those abilities the reason they deserve help makes acceptance contingent on how well those options turn out.

Consider the person who never becomes the success story. Not the future surgeon whose qualifications need recognition, but someone who will need substantial support for the rest of their life. Or someone who works an ordinary job, earns little, and never produces a persuasive account of having repaid society. If the case for welcoming them rests entirely on the promise of an economic return, what can be said on their behalf when that promise cannot be made?

One answer is to broaden what counts as contribution. Paid employment is hardly the only way a person matters to others. Raising children, caring for relatives, translating a letter for a neighbor, or being a dependable friend can all be valuable without appearing on a payslip. An economic account that leaves these things out is incomplete.

But even this answer stops short. It asks us to conduct a more generous inventory of a person's usefulness. It does not release them from the inventory. Eventually, we still reach someone who cannot supply the evidence we want, or who should not have to explain their most intimate relationships to establish that they deserve a place.

Of course, the economic case does not have to impose an individual test. A policy can have broad benefits without everyone contributing the same amount. Someone who argues that inclusion strengthens an economy need not believe that an individual unable to work should be excluded. The question is whether we have another reason ready when the economic argument runs out.

There is a serious practical objection here: institutions need resources, and public support cannot simply be assumed. Evidence of mutual benefit may persuade people whom an appeal to dignity does not. If that evidence helps secure housing, education, or the opportunity to work, refusing to use it would be a peculiar kind of principle. The people needing those things should not be asked to wait for everyone else to acquire better motives.

In Refuge, Betts and Paul Collier examine the problem of sharing responsibility for refugee protection among countries with unequal incentives to participate. Their analysis makes clear why a moral commitment needs workable arrangements behind it. Protection cannot be sustained by announcing that it ought to exist.

Still, an argument can be politically useful without being morally sufficient. Showing that a commitment is affordable, or even beneficial, helps explain how it can be sustained. It does not settle why the commitment should hold when it becomes costly.

The distinction changes how we might speak about success. We can celebrate someone building a business without presenting it as retroactive proof that helping them was justified. We can take pride in a person's achievements without making another person's life look like a failed investment.

It also changes what a person should be free to ask for. Imagine someone who believes they are welcome only because they fill an urgent labor need. Asking for better conditions, taking time to recover, or choosing a less profitable path could begin to feel like a breach of the bargain. A person whose place depends on being valuable to someone else has a reason to keep proving that value, even when doing so costs them too much.

Rejecting this continual test of worth does not mean rejecting responsibility. People can owe one another fairness, effort, and consideration without their basic standing being up for review whenever they fall short. Living together involves obligations. It should also allow for the fact that our ability to meet them changes, sometimes dramatically, and not always in ways we can anticipate or control.

When someone asks whether they have done enough to justify having been welcomed, there should be something kinder, and more secure, to offer than another task.