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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

I have a question that only a Lebanese could probably answer.

From the article: > the port sent a team of Syrian workers to fix the warehouse.

What's the purpose of mentioning that they're Syrian?

Syrian refugees are about 20% of the Lebanese population, so they're the bulk of the low-paid, low-skill labor force. (Low-skill not necessarily because they don't have any skills, but because the skills they have don't match what the Lebanese economy demands.)

Mentioning that they're Syrian is a shorthand for "they did it on the cheap".

This was kind of the case before the Syrian civil war though. "Unskilled" Labourers from Syria would work the week in Lebanon, live in miserable, cramped conditions, then go home for the weekend. Rinse/Repeat.

The earning power was simply different - and a Lebanese would rarely do it for the rates those jobs ended up paying because of the abundance of Syrians who were willing to do it in Lebanon.

Probably because Syrians are considered cheap low quality labor (due to their desperation from having a decade long civil war), so it's kind'of like the US picking up laborers from Home Depot to figure out how to clean the Nukes.

"Unskilled laborers" would have been a better turn of phrase.

Not to imply Syrians are generally so, but just probably so in this case given recent events and war refugee movements, unverifiable credentials, and available jobs, etc.

I am not Lebanese but I am aware of all conflicts going in the region, Lebanon had the second largest number of Syrian refugees after Turkey and many of them are used there as cheap labour, so that also could go with what was mentioned earlier of corruption go hand in hand with incompetence, so getting a cheap labour to fix the door would mean very likely these people were not trained in handling or working in near proximity of dangerous chemicals, I think mentioning that they were Syrians would clarify the point, rather then accusing them of being the cause of the accident

> Lebanon had the second largest number of Syrian refugees after Turkey

And the most, per capita. (1M Syrians to 7M Lebanese means 13% or so of the people in Lebanon right now are Syrian refugees; Turkey has 3.6M across 83M, or 4%)

In both cases, the burden that these countries (and others like Jordan and Germany) are bearing, in response to the humanitarian apocalypse that is Syria right now, is very impressive. But 13% is absolutely staggering.

It was a totally unnecessary detail. In my opinion it was dog whistling. Replace Syrian with "African" or "Jewish" and it shouldn't be any more or less outrageous of a detail to add. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24162563

just a correction Syrian is not a race Lebanese and Syrians or Jordanians are all arabs but you find different belief groups there, christians muslims (Shia and sunni and...) and more but most of them are Arabs if not all

They're all Arabs only in the sense that they speak Arabic. Syrians and Lebanese people are Levantine (with varying degrees of mixture with Arabs depending on subregion and religion - but the vast majority have primarily Levantine DNA). Nonetheless, modern DNA analysis can guess who is Lebanese and who is Syrian more often than not. The same goes for distinguishing a Nord from a Swede.

Probably the contractor doing the job was using low paid incompetent Syrian refugees as workers.

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