Hard not to believe Malawi would have a bigger economic upside from liberalising working rights and providing a pathway to citizenship.
From my experience with people who’ve spent years over there, there isn’t much desire for refugees to stay and become citizens. They are perceived by the voting public as competing for jobs. Jobs are perceived as scarce. It is politically far more popular to run on a platform of getting rid of refugees and refugee camps. There is also a very widespread perception that refugee camps are about making money for corrupt…
This disparity is usually showing up as a rural-urban divide, with the cities being more migrant friendly.
Whether migration is good or bad in pure economic terms is mostly a function of the demography of a country/region. For most industrialized nations more migrations would be economically benefitial, since the own birth rates are too low to even cover the retirement of their own population.
But of course for many people migration isn't just a rational economic question, is a much more loaded, symbolic issue —interwoven with questions of identity, self-worth, self-perception, self-confidence and mythological narratives of the own nation. Which is why identity politics is so effective in getting people to vote against their own economic interests.