Kenya says the camps are a security threat, but the move comes at a time when refugees are big business.

Kenya recently announced it will close the world's biggest refugee camp. It's a move it's threatened before, but this year, it has some unexpected leverage: Europe.

Kenya is home to about half a million refugees, most of them from neighboring Somalia, where insecurity has been the norm for decades. The world's biggest refugee camp, Dadaab, opened in northern Kenya 25 years ago. Kenya has long wanted to reduce those refugee numbers, and nearly three years ago struck a deal with Somalia to slowly send Somalis back who were willing to go.

Tobias Schwarz / AFP / Getty Images

When Europe began panicking over its growing refugee population, Kenya took notice. A very noticeable feature of that crisis is that Europe is willing to spend cash — lots of cash — to end its refugee problems.

The European Union struck a deal with Turkey in March to send back refugees who’d sailed in rubber boats from Turkey to Greece. It promised to bear the financial burden for their care, pledging €3 billion immediately and another €3 billion when that runs out. (That’s nearly $7 billion.)

Last week, the EU made its calculations even clearer, with a proposal for fairly distributing refugees across EU member states — a proposal that included an opt-out option, called a “solidarity contribution”: €250,000 (nearly $300,000) for every refugee a member state refuses to admit.

Europe’s reluctance to accept refugees — and, presumably, the money it’s willing to pay to dodge them — has grabbed Kenyan officials' attention.

“In Europe, rich, prosperous and democratic countries are turning away refugees from Syria, one of the worst war zones since World War Two,” said Joseph Nkaisserry, the minister of the interior, in an address on Wednesday explaining the policy to close the camps.

Nkaisserry’s statement “directly points towards the scenes we’ve seen in Europe, with regards to how [Kenyan officials] have decided to use refugees as a bargaining chip in international politics,” said Andrew Maina, an immigration and asylum lawyer and the program officer for communications at the Refugee Council of Kenya, a Nairobi-based non-governmental organization.

“I think Kenya is borrowing a lead from a very bad example,” he said. “If the most powerful states are actually doing the same thing Kenya is doing … and they’re the ones with the moral authority of telling Kenya to stick to its international obligations, there’s the notion the international community can’t do anything about it.”

Kenya isn’t the only one taking note of Europe’s seemingly priceless appetite for avoiding refugees. One day after the EU proposed its opt-out price, a delegation of EU foreign ministers met with the government of Niger, a West African country that 150,000 people are expected to pass through on their way to Libya and, after a dangerous sea journey, to Italy, to talk about illegal immigration. The Niger government said it could help curb the problem — for around $1.1 billion.

Which means Kenya, while it’s attracting headlines right now, isn’t alone in sensing opportunity.

"The lack of leadership from Europe gives thse other countries the space to start ransoming the EU," said Ben Rawlence, author of City of Thorns, an up-close look at Dadaab, and a former Human Rights Watch researcher.

Umit Bektas / Reuters

Kenya's displeasure for hosting refugees does have a long history, and — to be fair — its plan to voluntarily return some refugees was already set to expire this year.

In 2012, Kenya tried to force all refugees in the country into two camps in the north — Kakuma, near South Sudan, and Dadaab, near Somalia. In 2014, the police rounded up anyone suspected of being a refugee who didn’t have the right paperwork. As many as 4,000 people were held in a Nairobi sports stadium during the roundups, and many people reported that they had to pay bribes to be released; at least one woman died during detention.

In late 2013, Kenya formalized a three-year plan, along with the Somali government and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to voluntarily return refugees. But only 14,000 people have gone back — a rate the government has long complained is too slow — and Kenya has been disappointed that international donors haven’t pledged more money for the program, and the agreement that governs those returns is set to expire in November.

Tony Karumba / AFP / Getty Images

Kenya thinks the refugee camps harbor terrorists, but experts and refugee aid workers dispute this.

Kenya definitely has a terrorism problem. Al Shabaab, an Islamist terrorist group based in Somalia, killed nearly 70 people in an attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi three years ago. Last year, the group murdered nearly 150 students at Garissa University, in northern Kenya.

“Some of the largest terrorist attacks, such as the 2013 Westgate atrocity, have been planned and executed from Dadaab,” wrote Karanje Kibicho, a high-level security official, in a British paper on Monday.

“That’s nonsense. It’s completely not true. There’s no evidence linking any of the terror attacks in Kenya to Dadaab,” said Rawlence, who spent years in Dadaab for his book. “If you talk to police in Dadaab they’ll talk very proudly about their community policing, which was paid for by USAID and which has been very successful. The community [in Dadaab] is hostile to Al Shabaab — if Al Shabaab discovers you have a ration card, they execute you for taking food from the infidels.”

Tony Karumba / AFP / Getty Images

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