When the winners of the Secretary of State’s Awards for Corporate Excellence (ACE) were announced earlier this month, I was delighted to see that McDonald’s Deutschland was one of the winners of the first ever ACE award for inclusive hiring practices for hiring refugees in Germany.  This is the type of corporate leadership that makes many of our companies our best ambassadors overseas.

Today, we are witnessing the largest displacement of people since World War II.  Twenty million refugees are scattered across the globe; the Syrian conflict alone has uprooted 4.5 million people.  A crisis of this scale simply cannot be solved by one or many governments alone.  An “all hands on deck” approach is needed. The private sector has a crucial role to play -- driven not just by beneficence but by dividends. That is because many refugees I have met over the course of my work have hard skills and can have a significant positive impact once they are economically integrated in their host economies...