AMMAN, Jordan >> On a busy thoroughfare in Amman, Jordan’s capital, a coffee seller named Mohammed al-Mulki no longer shivers when he sees a police car pull up. At a nearby sweet shop, the counterman, Zuheir Taleb, no longer slips out of the back when a uniformed official walks in.

And in the country’s north, on scorching fields a few miles from the Syrian border, Badra Hadahed, a diabetic grandmother doing backbreaking work, no longer worries that she will be plucked from the cucumber fields and sent back to her home.

Like many Syrians who fled their country’s civil war, all three had been working illegally in Jordan. But under a shrewd, delicate experiment that grew out of Europe’s desire to contain the influx of foreigners to its shores, Jordan has been persuaded to let these Syrians make an honest living — in return for potentially big financial rewards.

Jordan, which has 650,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations inside its borders, has long made it nearly impossible for them to work legally, citing concerns about high unemployment among its citizens. But under the new experiment, the government has given out 13,000 work permits to Syrians, and is promising to issue up to 50,000 by year’s end — and tens of thousands more in the future.

In exchange, the World Bank is giving Jordan a $300 million interest-free loan, the likes of which are traditionally reserved for extremely poor countries in Africa. Western nations, including the United States, have offered roughly $60 million to build schools to accommodate Syrian children. And Jordan is close to clinching what it wants most: tax-free exports to the European Union, especially garments stitched in its industrial export zones.

In short, Western leaders are using their financial and political leverage to convince Jordan that it is worthwhile to help refugees improve their lot in this country so they do not cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy rafts in search of a better life in Europe. It is a stark shift for both donor countries and Jordan, which, after absorbing generations of refugees from wars across the Middle East, had tried to keep Syrians from establishing a permanent foothold.

“Some may say this is the one shot that the government has to extract a lot of money,” Stefan Dercon, a professor at Oxford University and the chief economist at the British government’s development aid agency, which supports the effort in Jordan. “I would say it is also the only shot that it will have to really reform its economy and create jobs, with substantial international funding.”

Jordan is not the only country trying to leverage Europe’s anxiety about refugees and migrants. Turkey has negotiated a deal that involves taking back most of those who traveled across the Aegean Sea into Greece in exchange for $6.6 billion in European aid and a proposed waiver of visas for Turks entering Europe.

Europe is also promising more than $4 billion in aid to several African countries in exchange for their help in stemming the exodus out of the continent. Even Sudan, long under European and American sanctions for its human rights record, is reaping money as part of the package. Libya is getting assistance from Europe to keep migrant boats from crossing the Mediterranean, an approach that Human Rights Watch describes as outsourcing “the dirty work to Libyan forces.”

The shifts in refugee aid policies come as war and persecution drives near-record numbers from their home countries and into poor and middle-income countries like Jordan, where they are blamed for straining public services and driving down wages by working for less.

The Jordan deal, announced in February as part of the Jordan Compact, is described optimistically by its framers as “turning the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity.” Its goal is to draw new foreign investment and create jobs for both Jordanians and Syrians. The risk, its proponents privately point out, is that no new investments will pour in, Jordan’s economy will continue to languish and local resentment will grow.

Until recently, barely 5,000 Syrian refugees had work permits. The International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency that supports and devises work policies, estimated that 50,000 people in Jordan worked off the books — roughly the number that the government is promising to legalize this year alone.

For Jordan’s leaders, grappling with debt and an economy growing at an anemic 2.4 percent, access to the European market is a critical incentive.

The challenge for Jordan is to demonstrate that the new deal will revive its economy and create jobs that its citizens want.

“This is a good opportunity for Jordan to attract new investment,” said Raed Nimri, a Jordanian engineer turned aid worker with Mercy Corps, a group based in Oregon that assists people during crises. “In five years, 10 years, the Syrians are going to go home. The investment is going to stay.”

There are still many uncertainties. Jordanian officials point out that they are waiting for much of the aid that has been promised and for the European Council to approve the trade concessions that Jordan hopes will draw foreign businesses. Refugees are often nervous that signing up for work permits may imperil other aid they get from the United Nations.

One industry being targeted is garment manufacturing in factories in special export zones.

One of those, al-Hassan Industrial Zone, sits barely a half-hour drive from the Syrian border, near the city of Irbid in northern Jordan, now home to an estimated 300,000 Syrians. The factories there employ barely any Syrians or Jordanians. Instead, they employ thousands of women from poor countries under temporary contracts.

Among them: Baby Hawladar, a mother of two from Bangladesh who defied her husband’s orders to travel halfway around the world to hunch over a sewing machine 10 hours a day, six days a week.

On a recent afternoon, Hawladar, 27, was stitching Under Armour yoga pants for export to the United States. She has been in the job two years, working for about $155 a month, plus overtime, and a room and meals. Her goal is to stay a bit longer to save enough money to build a house in her home village.

Every week, her children call and ask when she is coming home. Every week, she says, “Soon.”

Western Union sends agents directly to the factory floor. Bangladeshi migrants around the world sent $15 billion in remittances back home last year. Replacing workers like her with Syrian refugees, some economists say, would be like robbing Peter to pay Paul — rewarding those fleeing war to the detriment of others fleeing poverty.

Not far from the industrial zone, leaning over rows of cucumbers on a vast farm close to the Syrian border, were migrant workers from Egypt, Pakistan and Syria, plus a few Jordanians. In May, after the loosening of work rules, the farm’s owner, Jamal Muhammad Zoabi, obtained permits for the 100 or so Syrians who used to work for him illegally.

Hadahed, the grandmother, was one of them, having taken over the job from her son after he was picked up in a police raid last year for working without a permit. He was deported back to Hama, the Syrian province now partly controlled by the Islamic State.

Exhausted, ailing, her head spinning some days in the heat, Hadahed supports herself, her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren on her $270 monthly wage. She does not have much of a choice. Every time she speaks to her son on the phone, he warns her: “Whatever you do, don’t come back.”

Zoabi, the farmer, knows something about the perils of life on the other side.

Before the war, he grew watermelon in Syria. He went back last year to collect some money he was owed, only to be detained, he said, by Islamic State fighters at a checkpoint. Zoabi said they had held him for six hours. They made him watch as they beheaded an entire family and then threw the skulls into an icebox.

Zoabi said he had paid the fighters close to $3,000, before being allowed to leave. “It was the worst trip of my life,” he recalled. “Imagine living there.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company