Tradable Refugee-admission Quotas (TRAQs), the Syrian Crisis and the new European Agenda on Migration

Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga,Hillel Rapoport

doi:10.1186/s40174-015-0045-y

Abstract

The Syrian Civil War gave rise to the largest refugee flight reaching Europe since the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s. The crisis evidenced the deficiencies of the European Union Asylum Policy, which struggled both to offer solutions to Syrian refugees and to efficiently allocate costs across Member States. We draw on previous theoretical work to simulate how a system of tradable refugee-admission quotas coupled with a matching mechanism assigning refugees to their preferred destinations and destinations to their preferred types of refugees would give more flexibility to Member States while respecting refugee rights and preferences.

Highlights

“Nine member states in the EU today receive 90% of all asylum applications annually, but those nine states are starting to, well, become fed up.” (Tobias Billström, Sweden’s Immigration Minister, 3 March 2014)
UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres referred to the Syrian refugee crisis as the “worst humanitarian crisis of our era,” with almost 4 million Syrians concentrated in refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt in bleak conditions at the beginning of 2015.1 A year earlier, Tobias Billström, Sweden’s Immigration Minister, complained that most asylum applications in the European Union were handled by only nine countries, his own included, an asymmetry that was leading even the most welcoming countries in Europe to reconsider their willingness to help
In Guterres’ words: “If we fail to provide adequate support to refugees and their hosts, and to build up their resilience to cope with the long-term pressures of this increasingly protracted refugee situation, we risk a further destabilization of the entire region.”2 Sadly enough, the Common European Asylum System” (CEAS) remained largely virtual for a long time, prompting strong criticism of its legal framework; at the same time, the pressure to “do something” generated frantic policy experimentation, with a succession of spectacular but often short-lived initiatives, such as the “Mare Nostrum” operation (Fargues and Bonfanti, 2014; Fargues and Di Bartolomeo, 2015)

Summary

Introduction

“Nine member states in the EU today receive 90% of all asylum applications annually, but those nine states are starting to, well, become fed up.” (Tobias Billström, Sweden’s Immigration Minister, 3 March 2014). Its principle is to determine a total number of asylum seekers/refugees to be hosted by the EU and a distribution of initial quotas across countries.

Results

Conclusion