Asylum Policy Research Articles

Implementing and Rethinking the European Union's Asylum Legislation: The Asylum Procedures Directive

AbstractThe Asylum Procedures Directive, which was put in place in the context of the Common European Asylum System, is expected to both harmonise the asylum procedures in the European Union and to safeguard applicants’ rights. This article explores various steps in the implementation of the directive, starting with transnational negotiations which aim to influence domestic asylum policies. Focusing on asylum systems in Germany and Sweden, the article shows that the way decision makers implement the directive is shaped by diverging domestic asylum policies. The risk of failing common standards, however, is not only a matter of implementation, but inherent in the directive's design. Furthermore, harmonisation does not necessarily improve compliance with the principles of international refugee law. Safeguarding protection seekers’ rights requires rethinking both asylum legislation and the role of the actors who intervene in its implementation.

A Utilitarian Approach for the Governance of Humanitarian Migration

Abstract Humanitarian migration creates, on the one hand, huge benefits for those who are protected from war, persecution and other forms of violence, but, on the other hand, involves also net monetary and social costs for the population in host countries providing protection at the same time. This is the core of the ethical and political problem associated with the governance of humanitarian migration. Against this background, this paper discusses whether the provision of protection can be founded on rational ethical principles. By drawing on a utilitarian approach a simple criterion is derived: Humanitarian migration is welfare improving, as long as the benefits of the marginal humanitarian migrant exceed the marginal costs of providing shelter per refugee. Based on this principle, practical solutions for the admission of humanitarian migrants and the international and European coordination of asylum policies are discussed.

Managing stake and accountability in Prime Ministers' accounts of the "refugee crisis": A longitudinal analysis.

Taking a (critical) discursive psychological approach, the present study explores the identity management of the Finnish and Swedish Prime Ministers (PM) in relation to the “refugee crisis” and their countries' asylum policies. By taking a longitudinal approach and analysing the PMs' accounts of the “refugee crisis” from 1‐year period, we focused on the ways rhetorical devices related to ethos, logos, and pathos were used to manage the issues of stake and accountability, as well as on the ways in which categories were worked up to serve particular functions. Our comparative analysis demonstrated significant similarities in the Finnish and Swedish PMs' talk, especially with regard to the transfer from a discourse of pathos and ethos, describing refugees in terms of individualism and humaneness, to a discourse of logos, emphasizing rationality, justifying sharpened immigration policies, and homogenizing refugees. However, the different historical paths of the two countries' immigration policies and the specific political situation had implications for the PMs' discourse. The Swedish PM could feasibly scapegoat the Sweden Democrats and the political right in opposition, whereas the Finnish PM, with the populist radical right as a government partner, engaged more heavily in distinctions between “real, needing” and “false, undeserving” refugees. We argue for the longitudinal approach in the analysis of political discourse, as such an approach allows to identify the changes and continuities in the discourse, as well as to grasp the dialogical interplay between the discourse and its context.

Where Do We Go From Here? Challenges and Strategies Following Additional Asylum Policy Restrictions in Sweden

This policy note highlights issues concerning the right to seek asylum raised by a panel of migration experts in Sweden during the annual Swedish Forum for Human Rights in 2016. The discussion took ...

The New Third Party in Two-Party System? Circumstances and Implications of UKIP Success in 2014 European Parliament Elections

For a growing group of voters the UKIP party ceases to be a second choice, and it becomes a main party. But, contrary to popular belief, its electoral success is only partly due to its Eurosceptic program. Its growing support is rather the result of disappointment in policies of the main parties and a sense of alienation of a growing social group, failing to find its way in a liberal, multicultural society. Note, however, that the UK electoral system rewards parties that have geographically concentrated support, yet in case of UKIP it is distributed fairly evenly. For this reason, even a significant popular support will translate only in a small degree into the seats in the House of Commons. UKIP electoral successes has forced the major political parties to modify their policies, which manifested mainly in radicalization of their programs in the area of immigration and asylum policy, as well as their attitude towards the UK’s membership in the European Union.

(In)credible Subjects: NGOs, Attorneys, and Permissible LGBT Asylum Seeker Identities

AbstractIn this paper, I demonstrate how statist logics concerning acceptable lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) immigrants permeate civic spheres, creating new forms of exclusion for asylum seekers in the United States. Existing research on US asylum policy and procedures as they pertain to LGBT claimants suggests that a “gay enough” litmus test typifies U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adjudications, such that officers expect claimants to engage in conspicuous consumption of stereotypical commodities and culture and to appear visibly “LGBT,” either through gender non‐conformity or by being “out.” My analysis focuses on the social as well as legal lives of LGBT asylum seekers in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected at specialist NGOs, I argue that limited ideas about LGBT subjectivity often structure NGO workers’ attitudes and practices in ways that echo USCIS criteria for granting asylum. I demonstrate how NGO client selection and intake processes assume homonormative ideals and subtly yet effectively replicate existing adjudication norms. Within ostensibly non‐governmental spaces, LGBT asylum seekers experience suspicion, surveillance, and pressure to conform to NGO workers’ expectations of “credible” claimants. Contrary to NGOs’ stated intentions, these processes extend, rather than challenge, existing barriers to asylum.

What drives the public opinion on asylum policy in the Netherlands?

AbstractAmong the citizens of Western Europe, Dutch residents appear to be the least supportive of a generous judgement of asylum applications. In line with the perceived ethnic threat theory, people with a higher level of education advocate a more generous judgement of asylum applications than people with a low level of education. Surprisingly, income has the opposite effect. The effect of the (perceived) presence of out‐groups members on the attitudes towards asylum seekers appears to vary between different scale levels. Those with a higher level of education estimate the size of the immigrant groups at the national level, the less support they express for a generous judgement of asylum applications. At the neighbourhood level, more interethnic exposure leads to more support for a generous judgement of asylum applications. This may indicate that the ethnic competition theory works at a macro level, while at the neighbourhood level the contact hypothesis applies.

The Limits of a Commitment? Public Responses to Asylum Policy in Sweden over Time

It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that one of the most turbulent political areas in recent years has been asylum policy, which has disclosed a rapidly increasing inflow of asylum seekers, and, in many countries, has been followed by fierce media discussion and political controversies. In Sweden, this development has been heated as the Swedish self‐image is one of providing generous policies, which is also reflected in terms of strong refugee policy. The article uses this example to explore assumptions about public responsiveness in previous policy feedback literature and to examine the link between citizens' attitudes towards immigration and changes in asylum policy output, measured as asylums granted, over time in the period 1990–2015. It focuses especially on the link through which citizens become aware of policy output, operationalized as media visualization, and find that including media reveals a suppressed relationship between policy output and public attitudes. The relationship is negative and thus confirms the assumptions of the thermostatic models. Second, the article shows that feedback is mediated by political orientation: People defining themselves politically as right‐oriented respond with negative feedback when the number of granted asylums increases, while left‐oriented people do not change their attitudes. Based on these findings it is concluded, first, that analyses of democratic responsiveness need to incorporate a clear measure of the link by which exogenous factors become visible. Second, the importance needs to be stressed of considering important cleavages in the population in order to display responsiveness processes fairly.

Towards a Common European Space for Asylum

In this paper, we provide a critical overview of the current migration policies of the EU as framed by the recent amendments of the EU migration policies since 2015. We highlight that the construction of the migration policy is a constitutive element of the spatial process of reorganization of territorial policies through the combination and diffusion of state, regional and global. We show that the perception of permanent and static migration pressure, and countries’ specialization in migration are the basis for diffusion of asylum and migration policies to a number of different countries imposing similar migration systems and establishing a global governance of migration regime. The paper highlights a geographic and political change in migration and border management, through the patterns of EU Member States cooperation, and in particular their reluctance to establish a common asylum system based on solidarity and the focus on substituting the lack of a common asylum system by bilateral externalization agreements the main objective of which is the management of migration and border control rather than guaranteeing asylum and refugee policies.

Model in disarray: welfare, austerity dogmatism and the u-turn in Swedish migration politics

The winds of xenophobia hovering over Europe have swept the moral political foundations of an inclusive Swedish migration policy into the dustbin of history and twisted an enlightened left-right consensus on an open and humanitarian asylum policy into its mirror opposite. Lured by advances of the extreme right the main political parties have, since 2015, come to indiscriminately embrace the view that immigration, etno-cultural diversity and an open-door refugee policy is detrimental to welfare and, in consequence, curbing migration has become the all dominant political strategem in vying for votes. The authors challenge this widely accepted narrative by arguing that the sustainability of the Swedish welfare state has not been undermined by migration but by consecutive Swedish governments' unbending adherence to austerity politics since the beginning of the 1990s. Austerity politics have, step by step, weakened the Swedish Model's socially integrative functions and prevented the implementation of an ambitious agenda, harvesting a potentially dynamic interplay of expansionary economic and social policies and a humanitarian asylum policy.

New and enduring narratives of vulnerability: rethinking stories about the figure of the refugee

ABSTRACTThe role of vulnerability in relation to mechanisms of governance and social welfare practices has received growing interest, but how ‘vulnerability’ is operationalised in asylum policy is less well understood. This paper explores narratives of vulnerability in relation to the figure of the refugee. Taking a narrative approach to stories told about refugees across Europe, it puts forward the argument that access to asylum has gradually moved away from spontaneous asylum seeking to more controlled routes in the UK. This transition has increasingly drawn on the notion of vulnerability to highlight distinctions between people who deserve protection and those who do not. In particular, this paper focuses on the ways in which the UK Syrian Vulnerable Person’s Resettlement Programme is underpinned by stories of ‘the vulnerable’ and exemplifies the latest hierarchy of rights and entitlements to emerge in relation to the figure of the refugee. It also offers insight into some of the ways in which asylum policies create the conditions where vulnerabilities are generated and produced. As such, this paper brings a critical perspective to the state increasingly narrowing the protection space for refugees and redefining ‘the vulnerable’ as an essential marker of asylum policy.

The narrative assemblage of civil society interventions into refugee and asylum policy debates in the UK

This article explores how pro-refugee civil society organisations discursively navigate the challenges of influencing policy in contexts that are largely hostile to their perspective, and the tensions implicit in doing so. It draws on rich documentary data to present an analysis of the policy narratives of seven case study organisations in the UK. Through this analysis, the article argues that these narratives form an ‘assemblage’ of discursive conformity to and contestation of the dominant construction of the policy problem, with the organisations concurrently positioned both as experts in the field and as facilitating expert knowledge transfer from refugees themselves. It is through this assemblage that the organisations negotiate the dilemmas arising from their largely adversarial positioning in the policy debate.

EU Policies for Refugee Protection and Immigration: Cooperation is Key

The contrast between the common sense messages and humanitarian aspirations of the Compact on the one hand, and certain influential proposals for EU asylum policy on the other, points to a deeper problem with the EU asylum system.

Unijny system relokacji w sprawozdaniach Komisji Europejskiej. Ocena i perspektywy

26 września 2017 r. formalnie zakończył się okres obowiązywania decyzji o relokacji osób będących w oczywistej potrzebie ochrony międzynarodowej. Z przewidzianych 160 tysięcy, relokacji poddano do tego czasu nieco ponad 29 tysięcy osób. Przy zastosowaniu metody analizy prawnej oraz analizy decyzyjnej, w artykule podjęto próbę odpowiedzi na następujące pytania badawcze: (1) co było przyczyną odmowy dokonania relokacji przez niektóre państwa członkowskie?; (2) jakie działania podejmowała Komisja Europejska chcąc nakłonić państwa do wypełnienia zobowiązań prawnych?; (3) jakie konsekwencje pociąga za sobą odmowa dokonania relokacji osób, będących w potrzebie ochrony międzynarodowej?. W artykule analizie poddano cykliczne sprawozdania Komisji Europejskiej z funkcjonowania nadzwyczajnego, czasowego mechanizmu relokacji. W toku poprowadzonych rozważań wskazano przyczyny niewywiązywania się przez państwa członkowskie z prawnych zobowiązań oraz przyczyny braku woli dokonania rzeczywistej reformy polityki azylowej i imigracyjnej. Udowodniono, że wyrażone w traktatach zobowiązanie do wspólnych, solidarnych działań w obliczu kryzysów ustąpiło miejsca partykularnym dążeniom do wzmocnienia ochrony terytoriów państwowych.

Einwanderungsland? Germany’s Asylum Dilemma in Policy and Design

Germany has experienced an unprecedented influx of refugees over the last years. In dealing with the so-called crisis, the management of settlement and housing of refugees is a crucial aspect. Germany’s asylum policy—torn between long-term versus short-term and permanent versus temporary approaches and solutions—has equally contradictory spatial implications. This article brings together policy with design. Through the analysis of an architectural project database featuring recent refugee housing projects across Germany and some of its neighboring countries, this paper explores design responses to the refugee influx. It shows that the refugee shelter design is equally torn and reflects the political inconsistency that is symptomatic of the wider context of Germany’s current asylum policy.

The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism

This article departs from the discussion by Stephen Castles on the migration-asylum nexus by focusing on the political and cultural effects of the summer of immigration in 2015. It argues for a conceptualization of the asylum-migration nexus within the framework of Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of power” by developing the analytical framework of the “coloniality of migration.” Through the analytical framework of the “coloniality of migration” the connection between racial capitalism and the asylum-migration nexus is explored. It does so by first focusing on the economic and political links between asylum and migration, and how both constitute each other. On these grounds, it discusses how asylum and migration policies produce hierarchical categories of migrants and refugees, producing a nomenclature drawing on an imaginary reminiscent of the orientalist and racialized practices of European colonialism and imperialism. In a second step, it focuses on migration and asylum policies as inherent to a logic of racialization of the workforce. It does so by first exploring the racial coding of immigration policies within the context of settler colonial-ism and transatlantic White European migration to the Américas and Oceania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and second, by discussing migration policies in post-1945 Western Europe.

Paradoxical infrastructures of asylum: Notes on the rise and fall of tent camps in Denmark

AbstractAsylum policies in the Global North have increasingly turned towards populist policies of deterrence, as states attempt to make themselves seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. This article examines one such case: the tent camps for asylum seekers that were hastily erected in Denmark in early 2016. However, while the tent camps surely are an instance of symbolic politics, we argue that to understand their daily operation, attention must also be paid to their infrastructural qualities. Drawing on two months of fieldwork at a tent camp in Næstved, this article examines the ways in which asylum policy and infrastructure interact to shape the daily lives and interactions of camp residents and staff. We propose two paradoxical frames for the analysis, which we term ‘spectacular obscurity’ and ‘successful failure’. The tent camps were trumpeted as symbolic politics, while their daily operation remained obscured, only to burst in to scandal as reports emerged of threatening and violent behaviour on the part of the staff. The tent camps’ infrastructure was constantly failing, as both material and social support broke down, but at the same time these failures successfully formed the basis for the everyday interactions that structured life in the camps. We conclude by questioning the effect of the policies of deterrence as mediated through particular infrastructures, suggesting that the materialities of the tent camps played a more significant role than supposed by policy makers, and that paradoxes of infrastructure provide a useful perspective through which to analyse migration management more broadly.

To Share or Not to Share Responsibility? Finnish Refugee Policy and the Hesitant Support for a Common European Asylum System

ABSTRACTThis article outlines the policy of the Finnish government in relation to the development of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Finland has traditionally displayed a strong commitment to international cooperation. Yet, during the European so-called refugee crisis, when Finland experienced a 10-fold increase in the number of asylum seekers, some politicians hesitated to support the decision to relocate asylum seekers within the European Union. The article contributes to the analysis of Europeanization by describing how a Eurosceptic opposition to EU asylum policy can also emerge in member states that have an interest in supporting common asylum policies.

Refugee rights or refugees as threats? Germany’s new Asylum policy

On-going Mediterranean migration highlights serious tensions over asylum policy in Germany, among European Union members, and with neighbouring states. Yet commentaries thus far lack a clear understanding of these complex dynamics and their policy implications, because each typically relies on only one of two analytically distinct frameworks: either refugee rights or refugees as threats. Instead, we integrate these frameworks. Specifically, we juxtapose securitisation theory with the coalition literature from migration studies in order to analyse societal contestation in Germany’s responses to the Syrian refugee crisis. We conclude that, despite tactical political shifts, Germany’s commitment to rights remains fundamental because of a resilient coalition of political parties, economic actors, and rights advocates. Insights about Germany, the country arguably most responsible for pushing a common European Union approach to refugees, also help us understand better regional dynamics.

Becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces

ABSTRACTThe securitization of the EU’s external borders and repressive asylum policies biopolitically control and discipline the bodies of refugees. In Germany, these developments hark back to a longer colonial history of racialization that the state collectively disavows. To approach this continuity of racialized citizenship, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by refugees from 2012 till 2014 in Germany. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the hunger strike, I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical geography of detention, asylum, and deportation marks the racialized refugees’ bodies as disposable within the logics of citizenship. I propose that hunger strike is a form of becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’ bodies. Becoming flesh articulates a politics of refusal that subverts the logics of recognition, empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an embrace of the refugees’ abjection.