Q&A Refugee Migration Crisis

Journal of Refugee Studies, 1998

Statistics on asylum applications have been used in a highly selective way in the debates on refugees and asylum policies in Western Europe, to justify restrictive measures. This paper provides a more systematic analysis of these statistics. It focuses on the pattern of origins and destinations for asylum seekers in the European Union in the period 1985-1994. Asylum seekers from a particular country of origin often tend to go to a particular country within the European Union. Most of these cases can be attributed to historical ties between the sending and receiving country. When the patterns of origin and destinations are compared for separate years, it becomes clear that the destinations of asylum movements have been constantly changing. Though some of the more remarkable shifts were clearly related to policy measures in the relevant countries, many measures produced only limited effects or failed to have any effect at all.

Labor Mobility and the World Economy, 2004

The number of refugees worldwide is now 12 million, up from 3 million in the early 1970s. And the number seeking asylum in the developed world increased tenfold, from about 50,000 per annum to half a million over the same period. Governments and international agencies have grappled with the twin problems of providing adequate humanitarian assistance in the Third World and avoiding floods of unwanted asylum seekers arriving on the doorsteps of the First World. This is an issue that is long on rhetoric, as newspaper reports testify, but surprisingly short on economic analysis. This paper draws on the recent literature, and ongoing research, to address a series of questions that are relevant to the debate. First, we examine the causes of refugee displacements and asylum flows, focusing on the effects of conflict, political upheaval and economic incentives to migrate. Second, we examine the evolution of policies towards asylum seekers and the effects of those policies, particularly in Europe. Finally, we ask whether greater international coordination could produce better outcomes for refugee-receiving countries and for the refugees themselves.

Journal of International Migration and Integration, 2018

The recent exceptional migratory surge has put huge pressure on many countries of the developed world. The Member States of the European Union are still striving to find a sustainable solution to the ongoing massive asylum crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from wars, authoritarian regimes, and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa. Really, the recent asylum crisis is essentially a policy asylum crisis, which places under pressure a limited number of Member States. The research provides a diagnosis of what went wrong, by highlighting the weakness of mechanisms for implementing the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility. To overcome some drawbacks of the European asylum system, the research suggests a novel and constructive solution, which could promote common values and interests in a viable way. Due to its geographic location and expertise, Italy could play a central role in supporting the EU asylum system, by facilitating substantial cooperation and policy integration.

The study sets out to provide a better understanding of the emerging challenges in policy targeting the labour-market integration of refugees. What are the strategies and practices implemented in different EU Member States to facilitate access into employment? What do we know about their effectiveness? What are good practices and lessons learned in different countries? The study is based on nine detailed country case studies of the following EU Member States: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It has been produced by the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) at the European University Institute in Florence.

While Europe feels inundated by the 2015 refugee waves, the policy responses of the European Union and its member countries exhibit signs of helplessness. The Dublin system assigning responsibility to the country of first-entry has failed. Identifying true asylum seekers effectively and distributing them fairly across Europe requests loyalty to the once accepted humanitarian standards and solidarity with the principles of Europe. A turnaround of the European asylum policy is needed: Commonly organized registration, selection and distribution systems have to be followed by an early access of asylum seekers to the European labor markets.

The lecture explores some political and institutional issues concerning the reception of asylum seekers in the European Union (EU). It has a twofold objective. First, it aims to provide analytical tools for a critical assessment of the management of asylum seekers at the EU level. Second, it intends to offer a comprehensive summary of policies of reception and “integration” in some of the main receiving countries in the EU. It is divided into three main parts. The first part provides a historical overview of the creation of the Common European Asylum System in order to situate the issue of reception within a wider historical and political framework. Such historical overview allows the identification of some issues related to the feasibility of harmonisation of reception conditions, the ambiguity embedded in the formal definition of reception, the lack of EU provisions in the field of refugees’ “integration”, and the mechanisms of allocation of the responsibility for the provision of reception measures based on the Dublin regulation. The second part looks at the ways in which reception is organised and provided in four EU member states, which all together host a significant proportion of asylum seekers arriving in the EU nowadays. The member states chosen are Italy, Belgium, France, Germany and Sweden. The main features of their reception systems and “integration” policies, as well as their response to the recent “refugee crisis” are discussed. Building on such comparison, the third part stresses the great heterogeneity of reception conditions between member states while at the same time identifying common trends that cut across borders. These trends include the increasing adoption of temporary and emergency measures, the rising involvement of private contractors, and the transformation of reception as a form of warehousing.

International Political Economy: Migration eJournal, 2016

The recent asylum crisis has thrown into sharp relief the inadequacies of European asylum policies and has highlighted the need for reform. The existing asylum system, which encourages migrants to make hazardous maritime or overland crossings to gain access to an uncertain prospect of obtaining refugee status, is inefficient, poorly targeted and lacks public support. In the long run it should be replaced by a substantial joint programme of refugee resettlement that would help those most in need of protection, that would eliminate the risks to refugees, and that would command more widespread public support. These arguments are built upon an analysis of key facts and data. This includes estimation of the origin and destination factors that influence asylum applications, and the effects of asylum policies adopted in developed countries. It also includes an examination of different aspects of public opinion that condition the scope for the development of asylum policies. In this light I...

2016

This study has been funded by Bertelsmann Stiftung and produced by the Migration Policy Centre at the EUI.

Global Migration: Responses and Consequences, 2020

This comparative report is based on the RESPOND country reports [deliverable D3.1] that discusses the developments regarding legislation, policy measures and practices on refugee protection, but most importantly the implementation aspect in ten countries covered by the project (Austria, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and the United Kingdom) for the 2011-2019 period. This report aims to provide a comparative analysis of refugee protection, emphasising the implementation aspect as drawn from the experiences and perceptions of meso and micro level actors. In doing so, the report offers analytical insights for evaluating the implications of the dynamics of refugee protection, which has undergone many changes since 2011. Despite the largely shared regional, international and supranational obligations regarding refugee protection, the overarching pattern in the field of refugee protection is characterised by a restrictive approach. Although some countries were relatively more welcoming at the beginning Syrian displacement in 2011, such as Turkey (open-doors policy) and Lebanon, restricted access to national/federal territories, additional physical measures such as security walls and other actions such as push backs have become common, hindering the asylum procedure, particularly after 2015. Many countries have introduced additional procedural measures to prevent and restrain access to international protection as well as to speed up asylum assessments, such as accelerated procedures, fast-track-procedures, border procedures. Increased rejections and long waiting periods have become policies in themselves. Almost all countries tended to downgrade the rights of applicants and beneficiaries of protection. In general, all newly introduced amendments or regulations impose new restrictions or limitations to existing standards of rights. However, at the same time, some countries developed policies and practices to respond to the humanitarian crisis and welcomed refugees only from certain nationalities on the grounds of humanitarian or national reasons, through residence permits and family reunification. As for the RESPOND countries who are EU Member States, the observance of the so-called minimum EU-level standards, or even lower, has become common. All countries display an extremely complex and continually changing legal framework on refugee protection. The newly introduced additional procedures result in the fragmentation of the examination of claims through the categorisation of asylum seekers. This also resulted in stratified legal statuses with different procedures and specified rights, adding up to the traceable nationality-based discrimination against certain asylum seekers (e.g. Afghans), creating ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ migrants/refugees.

The study sets out to provide a better understanding of the emerging challenges in policy targeting the labour-market integration of refugees. What are the strategies and practices implemented in different EU Member States to facilitate access into employment? What do we know about their effectiveness? What are good practices and lessons learned in different countries? The study is based on nine detailed country case studies of the following EU Member States: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It has been produced by the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) at the European University Institute in Florence.