Managing Asylum and European Integration: Expanding Spheres of Exclusion?

During the last decade, thhe European Union intensified its efforts to define its external borders in conjunction with its efforts to evolve into a coherent, frontier-free political territory. European policy-makers slowly shaped new norms and rules pertaining to asylum, with increasingly stronger mechanisms to enforce the policy decisions. In the case of asylum and refugee protection, Europe's efforts are nested in the broad global institutional framework negotiated through and carried out by international organizations. However, these developments raise the specter of deteriorating refugee protection in Europe and beyond. This article reviews the norms and rules on which the post–World War II refugee protection regime rests and then points to the recent developments in refugee protection in Europe, which might undermine the goals of the global refugee protection.     

Bogus Refugees? The Determinants of Asylum Migration to Western Europe

This article analyzes the determinants of asylum migration to Western Europe. Potential asylum seekers balance the costs of staying versus the costs of migrating. Estimation results confirm that economic hardship and economic discrimination against ethnic minorities lead to higher flows of asylum seekers. However, political oppression, human rights abuse, violent conflict, and state failure are also important determinants. Migration networks and geographical proximity are important facilitators of asylum flows as predicted by theory and colonial experience, religious similarity, and casual contact with the developed world (aid, trade, and tourism) are not. Natural disasters and famines are also not statistically significant determinants. These events are typically short term and unexpected, whereas asylum migration to Western Europe requires preparatory planning. If Western European countries want to tackle the root causes of asylum migration, then they need to undertake policy measures that promote economic development, democracy, respect for human rights, and peaceful conflict resolution in countries of origin.     

Framing Asylum Discourse in Luxembourg

This article examines media and political asylum discourse inLuxembourg between 1993 and 2000. A frame analysis of mediaand political asylum discourses and a headline analysis of newscoverage of the refugee and asylum question were implementedto that effect. The results show that media and political actorsin Luxembourg used four frames to refer to the refugee and asylumquestion: administrative, genuineness, human dignity, and returnhome. Overall, the framing of asylum discourse in Luxembourgwas shown to reflect a restrictive undercurrent—relatingto the prevention of the asylum systems of member states ofthe European Union—identified in European asylum discourse.The article concludes by noting that the framing of media andpolitical asylum discourse in Luxembourg was affected by national,international and supranational concerns relating to the regulationof asylum.     

De-Europeanization by Default? Germany's EU Policy in Defense and Asylum

Since the end of the Cold War and unification, Germany's policy toward and within the European Union (EU) has undergone significant changes. Once a model "Europeanist," Germany has become increasingly reluctant to support the progressive implementation of key projects of European integration. Neither an instance of a planned strategic change nor a result of an inevitable adaptation to structural shifts at the systemic level, these changes in German foreign policy, incremental yet significant as they are, evade both deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of foreign policy change. Integrating insights from foreign policy analysis, integration theory, and social theory, the article develops an innovative framework for analysis that is applied to Germany's European asylum and refugee policy as well as its security and defense policy. The origins of both policy fields at the European level can be traced back to initiatives that were supported by or even originated in Germany. However, as the 1990s progressed Germany increasingly obstructed further institutionalization. While in the field of asylum and refugee policy the Amsterdam summit marks a clear turning point in Germany's position, the transformation of German policies on European security and defense proceeded rather as an incremental decrease in material support, aggravating substantive progress in the policy field more broadly. An unanticipated consequence of earlier initiatives, in both cases Germany has found it increasingly difficult to live up to the expectations it has helped to raise.     

Protection and Dignity in Johannesburg: Shortcomings of South Africa's Urban Refugee Policy

Since the end of apartheid, South African cities have becomedestinations for refugees and asylum seekers from across Africa.In line with its constitutional commitments to human rightsand dignity, South Africa has enacted a refugee policy intendedto maximize freedom and protection by promoting refugees' temporaryintegration into local communities. In doing so, the law guaranteesfreedom of movement, access to many social services, and rightsto compete in labour and housing markets. This article arguesthat because refugees and asylum seekers are effectively unableto convert these legal entitlements into effective protection,South Africa has failed to meet its domestic and internationalobligations. This argument draws particular attention to institutionalfailures in determining refugee status and issuing recognizableidentity documents; denial of essential social services; andabuse at the hands of law enforcement agents. It concludes bysuggesting a positive obligation for the state to counter thefull range of obstacles that prevent asylum seekers and refugeesfrom securing effective protection.     

Negotiations for Refugee Repatriation or Local Settlement: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

This paper uses a model developed by Brams and Doherty (1993) to examine negotiations among a country of origin, a country of asylum, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a refugee crisis. A unique feature of the paper is its treatment of the country of asylum as a separate player in the negotiations, which makes the choice to permit or deny settlement in the asylum country endogenous.
The model is applied to two groups of Rwandese refugees: Tutsis living in exile in Burundi for three decades and Hutus in Zaire during the 1990s. The contrasting circumstances surrounding these two refugee crises provide an opportunity to study asylum countries that were sympathetic and unsympathetic, and to model changing attitudes in the country of origin and the international community toward the refugees. For both crises, the predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the unfolding of the negotiation process and the opportunities that eventually became available to the refugees.     

Agents of Change or Passive Victims: The Impact of Welfare States (the Case of the Netherlands) on Refugees

This paper explores the impact of a regulated society such asthe Netherlands on the lives of refugees in general and on thoseof Iranian women refugees in particular. Two periods are distinguishedin regard to Dutch asylum policies: the 1980s and post-1990.For the 1980s when refugee reception was less restricted, Iuse empirical material collected between 1995 and 2000. Thewomen I interviewed during this period were leftist activistsinvolved in the Iranian revolution of 1979 and had to leaveIran because of their political backgrounds. The material usedfor the post-1990 or more restricted period, is mainly fromsecondary sources, supplemented by occasional, informal visitsto asylum seeker centres. The paper argues that a strict refugeepolicy—especially the policy that was put in place duringthe 1990s—has a direct effect on the affected refugeesby making them dependents of the state. These restricted policiesreinforce the image of refugees as problems in society and havean effect, albeit less direct, on the lives of the refugeeswho arrived prior to the 1990s and who are now Dutch citizens.     

Contemporary Compulsory Dispersal and the Absence of Space for the Restoration of Trust

This paper investigates the issue of trust, or mistrust, specificallyin relation to single adult asylum seekers and asylum seekerfamilies compulsorily dispersed across England. It draws upondoctoral research on the social exclusion of asylum seekersas a result of dispersal and their separation from mainstreamwelfare provision due to the creation of the National AsylumSupport Service (NASS) following the Immigration and AsylumAct 1999. Trust is an ambiguous term and four forms of trustare delineated to assist conceptualizing the experience of forcedmigration: social, political, institutional and restorativetrust. This paper provides an overview of the aims and eachphase of the implementation of dispersal. It is argued thatthe dispersal system leaves little room for political or institutionaltrust to be restored and hinders the restoration of social trust.It is suggested that this lack of space for the restorationof trust has negative implications for the longer term resettlementprocess of asylum seekers who obtain refugee status. It is alsosuggested that trust is an essential component of UK governmentpolicies promoting social or community cohesion, community engagementand initiatives to combat trafficking, forced marriage and ‘honour’based violence and that mistrust of asylum seekers as a groupdirectly contradicts such policies and initiatives.     

Mainstreaming gender in refugee protection

The issues of gender-related persecution and violence against women have been put onto the international agenda, largely thanks to lobbying by feminist NGOs and transnational networks. There is a question, however, of how successfully this agenda-setting has translated into effective policy-making and policies that will increase the protection of women who are victims of gender-related persecution. One of the problems with policies to support women refugees and asylum seekers lies in a failure of transmission of the goals of gender sensitivity through all the various bureaux and representatives of a large bureaucratic organization such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). For nearly twenty years, since the early 1990s, the UNHCR has identified ‘refugee women’ as a policy priority, and yet, despite this prioritization of concerns about women refugees and gender issues in the asylum and refugee process, it could be argued that little progress has been made in implementation of policies on refugee women. This article will examine the way in which the concept of gender has been adopted within the UNHCR and the processes that have been put in place to mainstream gender within refugee protection activities. How far has mainstreaming managed to move policies to protect women beyond a mere focus on ‘vulnerable’ groups, and to integrate a gendered understanding of the global processes that produce refugees, and of the protection needs of these refugees?     

A Game Changer in EU-Turkey Relations: The Opportunities and Pitfalls of Migration Policy

ABSTRACT

The mass migration from Syria has been a major turning point and an important ‘game changer’ in EU-Turkey relations, as it marks a watershed in immigration and asylum between two periods: from 1999 to 2011 and from 2011 to the present. During the first period, the EU was one of the driving forces of change in Turkey’s immigration and asylum policy, along with significant migration movements from the Middle East. Although EU demands were largely implemented due to the country’s changing migration profile, there was also ongoing resistance and reluctance towards the EU, thus a certain degree of conditionality. With the Syrian mass migration in 2011, however, and in particular the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ in 2015, Turkey started to use migration as a foreign policy tool with which to oppose EU conditionality.     

Asylum applications in the European Union: patterns and trends and the effects of policy measures

"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.... 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."     

French immigration policy

From the late nineteenth century through 1974, France permitted immigration to furnish workers and to compensate for the low level of fertility. Intense immigration from North Africa, the economic crisis of the 1970s, and other factors led to policy changes in 1974. French immigration policy since 1974 has fluctuated between guaranteeing foreigners equal rights regardless of their religion, race, culture, or national origin, and attempting to differentiate among immigrants depending on their degree of assimilability to French culture. From 1974 to 1988, France had five different policies regarding whether to permit new immigration and what to do about illegal immigrants. In July 1984, the four major political parties unanimously supported a measure in Parliament that definitively guaranteed the stay in France of legal immigrants, whose assimilation thus assumed priority. Aid for return to the homeland was no longer to be widely offered, and immigration of unskilled workers was to be terminated except for those originating in European Community countries. Major changes of government in 1988 and 1993 affected only the modalities of applying these principles. The number of immigrants has fluctuated since 1974. Unskilled workers, the only category whose entrance was specifically controlled by the 1984 measures, have declined from 174,000 in 1970 to 25,000 in the early 1990s. The number of requests for political asylum declined from 60,000 in 1989 to 27,000 in 1993, and in 1991, 15,467 persons were granted refugee status. The number of immigrants of all types permitted to remain in France declined from 250,000 or 3000 per year in the early 1970s to around 110,000 at present. Although the decline is significant, it appears insufficient to the government in power since 1993. Although migratory flows are often explained as the product of imbalance in the labor market or in demographic growth, the French experience suggests that government policies, both in the sending and receiving countries, are a more potent determinant.     

Tools for Anticipating Asylum Denials: An Application to Afghan Refugees in Pakistan, 1997-2001

The growing tendency toward non-compliance with internationalobligations to refugees requires UNHCR to make contingency plansfor asylum denials. Making such plans calls for tools, suchas game theory and confrontation analysis, that link non-compliancein refugee asylum with the configuration of interests for asylumand donor countries in a potential crisis. We illustrate suchtools in a case study of Afghan refugees in Pakistan in 1997–2001,which generated asylum denials by Pakistan ranging from briefborder closings to threats of mass refoulement, linked to thewithholding of assistance by the United States and other donors.We also consider the prospects for using these tools to informcontingency planning for an impending crisis.     

Predictors of the Authorities' Decision to Grant Asylum in Denmark

With the aim of identifying predictors for being granted a residencepermit, adult members of 149 refugee families from the MiddleEast answered a structured interview shortly after arrival onsocial and demographic background and family exposure to organizedviolence. At follow-up, 90 families (60.4 per cent) had beengranted a residence permit. This was positively associated withIraqi nationality, with the duration of the father's educationand the family's religion being another than Islam, and negativelywith being a single mother family. No association was foundwith exposure to war, having lived in a refugee camp or to humanrights violations. Without transparency of the asylum grantingdecision process the conclusion is that this seems to favourthe selection of socially and culturally well situated refugees,while human rights violations seem to play a diminishing role.In order to develop its quality, continuous and transparentmonitoring of the asylum granting decision process appears relevant.     

Deterrence and Protection in the EU’s Migration Policy

EU migration and asylum policy is facing tough challenges at the southern borders of the Union as migration and asylum pressures rise, fuelled by political instability and poverty in several regions of Asia and Africa. Current European border control practices create three spaces of control: externalised borders, through readmission and return agreements which enrol third countries in border control; the EU borders themselves through the work of Frontex and the development of a whole arsenal of technology tools for controlling mobility to and from the EU; and the Schengen area, whose regulations tend to reinforce deterrence at the borders through the Smart Border System. As a result, the EU’s balancing act between irregular migration control and protection of refugees and human life clearly tips towards the former, even if it pays lip service to the latter. More options for mobility across the Mediterranean and more cooperation for growth are essential ingredients of a sustainable migration management policy on the EU’s southern borders. In addition asylum management could benefit from EU level humanitarian visas issued at countries of origin.     

The EU-Turkey Deal One Year On: A Delicate Balancing Act

Now in its sixth year, the war in Syria has triggered the largest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time. For most refugees and migrants, Turkey is the main transit country to reach Europe, where Syrian refugees hope for a better future. However, this journey has been hampered as several European countries closed their borders following the arrival of an unprecedented number of migrants and asylum seekers in 2015. In response, a deal was struck with Turkey to stem the migrant flow to Europe in exchange for some concessions. By outsourcing the management of migration flows to Turkey, the EU is failing to take its fair share of responsibility for refugee protection. Furthermore, as a result of the political situation in Turkey and the unmet promises under the deal, relations between Turkey and the EU have touched their lowest point since the start of accession negotiations in 2005. While survival of the deal is of critical importance as the EU needs Turkey’s assistance in curbing migration flows and Turkey is keen on revitalising its accession negotiations, the deal has exposed serious flaws that need to be addressed and must not be replicated with other countries.     

Matching humanitarian norms with cold,hard interests: the making of refugee policies in Mexico and Honduras, 1980-89

Humanitarian norms and institutions should be considered when analyzing the development and state of national policy. Mexico and Honduras, for example, have provided physical security, health care, and education to most Guatemalans and Salvadorans seeking asylum. In neither case, however, are Mexico's and Honduras' economic and political interests being best served. National interest initially forced the deportation or massacre of these refugees, in the case of Honduras, in the early 1980s. In the absence of change in neither national interests nor attitude, these refugees owe their current treatment to the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These cases support this paper's argument that national policy is shaped over time by interaction with international norm-promoting institutions. In the interest of minimizing costs and risk, policymakers and governments tend to adapt institutionally developed and internationally accepted policies to suit their needs. National policy is not developed solely on the basis of calculations of national interest outside of internationally accepted norms. This paper demonstrates the ability to empirically test the nature of forces guiding the development of national policy.     

难民与安曼城市发展探析

难民是国际热点问题。第二次世界大战后,安曼城市发展常常遭遇周边国家周期性的难民潮影响。由于约旦政府在难民安置和保护上的相对宽松政策,使其周边国家特别是巴勒斯坦、伊拉克的许多难民来此寻求保护,约旦首都安曼首当其冲成为难民的积聚地。难民不仅与城市发展安全、经济安全密不可分,而且在很大程度上影响着城市人口结构、城市规划与城市生活状况。安曼难民的走向与约旦政府、国际社会政策紧密相连。     

CFP and IPE: The anomaly of mutual boredom

The paper explores a puzzling anomaly in the interaction between two major analytic foci in the study of world politics. In the real world there is considerable overlap between problems of international political economy and the conduct of foreign policy; but this overlap is not manifest in the conceptual equipment employed by those engaged in the comparative study of foreign policy (CFP) and those who specialize in international political economy (IPE). Instead of drawing upon each other's work, both fields appear bored by the other. The paper seeks to explain this boredom and offers suggestions for overcoming it.     

John Barrett and collective approaches to United States foreign policy in Latin America, 1907-20

As the United States was becoming a major power in the early years of the twentieth century, it was confronted by a dilemma in its desire to promote a democratic free-enterprise system among the republics of the Western hemisphere. Should the United States act unilaterally or collectively to pursue its goals? The rise of the Pan American Union as a collective political and economic organization provided the means to deal with such issues as revolution and economic instabiliry in Latin America. Nations such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic provided early opportunities to test US policy approaches. However, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and subsequent civil war, provided a major testing ground for both the Taft and Wilson administrations. Ultimately Woodrow Wilson chose to pursue unilateral military intervention in Mexico despite the offer from the Pan American Union and its director, John Barrett, to provide collective negotiations to avoid war and establish political stabiliry in Mexico. As we enter the twenry-first century, the United States finds itself still confronted by these choices on a global scale.