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Tag: asylum applications

The Commission’s plan for reforming EU asylum policy is very ambitious. But can it work?

Note: A 3,000-word analysis of reform plans that are probably never gonna see the light of day anyways, based on simple arithmetics and not-so-simple simulations. Also, an excuse to do graphs. Re-posted from Eurosearch.    The European Commission announced last Wednesday a new package of proposals designed to reform the EU asylum system. The proposals include compulsory redistribution of asylum applications among the EU member states. This is called ‘corrective allocation mechanism’ or ‘fairness mechanism’. Countries would be allocated ‘reference shares’ of asylum applications, and the moment a country’s reference share is exceeded by 50%, an automatic system will set it that will send the excess asylum applicants to countries that have not attained their reference shares yet. If member states do not cooperate, they will have to pay a ‘solidarity contribution’ of €250,000 for every asylum application they refuse to process. The proposal for compulsory redistribution backed by the threat of financial penalties (sorry, solidarity contributions) is very ambitious. But can it work? And I mean, can it work in a strictly technical sense, provided that the EU musters the political support to adopt the proposals[1], manages to make the member states comply with the rules, ensures that they don’t game the national asylum statistics, and so on – additional problems that are by no means trivial to solve. Let’s also leave aside for the moment the normative issue whether such a compulsory redistribution system is fair, to asylum seekers and to the EU member states. For now, the simpler question –…

5 simple things to know about asylum policy in the European Union

Migration is quickly turning into the defining issue of our time. This might sound cliché, but is true. Not only does migration top the list of most important problems facing society, but it is also divisive in a way no other issue is. Unlike problems like inequality or the environment, immigration polarizes and divides opinions of ordinary people in a manner that cuts through social classes, education levels, age groups, and political affiliations. Divisions and bitter disagreements run even within families and close circles of friends. For no other issue do I see on my Facebook wall the full gamut of opinions ranging from strong rejection of migrants and refugees to their unconditional welcome and embrace. Most opinions of course fall somewhere in-between expressing, for example, support for `genuine’ refugees fleeing war but not for economic migrants, or for Christian but not for Muslim immigrants; yet, deep and important disagreements remain. The current crisis with the influx of hundreds-of-thousands asylum-seekers in Europe in the summer of 2015 is only but the current episode of the unfolding migration drama. The crisis and the political responses to it bring powerful emotions in people: fear and compassion, anger and humility, empathy and contempt. Together with polarization, emotions further cloud the discussion of asylum policies and the right thing for the European countries to do in this situation. In response, I want to share five simple things I happen to know about asylum policies in the EU. I am by no means a specialist on…

Visualizing asylum statistics

Note: of potential interest to R users for the dynamic Google chart generated via googleVis in R and discussed towards the end of the post. Here you can go directly to the graph. An emergency refugee center, opened in September 2013 in an abandoned school in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo by Alessandro Penso, Italy, OnOff Picture. First prize at World Press Photo 2013 in the category General News (Single). The tragic lives of asylum-seekers make for moving stories and powerful photos. When individual tragedies are aggregated into abstract statistics, the message gets harder to sell. Yet, statistics are arguably more relevant for policy and provide for a deeper understanding, if not as much empathy, than individual stories. In this post, I will offer a few graphs that present some of the major trends and patterns in the numbers of asylum applications and asylum recognition rates in Europe over the last twelve years. I focus on two issues: which European countries take the brunt of the asylum flows, and the link between the application share that each country gets and its asylum recognition rate. Asylum applications and recognition rates Before delving into the details, let’s look at the big picture first. Each year between 2001 and 2012, 370,000 people on average have applied for asylum protection in one of the member states of the European Union (plus Norway and Switzerland). As can be seen from Figure 1, the number fluctuates between 250,000 and 500,000 per year, and there is no clear trend. Altogether, during this 12-year period, approximately 4.5 million…

When ‘just looking’ beats regression

In a draft paper currently under review I argue that the institutionalization of a common EU asylum policy has not led to a race to the bottom with respect to asylum applications, refugee status grants, and some other indicators. The graph below traces the number of asylum applications lodged in 29 European countries since 1997: My conclusion is that there is no evidence in support of the theoretical expectation of a race to the bottom (an ever-declining rate of registered applications). One of the reviewers insists that I use a regression model to quantify the change and to estimate the uncertainly of the conclusion. While in general I couldn’t agree more that being open about the uncertainty of your inferences is a fundamental part of scientific practice, in this particular case I refused to fit a regression model and calculate standards errors or confidence intervals. Why? In my opinion, just looking at the graph is convincing that there is no race to the bottom – applications rates have been down and then up again while the institutionalization of a common EU policy has only strengthened over the last decade. Calculating standard errors will be superficial because it is hard to think about the yearly averages as samples from some underlying population. Estimating a regression which would quantify the EU effect would only work if the model is sufficiently good to capture the fundamental dynamics of asylum applications before isolating the EU effect, and there is no such model. But most importantly, I just didn’t feel…