Rivalry, ethnicity, and asylum admissions worldwide

ABSTRACT

Why do countries welcome some refugees and treat others poorly? Existing explanations suggest that the assistance refugees receive is a reflection of countries’ wealth or compassion. However, statistical analysis of a global dataset on asylum admissions shows that states’ approaches to refugees are shaped by foreign policy and ethnic politics. States admit refugees from adversaries in order to weaken those regimes, but they are reluctant to accept refugees from friendly states. At the same time, policymakers favor refugee groups who share their ethnic identity. Aside from addressing a puzzling real-world phenomenon, this article adds insights to the literature on the politics of migration and asylum.

¿Por qué los países acogen a algunos refugiados y tratan mal a otros? En las explicaciones existentes, se sugiere que la asistencia que reciben los refugiados es un reflejo de la riqueza o la compasión de los países. Sin embargo, el análisis estadístico de un conjunto de datos a nivel mundial sobre admisiones de asilo muestra que la política exterior y la política étnica determinan los enfoques de los estados respecto de los refugiados. Los estados reciben a refugiados de los adversarios con la finalidad de debilitar esos regímenes, pero son reacios a aceptar refugiados de los estados aliados. Al mismo tiempo, los encargados de la formulación de políticas favorecen a los grupos de refugiados que comparten su identidad étnica. Además de abordar un desconcertante fenómeno real, este artículo aporta ideas a la bibliografía sobre la política de migración y asilo.

Pourquoi des pays accueillent-ils certains réfugiés et n’accordent pas le même traitement à d’autres ? Les explications existantes suggèrent que la prospérité et la compassion des pays sont reflétées dans l’assistance dont les réfugiés bénéficient. Cependant, l’analyse statistique d’un jeu de données mondiales portant sur les admissions de demandeurs d’asile montre que l’approche des États vis-à-vis des réfugiés est déterminée par leur politique étrangère et leur politique ethnique. Les États admettre des réfugiés d’opposants afin d’affaiblir ces régimes mais sont réticents à accepter des réfugiés d’États amis. Dans le même temps, les décideurs politiques favorisent les groupes de réfugiés partageant leur identité ethnique. En plus d’aborder un phénomène réel déroutant, cet article apporte un éclairage sur la littérature relative aux politiques de migration et d’asile.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• asylum
• admission
• foreign policy
• ethnic politics

Acknowledgments

I thank Sarah Bush, Christina Davis, Rex Douglass, Kent Eaton, Andrea Everett, Amaney Jamal, Robert Keohane, Evan Lieberman, Alexander Ovodenko, Sarah Parkinson, Tom Scherer, and Erin Snider for their helpful comments on previous drafts.

Notes

¹ While the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol only cover individuals subject to persecution, the OAU Convention expands the definition to accommodate situations of mass flight. (Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees [entered into force April 22, 1954]; Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (entered into force Oct. 4, 1967); OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa [entered into force June 20, 1974]).

² In fact, from 1952 to 1980 American law defined a refugee as a person fleeing “from a Communist-dominated country or area, or from any country within the general area of the Middle East.” (Immigration and Nationality Act, Section 203(a)(7), qtd. in Teitelbaum 1984, 430). Teitelbaum (1984) also cites as an example of this argument a 1982 memo from the Central American Refugee Center in Washington: “ … granting political asylum to Salvadorans communicates world-wide that the government of El Salvador violates the human rights of its citizens. Since the US aids and supports the government of El Salvador, it does not want to communicate this message …” (qtd. inTeitelbaum 1984, 439).

³ Some research on individual attitudes toward immigration points to the importance of labor market competition and/or the fiscal burden on public services (Dolmas and Huffman 2004; Espenshade and Hempstead 1996; Facchini and Mayda 2009; Hanson, Scheve, and Slaughter 2007; Mayda 2006; Scheve and Slaughter 2001). Still, several studies cast doubt on these economic self-interest arguments (Citrin et al. 1997; Hainmueller and Hiscox 2010).

⁴ Although Veney (2007, 65) argues that “even in poor countries the state is more than able to exercise sovereignty by deciding who to let in, who to keep out, how to treat those who are let in, and who to kick out when they are no longer wanted.”

⁵ The “UNHCR Statistical Online Population Database” reports two types of recognition rates, refugee recognition rates and total recognition rates. The latter includes individuals who have been accorded complementary protection status. Receiving states may recognize an individual as a 1951 Convention refugee or grant them complementary protection status. The latter is generally used for individuals who, though not eligible for Convention refugee status, may still have sound reasons for not wishing to return to their home country. The two statuses usually entail different rights and entitlements for the asylum-seeker, with complementary protection often considered a subsidiary or temporary form of protection. My analysis covers only refugee recognition rates.

⁶ More precisely, UNHCR calculates the recognition rate as the number of decisions recognizing asylum claims in any one year, relative to the number of claims decided upon (UNHCR 2010).

⁷ In years in which both the Amnesty International and US State Department derived-ratings were present, their simple average was taken. Where one of the two ratings was missing, the other was used instead.

⁸ Fixed effects estimation was implemented via the “reghdfe” package in Stata (Correia 2017).

⁹ This statement holds whether the mean left-right position weighted by parties’ vote share in parliament (rile_wmean), or left-right polarization of the party system (rile_polarization), is used. Both of these variables were derived using the Manifesto Project Election Level do-file.

¹⁰ The Ethnicity of Refugees dataset was used in combination with the EPR dataset to indicate whether a refugee group shared the same ethnicity as the group in power in the receiving country.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 1121194.