https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2373-0180
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ABSTRACT
Many refugee-receiving countries have restricted their asylum policies and stepped up their border control policies to prevent asylum seekers from reaching their territories. At the same time, the resettlement of refugees has gained popularity. Many states have introduced resettlement schemes or have increased the number of refugees they resettle. Why do states voluntarily admit refugees by expanding resettlement? This article develops a comprehensive theoretical account of countries’ resettlement choices and identifies the determinants of their openness to refugee resettlement through an empirical analysis of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2019. We find that the supply-side factor of wealth best predicts whether a country engages in refugee resettlement. The number of effective resettlement admissions tends to fluctuate with the demand-side factor of humanitarian need. Nevertheless, the expansion of resettlement policies has not resulted in a subsequent expansion of humanitarian protection. Instead, states combine resettlement policies with restrictive border control policies which allows them to preserve their humanitarian credentials while curtailing refugees’ overall access to asylum. These findings provide important insights into the policy-making of refugee resettlement and the strategic considerations in the asylum governance of liberal democracies.
Acknowledgement
The article has benefited substantially from generous feedback provided by Sandra Lavenex, Natascha Zaun, and Dalston Ward. We would like to thank participants of the following events for enriching discussions: the Annual Conference of the Swiss Political Science Association 2020, the European Political Science Association Conference 2020, and the ECPR General Conference 2020. We also thank Giada Crivelli for her support in data collection and Melyssa Piña Sigg for her research assistance. Finally, we are grateful to the two anonymous referees who have helped to improve the article with their valuable comments.
Data availability statement
Replication files are available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/F8OKBF.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We focus on countries’ economies and largely neglect social, cultural, and demographic factors that may affect states’ capacities to admit refugees in order to ensure that our definition of ‘capacity’ neither becomes vague, nor overlaps theoretically or in terms of measurement with other explanations we consider (e.g., sociopolitical acceptance).
2 The relocation key also includes previous refugee intakes. While this could be read in terms of admission capacity, it is deployed in the opposite sense inasmuch as countries’ previous refugee intakes are deducted from their current obligations.
3 While refugees fleeing from the East to the West held considerable propaganda utility for Western democracies, their numbers remained more limited during the Cold War, with major peaks only occurring during the 1990s and more recently.
4 The strategic use of resettlement refers to the use of resettlement for purposes other than refugee protection (van Selm Citation2004).
5 European Commission (2016) ‘Enhancing Legal Channels: Commission Proposes to Create Common EU Resettlement Framework.’ Press release, Brussels, 13 July 2016. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-2434_en.htm.
6 The claim of ‘queue-jumping’ is a metaphor in the public discourse but does not adequately describe the reality of refugees as most of them do not have access to protection in a safe third country and therefore are not waiting in a queue.
7 The following countries are included: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States. Eastern European countries were only included after their first free elections took place. These are only the OECD member states of the year 2010 and leaves out countries that joined the organisation later.
8 Some non-OECD countries in the Global South (primarily in South America and Africa) started to be involved in refugee resettlement after 2000. However, these few cases remain of minor significance in comparison with the overall number of resettlement places.
10 The IMPIC indicator also includes the category ‘no asylum’. Since we are only interested in resettlement policies, we re-code these observations as ‘no resettlement’.
11 Data on countries’ unemployment rates and GDP per capita comes from the International Monetary Fund. Per-capita GDP is log-transformed for the purpose of the analysis due to the variable’s strongly skewed distribution.
12 Our classification of radical-right populist parties is based on Mudde (Citation2007).
13 Official refugee figures provided by the UNHCR are based on the total number of refugees under the UNHCR mandate. These figures do not include internally displaced persons.
14 Furthermore, the EU encourages the resettlement of refugees, identified as such by the UNHCR, with a voluntary program and financial resources. There have been several collective pledges from member states (e.g., during the war in Iraq in 2008/2009 and the conflict in Syria since 2011).
15 Note that refugee resettlement also used to be a common tool in the period following the Second World War. However, refugee statistics from these early times are less reliable (Fransen and de Haas Citation2019). Our analysis only focuses on the period after 1980 to ensure data comparability.
16 The countries whose policy index retained a constant value over time were dropped from the correlation analysis.