The Europeanization of asylum policy: an assessment of the EU impact on asylum applications and recognitions rates

Abstract

Asylum policy in the European nation-states has been a subject of increasing influence form the European Union over the last 12 years since the call for the establishment of a Common European Asylum System. This article presents an assessment of the EU impact on the asylum policy outcomes in the 27 member states, Norway and Switzerland. The article focuses on three central hypotheses about the effects of Europeanization – a race to the bottom, convergence and burden sharing. Using aggregate and origin-specific asylum data for the period 1999–2010 provided by the UNHCR, we show that the increasing Europeanization of asylum policy has not resulted in a race to the bottom in which asylum recognition rates and the numbers of admitted refugees have eroded. Contrary to existing literature, we find some evidence for convergence of the overall asylum recognition rates but important national differences in the recognition of applicants from the same country of origin persist. Europeanization has not led to more equal distribution of the applications and recognitions of asylum status in Europe. Overall, the EU has had only a limited impact on the changes in asylum policy outcomes.

Keywords:

• Asylum applications
• asylum policy
• asylum recognition rates
• burden-sharing
• convergence
• Europeanization

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

Notes

According to the Lisbon Treaty, the common asylum policy is subject to the ordinary legislative procedure (Chalmers et al. 2010). The treaty was signed in 2007 and entered into force on 1 December 2009.

We follow Hix and Goetz in defining Europeanization as ‘a process of change in national institutional and policy practices that can be attributed to European integration’ (Hix and Goetz 2000: 27).

Cross-border transfers have been criticized from a theoretical point of view by Facchini et al. (2006).

Agreements between the EU and Switzerland about the Swiss application of the Schengen acquis and the criteria and mechanisms for establishing the state responsible for examining a request for asylum have been signed in 2004 and entered into force in 2008. A similar agreement with Norway has been in place since 2001.

More specifically, non-origin-specific asylum data for the entire period of the study and origin-specific data after 2007 are taken from the respective editions of the UNHCR Statistical Yearbook (available online at http://www.unhcr.org). Origin-specific asylum data for the years prior to 2006 were provided by the UNHCR Division of Programme Support and Management upon request. All numbers that follow are based on first instance decisions only (where possible to separate them from decision on appeals).

The alternative would have been to calculate the recognition rate from the number of applications, but this has a number of shortcomings. First, it can lead to nonsensical results if the number of positive decisions is larger than the total number of applications in a year. While this seems unlikely in the case of the aggregate data discussed so far, it is a real possibility when we later zoom in on origin-specific applications and decisions data. Second, the number of decisions being taken is less of a subject to a shock than the number of applications. The capacity for taking asylum decisions adjusts slower than the flow of applications to the external environment, so if we were to use the number of applications in the calculation of the recognition rate, we could end up blaming a country for lowering its recognition rate even if its essential standards for recognition remain the same, but the capacity to take decisions relative to the number of applications decreases. Furthermore, since the number of applications and decisions are highly correlated, the exact choice has little effect. Yet, to make sure that states do not depress the number of decisions they take as a tool to restrict the inflow of refugees, we investigate the absolute number of people admitted in addition to the recognition rates throughout the article.

We also assume that the composition of asylum seekers applying to the European states remains roughly the same with respect to the likely merits of their claims. It could be that asylum seekers strategically adapt to the recipient countries' policies and, as a result, only asylum seekers with very strong claims are applying after the tightening of the European asylum policies. Without individual-level data on asylum seekers, however, it is not possible to control for this potential change in the composition of applications.

The exact influence of the EU on the flows of asylum applications, decisions and recognitions and the associated uncertainty of the inference are difficult to quantify given the absence of a theoretical model that can capture sufficiently well the overall variation in these asylum policy indicators. Since no such model is currently available and in view of the time series nature of the data, estimating a regression coefficient for the effect of the EU on the yearly changes in asylum indicators would be misleading.

We have also analysed an alternative measure of variation which takes into account the different numbers of decisions being taken by different destination countries. In effect, the alternative measure controls for the fact hat the recognition rate of, say, Germany, is more important than the one of Estonia as Germany processes many more applications. Using the weighted mean and the weighted variance to compute a weighted coefficient of variation and analyse convergence, we find a less pronounced converging trend compared to the results based on the unweighted coefficient of variation.

The April 2011 confrontation between Italy and France showed that reality is more complicated than that. Some countries might have rather relaxed admission rules in the full knowledge that, once admitted, asylum seekers would move to settle in another member state due perceived higher economic opportunities or existing social ties.