Official standards and local knowledge in asylum procedures: decision-making in Germany’s asylum system

ABSTRACT

The role of public officials in asylum procedures is generally a critical concern in scholarly and political debates. Focusing on the asylum system in Germany, this paper seeks to understand asylum procedures with regard to officially claimed standards and the still varying practices of decision-making. It draws on the findings of a qualitative study based on a multi-method design and carried out in the asylum administration. Based on a sociology of knowledge approach, the paper shows that administrative practices are largely a matter of how decision-makers on the ground interpret legal and political regulations. We demonstrate that decision-makers utilise shifting strategies to handle official claims and cope with local settings in their daily work, from defining the applicant to reaching decisions about asylum requests. The administration of asylum applications is discussed as a field that uses and (re-)produces both authorised and informal knowledge. Caseworkers develop a pragmatic knowledge of how to deal with the discrepancies between official standards and local working conditions. However, it is the asylum institution that provides the context in which they navigate the pitfalls and challenges of the asylum procedure.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum
• refugees
• bureaucratic field
• institutional analysis
• sociology of knowledge
• qualitative research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Data are drawn from the research project entitled ‘Europeanization of Asylum Administrative Practice?’ which is headed by Christian Lahusen and Karin Schittenhelm at the University of Siegen in Germany and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the context of the research unit ‘Horizontal Europeanization’.

2. Of the 1000 positions created in the autumn of 2015, 450 were assigned to decision-making tasks. See www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2015/20150911-0019-personalgewinnung-asylverfahren.html?nn=1366068 (11 September 2015).

3. During the current recruitment wave, however, requirements were loosened so that anybody with a Bachelor’s degree may now apply to enter administrative service within the BAMF (see, e.g. http://oeffentlicher-dienst-news.de/bamf-neue-stellen-ausgeschrieben-jetzt-bewerben/). In addition, employees from other state authorities support the BAMF for limited periods of time (see, e.g. Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 18/6860, 30 November 2015).

4. In some exceptional cases, an application can be lodged in writing (BAMF 2014, 14). In 2015, this was the case for a considerable number of applications from Syria, Iraq, and Eritrea (Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 18/6860, 30 November 2015).

5. In the context of increasing caseloads and measures introduced to speed up the procedure in 2015, however, the administration set up so-called decision-centres in which case officers take decisions on the basis of written protocols alone.

6. We translated all interviews carried out in German only after we had analysed them, for the purpose of presenting the data. The character of oral accounts has been preserved; unclear words and short breaks are marked by brackets, all names have been changed, line numbers are shown. The translation of the passages has been double-checked.

7. Member States shall ensure that the applicant has the opportunity to make comments and/or provide clarification orally and/or in writing with regard to any mistranslations or misconceptions appearing in the report or in the transcript, at the end of the personal interview or within a specified time limit before the determining authority takes a decision (Art 17(3) of Directive 2013/32/EU).