Coping with the asylum challenge: tightening and streamlining policies in Western Europe

ABSTRACT

To cope with the challenges posed by growing numbers of asylum seekers, Western European countries have relied on tightening policies over the last decades. We propose to complement this traditional and one-dimensional view by highlighting the importance of encompassing streamlining policies that aim to enhance the efficiency of national asylum systems through procedural accelerations and structural reforms. We argue that political conflicts over tightening and streamlining policies follow different logics. While it is hypothesised that the level of support for the former increases the more to the right a given actor position itself, approval for the latter is expected to decline with the degree of ideological extremity on the left–right axis. The empirical case relies on structured elite interviews conducted with the major political organisations involved in a referendum on the urgent modifications of the Swiss asylum law in 2013. Our quantitative findings tend to support our hypotheses.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum
• Western Europe
• Switzerland
• referendum

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Petra Mäder for her precious assistance and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Laurent Bernhard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5910-2859

David Kaufmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4185-4550

Notes

1 Czaika and De Haas (2013) introduced a very useful distinction between written policies, policy discourse and policy implementation when considering the effectiveness of immigration policies. As outlined in the present study’s research design, the policies we selected for our empirical analysis were part of a referendum proposition, which gave rise to a nationwide policy debate in Switzerland. Thus, the advantages and disadvantages of these policies actually occurred in the framework of a much broader policy discourse. However, given that our interview questions narrowly refer to every single policy of the reform, we posit that we ultimately examine written policies.

2 Given that Swiss political elites are motivated to participate in academic interviews, we succeeded in including all political organizations we considered to be of importance. We are thus dealing with an exhaustive actor selection.

3 Our measure for power draws on a question asked immediately after the vote had taken place. On a list that contained all organisations that we had interviewed in front of the campaign, selected campaign managers were invited to mark those organisations that, from their point of view, had been particularly influential. It turned out that the Evangelical People’s Party, the labour union Unia and the conservative youth organisation Young4fun.ch were not mentioned at all. Hence, these three organisations were excluded from the analysis.

4 This strategy enables an acceptable number of degrees of freedom. In addition, we need to mention that we relied on an iterative approach by adding one control variable at a time. These models did not change our findings in terms of statistical significance.

5 The wording of these items is as follows: (1) I am afraid of increased violence and acts of vandalism committed by foreigners in my neighborhood, (2) Because of foreigners I am concerned about my personal economic situation, (3) I am afraid of increasing violence and vandalism committed by foreigners in Switzerland, (4) I am afraid of the threat of the Swiss culture due to foreigners, (5) Because of foreigners I am concerned about the economic situation of Switzerland.

6 With respect to tightening, this noteworthy non-finding is primarily due to the fact that the explanatory power of the left–right scale tends to outweigh the effects that stem from xenophobic attitudes.