Asylum burden-sharing within the EU revisited: are we moving on the right track?

ABSTRACT

The refugee crisis evidenced a myriad of flaws in the EU common asylum policy, especially the lack of fairness in asylum burden-sharing. This paper reveals that, despite some progress in terms of inequality, a bi-polarised distribution gained ground. Moreover, two novel convergence approaches in this field reveal that the message of previous articles on disparity reduction is incomplete; there was no pure convergence, as it was achieved due to frontrunners, with no role for laggards. Consequently, urgent political action and greater leadership by European institutions are required to pave the way for distributive justice between states in asylum burdens.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum burden-sharing
• convergence
• polarisation
• collective action failure
• EU

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although the term “responsibility-sharing” is more widely used than “burden-sharing” in most policy debates, as it masks the pejorative connotation sometimes associated with burden, responsibility-sharing is a broader concept that encompasses not only the number of asylum seeker but also, as Betts, Costello and Zaun (2017, 20) explain, “all forms of state contribution to protect, assist, and find solutions for refugees”. Since our discussion will focus primarily on asylum applications data, we will hereafter restrict our discussion to burden-sharing.

2. The Dublin Regulation – backbone of the EU common asylum system – was created as a system for making only one member state responsible for examining an asylum application, thus preventing the so-called phenomenon of “asylum shopping” (Gray 2013). As such, it was not intended to safeguard the principle of solidarity and fair sharing, but rather to establish a criterion for determining responsibility for a claim. In fact, its potential for discouraging secondary movements has been very limited so far (Wagner, Perumadan, and Baumgartner 2019).

3. Since the Eurodac system became operational in 2013, member states can crosscheck through fingerprints whether applicants for international protection in a country had already lodged an asylum application in another (usually the country of first entry) and, therefore, detect some secondary movements.

4. Although there is a broad range of economic and policy indicators to adjust raw numbers of asylum applications (for more details, see Toshkov and De Haan 2013), population is the most common adjustment criteria (UNCHR 2002).

5. A typical example of the different conclusions than can derived from the use of absolute and relative figures is the case of Germany. With the highest burden in absolute terms during the first years of our sample period, Germany was a country with a relative asylum burden below the EU average.

6. As data for Croatia is only available since 2013, this country was classified in 2008 according to its relative asylum burden in 2013.

7. There is general agreement that the $\beta$ parameter should be close to one (Esteban, Gradín, and Ray 2007).

8. This rate is defined as the share of positive decisions out of the total number of applications.

9. This method delivers consistent estimates when disturbances are heteroscedastic in presence of common AR(1) autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence (Hardin 1995).

10. In our case the optimum bandwidths in the x and y directions have been computed according to rules laid out by Bashtannyk and Hyndman (2001).

11. This does not necessarily mean (in cases such as Greece, Austria and Belgium) that their relative asylum burden decreased; it increased but to a lesser extent than that of the others. Unfortunately, the active role played by Germany was partially offset by the seemingly passive attitude of some laggard countries (especially the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Slovakia and Poland).

12. This term is frequently used in the refugee literature to describe a situation in which countries compete to discourage asylum seekers knocking at their door, thus passing on the problem of an excess of asylum burden to their neighbours (Toshkov and De Haan 2013).

13. An interesting special issue on “Economic and Financial Governance in the European Union after a decade of Economic and Political Crises”, focused (in part) on the heath crisis and its consequences, has been just published in Journal of Economic Policy Reform (D’Erman, Schure, and Verdun 2020).