Reforms of asylum seekers' reception during the 2010s (original) (raw)
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The reception of asylum seekers in the EU: comparing national policies and identifying common trends
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Research on the governance of refugees has until recently remained conceptualized with the national perspective as a starting point. This article compares asylum governance at the local level between Germany, Luxembourg and the Neth-erlands, focusing on the often sensitive and highly debated issue of reception and accommodation. The central idea is to determine convergences and divergences of local reception structures and efforts, and how they are linked to the governance levels situated above them. Despite municipalities having been greatly affected by, and having shaped in practice, reception and integration processes of asylum seekers and refugees, so far there has been little in terms of comparative research across countries in Europe. Our findings emerging from the comparison suggest that top-down implementations of asylum reception have created numerous problems and protest on the ground, especially when the local population and local stakeholders were not involved in the decision-making process. On the one hand, the case studies show that within each national setting, the local regimes and agencies can shape divergent reception outcomes in terms of integrative or disintegrative policies. On the other hand, converging developments in the local cases across national contexts, such as the impact of the local political climate, suggest the crucial impact of local reception regimes and agencies, notwithstanding varying regulatory frameworks and procedures. We thus underline the importance of local-to-local comparison, and not only national-to-national, when it comes to analysing refugee reception.
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The chapter analyses the implementation of asylum seekers’ reception policy in Italy since the migration crisis of 2011 following the collapse of the Tunisian and Libyan regimes. By using multilevel governance (MLG) as an analytical concept, this chapter explores the evolution of the Italian reception system focusing on the relationship between the national and local levels of reception governance. The chapter compares and contrasts two local case studies in Italy – Torino in the Piedmont region and Treviso in the Veneto region. These two localities have different political backgrounds and legacies and they both experienced a change in the political affiliation of the local administration. Although on paper the Italian reception system is characterised by the existence of various MLG mechanisms, in practice there is a large variance, both over time and across the country, in the way MLG arrangements and instances are deployed and work. Drawing upon interviews carried out with stakeholders involved in reception of asylum seekers at the national, regional and local levels, this chapter aims to show that, among the factors explaining this variance, major roles are played by politics (both at the national and regional/local level), socio-political legacies and the strength of civil society organisations (at the regional and local level).
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Well-developed migrant integration policies are crucial for the integration of asylum seekers and refugees into new host societies. When the numbers of asylum seekers to Europe have increased the past decade, European governments seem to respond by developing better policies that improve integration opportunities for asylum seekers. This study examines how the inflow of asylum seekers to Europe in the period of 2008-2014 have impacted the change in integration policies in a selection of European nation states. Based on data from the European Social Survey, ESS7, including data recovered from the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX), this study uses a quantitative comparative method to discuss the importance of the subject. Refugee integration is a much-discussed topic within the research field of integration and the discipline of political science. Earlier studies have addressed a broad specter of themes from the conceptualization of integration, to content and consequences of integration policies. This paper aims to discuss how policies change, from a quantitative perspective, in order to face the challenges of an increasing number of asylum seekers in Europe, in the present time, and in future decades to come. The final results of this study show that the inflow of asylum seekers to European countries, has a positive effect on the change in immigrant integration policies.
EU Law in Populist Times: Crises and Prospects (Cambridge University Press), 2020
Scratching beneath the superficial layer of the ongoing political and media debate, this contribution holistically analyses the content of the EU’s Common European Asylum System (CEAS), a notion that despite its centrality to the EU’s asylum policy lacks a precise definition. Beyond legislative harmonisation, I point to the central role of implementation, which should be viewed as an integral part of the system design, and critically assess the impact of the principle of solidarity and fair-sharing of responsibility. Thereafter, I examine the CEAS’s changing implementation modes, critically assessing to what extent they signal a passage towards an emerging integrated European administration. I also trace the relationship between the events of the 2015–2016 ‘refugee crisis’ and developments in the administrative architecture of the CEAS. I conclude by highlighting how Member State unilateralism and externalisation, i.e. the transfer of obligations to third countries, are increasingly taking centre stage and are operating as a parallel – or indeed even alternative – track to harmonisation and intra-EU cooperation on asylum matters.
Comparative Migration Studies, 2020
The reception of asylum seekers in Italy has become an increasingly contentious issue: many actors, public and private, are involved at various levels of government, and cooperative behaviour cannot be taken for granted. The multi-level governance approach sheds light on the possible patterns in vertical relations, while it does not effectively explore the horizontal relations, which are however crucial, especially at the local level. Moreover, we argue that the definition of multilevel governance as negotiated order among public and non-public actors is too rigid and normative. Local policies of reception are instead a playing field where different actors come together with different interests, values and frames. This paper discusses the implementation of asylum seekers' reception in Italy, looking at both the multilevel and the horizontal dynamics, and it uses the concept of 'battleground' in order better to grasp the complexities of the interaction between actors. The article discloses conflicting and competing frames between different tiers of governance, since municipalities try to resist government imposition related to asylum seekers' reception in their areas. As for the horizontal dynamics, this paper argues that four possible patterns emerge in the relation between state and state actors: a) closure vs. civil society activism; b) tolerance; c) institutional activism vs. anti-immigrant mobilizations; d) cooperation. Overall, the paper aims at addressing the limits of the MLG approach by means of a conceptual tool (the "battleground") which yields a more vivid understanding of implementation dynamics.