Asylum Destination Choice
| Published date | 01 June 2004 |
| Date | 01 June 2004 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116504042444 |
| Subject Matter | Journal Article |
Asylum Destination Choice
What Makes Some West European
Countries More Attractive Than Others?
Eric Neumayer
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
ABSTRACT
This article examines what explains the relative attractive-
ness of West European countries as a destination for asylum
seekers. Individuals coming to Western Europe in order to
lodge an asylum application are modelled as utility maxi-
mizers who choose the destination country that offers the
highest net benefit. This benefit is seen as a function of econ-
omic attractiveness, generosity of welfare provisions, deter-
rent policy measures, hostility towards foreigners and
asylum seekers, existing asylum communities, colonial and
language links as well as geographical proximity. Results
from a large dyadic panel over the time period from 1982 to
1999 demonstrate the impact that these fundamental deter-
minants have on asylum destination choice. The impli-
cations of the results for the ongoing debates over fair
burden-sharing are complex because they provide argu-
ments for two conflicting interpretations of burden-sharing
as either financial side payments or the physical reallocation
of asylum seekers.
155
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116504042444
Volume 5 (2): 155–180
Copyright© 2004
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
KEY WORDS
asylum destination
burden-sharing
migration
origin
networks
01 042444 (to/d) 15/4/04 12:25 pm Page 155
Introduction
Asylum seekers coming to Western Europe have preferred some destination
countries over others. Austria, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland were the
main destination countries relative to their population size in the 1980s and
1990s, whereas Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain took on very few asylum
seekers. Sharing the burden of hosting asylum seekers has long since been on
the political agenda of West European countries (Hailbronner, 2000). Vink
(2002: 204) calls it the ‘most salient aspect’ of European Union (EU) immi-
gration politics in the 1990s. Not surprisingly, those with a high burden –
whether perceived or real – have been arguing for a more equal or ‘fair’
burden-sharing. Germany, in particular, has been an outspoken proponent of
such requests (Lavenex, 1999: 57).
It is far from clear what amounts to fair burden-sharing, however. For
some, it means that developed countries assist poor front-line developing
countries in coping with mass inflows of refugees (Suhrke, 1998), keeping in
mind that many of them host a far greater number of refugees than any devel-
oped country (UNHCR, 2002). Nevertheless, within the European debates, fair
burden-sharing has come to be understood as the demand of countries that
perceive themselves as overburdened to share this burden with other West
European countries. Of course, it is not even clear how the burden of hosting
asylum seekers should be measured (Hailbronner, 2000: 419). Germany,
during its presidency in the second half of 1994, proposed a complex set of
criteria ranging from population and territory size to gross domestic product
and the contribution of destination countries to peace-keeping forces and
other security measures (Thorburn, 1995: 476). Others have speculated about
the number of existing refugees previously granted asylum and the destina-
tion country’s ethnic composition (Dacyl, 1995: 104) as well as cultural,
historical and linguistic links (ECRE, 1995) as supplementary criteria. Equally
unclear is whether sharing the burden would mean a reallocation of asylum
seekers as in the German proposal or financial side payments.
Calls for harmonized policy measures aimed at a fairer burden-sharing
of asylum seekers have had only modest success. The non-binding 1995 ‘Reso-
lution on Burden-Sharing’ (Official Journal of the European Union [O.J.] 1995,
C262/1) and the 1996 ‘Council Decision on an Alert and Emergency
Procedure for Burden-Sharing with Regard to the Admission and Residence
on a Temporary Basis of Displaced Persons’ (O.J. 1996, L63/10) apply only to
unusually large inflows of asylum seekers, who are taken out of the
conventional asylum determination system and are granted temporary
protection status, such as those fleeing the war in former Yugoslavia. These
represent important flows in terms of absolute numbers, but there is no
European Union Politics 5(2)
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