Do asylum seekers and refugees choose destination countries? Evidence from large‐scale surveys in Australia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| Author | Dinuk Jayasuriya,Marie McAuliffe |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12240 |
Do asylum seekers and refugees choose
destination countries? Evidence from
large-scale surveys in Australia, Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
Marie McAuliffe* and Dinuk Jayasuriya**
ABSTRACT
Some literature depicts refugees as more passive than active when selecting a destination coun-
try. We draw on surveys of over 35,000 people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri
Lanka and Australia, to show that most potential asylum seekers and refugees of Hazara,
Rohingya, Muslim and Tamil backgrounds prefer some destination countries over others and
that many refugees from these groups surveyed in Australia specifically had Australia in mind
as a destination country. We show how Australia’s asylum seeker policy was a key reason
why many refugees chose Australia in 2011 and 2012 and that subsequent restrictive asylum
seeker policy changes appear to be reflected in potential asylum seeker considerations in 2014.
We find that despite the restrictive asylum seeker policy changes, perceptions of Australia as a
highly functioning civil society, relative to other potential destination countries, may explain
why Australia remains a country of choice for asylum seekers from west and south Asia.
INTRODUCTION
Do asylum seekers choose particular destination countries, and if so why? For those contemplating
or managing asylum flows, and others advocating for increases in burden sharing in particular des-
tination countries, this is an important question. Given the large flows into Europe in 2015, and the
previous spike in maritime asylum seekers to Australia, understanding the destination country pref-
erences of refugees, and why potential asylum seekers may still prefer Australia, offers a timely
addition to the policy discourse.
The concept of agency in migration theory is not new. It has threaded its way through the long-
running academic discourse since E.G. Ravenstein’s (1885: 183) analysis of internal migration
using census data in the United Kingdom, where he concluded that many temporary migrants are
“migrants by compulsion not by choice”. Subsequent theories of migration built on Ravenstein’s
(1885) laws of migration (Petersen, 1958). Petersen (1958) focused on a typology at the macro-
level, distinguishing between those who “retain some power to decide whether or not to leave (im-
pelled migrants), those who do not have this power (forced migrants) and those whose will is the
most decisive element in migration (free migrants).”However, he conceded that “often the bound-
* The Australian National University.
** Red Elephant Research and Australian National University.
doi: 10.1111/imig.12240
©2016 The Authors
International Migration ©2016 IOM
International Migration Vol. 54 (4) 2016
ISS N 00 20- 7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
ary between the two [impelled and forced], the point at which the choice becomes nominal, may
be difficult to set”(Petersen, 1958: 261).
Subsequently, over the last two decades, there has been widespread recognition that a continuum
of agency exists rather than a voluntary/involuntary dichotomy (Richmond, 1993). Nevertheless,
‘mixed migration’flows involving forced and voluntary migrants who may be situated right along
the ‘agency’continuum has been a focus in the literature for the last two decades, and particularly
since the very significant increase in asylum applications in Europe in the 1990s. This, however,
has been largely policy-oriented due to the governance of international migration and its reliance
on distinguishing between forced and voluntary migration (Betts, 2009; Fussell, 2012). Such analy-
ses of asylum seeker and refugee movements have tended to be undertaken within this framing.
Consequently, there has been minimal progress on the theory of forced migration as it relates to
migrant agency outside of the constraints set by policy. Fussell (2012) argues that refugee scholars
have made few theoretical forays for a number of reasons, partly because “the policy-oriented nat-
ure of refugee studies makes the typing of migrants attractive”. Hence, the theoretical focus on
whether some asylum seekers and refugees choose to leave their home country and a specific desti-
nation country has not received sufficient attention.
Kirmayer (2013: viii) offers a further reason for such a gap in conceptual frameworks of refugee
movement that involves agency:
To the extent that refugees are viewed as having agency –making choices, planning their escape,
seeking to secure asylum ... –they may be suspect .... to the extent that refugees are agentic,
strategic and future-oriented they are perceived as manipulative and less worthy of protection and
support.
In this respect, the reality of refugee volition and the politics of decision-making and movement
render it a contested but nevertheless rich area of enquiry worthy of further examination. Fussell
(2012: 43) further notes that attempts to theorize forced migration through the prism of volition
have been “taken up and set aside by migration scholars but not since the 1980s.”She argues that
there is a significant gap in theory on this topic and that “new theories and research methods used
for studying migration make this a topic poised for growth”.
It is with reference to this theoretical gap that we seek to make a contribution to the discussion
of agency within forced migration studies. There are many aspects related to agency including, for
example, temporal dimensions (when to migrate), social dimensions (who to migrate with), and
spatial dimensions (where and how to migrate). In this article we focus on one aspect of agency:
choice of destination, which has had attention with respect to general migration theory but less
attention in the context of forced migration. Our focus is Australia as a destination country, given
the atypical spike in asylum seekers arriving irregularly in 2012 and 2013.
To investigate whether potential asylum seekers do have preferences, and whether refugees did
have a destination country preference, we use large-scale survey-level data which allow us to cap-
ture the advantages of both case-studies (through agency) and macro-level studies (through scale).
Our data on potential asylum seekers and refugees were drawn from surveys of 1,008 asylum seek-
ers who had been granted refugee status in Australia in 2011 and 2012 and over 34,000 people in
major sources of refugees for Australia, namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka
in 2014. Among those who did have a preference, we investigate what was driving such prefer-
ences and whether preferences were different between ethnic groups and over time.
In the next section of this article, we present earlier key theoretical contributions relevant to des-
tination country choice and introduce the concept of proactive asylum seekers. The third section
reviews empirical literature that investigates destination country choice, and explains how our
research builds on this earlier work. The fourth section presents a background to unauthorized asy-
lum seeking in Australia and this is followed by a brief description of the methods used to collect
Do asylum seekers and refugees choose destination countries? 45
©2016 The Authors. International Migration ©2016 IOM
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