Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Policy in Oecd Countries

Refugees and asylum seekers are only a small proportion of the 60 million forcibly displaced persons. But those seeking asylum in the developed world have received much of the attention as western governments have struggled to develop a policy response. An analysis of asylum applications by origin and destination indicates that these flows are largely driven by political terror and human rights abuses. Poor economic conditions in origin countries and tough asylum policies in destination countries matter too. In the light of the findings I suggest that greater coordination among OECD countries could improve the lot of those fleeing from persecution but even this would make only modest inroads into the sum of human misery that displaced people exemplify. One hardly needs reminding that there is a refugee crisis. The war in Syria and Iraq, the huddled masses in refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran and Jordan, and the reports of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas are reminder enough. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before” (UNHCR, 2015a, p. 3). The UNHCR’s estimate of the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide reached 59.5 million by the end of 2014, up from 51.2 million in 2013 and from 37.5 million a decade ago. On a different definition, those enumerated as “of concern” to UNHCR, numbered 54.9 million at the end of 2014. This total includes asylum seekers, stateless persons, returned 1 Department of Economics, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. Email: [email protected]; Tel: +4412062182. I am grateful for financial support from the Collaborative Research Programme on Irregular Migration between the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Control and the Australian National University. 2 refugees, and above all, those who are internally displaced within the borders of their home country (but not those outside the UNHCR’s mandate). Only a fraction of them are refugees, traditionally defined as those who have been displaced outside their origin country owing to a “well-founded fear of persecution”. Most of these (about 80 percent) are located in less developed countries, often in squalid camps with little security. Figure 1 shows that the worldwide stock of refugees rose to a peak of 18 million in 1992, then declined until 2005. Since then there has been an increasingly steep resurgence although the numbers have not yet reached the peak of 1992. Figure 1: Refugees and Asylum Seekers, 1982-2014 Sources: UNHCR, “Total Refugee Population” and UNCHR, “Asylum Trends,” various issues. Figure 1 also plots the flow of applicants for asylum in 38 ‘industrialized’ countries— those that have consistently grabbed the headlines. Asylum applications ascended to a peak in 1992 following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with another surge in the early 2000s and a steep increase since 2007. Although there is no clear trend over the last quarter of a century there was a sharp upward step in the 1980s, which was only partially reversed. The last few years show a similar increase (but from a higher base) 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 90