What Refugees Want: A New Cross-National Dataset on Refugee Rights (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Privileging Migrants' Voices

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, refugee issues have become increasingly politicized due to the rapid expansion of migrant flows to the global North by asylum-seeking individuals. Despite a general tendency of receiving countries to restrict the number of refugees, the countries reveal very different patterns in regards to the number of asylum applications and their recognition rates. This diversity in trends could be the result of the country’s specific location or the source country composition of its applicants. But it could also be the result of differences in asylum and refugee policies.

In order to enhance our comprehensive understanding of these issues, this paper sheds light on refugees’ post-entry rights provided by host governments. In fact, despite recently heated debates on refugees, they have predominantly focused on the volumes or inflows of refugees. Subsequently, most of longitudinal cross-national refugee datasets treat refugees numerically (e.g., a number of emigrating or migrating refugees, caps imposed by host governments, border controls, etc). Although there is awareness that it is equally significant to examine post-entry rights of refugees to fully understand directions of refugee movements, our knowledge on this dimension is rudimentary due to limited data availability. In most cases, there are case studies that qualitatively delve into the issue or at best, empirical measurements investigating one country or region’s policies on post-entry rights.

To fill this lacuna, this paper introduces a new dataset that systematically measures cross-national differences and time-series changes in refugees’ post-entry rights in host countries between 1970 and 2020. We first provide an overview of the main features of the dataset, identify its limitations, and trace variation in post-entry rights for refugees over time and across countries. The dataset is inspired by numerous sources, such as DEMIG (Determinants of International Migration) project, International Migration Outlook by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), DWRAP (Developing World Refugee and Asylum Policy) dataset (2020) by the Immigration Policy Lab (Stanford University), Timothy J. Hatton’s (2009) works, and the World Refugee Survey by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (2009), along with extensive archival research in the UNCHR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) library.

As an exploratory analysis of this newly constructed dataset, this paper examines the relationship between host countries’ domestic political institutions and their post-entry policies on refugees. Statistical analyses yield that host governments’ treatment of refugees is positively associated with political rights and civil liberties granted to natives in their countries. In other words, when a country is highly repressive, refugees only enjoy limited amount of rights. In contrast, as a country becomes more democratic, it enhances a chance that refugees would obtain greater rights. In conclusion, we emphasize that the data would be helpful for researchers, policymakers, and international organizations to more accurately understand the overall nature of refugee movements.

Authors

• Yu Jin Woo, Waseda University

• Masaaki Higashijima, Tohoku University