| Abstract: |
The cross-national empirics of the international asylum system are in their
infancy. While Hatton, 2009, and Neumayer, 2005, 2006a and 2006b provided
important and valuable cross-national insights on the drivers of the asylum
seeking process, as yet little is known in terms of hard-core evidence about
the effects of asylum-driven migration processes on the recipient countries.
But such analyses are necessary, since asylum plays such an important role in
the overall South-North migration process, and several international decision
makers, especially on the European level, are increasingly stressing the
necessity to get asylum seekers into employment, while others – like the
Austrian Ministry of the Interior in its long-term strategy, published in 2012
– vehemently argue in favour of a clear separation between legal,
employment-related migration and asylum. Will ‘getting asylum seekers into
employment’ have any effects on social and economic development, or will it
motivate more and more people to emigrate for work as “free riders” of the
asylum system? This paper should preliminarily attempt to close this widening
and politically highly relevant research gap. The EU's total population was
502.5 million, with a yearly increase of 0.5 million due to natural population
increase and 0.9 million due to net migration. While the European Union
accepts about 2.4 million immigrants per year from third countries, among them
more than 800.000 people in the framework of work visas, and more than 750.000
people under the title of family reunifications, 260.000 to 300.000 people
apply for asylum each year. All official European Commission data, surveyed in
this article, seem to suggest that asylum and illegal migration are part and
parcel of the overall migration process. While on average ¾ of the asylum
applications in Europe are being rejected by the authorities as unfounded,
there was a stock of up to 4.5 million illegal residents already residing in
the entire EU-27; and in addition, we can assume that around 450.000 illegal
entrants are apprehended each year at the EU external borders. The illegal
inflow and shadow economy migration statistics also have to take into account
the around 340.000 persons, denied entry each year, suggesting that the
overall shadow migration pressure, resulting from unfounded asylum and illegal
or rejected entries amounts to more than 1 million people each year, by far
exceeding the 800.000 work visas granted annually. Thus there is an urgent
political need to act. The somewhat surprising, but undisputable net end
result of all these European immigration procedures (work visas, family
re-unifications, and other migration) up to now was a sharp and clear-cut rise
in the total stock of the resident population in Europe from only three
countries: Turkey (approx. 2.4 million), Morocco (approx. 1.8 million) and
Albania (approx. 1 million). They are the absolute winners of the hitherto
existing de-facto European migration ‘policy’. The combined size of illegal
border crossings, denied entry applications, and rejected asylum applications
of more than 1.0 million persons seems to suggest that indeed there exists a
huge migration-related shadow economy (Graphs 1-3). Our ensuing data analysis
is based on the tradition of cross-national development accounting, using an
expanded version of the Tausch, 2012b data set (“Corvinus University data
set”) and UNDP, 2009 and UNHCR, 2012 figures on migration. We start these
empirical cross-national analyses by providing some calculations about the
societal effects of the well-known Migration Policy Index, which measures the
general institutional ease with which migration recipient countries integrate
migrants economically in general. Our calculations reconfirm the reservations
by the present author (Tausch, 2010, 2012) against the generalized neo-liberal
thesis that a free migration process automatically ensures economic
prosperity. With the level of development and the overall conditions of the
migration process being constant, there are some very serious and significant
negative partial correlations of the MIPEX Index with indicators of political
participation and the fight against discrimination. Our data also show the
significant pull-factors, caused by an open migration regime, as measured by
the MIPEX Index, as well as the societal consequences of a high MIPEX Index
score - growing xenophobia against the weakest groups in society - such as the
Roma and Sintis, an ensuing growing public debt burden, and lower economic
growth. One might still argue that, on ethical grounds, one should be still in
favour of increasing MIPEX index performance, but in terms of its societal
consequences, our results suggest to be pessimistic. We then move on to
analyse systematically the effects of the UNDP cross-national migration
variables on socio-economic development and vice versa. Our hypothesis is that
opening the gates of unlimited access of asylum seekers to the labour market
an even more substantial number of people would decide to enter the labour
markets in the developed countries in Europe via the asylum procedure, thus
thwarting any attempts to arrive at a more education and skill oriented
immigration system. We try to corroborate this by first looking into the
question of the relationship between access liberalization, measured by the
MIPEX Index, and the UNDP documented asylum burden rate (Graph 1 and 2).
Although the relationship is not too strong, there are some positive
trade-offs between the two variables. In Table 3 of this study, we then
provide a very clear-cut argument on how a migration policy, based on asylum
influx, is ill-conceived, and several important phenomena are significantly
being undermined - internal security, the balance of tolerance in society,
gender relations, education, and environmental conditions. Our partial
correlation analysis shows that with increasing dependence on the immigration
system based on the influx of asylum seekers, there is a significantly larger
societal acceptance of the value orientation that men have precedence on the
labour market over women when jobs are scarce; and in addition, the import of
polluting goods and raw materials; maternal mortality, terrorist attacks, and
the violations of civil rights and political rights increase, independent from
the development level reached and the general conditions of the migration
process being in place. The near bankruptcy of the current de facto existing
European asylum-based migration policy is also reflected in Table 4 of this
study – documenting the partial correlations of asylum seekers per head of
population with processes of socio-economic development. Again, the level of
development and general overall conditions of the migration process were held
constant. Crime rates, macho values, and the terrorist threat increase
significantly, while fiscal freedom, growth prospects in the current crisis
and the employment of older workers are being curtailed, and important areas
of environmental policy, measured by the Yale-Columbia environment policy data
series, are again being negatively affected. In addition, also the World
Values Survey data on the work ethics of society are negatively being affected
by an asylum-based migration system. Table 5 then documents the positive
effects of work permit requirements for asylum seekers, still in place in
several European countries and documented by the European
Commission/Europäische Kommission (2012), on various socio-economic indicators
from the Tausch 2012b Corvinus data set, including environment data, economic
growth, education, and World Values Survey indicators of tolerance and
volunteer activities. Social security, growth, environmental policy,
education, health, liberal values in society - all these are positively
affected by a work permit regime for asylum seekers in Europe, which the
European Commission seems to be inclined to abolish. Table 6 shows the
sobering results of the determinants of average economic growth rates in the
EU-27 in the era of the current world economic crisis, 2008 to 2011. The
crisis hit the poorer EU countries - ceteris paribus - far harder than the
richer countries, and immigration rates are a significant negative determinant
of growth, while the work permits regime for asylum seekers significantly and
positively affects economic growth. Table 7 shows our final estimates of the
determinants of asylum burden rates in the world system. In addition to the
famous "bell-curve" of the levels of development, private health expenditures
and the military personnel rates are significant drivers of asylum burden
rates, while we also show that dependency from the large transnational
corporations (measured by UNCTAD data on MNC penetration and its rise over
time) are conducive to such higher asylum burden rates. Thus, we can show that
traditional quantitative approaches to international development, initiated by
the Swiss sociologist Volker Bornschier, which are based on UNCTAD data on MNC
penetration and its rise over time, explain well contemporary social asylum
process realities of the world today. By contrast, an employment policy
favouring the employment rates of older workers generally deters higher asylum
dependency ratios. In Tables 8a and 8b, we finally show bivariate and partial
correlations of asylum procedure global recognition rates, as documented by
the UNHCR for 2010, and key variables of socio-economic development, as
documented in Tausch, 2012a, 2012b. Our results again would caution against an
asylum-based or asylum-driven immigration policy. We conclude by saying that
the European Commission would be well advised to seek to redistribute current
asylum inflows from countries like Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and
Austria to other EU-member countries, thus providing more fairness in the
current Schengen system. Doubling or even tripling the European numbers of
legal work permits would also be an advisable strategy, and Europe should
seriously consider the new Austrian migration procedure for third-country
nationals (Red-White-Red-card) as a best practice model. |