Lost in Migration. Which Policies are needed to Safeguard the International Protection System?

In this Policy Brief, PROTECT's principal investigator Hakan G. Sicakkan provides an overview of the research output from the project as well as some of the main policy implications and recommendations.

A central insight from the large body of inter-disciplinary and multi-methodological research is that the right to international protection is both “lost” in the attempts to treat refugees as migrants and contained by other kinds of political concerns, including development, security, border, economic, development, and foreign policy.

The evidence and analyses provided by PROTECT’s researchers cover a range of topics: the evolution of national asylum administrations since the 1950s; the effects of different types of legal, institutional, and procedural frames of asylum decision-making on the asylum recognition rates; the externalization and securitization of the EU’s international protection policy; how the notion of vulnerability is often used as an instrument of narrowing down the protection-seeking migrants’ access to legal and social rights; and how the (non-)distinction between international protection of refugees and asylum seekers on the one hand and migration policy on the other is closely interrelated with the strategies of civil society organizations, citizen attitudes towards refugee policy, and traditional and social media framings.

Three main policy implications are identified: 1) The asylum policy component of EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum should be separated from its migration component; 2) the EU and member states should strive to live up to their UN commitments by, among other things, providing humanitarian corridors and visas, making basic rights independent of migratory status, and strengthen the relocation of asylum seekers from overloaded EU Member States; 3) Language and framing of refugees and asylum seekers is key to increase the legitimacy of international refugee protection.