Refugee Burden-Sharing: A Modest Proposal

Abstract

Refugee Burden-Sharing regions, notably Africa, south and southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, and internally displaced individuals became more numerous than the border-crossing refugees.' By the 1980s, Europe had come to think of the refugee burden as more of a problem for the Third World and the United States than for itself. Protected from large-scale refugee movements by an impregnable Iron Curtain in the east, Europe seemed relatively immune to the threat. It is no longer possible to entertain this comforting illusion. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Germany's reunification, the militarization of bitter ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, and the failure of many former European colonies to establish viable political and economic systems, refugees are once again pouring into the very heart of Europe. Moreover, new migration routes, facilitated by cheap transportation and intricate social networks, are bringing migrants to Europe (and thence to the United States) from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific archipelago. 6 Although few of these migrants are likely to meet the legal qualifications for Convention refugee status, 1 many of them nevertheless seek some form of temporary or permanent protection and must be processed in one or another European state until their status can be determined-with the attendant fiscal, social, and political burdens on the receiving state that such processing ordinarily entails.' Europe thus joins the Third World, North America (the United States and Canada), 9 and the other traditional receiving 5. On the growing predominance of the internally displaced, see Weiner, supra note 3. 6. See Raymond Bonner, New Road to West for Illegal Migrants, N.Y. TIMES, June 14, 1995, at A12. 7. The Refugee Convention defines a refugee as a person with a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." 1951 Refugee Convention, supra note 1, art. 1, para. A(2). This does not cover the bulk of migrants fleeing the conditions listed in the first paragraph of this Article. 8. The methods for processing refugees in Europe were harmonized in the Dublin Convention and the

Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement

“…1 Abridged. See the full poem, http://seekershub.org/blog/2015/09/home-warsanshire/ 2 See for example Schuck (1997), who offers four proposals for improving refugee protection and advocates for a regionally structured, rather than global, system of refugee protection. Also see Burton (1988), Hathaway (1991), Arulanantham (2000), and more recently, Amnesty International (2015), UNHCR (2016).…”

Why Dublin Fails: The Prisoner's Dilemma in Europe's Responsibility-Allocation for Refugees

“…There have been plenty of proposals for a better system of responsibility allocation in Europe. 45 These proposals vary from a market for refugee admission quotas (Cook 2004;Fernandez-Huertas Moraga 2014;Gerver 2013;Schuck 1997), matching systems (Jones & Teytelboym 2017), free choice (AWO et al 2013) to a cementation of the current system in the Dublin IV Proposal (Tubakovic 2017). Chapter 4 will analyze Dublin IV using the gametheoretical model developed in the previous Chapter.…”

The Local Refugee Match: Aligning Refugees’ Preferences with the Capacities and Priorities of Localities

“…The use of economic theory in refugee protection is not new. Most prominently, Peter Schuck proposed a system in which states would be permitted to purchase and sell quota-compliance obligations (Schuck, 1997). It is important to recognize how different our proposal is.…”