Tradable Refugee-admission Quotas and EU Asylum Policy

Abstract

The current EU Asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EUwide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum-seekers coupled with a matching mechanism linking countries' and migrants' preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way towards addressing the shortcomings of the current system. We illustrate this claim using the recent problems regarding relocation faced by the European Relocation from Malta (EUREMA) program.

Towards a Fair Distribution Mechanism for Asylum

“…Fernández-Huertas Moraga and Rapoport [3][4][5] use a matching system embedded in the tradeable immigration quotas system they propose for, among other things, the distribution of refugees over EU countries. Furthermore, Jones and Teytelboym advertise the implementation of matching systems both on a local [6] and on a global [7] scale.…”

“…Call the number of refugees assigned in a matching its cardinality. The cardinality of a matching depends on the set of acceptable refugee-country pairs, i.e., the set E ⊆ R × C. 4 Call maximum cardinality (MC) the desideratum that matchings should not waste places. More precisely, for a given CA-instance, a matching M satisfies (MC) if and only if |M| ≥ |M | for all matchings M .…”

“…Formulating the asylum market in this way allows us to use tools from matching theory to provide a more precise understanding, and may eventually contribute to the implementation of more fair or efficient policies. Various social scientists have recently argued for imposing centralised matching systems and have investigated mechanisms that could be implemented in different stages of distributing asylum seekers [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. While we are sympathetic to this line of research, this paper does not directly contribute to it.…”

Can market mechanisms solve the refugee crisis?

“…Allowing refugees to express their preference can reduce costs and misunderstandings in relocation processes, as has been documented in respect to the European relocation from Malta, undertaken by the EU in a pilot program in 2009-2011 [11]. During the program, many European member states reported serious communication problems with the refugees and asylum seekers, who were often unaware of their final destination.…”

“…Previous work of the author, co-authored with Hillel Rapoport, contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [7], [9], and [11]. Support from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain), grant MDM 2014-0431, and Comunidad de Madrid, grant MadEco-CM (S2015/HUM-3444), is gratefully acknowledged.…”