Political and Military Sociology

The European Refugee Crisis

Karthika Sasikumar,Danijela Dudley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429871627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This special edition of Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review encompasses a full range of coverage on the European refugee crisis. Contributions include a focus on the characteristics and motivations of modern-day migrants, an analysis of the inconsistent standards displayed by the European Union, and the militarization happening across parts of Europe in response. The volume leads with a discussion on the identity of the refugees: who are they and what are their reasons for leaving their homelands? Following chapters cover the response across Europe in countries including Serbia, Greece, Turkey, and Italy. The penultimate chapter examines the European Union's inadequate response to the unfolding crisis, and the book concludes with a central analysis of the agreements between the EU and transit countries with remarks on the unintended consequences that have emerged.

1
Who are the Refugees?

A Demographic Analysis

Petar Vrgović
UNIVERSITY OF NOVI SAD
Nila Kapor-Stanulović
UNIVERSITY OF NOVI SAD

Political and Military Sociology: An Annual Review, 2017, Vol. 45: 4–17.

The ongoing migrant crisis has challenged many things that were until now, and especially in the European Union, taken for granted. The causes of a very complex situation in one region of the world have also challenged scholars to try to understand who displaced people are and what their intentions are. This article surveys previous studies on migrants around the world, analyzing the past in order to better understand the present. Secondly, the article compiles available data about the current migrant crisis in order to describe the situation as well as the motivations of those individuals who migrate. The article shows that the present situation is the result of a “perfect storm” for mass migrations, with multiple factors converging both from the territory of origin and the final destination.

Introduction

The year 2015 will, among other things, be remembered as a year in which an unprecedented number of asylum seekers fled to the European Union. This phenomenon was quickly found to be much more than a statistical anomaly and, probably, no less than the biggest social challenge that part of the world had seen in recent years. Experts from a wide range of disciplines became interested in various aspects of this mass migration, some of them trying to understand what made such a large number of people move synchronously toward the same goal, while others tried to define what the goal was in the first place. As the numbers of illegal border crossings and asylum applications went off the charts, Western society struggled to understand what it was facing.

This article aims to describe the basic demographics of the recent migrant crisis, attempting to understand who the migrants are and what they desire to achieve. Certainly, heads can be counted, but aspirations cannot. The authors therefore begin by presenting some previous findings and insights into other migrant crises of a similar nature that, in turn, offer explanations of the current phenomenon.

The Motivation to Migrate to Distant Locations

It is commonly known that it is not easy for most people to leave their homes, belongings, social ties, and communities to start life elsewhere. Therefore, it is important to understand the decision-making process that leads one to migrate. Factors that instigate the move are usually separated into two groups: the relative benefits of moving to a new destination country (“pull factors”) and the hardships faced in the sending country (“push factors”). In most cases, non-voluntary migration from one area to another is easily related to the push factors: some form of violent and life-threatening situation, such as war between two states, civil war within one state, or political oppression. People sense they are in direct danger and flee to a safer area, whether to another region of the same country or to a neighboring country.

However, it is more complicated to explain migration to places that are more distant. The usual scenario, “direct danger—minimal movement to a safer area—moving back when the threat is gone,” requires minimal resources and little planning and is not sufficient to explain the decisions of people who travel thousands of miles. For such a substantial migration, people need to inform themselves, prepare, and organize. Also, it becomes apparent that individuals who migrate large distances tend to stay abroad and start a new life. In such cases, the public and mass media of the receiving country often question the migrants’ motivations, usually claiming that economic motivations dominate. The reasons that migrants themselves put forward for such migrations are then judged as untrue, leading frequently to a decline in sympathy toward migrants among the population of receiving countries.

One example of such a misunderstanding is that of migrants from El Salvador who tried to find a new home in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During that period, roughly half a million Salvadorans (one person in four) became either an internal or external refugee. Many of them were apprehended as illegal immigrants in the United States (Stanley 1987). At that time, the U.S. government faced a dilemma as to whether these immigrants should be deported or offered special protection. On the one hand, the Reagan administration considered these Central Americans as economic migrants in search for a better life based on the fact that they had passed through Mexico as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the legal staff members of private agencies aiding Central Americans in the United States argued that most of the Salvadorans who came to the United States did so out of fear for their lives because of political violence in their home country. For their part, most of the migrants maintained that they came to the United States reluctantly and planned to return home as soon as it was safe to do so; they also stated that they often suffered considerable hardships in Mexico and, thus, were seeking better temporary shelter. Indeed, it was shown that fleeing political violence was at least an important motivation of Salvadorans who migrated to the United States during the political oppression and civil war in El Salvador: indicators of political violence explained more than half of the variance in Salvadoran apprehensions in the United States (Stanley 1987).

Similarly, Guatemala witnessed an outbreak of political violence, guerrilla attacks, and death squads that started in 1966 and spanned the next two decades. Similar situations were seen in countries such as Honduras, Colombia, Peru, and Nicaragua, where a combination of economic downturns and political oppression conducted by authoritarian regimes drove hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes. Popular models, based on expected wage maximization, failed to explain these instances of migration; people were looking for something more than better wages. Because violence interferes with a person’s perception of economic benefits (since the person enjoys less safety and less consumption), economic factors are connected to other factors and should not be seen as dominant in countries that have high levels of violence and conflict. As Morrison concludes, “[M]igration flows are shaped by violence, and the effect of violence on migration tends to increase as the level of violence escalates. Consequently, a narrow focus on economic determinants of migration is inappropriate in high-violence countries” (Morrison 1993 :828).

In addition to these Latin American case studies, a number of studies question the causes of refugee migration on a global scale. For example, Schmeidl identified generalized violence and civil wars with foreign military interventions as variables responsible for producing large refugee populations and prolonged migrations. Thus, while a country’s level of economic development was found to influence the total number of refugees, Schmeidl found little evidence of economic and other intervening variables having a direct impact on mass exodus (Schmeidl 1997). Similarly, a large sample of internal and international conflicts between 1964 and 1989 demonstrated that threats to the personal integrity of individuals were of primary importance in forcing people to abandon their homes, especially if the threats were in the form of a civil war or a genocide/politicide. Economic threats and ratios of GNP per capita were not found to have a role in generating refugee movements (Davenport et al. 2003). Finally, Moore and Shellman, who analyzed a significant number of migrations around the world in the period 1952–1995, also concluded that state violence, dissident behavior, civil wars, genocides, and international wars were all factors of forced migration for both internally displaced people and refugees. They therefore concluded that, while institutional democracy and economic factors influenced the size of forced migration, their impact was relatively small; instead, the “push” factor of violence was found to drive the process of non-voluntary migration to a greater extent (Moore and Shellman 2004).

Despite such research findings, it appears that migration to Western Europe in the last few decades took place in a unique context. During the Cold War, asylum seekers from East European communist countries were often accepted by the receiving states since there was clear political and ideological violence aimed at them—they were dissidents with political reputations that needed protection (Neumayer 2005). In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the structure of asylum seekers changed: They were predominantly from third world countries, had less cultural affinity with Europeans, and often arrived through the use of traffickers and false documentation (Hansen and King 2000). While still officially dubbed “asylum seekers” as they tended to apply for asylum, some segments of the public in receiving countries described them as “bogus refugees,” branding them as mere economic migrants. This led to calls for restricting the inflow of refugees, resulting in measures aimed at deterrence and deflection, such as the compilation of lists of “safe” countries of origin and “safe” third countries to which the refugees could be returned.

European countries took some time to grapple with the reasons why people seek asylum. Neumayer tried to identify reasons, showing that factors that influence asylum seeking in Western Europe are numerous and interdependent: the economic conditions in the country of origin are statistically significant and substantively important determinants of aggregate numbers of asylum seekers. However, the type of political regime, threats to the personal integrity of the individual, dissident violence, civil/ethnic warfare, and external conflicts were also found to be important factors (Neumayer 2005). Thus, for many refugees it appears that economic factors and violence influence each other, creating a strong “push” for migration. Studies also concluded that migrants are more mobile in larger groups, when a larger number of past asylum seekers exists, when the destination country is geographically closer, and when the possibility of obtaining generous welfare provisions exists. For example, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s resulted in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Western Europe; this should have been seen as a harbinger of the current wave of migration. We note that all of the relevant characteristics were present: the economic decline of the former Yugoslavia, followed by political confrontation that escalated into ethnic violence and ended with foreign intervention; the fact that economic migrants had paved the way previously in smaller numbers; that destination countries were merely hours away by land transport; and that generous welfare benefits existed with relatively easy access to them by migrants.

The Global Refugee Crisis: 2014 and 2015

In recent years, worldwide conflicts have displaced millions of people against their will. The years 2014 and 2015 were particularly significant as 2.9 and 1.8 million people, respectively, were forced to flee their countries to become refugees (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2016a). A dramatic rise in the refugee population started in 2013, as shown in Figure 1.1. However, the

Figure 1.1 Trend of Global Displacement and Proportion Displacement, 1996–2015

Source: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2016a :6)

rise in the last few years (with nine people per 1, 000 being forcibly displaced, as opposed to six per 1, 000 since 1999) has coincided with the Arab Spring and the prolonged Syrian conflict. Other unresolved conflicts such as those in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Yemen, as well as some new or reignited conflicts, such as those in Burundi, Iraq, Libya, and Niger, have also contributed to the increase in these numbers.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) records that, by the end of 2015, global forced displacements (including “internally displaced persons”) reached 65.3 million. This number includes forcibly displaced people that have fled “persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations” (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2016a :2). Out of this number, 21.3 million are recognized as refugees (5.2 million of them are Palestinian refugees registered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, UNRWA), 40.8 million are recognized as “internally displaced persons,” and 3.2 million are recognized as “asylum seekers.”

It is important to note that in 2015, developing regions hosted 86 percent of the world’s refugees under the UNHCR’s mandate, compared with about 70 percent two decades ago. The least developed countries have provided asylum to 4.2 million refugees, or about 26 percent of the global total, while at the same time struggling to meet the development needs of their own citizens. By far, the main receiving country is Turkey, with over 2.5 million refugees. Next on the list are Pakistan, Lebanon, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, as shown in Figure 1.2. Developed countries do not even appear on the list of the top 10 receiving countries. Lebanon is the first state on a list of countries that have a significant refugee-to-national population ratio, with nearly one in five residents being a refugee. When the number of refugees is recorded against the host country’s gross domestic product measured in U.S. dollars, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has received 471 refugees per U.S. dollar of GDP, which confirms the strain of hosting refugees on that country. Ethiopia and Pakistan are also in a similar position (UNHCR 2016a :17).

Similar trends can be observed in regards to countries of origin: in 2015, the top ten countries of origin of refugees were located in the developing regions of the world. These ten source countries (presented in Figure 1.3) accounted for 76 percent of the global refugee population under the UNHCR’s mandate. The Syrian Arab Republic was in 2015 (as it was in 2014) the top source country of refugees, with 4.9 million of its people residing elsewhere. The overwhelming majority of these refugees moved to one of the neighboring countries, mostly to Turkey, while major host countries outside the immediate region included Germany, Sweden, and Italy.

When the data regarding source and host countries are compared, it is confirmed that around 90 percent of the refugees find asylum in neighboring countries (Figure 1.4). It is apparent that host countries usually host ...