Post-procedural mobility among asylum residence permit holders cohort 1995-1999


Prof. Dr. Arjen Leerkes & Marloes de Hoon, UNU-MERIT & FASoS, Maastricht University

There is limited information about what could be called post-procedural mobility among asylum permit holders: different forms of internal and international movement after asylum migrants obtain a residence permit and, in case of the Netherlands and various other countries, are allocated to different municipalities based on a responsibility sharing principle. In this presentation, we focus on post-procedural emigration in the form of onward migration or return migration (possibly followed by renewed immigration in the Netherlands). More knowledge on such migration trajectories is relevant to assess the possibilities/limitations of providing temporary protection to asylum seekers, and can be used as input in the discussion on Dublin IV, which aims to institutionalize a corrective allocation mechanism in the European Union in cases of 'disproportionate' pressure on individual Member States (which migrants should be matched to which countries?). Additionally, it may help to reduce the settlers' bias in research and theories on immigrant assimilation/integration. We find that about 30% of the asylum residence permit holders who came to the Netherlands in the second half of the 1990s no longer resided in the country by the end of 2015. We furthermore find that (1) post-procedural emigration in the form of onward migration to another (mostly European) country was more common than return migration, (2) naturalization into Dutch citizenship (and: EU citizenship) partially operates as a way of obtaining a 'European residence permit', (3) the probability of return migration increases with the initial age of immigration to the Netherlands, and (4) migrants who depended on forms of group-based humanitarian protection were more likely to emigrate than asylum migrants who obtained a residence permit on individual grounds. We discuss contemporary policy implications, implications for assimilation/integration theory, and avenues for further research. 



About the speaker

Arjen Leerkes (www.arjenleerkes.nl) is a Full Professor of Migration, Securitization and Social Cohesion at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is also affiliated with the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. He has published widely on the social operation of immigration regimes (especially examining the effectiveness and perceived legitimacy of immigration control), and immigration and crime (especially examining how the context of reception shapes immigrant crime patterns).   

Marloes de Hoon (https://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/nl/m.dehoon) joined the Maastricht Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in January 2016 as a PhD candidate. Her research project is part of the recently founded Institute for Transnational and Euregional Cross Border Cooperation and Mobility (ITEM) and focuses on residential trajectories of asylum migrants in the Netherlands, including both internal and international (onward) moves. Her broader research interests include (cross-border) human mobility, immigrant integration and social cohesion.



Venue: 0.16/0.17

Date: 16 January 2019

Time: 12:00 - 13:00  CET


UNU-MERIT