cover image: Understanding the tide: a comparative analysis of policy responses to refugee inflows

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Understanding the tide: a comparative analysis of policy responses to refugee inflows

15 Aug 2021

This doctoral dissertation is composed of three research articles, and it examines the development, determinants and effects of migration and asylum policies. The first article explains the development of asylum policies in Latin America and tests claims by scholarship about the existence of a ‘liberal turn’ in asylum policies across the region. To address this issue, I develop a new methodology – called the Asylum Policies in Latin America (APLA) Database – to measure policy outputs on asylum across Latin America over time. Applying this new methodology, I codify the asylum legislation of 19 Latin American countries, over a 31-year period (1990-2020), using 65 indicators. By discussing trends and outliers, the article confirms the existence of a ‘liberal turn’ in asylum policies across the region. In the second research article, my co-author and I explain the rationale behind the expansion of refugee protection across Latin America. More specifically we ask, what factors drove Latin American countries to significantly expand refugee protection over the last two decades? By using a mixed methods approach – which includes both a series of nested regression models and process tracing together with evidence from in-depth interviews – we show how government ideology and regional integration explain the liberalisation of asylum policy across the region. We also find that this asylum policy liberalisation process was mostly symbolic. Finally, the third research article examines the effects of visa restrictions in a context of mass displacement and porous borders. In it, I estimate the effect of introducing visa restrictions on migrants’ likelihood of travelling and the effects of such visa restrictions on migrants’ well-being. I do so by studying the recent mass displacement of Venezuelan nationals through a difference-in-differences research design. Findings suggest that the introduction of visa restrictions increased irregular entry and irregular visa status for migrants while also leading to changes in their priorities. Unexpectedly, I do not find evidence of increased irregularity leading to more incidents of violence suffered by migrants. This article contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of visa restrictions and its findings have broad public policy implications.
refugees latin america asylum visa restrictions

Authors

Omar Hammoud Gallego

Published in
United Kingdom

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