Kurzbeschreibung

In this project we investigate whether and how local contexts affect the protection chances of asylum-seekers who recently arrived to Germany. To this end, we employ the IAB-BAMF-SOEP-Survey of Refugees in Germany. The survey enables us to draw representative inference on the refugees which arrived from 2013 to the beginning of 2016 in Germany, i.e. it covers Germany’s recent surge in refugee migration. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first analysis to systematically investigate how regional factors affect the outcome of asylum recognition processes while controlling for individual characteristics of the asylum seeker and the human rights situation in her country of origin. Asylum decision-making in Germany is based on federal law but implemented in a decentral fashion, thereby opening the scope for extra-legal reasoning by the local decision-maker. Describing the asylum process in Germany as a principal-agent problem, we test whether the odds for a positive asylum decision in Germany are determined by the local context. In particular, we assess the effect of prevailing political preferences in the region as well as the effect of regional economic conditions regarding the “integratability” of the asylum-seeker on her protection chances across Germany. We furthermore expect these extra-legal factors to increase in importance when regional administrative capacities shrink. While a certain variation in asylum policy outcomes is an essential feature of the political system of federal Germany, a regional variation in the asylum decision outcomes is problematic once it is of systematic nature: it disadvantages certain groups systematically and raises concerns regarding Germany’s self-conception as a state bound to the principle of equality before the law.