The Syrian refugee crisis: a comparison of responses by Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States

The conflict in Syria between the government of Bashar al-Assad and various other forces, which started in the spring of 2011, continues to cause displacement within the country and across the region. By the end of 2014, an estimated 7.6 million people were internally displaced and 3.7 million Syrians had fled the country since the conflict began (OCHA 2014; UNHCR 2015a). The refugee situation caused by the Syrian conflict is dire, and it has placed enormous strain on neighboring countries. Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey host massive numbers of Syrian refugees, and Syrians have been seeking protection beyond these countries in increasing numbers since 2011. This paper looks at the burdens and costs of the Syrian refugee crisis and considers how they have, or have not, been shared by the international community at large, and in particular by Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It also considers to what degree Syrians have been able to find protection in states outside the region. Germany and Sweden, by the end of 2014, had provided protection to the largest number of Syrian refugees outside the region. Although Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States differ in the level of protection provided to Syrians, all four states have increased protection to Syrians via resettlement and asylum (and in the case of the US temporary protected status) since 2012. Despite this, the degree of protection provided by the four states is modest in relation to that provided by neighboring countries to Syria, and far more could be done. This paper also argues that the international community as a whole has not sufficiently contributed toward alleviating the burden caused by the Syrian refugee influx, in terms of both financial assistance and refugee resettlement. The paper puts forward two general recommendations to reduce the strain on neighboring countries: increase the level of burden sharing by the international community as a whole and more evenly distribute the burden among industrialized states in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific. In terms of enhancing the level of protection for Syrians in countries beyond the region, it proposes three recommendations for states: namely, increase refugee resettlement, facilitate family reunification and other forms of legal admission, and allow refugees to seek protection through embassies in the region

Hidden in plain sight: the UK’s extraterritorial management of immigration

The UK, like most countries in the Global North, seeks to regulate immigration and travel in advance of its physical border by projecting their interventions outward and cooperating with sending and transit states. These extraterritorial practices vary widely in their application across different countries, national populations and individual profiles. The UK, for example, requires restrictive visitor and transit visas for nationals from Jamaica, India and Turkey while waiving them for people from Botswana, Malaysia and Mexico. The UK’s extraterritorial interventions in countries like Ghana and Egypt also differ greatly. How do we explain these variations? What are the conditions influencing the UK’s choices, and who are the actors involved in the process? Which countries and groups of people are targeted for greater exclusion and control? The thesis sets out to answer these questions by examining the UK’s visa system and liaison network in relation to Ghana, Egypt, Thailand, the US and France. By comparing the UK’s actions across such diverse contexts, this study provides an in-depth analysis of the conditions shaping the Home Office’s choices. The goal is to shed light on the way extraterritorialisation manifests in practice and the reasons it takes the shape that it does. Or, to put it another way, the study aims to better understand how, where and why the UK intervenes from abroad. Drawing on original evidence from interviews with Home Office officials, freedom of information requests and documentary research, this thesis demonstrates how the Home Office balances the government’s interests in encouraging and excluding particular flows by making judgements about levels of so-called “immigration risk.” Equally important, it shows the UK’s international relationships and the behaviour of foreign state actors too are necessary for explaining the state’s actions. In doing so, the study reveals more complexity to extraterritorialisation than is often depicted in the literature

‘Street-level’ agents operating beyond ‘remote control’: how overseas liaison officers and foreign state officials shape UK extraterritorial migration management

Extraterritorial migration management perspectives on how states try to enforce immigration controls beyond their juridical borders are strongly influenced by ‘remote control’ metaphors. This is conceptually limited and outdated. Most research fails to sufficiently acknowledge agency by a destination state's officials acting abroad, foreign states and their officials, when evaluating extraterritorial measures and ‘outcomes’. We study UK liaison officers abroad, specifically, how they see their efforts to implement extraterritorial immigration control through interactions with foreign state officials. Our approach links inter-state relations to the social world of on-the-ground ‘street-level’ interactions between officers abroad and their foreign counterparts. The empirical analysis draws from original interviews and official sources. We compare factors accounting for the UK's activities and perceived ‘outcomes’ across USA, France, Thailand, Egypt and Ghana. Findings show the UK's extraterritorial migration management results from a very long chain of decisions and actions, by foreign and UK state actors, operating at different institutional-levels, with uncontrollable local circumstances abroad. Realising extraterritorial goals depends strongly on liaison officers’ agency, ‘soft power’ over foreign officials and foreign officials’ willingness to cooperate. Meanwhile liaison officers’ ‘feedbacks’ importantly influence Home Office decision-making. Against the simplistic one-way causality of ‘remote control’, this is ‘street-level’ agency beyond ‘remote control’

Liaison officers as influential ‘immigration risk’ brokers in visa policy implementation: intermediaries across institutional and national borders

This article studies the hidden world of extraterritorial liaison officers, mid-level civil servants posted abroad whose agency influences UK visa implementation within a global framework. Specifically, we unpack their influential role in translating vague policy objectives into specific institutional justifications, norms, and practices, which bureaucrats apply when implementing visa decisions on location. ‘Risk’ knowledge production is crucial: they mobilise, broker and communicate so-called ‘immigration risks’ applied to specific foreign nationals across institutional levels and national boundaries. Liaison officers are intermediaries, ‘risk’ brokers, who: (a) interpret (and feedback on) the Home Office’s supposedly objective central ‘risk’ assessments; (b) construct ‘risk’ assessments based on local knowledge and intelligence to guide and legitimate street-level bureaucrats’ (consulate, airline) decisions; and (c) co-operate to a surprisingly high degree over ‘risk’ assessments with peers in Global North multi-state frameworks. Importantly, their interventions for the UK state effectively reinforces an unequal North–South global mobility regime. To examine how ally and target states are treated differently, we compare across France, USA, Thailand, Ghana, and Egypt. High state secrecy makes studying liaison officers difficult. Our original research applies document analysis of public policy statements, interventions via freedom of information requests, and interviews with twenty mid-level operational officers

Liaison officers as influential ‘immigration risk’ brokers in visa policy implementation: intermediaries across institutional and national borders

This article studies the hidden world of extraterritorial liaison officers, mid-level civil servants posted abroad whose agency influences UK visa implementation within a global framework. Specifically, we unpack their influential role in translating vague policy objectives into specific institutional justifications, norms, and practices, which bureaucrats apply when implementing visa decisions on location. ‘Risk’ knowledge production is crucial: they mobilise, broker and communicate so-called ‘immigration risks’ applied to specific foreign nationals across institutional levels and national boundaries. Liaison officers are intermediaries, ‘risk’ brokers, who: (a) interpret (and feedback on) the Home Office’s supposedly objective central ‘risk’ assessments; (b) construct ‘risk’ assessments based on local knowledge and intelligence to guide and legitimate street-level bureaucrats’ (consulate, airline) decisions; and (c) co-operate to a surprisingly high degree over ‘risk’ assessments with peers in Global North multi-state frameworks. Importantly, their interventions for the UK state effectively reinforces an unequal North–South global mobility regime. To examine how ally and target states are treated differently, we compare across France, USA, Thailand, Ghana, and Egypt. High state secrecy makes studying liaison officers difficult. Our original research applies document analysis of public policy statements, interventions via freedom of information requests, and interviews with twenty mid-level operational officers

Characterizing a snapshot of perceptual experience

What can we perceive in a single glance of the visual world? While this question seems straightforward, answering it has been unexpectedly difficult and controversial. Here, we sought to characterize a snapshot of perception by asking how much we could alter an image before observers noticed those alterations. Surprisingly, we found that we could drastically alter an image (e.g., scrambling the periphery so no object can be identified, putting the center of one image on the background of another image, etc.) without participants noticing even though they fixated on those images for hundreds of milliseconds. In fact, observers only reliably noticed these alterations if we placed the central part of a scene on (1) a blank background, (2) an abstract background, or (3) had participants explicitly shift their attention towards the periphery. Together, these results show that a single snapshot of perceptual experience is often remarkably impoverished