Creating a European market for refugees?

Creare un mercato europeo dei rifugiati?

Abstract

The idea to establish a European market of refugee quotas, although promising for the flexibility that it would introduce into the European asylum system, raises doubts about its feasibility and adequacy to the current regional context. Firstly, however iniquitous and obsolete, a distribution of the refugee burden already exists at EU level: negotiating in the shadow of the non-cooperative legal framework designed by the Dublin III regulation constitutes a significant constraint. Secondly, for the EU and its Member States, externalizing the burden of refugee protection (burden-shifting) is a much less divisive strategy than internalizing it (burden-sharing). Thirdly, the ‘commodification’ of refugee protection might produce an unintended consequence: to the extent that it legalizes the ‘welcome-or-pay’ alternative, it could paradoxically ‘crystallize’ the existing uneven distribution of the refugee burden both inside and outside the EU.