Well, thank you all for being here. My name is Skye Doney. I’m the director of the George L. Mosse Program in History here at UW Madison and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the co-director of the Mosse Lectures Initiative. This is Libby Theune’s and I’s sixth Mosse-Friends Fellowship lunch event. (applause) Libby is retiring in two weeks.
Oh my goodness!
No!
No!
Doney: She will be greatly missed. So, press your thumbs for next summer. If you go to the Mosse Blog, you can find our previous speakers, who included David Milne, Donatello Aramini, Stefania Regaù, Norman Domeier, Eliana Chavkin.
A bit about the friends. The friends were formed in 1948. And they strive to inspire researchers, the campus, and the public to engage with the libraries through visible, thought-provoking activities such as this one. Programs like the Mosse-Friends Fellowship help fulfill the Friends mission, to build a community that encourages intellectual growth, examines diverse perspectives, and values the distinctive collections, their use, and the exemplary services of the UW Libraries. The Friends appreciate all of your support, financial gifts, the books that you donate, your attendance at these types of events, and going to their book sales. Today’s event is not only supported by the Program and by the Friends, but also by the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence for Populism and Political Economy and the UW History Department. As ever, it’s a delight to partner with our other friends on campus.
Today we’re here to learn from Professor Kara E. Dempsey, who is the 2025-2026 George L. Mosse Program and Friends of the UW Libraries Fellow. In fact, she is the 27th Mosse Friends Fellow. This partnership began in 2002, when the first Mosse-Friends Fellows traveled to Madison from Italy and Israel. Not coming quite as far. Appalachia. The goal of our fellowship, though, is to encourage scholars to use the vast archival holdings in Madison and at the UW Libraries in innovative research. Kara E. Dempsey is associate professor of geography at UNC Appalachian State University, where she studies international forced displacement, ethnonational conflicts and consolidation of state and regional power, as well as peace-building processes. She is the author of The Geopolitics of Conflict: Nationalism and Reconciliation in Ireland, that’s from 2022, the co-editor of Making and Unmaking Refugees, that’s 23. And from last year, co-editor of Making Geographies of Peace and Conflict. She’s president emeritus of the Political Geography Organization of the American Association of Geographers, the AAG, a member of the AAG’s Honor Committee, and a board member of the journal Geographic Review.
Here in Madison, she’s been researching significant changes in migration legislation that the European Union and its member states implemented in response to increased international immigration that began around 2015. Syrian Civil War, I expect?
Dempsey: Some of it, yes. Yeah.
Doney: Along with the resultant impacts on asylum seekers in the region. We’re going to hear a bit more about that today. Please join me in welcoming her to our campus. (applause)
03:45
Dempsey: Okay, so hopefully this works. And this is something that folks can hear. Okay, great. My students tell me I don’t project well. So in large lecture halls, I do often have to use a microphone. So, that’s great. Okay, well, first of all, thank you so much for joining me. And of course I know it’s customary to end with a thank you. But I’m actually also going to begin with a thank you to the Mosse-Friends of the UW Libraries Fellowship. Not only for their financial support, but specifically, one may ask what is the value of archival research for something that basically began about 2014 and perhaps “ended,” and I’ll put that in air quotes, and I’ll explain that, in 2018. And the answer is, with increasing what we call paywalls and budget cuts that we’re seeing across universities, in the last three to five years, the UNC system, University of North Carolina, and particularly the App State library system has increasingly faced more and more paywalls where I don’t have access to EU documents, UNC, UNHCR documents. And even things like academic journals, it is standard to have what we call an eighteen-month freeze where I don’t have access to the most recent publications. And so we’ve of course been using our wonderful library system to try to request individual items through WorldCat and other elements like that. But as you can imagine, our wonderful libraries are just overwhelmed with the requests.
And so the access that the University of Wisconsin has afforded me was basically unprecedented and I’m most grateful for it. Because I would not be able to do this archival research, even though it’s relatively up to date. And you might say whoa, Chat GPT, you can pull everything up. I purposely tested, and sure enough, as expected, a lot of answers on Chat GPT were incorrect. So I just want to thank you again. If we want to get to the facts, even relatively recently, libraries are such a tremendous resource. So thank you, thank you, thank you. This talk, this research project, would not be possible without you.
With that in mind, what are we going to be speaking about for a relatively short time today? Well, the first thing is, I just want to mention the period of time that we’re looking at is known as the so-called European migration crisis. Oftentimes “crisis” is in quotes. Because while individuals were under duress fleeing wars for several years, it was only labeled in the media as a crisis once those individuals reached Europe. And so when we talk about the time period, it’s also relatively in flux. Because we have individuals that have always been asking for asylum assistance in Europe. But these unprecedented numbers of individuals on the move and entering Europe in particular where our focal geographic emphasis will be, is about 2014 to about 2018. And we’ll look at the reason it’s tapering off at the end is not because of human need decreasing and wars decreasing, but rather legislation and what we call bordering processes. The hardening of borders well beyond the actual legal border. And what geographers and other people in border studies call border states. Where, particularly technology has been pushed beyond the borders themselves to sort of intercept individuals from even arriving.
So, one of the things as a geographer I’m interested in is of course variability over space. I’m what we call a human geographer. So I’m interested in human movement and its relationship with space and earth. But also, variability. And so when I looked at Europe, and here’s a kind of a bar graph on the left where you see in 2015, which is the largest number of asylum applications. And I will jump back in just a moment, explain what’s asylum, what’s a refugee, what’s an IDP. But the largest number of applicants and expected applications was in Germany. Here it’s with the individual country names. So Deutschland, DE for Germany. So you can see Germany’s a very high bar graph. And while someone might say okay, Germany is a large member state of the European Union, it has a good economy, that makes sense. But as someone who is familiar with the EU laws, we’ll talk about the Dublin Regulation in just a moment. But while Schengen is the common border policy, where one in theory could enter, say, Spain, and once they go through the EU border, in theory they could then drive through Andorra, through France. Well, technically Andorra is sort of a gerrymander, they’re not part of the Schengen border policy. And so you can go into say France without a border check.
So in theory, one could arrive in Germany and ask for asylum. Until you stop and think oh, wait, there’s something called the Dublin Regulation that should not allow individuals to arrive in Germany. So I’ll explain that in just a moment.
And the other thing is, why travel to Germany when theoretically, Greece, Italy, Spain, those are EU member states as well.
So I was very curious about, and surprised, not only about the so-called violation of the Dublin Regulation, which requires someone to apply for asylum in the first EU member state in which they step foot in. You’re not supposed to leave that first member state and go somewhere else. But also, why were people say bypassing registering in Greece? So I was interested in tracing these drivers, and also the legislated changes that really shaped migration.
Because what I’ve discovered in the archival work is basically the European Union works from west to east, essentially sealing up borders. So I’ll explain in a moment. But this western Mediterranean route was pretty shored up well before 2014. It was very difficult to bypass that area. So that the two main routes—and I have some maps to show you in just a moment—was the central Mediterranean route and the eastern Mediterranean route. But then over time, Frontex, which is the EU border force, really kind of focuses on this. And so the last thing we notice is individuals traveling through the eastern route.
And the asylum processes over time also reflect those legislative elements. So I don’t want to say it’s only the laws, because we will see, people have preferences and they’ll try to bypass certain things, for instance. But these are things that really kind of caught my attention when I was working on this research project.
And just to give you an idea, this is Europe’s record number of asylum applications since World War Two, which is probably no surprise if you know the history of Europe. And to put it into context, in 2015, which was the largest number of applicants, Europe saw 1.3 asylum applications alone that year. And there were many that predated that would follow 11:35 as well.
So over the course of several summers, starting in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I was able to go into these asylum camps in various EU member states to interview individuals about the routes they took, some of the motivations and elements that really kind of impacted their choices. And then I was really curious in kind of reversing and looking at the legal implications of those choices.
And so one of the things that really struck me was EU southern member states were less desirable. And so one of the things I really wanted to look at is why. And that is particularly important because when I teach classes at the university on asylum and forced displacement of refugees, usually we define some of the categorical elements of a forced migration versus so-called voluntary migration as it tends to be the shortest distance possible away from the so-called perceived threat as one is able to physical do. And so as a result, we have individuals, I’ll talk about IDPs in just a moment, where we have individuals that can’t even get out of that country of war. But they at least have moved away from that epicenter of violence. So if that is a commonality among most forced displacement, why are they bypassing Italy, Greece, Spain?
And perhaps as an American, one might think well, it might have like climactic similarities, right? The weather might be similar. I was doing some interviews on Ramadan, during Ramadan, in the summer solstice, it happened to line up, in Iceland. And I was so concerned about the Muslims practicing Ramadan because of that lack of the sun setting. And so one may say, why didn’t they stay in Italy, right? And so I really was interested in elements like that.
And for this specific project, I was interested in, so these were my research questions. What attracted certain asylum seekers to certain member states, despite the Dublin Regulation. And I’ll define that in just a moment. But just to kind of remind you, the Dublin Regulation is EU’s asylum policy where one must apply for asylum in the first member state they set foot in.
I also was very curious in the archives, and again, thank you so much for the access. I was able to get into newspaper and social media archives and look at the role that the media would play in propaganda over time really influencing—I won’t say dictating—but influencing perhaps the way that not only the public, but some of the legislation really responded. Or political leaders, in particularly Hungary, Viktor Orbán, using the media as a weapon against asylum seekers.
And I wanted to identify some significant legal responses that still exist today. So we’ll talk briefly about Brexit. That’s one big example. But Austria has changed its border policies. Eventually permanently. They just renewed through 2026. Hungary, obviously, and the very notable Turkey/EU agreement. And if you’re not familiar with these, don’t worry, I’ll certainly walk you through.
And then lastly, was an individual’s approval or rejection rate heavily influenced by geopolitics? Meaning, are humanitarian efforts, the EU and all those that signed the Geneva Convention, and particularly the Convention on Refugees, following the promise to evaluate the individual and the need and the experience? Or are they looking at where you’re coming from and where you’re going to and the political relationship among those two, right? And that gets highly political very, very quickly.
I’m a visual person so I like to kind of map these numbers. I’ve showed you some bar charts and I’ll have some other elements as well. But to give you an idea, the EU believes it detected 2.3 million people entering the European Union’s borders between 2015 and 2016. And that doesn’t mean that everyone applied for asylum. But if we look, and this is from the European Union’s own member information about asylum applications. And I’ll explain asylum applications in just a moment. They were able to filter through first-time non-EU citizens applying for asylum in EU states. And apparently, particularly before 2014, Spain received many repeat applications for asylum, particularly individuals coming from war-torn countries in Africa that may have been rejected, are allowed to try to come back again and apply for asylum later and perhaps have better documentation, etcetera.
So you can see this very large number. Two thousand fourteen was Europe’s largest number of asylum seekers since World War Two. And as you can see, that pales in comparison to the number you see in 2015. A lot of legal legislation, bureaucratic, particularly bordering policies, occur at the end of 2015. As you can see, 2016 is starting to taper. And then we have that EU-Turkey deal, which I mentioned is going to be very significant. And that’s really going to kind of shore up that last main corridor. And then you can see the numbers dropping profoundly.
I’ve checked the UNHCR website, and there are no fluctuations in the numbers of people in duress. Just the numbers of people that have reached Europe to apply for asylum.
So, let’s make sure we understand the terms so that I’m not confusing anyone. The term “asylum seeker” is recognized under the refugee convention that was signed 17:49 in 1951 in Europe. And I’ll explain that in just a moment. But I actually went onto the European Parliament and found their actual documents that were published when they created the second Dublin agreement. It’s that one must apply in the first member state. So in 2013, they basically said this: An asylum seeker is someone who’s fleeing for fear, for various reasons. But the second bullet point, I think, is probably the most important. The paperwork has not been processed yet. So you could be under terrible duress, but there’s no paperwork to protect you. The only thing that you are offered if you are able to physically enter a place that has signed either the 1951 refugee convention or the 1967 protocol where the United States, for instance, signed the 1967, most countries on the planet have signed one of the two. It recognized refugee protection and the asylum element. And what is assumed, it’s not like the UN would enforce this to happen. But the assumption is, anyone under duress can enter a country that has signed that agreement. And they are given three months of basic necessities—food and housing—while their paperwork is processed. And that’s it. In the meantime, they are protected by what’s known as non-refoulement. They’re not supposed to be sent back until the paperwork has been completed. And the idea was, the paperwork was supposed to be processed in three months. As we will see, it’s going to really take a lot longer than three months. But the idea was, everyone has the right to ask for help. But, it does not mean they will be given asylum access.
And by the way, if during the answer, question and answer session, if you have any questions about, there are other special categorizations, such as Venezuelans in the United States had special elements. There are very rare, but some people can kind of skip the asylum process and become a prima fascia refugee. But again, it’s very rare. So this is the kind of standard, the gold standard assumption.
Now, who is a refugee? And one of the big things that I will say is if you didn’t realize there’s a difference between an asylum seeker and a refugee, don’t blame yourself. The media conflicted accounts and conflated them in many cases. And I was actually able to kind of look into archives. And even media like Al Jazeera, which different geographic place, stopped using the word “migrant” and used the word “refugee” on purpose, even if people did not have the paperwork approved. And so you have, you know, you have every right to be confused about that term. It’s even called the refugee crisis, even though they were asylum seekers, right?
And so a refugee, one thing I like to tell my students is, refugees, statistically speaking, are tremendously, tremendously rare. They say about 2% of the people on the planet that apply for asylum status get refugee status. It’s very rare. And it’s a process that really can take an extended period of time. Usually if you are given refugee status, you become a permanent resident of that place. And then the individual country can decide if there’s a way to citizenship. Can you vote, etcetera. It depends on the country, and it actually depends on the time, because that changes over time. We will even see that how long you can stay if you’ve been approved as a refugee will change over time during the migration crisis. For instance, Sweden went from permanent resident, and then in 2016 they said hmm, you only get three years, and then you need to leave or reapply.
And a lot of what Sweden was responding to was the age of the people that arrived in Sweden. And so again, as a geographer, I’m very interested in that geographic difference, that variability. Why were young people going to Sweden?
But to kind of remind folks about where the term refugee comes from, it’s very fitting for this lecture. Because it was actually a policy that was coined in Europe for Europeans, initially. In 1951, the writing, basically, is geographically limited, the assumption is, to Europeans. And the time period is to those after World War Two. And in fact, it wasn’t until the 1967 protocol where countries like the United States will sign, that they literally removed the geographic and time-based limitations to say okay, anyone in duress. And I find that very interesting that the concept of refugees are really relatively recent and came out of Europe. And as a result of World War Two, at least the legislation.
So, who were these individuals that were asking for assistance, and where was their place of origin? Well, one of the things, and I have two separate maps. I want to show you kind of in Africa and all the way as far east as Iran, and obviously places like Afghanistan, we have individuals that are traveling extensive locations over periods of time. Initially, I assumed somebody left point A and arrived in point B and it took a period of time that you’d expect to see in a Hollywood movie, right? But in reality, it can take years. Where people will make it to one place and try to get information, try to get assistance. Perhaps be detained by law enforcement in a particular place, or sent back and they’ll try again. So the journeys are often disrupted. And the term we use is protracted. Very, very long. And in the case of, say, Africa, there are individuals that are traveling from Sub-Saharan Africa or central Africa fleeing wars that have traveled for an extensive period of time, arrive in northern Africa and they cross over and are often misidentified as North Africans.
And so I want to just point out that there was a large diversity of individuals entering Europe. While statistically most were Syrian, there was a great diversity of people and still continues to be.
So and then you can see regarding war-torn countries in the Middle East and as early as the Arab Spring and the Arab Winter, we have individuals on the move, needing assistance. If you’re familiar, Jordan has one of the largest Syrian asylum refugee camps per capita. Lebanon and Jordan have large numbers of individuals. And that was even before 2014, where individuals are trying to get into places like Lebanon or other areas that had camps. And they said, we’re full, we can’t take you, see if you can go somewhere else.
And so you really start to see three main routes. And as I mentioned before, the western route was, as you can imagine, a traditional human migration route from the beginning of human migration. People have been traveling back and forth between want we call North Africa and southern Spain or Gibraltar with the Brits for the beginning of human migration. But I teach a class that focuses on this part of the Mediterranean. And if you’re familiar with the history, what we call Spain today wasn’t called Spain at the time. Spain and Portugal were ruled from 711 to 1492, depending on the geographic location, but Muslims that were a mix of Berbers and Arabs. And so this concept of individuals moving back and forth in this area were so part of the culture that Spain did not put up border blocks for Africans moving into Spain until 1991. So anyone that was coming from, say, Moroccan and crossed in, if you were not North African, you would be asked for identification. But if you were North African, you belong here. This was all part of our society. They really talked about how the Strait of Gibraltar was a highway, not a barrier.
So as the European Union is really focusing on the common border and really trying to prioritize a protected external border and Frontex is really getting involved, EU member states are pressured to make sure they’re not leaky borders in allowing people to come in. And so Spain has had many financial arrangements with North African governments to really deter the number of people crossing there. So geographically very short distance, but one that is becoming increasingly difficult to cross over before 2014. So you may expect a lot of people are crossing through. But they’re not because of eventually the blockade.
So what we see is a lot of individuals having what is often referred to as the land route, which is somewhat misleading, because usually includes a relatively short but extremely dangerous boat trek across the Aegean Sea to reach Greece usually from Turkey. The land route means they have traveled from elsewhere to arrive in Turkey, and then tried to travel from there. And then once that was identified, or individuals were geographically already located elsewhere, they would take the much more dangerous, statistically speaking, sea route to try to reach the central Mediterranean route. So, southern Italy, Lampedusa, Malta, for instance.
The EU’s Frontex border guards estimate that one in four boats sank trying to cross the central Mediterranean route. So it was very dangerous. Not to say that it wasn’t dangerous in the Aegean. But that central Mediterranean was substantially more of a risk. And we’ll talk about smugglers in a moment. But oftentimes you had to be facilitated by a smuggler to help you—“help you”—be able to get across the ocean.
So I mentioned before about the Dublin Regulation. And I wanted to kind of bring this to light. Because this is where things get really confusing and sticky, not only for citizens of the European Union, but also for asylum seekers. And so the Dublin Regulation comes out of the original asylum policy, refugee policy, in the European Union as it becomes the official European Union. And particularly when they come up with that change in common border policy. So they say, okay, what are we going to do with individuals in duress and quite frankly, they anticipated most people would be coming from within Europe or just on its nearest exterior, not from such far distances. And they did not anticipate the numbers of people that we witnessed in 2014, 2015, etcetera. And so the Dublin Regulation two, and they are updating it, it’s supposed to be updated in 2016, I’ve looked into those archival documents. No one has any idea what’s going to happen in 2016. But at least the one that was in play during this period of time is the first member state that you reach, which at least logically it would be the Schengen, meaning common border policy, would be the place you must apply first time. Because it’s a European Union member state. So if you arrive in Greece, in theory or by law, you must apply there.
And so, for instance, if someone reached Bulgaria, it may be a future EU country, but it’s not EU now, may not be as desirable. In theory, if one could enter Hungary, the idea is then you could travel from there to Germany. But as we’ll see, they’re going to start putting up border walls that were not permitted by the European Union’s border policy. So we have interior border walls that are really challenging the idea of the European Union itself.
And so you start to get into this who has the right to experience the European Union? Is it only the European Union citizens? Is it those in need? Etcetera, etcetera.
So as I mentioned, and here’s kind of the two main routes, are all the countries, the EU member state country policies the same? And the answer is of course not. But what really drew individuals to a particular country? And I like this map from the BBC. Because again, it really shows you that the difference, Germany being the largest, Sweden being one of the second largest regarding individuals, Sweden specifically took all unaccompanied minors, which I’ll explain in just a moment why, but they were set up 31:14 for unaccompanied minors specifically. And so if you were fourteen and you were applying in Greece, it very specifically because of minor status, you were transported to Sweden. Because they had the infrastructure and basically the support for unaccompanied minors.
But things like Hungary we’ll see it is because they forced them to apply. And then Hungary after 2015 gets in a fight with the European Union’s parliament and says we’re not taking any more. And they stopped fingerprinting and registering asylum seekers after 2015. And so we’ll see that number drop. This is 2015, the largest number.
And so Italy has a lot. But as we know, Spain doesn’t in comparison. And even Greece, even though geographically that’s where most people, most Syrians, because that’s the largest number that were traveling, entered Greece. The fact that they did not apply for asylum status there is striking.
And so one of the things I really dug around in the archives is why. And so I kind of have some of the key elements that I’ve discovered here. So one, Germany. As many of you probably remember, because Angela Merkel was very open about it, she was extremely open about opening the walls of economic opportunity to those that could reach them. Many people speculated it had to do with what European researchers called the grain of the core, particularly countries like Germany where they’re living longer and having fewer children so there’s more people that are going to draw on the tax base as they go into retirement. So they need young people to essentially work in factories. And so this idea of not only helping people in need, but getting young, eager people working was a great thing.
But Dublin Regulation is going to make that impossible, right? And you may say, well why don’t they fly in, because that was one of my first questions. I mentioned borderscapes and border processes and the hardening of borders. Once these routes were becoming well known, EU border guards, meaning each individual country, would send members to Afghanistan, to Syria, to Greece, in the actual airport. And as people were boarding a plane—because one has a right to board a plane—as you board a plane, if it was a plane going to Greece, they would apprehend you and not allow someone from Afghanistan or a place that was under duress to arrive. And so people were basically forced to look for other avenues, which were increasingly dangerous. Right?
The Netherlands was best for family reunification, and this was really significant. There were a lot of people, particularly in places like Syria, where they will have multigenerational families living in a housing establishment. And what they’ll say is, Grandma needs help. Baby needs help. It is far too dangerous to go across the Aegean Sea, work with smugglers. There’s human traffickers. We’re going to send one person as a representative to legally apply for asylum status. The Netherlands has the fastest family reunification policy. So that’s where someone’s going to go. Let’s look at the age of the family members and let’s look at perhaps gender. The likelihood of making it and not being detained by, particularly sex traffickers became quite active along these routes. And soon it wasn’t gender-based. But that was the idea of like who was most likely to arrive, right?
And so one of the things I’ll talk about in just a moment is there was a big backlash against the fact that it was primarily men entering Europe. But there was a reason for that. There was an “I represent an entire family in need and we’re going through the asylum application route.”
Initially Denmark was the best. They had the best financial support package. You were able to work. You were given a work visas within three months, etcetera, etcetera. Job training. And then that was absolutely splashed. And I actually found in parliamentary notes that they still have a rule from during pre-World War Two where the police are allowed to apprehend an asylum seeker and remove any money or jewelry off of one’s person. And there were documented example of jewelry being removed from people’s person. And so as you can imagine, Denmark went from yay, everyone wants to, no. So it was very interesting to see that change.
The UK, no surprise. We end up having Brexit. The UK has great financial opportunities. The currency was a great draw. The language, that was interesting, because a lot of people in the Middle East, if they spoke a second language, it was English. And I actually met someone in the Netherlands that said, “I was a computer engineer. I have a master’s in engineering. I speak French, Farsi,” and you know, they listed off numerous numbers. English, French, German Farsi. “I know Swahili from my cousin. I don’t speak Dutch. I don’t speak Dutch. How do I get a job if I don’t speak Dutch?” Right? And so, you can see how English was a big draw.
Sweden, as I mentioned, was the place the EU established for unaccompanied minors. So that was a unique situation where if someone was apprehended on a train, for instance, and saying, oh, you violated the Dublin Regulation, because how are you in Austria? If they recognized the age, they said, okay, we’ll make sure you safely get to Sweden.
France had a large number of individuals. A lot of it, people believe, is the idea of job and cultural possibilities. Family connections. Linguistic connections. So we have a lot of individuals traveling from former colonial holdings in North Africa, entering into France and applying for asylum status as well.
So, other variability. Well, I had read about, so this is a combination of my own photographs but also some from the archives as well. So it’s a combination of my own pictures and then those from the archives I’ve been able to reach in the last month, thanks to you. The asylum camp accommodations vary from tents to modular constructions and, in some cases, former prisons. So again, Europe was expecting either World War Three, where it’s going to be Europeans in need and maybe they can figure something out in one particular geographic location versus people traveling all throughout Europe targeting particular member states. And in some cases, like Germany, more people are arriving in Germany than they anticipated. And so ultimately, one of the more common things was, it might be hard to see, these are semitruck trailers where they just pop windows into them. They cut them out, pop them in. They put bunkbeds in there. There’s sleeping accommodations for sixteen people. They probably don’t speak the same language. And so they’re in there in one semi truck trailer. And then obviously the other one.
The element that seemed to be most problematic, probably not surprising, is the former prisons. As the individuals said, “We are not prisoners. We are not criminals. We don’t want people to put that together in their mind.”
And then when I was really looking into the archival work, there were tremendous national bias throughout the European Union. Basically the European Union and member states had to make a snap decision when they realized after 2014 the numbers were going to increase. And I showed you that increasing rate from 2014 to 2015. So by the summer of 2015, the policy was only focus on Syrians. Everyone else, we don’t know. It’s going to be too hard to go through their paperwork. So the percentage of quotas that you want to fill for people in need, focus on the Syrians.
So this is a picture I took with permission—they’re turning eighteen, so they’re now adults—where the two young gentlemen on the left are from Syria. They were fast tracked right away. Ninety-eight percent of all Syrian applicants were accepted right away. Versus these two individuals are from Afghanistan. Only 67% of individuals from Afghanistan were given asylum. And that was because, if you remember the dates, the U.S. bombs Afghanistan in 2017. But we had, the United States had, after the death of Bin Laden in 2011, 2014 withdrawing the troops and called it the war was over. And so if a European member state were to grant too many asylum applications to people from Afghanistan, it was conflicting with the narrative that the U.S. was sharing publicly. And so there was that political element that became quite complex.
So, for instance, if you were from Eritrea, about 90% were approved. But Nigeria, which has active war, Boko Haram, etcetera, etcetera, the numbers I counted were about 39% of people were approved.
The other thing is I mentioned how legislation changed. I was able to go through newspaper archives and basically trigger how things changed over time. And so initially, in 2014 up to 2015, kind of that summer where the numbers really changed, the media and the Europeans were tremendously welcoming. There are so many reports of Europeans waiting at train stations with baskets and blankets, with signs in all different languages saying, “Welcome. You made it. You’re safe now. You can rest. We’ll help you, whatever you need.” And so it was a combination not only of this idea of fleeing from dictators and fleeing sex traffickers were a lot of the things that were being reported as well. But of course, as many of us remember, the death of Alan Kurdi really, really reminded people of the humanity of these individuals fleeing. And so you really had this warm welcoming.
By the end of 2015, for various reasons, particularly numeric 42:20, and I’ll talk about Cologne in just a moment, but late 2015, early 2016, you start to see almost universally in our media across the European Union is humans are described as natural disasters. So they use the words floods of humans, swarms, tidal waves, an earthquake of humans. They’re no longer individuals in need; they’re a natural disaster. And then it culminates, and you probably are not surprised, because this is obviously a reused narrative, geopolitical threats to national security by the end of 2015, particularly after Cologne.
And so elements of fear focused on things like gender. It’s primarily men. Focused on age. They’re very young. They say about 75% of people that applied for asylum status were between 18 and 35. Then again, if you know, international travel usually is individuals that are relatively young.
And the other thing that really concerned individuals was the presence of smartphones. These individuals often used smartphones to navigate and communicate with family and let them know they’re alive. And try to figure out the next place. And this infuriated people. I guess they really expected people to not have anything with them. And if you think about it, people didn’t have much with them. I interviewed one person that in the winter was crossing through Serbia and gave away her only blanket to an unaccompanied minor. And literally, that’s all she had. And she had her smartphone. But the smartphone was the thing that people were upset about, right? Whether it was a tactic of communication and GPS tracking, terrorist, etcetera, etcetera.
So I’ll briefly kind of wrap up here. But I just want to mention technology being something of fear against the asylum seekers. But of course the EU really ramped up its technological control of individuals. Not only were people fingerprinted in the country in which they went to apply for asylum status, but in asylum camps, you had to give your fingerprints each and every day to get your daily financial stipend. And then it was your responsibility to go to the grocery store and get food, etcetera, etcetera. And so this idea of really technological control of the individuals.
With that control and fear, we obviously saw the increase of the far right in Europe. And in places like Sweden, they went from zero regarding recorded incidents of xenophobia, to about 20% of groups like we would call in the United States the Proud Boys or other national programs. And really what, in the case of Sweden was, they didn’t have people. It wasn’t part of their discussion until this period of time since World War Two.
So, when I really kind of looked at what were some of the legislative changes, of course you have major things like what becomes Brexit? So the UK starts denying support for Mediterranean rescues. They say, don’t even let people try to get there. Frontex, which was involved in this sea search and rescue in the Mediterranean, we don’t have to process them if they don’t arrive. So pus the boats back to where they came from, they should be applying for refugee status or asylum status in Turkey or other places. And so I was able to find in the parliament notes, one of the house of lords in the UK said, “We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.” And she categorized it as a pull factor, encouraging migrants to attempt a dangerous sea crossing.
And a lot of the legislation was framed as let’s stop human trafficking. Not people in duress.
Other elements that happened and really violated EU’s common border policy was Germany implemented border controls with Austria in 2015. Austria continues that border, that sort of militarized visa check border today. They just renewed about a week ago. That goes through until November 2025. Again, the narrative is reducing human trafficking, right? Stop those dangerous smugglers from bringing people in.
And then lastly is kind of where we are today. So starting, they signed it in December and it was implemented in 2016, and that’s why those numbers start to dwindle, is the EU/Turkey agreement, which was very influential for the EU. But Turkey has yet to see a lot of benefits, at least for their citizens. By this year when I looked, the number is now up to about nine billion euros, where basically the European Union is paying Turkey to keep all in duress there. And they will process them. And if it’s approved for refugee status, then they’ll move one by one into individual member countries. They’ll match them. And so, it was quite influential regarding decreasing the number of individuals crossing in.
So just to kind of wrap up where we are today, this is the sort of remaining avenue where individuals are entering. But we’re really only talking about under 150,000 asylum seekers across Europe this year, or 2024. And if they are, they are primarily doing what is known as the Balkan route. And I actually have a colleague, if you’re interested, and I can give you the name after. Claudio Minca has been actively working with the European Union to really chart this Balkan route and how things have changed over time. And interesting things, like Serbians are actively helping asylum seekers move north. They’re like, “We don’t want you here. You don’t want to be here. We’re angry at the EU. How can we help?” So it’s this relatively friendly place. And the asylum seekers are well aware of that fact. And so they’ll try to cross, and then be detained, be deported, try again. And the term they use—and this is their word—they use, it’s becoming a “game” to try to apply for asylum status now in Europe. So. You know, the geographic variability changing over time.
So again, I would like to share my heartfelt gratitude for all of your support and access to this expansive avenue of information that I didn’t have access to without your assistance. So thank you very much for your time and support. (applause)
49:39
Doney: Okay, we have ten minutes for questions. I can bring you a mic. Yeah, sure. Mike?
Mike: Is there any reason why Ireland and Andorra are both designated as Schengen exempt countries?
Dempsey: Yes. So, good question. And it’s funny you mentioned Andorra. I just asked a good friend of mine who is born in Spain and is driving to Andorra on Monday about that. And Andorra is what they call a micro-state, a European Union, or a European micro-state. Another one is actually the Vatican, the Holy See. And so, because they’re so small, they are not interested in really getting involved with the policies and the bureaucratic force of the European Union. But they’re happy to really kind of benefit from allowing people to come in. And in the case of Andorra they have tax breaks that are not allowed by EU law. And so apparently it’s like Europe’s best buy. Everyone goes there to buy cheap electronics and cheap liquor and apparently cheap cheese. It’s the best place to buy Europe’s best cheese at almost 50% discount.
In the case of the Republic of Ireland, it’s a very complex fallout of the 1998 peace agreement that happens with the border in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The European Union coming in to try to demilitarize that border. And so part of that agreement was that the EU border would move to the outside of the island of Ireland. It’s sort of an artificial gerrymandering that was allowed. Which was to essentially decrease the violence coming from the IRA. So it’s a really interesting, unique example. So great question.
Mike: And then along came Brexit, which—
Dempsey: Yes. Along came Brexit. Made everything difficult. But at least the republic, it kept its promise. So, yeah, great question. Very timely. So, yeah.
Question: Thank you for the lecture. It was really good. I have a question, and a comment, let me start with the question. We saw that you said how Sweden was allowed more refugees—
Dempsey: Yes.
Question: –let you come in. What we’ve not talked aboutwas the reasons this crisis came into being.
Dempsey: Do you mean why Syria was under duress?
Question: Part of it. Part of it. Like yeah, we saw this
Dempsey: Yeah, I was anticipating questions. So I have, ta da!
Question: So is it like the reason why a certain place goes into crisis anytime is a legitimizing factor for those individuals from those lands should be allowed? If it’s not, shouldn’t it be? For example, some place might not be affected by natural disaster or war. It’s just that hey, it’s a better life there, we can raise it. Or it might be that hey, we just went through war.
Dempsey: Yes.
Question: Now I need a place to stay because I am literally homeless where I had a home yesterday. So?
Dempsey: Yes. Yes. You are asking the quintessential questions of what one of the most famous European philosophers, Hannah Arendt, talked about the right of human rights and the paradox of what we call the member state, or the nation state. If your nation state is under duress, are you allowed human rights? And that was one of the things she really questioned. And so what you’re bringing up is one of the major discussion points of the concept of refugees. Because as of now—and this is significant with climate change happening—as of now, being forcibly removed by climate-driven elements does not qualify as a refugee. You must be under physical threat, duress, because of the elements defined here. And economic crisis despite how horrific it may be does not qualify. So most Afghan applicants were denied and called economic migrants. It’s too bad your economic situation is what is causing you to ask for help in Europe, but it’s not our responsibility, is what that legislation is telling people. Will that need to change? That is absolutely part of the discourse. And things like the southern border in the United States, that’s one of the biggest discussion points. Where you have individuals from Venezuela and you have individuals from Mexico, equally might be facing horrific duress—physical, gang-related, drug war-related—but how the politics of what is happening in that country is defined by the host country will influence an individual’s chances of getting help.
So one of the, and I teach about this. In fact, one of the examples is, if you know the famous dancer Baryshnikov, Baryshnikov was listed as a forced migrant and refugee fleeing from the Cold War, even though he wasn’t under duress, because the U.S. hated everything that was the USSR. And so automatically said yes, you are under duress.
The most infamous example, since we’re talking about Ireland, is those that were starving because of the potato famine. Some Irish historians will label it as a genocide for particular reasons. It was labeled as an economic migration, and not a forced migration. Oh, we’re sorry you’re starving, we’re sorry you’re starving, but not all the people on the British Isles are starving. And really, the politics is the U.S. doesn’t want to go against the British system of laissez-faire economic policies against land owning of the Irish and colonialism, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So you’re bringing up an absolutely important question. So, yeah, thank you for that.
Doney: This will be our last question.
Dempsey: Okay. And I’m here after if folks have time.
Question: I’m an Appalachian alumni.
Dempsey: I was going to say, woo! ASU!
Question: I’m glad you’re here. So, pre-war Syria held a large amount of refugees.
Dempsey: Yes.
Question: Especially from Palestine, from Iraq. How in the secondary and tertiary movement, were they classified as Syrian refugees? A lot of them probably didn’t have paperwork. How did that work?
Dempsey: Great question. So, those individuals, if they could make it, if they applied in Europe, they were listed as, from their origin state. It’s always your passport, right? You’re always trapped where you were born, pretty much, or if you can get citizenship elsewhere. In the case of Syria, the EU was well aware of most of those, because they were well-processed. And so they had a unique situation where if they could, they were allowed, because they were already refugees, they could work with the EU, or, sorry with the UNHCR. And so, for instance, the United States actually took a small number of those individuals when they were involved in kind of the efforts with boots on the ground. So once you have your paperwork approved, you do have a little more visibility. Because the UNHCR is actually tracking you across time and space. So, yeah. Great, great question. Well, thank you so much.
Doney: Yeah, let’s thank Professor Dempsey. (applause)
Dempsey: Thank you very much for your time and attention.
57:50
[End Session.]
Kara E. Dempsey is Associate Professor of Geography at UNC-Appalachian State University. She studies international forced displacement, ethnonational conflicts, consolidation of state and regional power, and peace-building processes. She is the author of The Geopolitics of Conflict, Nationalism, and Reconciliation in Ireland (2022), co-editor of Making and Unmaking Refugees (2023), and co-editor of Making Geographies of Peace and Conflict (2024). She is president emeritus of the Political Geography Organization of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), a member of the AAG’s Honor Committee, and a board member of journal Geographical Review. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she will research significant changes in migration legislation that the European Union and its member-states implemented in response to increased international immigration (since 2015), along with the resultant impacts on asylum seekers in the region.