Reform of the EU Sugar Regime: Impacts on Sugar Production in Ireland

Distance

Given the difficulties and costs involved in long-distance travel, we
expected a negative relationship between the average distance of a host
country from the principal countries of origin and that host-country’s
asylum burden in any particular year. However, in our dataset of 20
OECD countries, proximity as a pull factor does not produce any
significant effect in the analysis. One might expect that the selection of
host-countries analysed here will have influenced this result and that had
we included host countries in the developing world, the results might have
been different. However, the result might also be explained by the fact
that an asylum seeker’s sense of security might increase, the further away
they settle from the country in which they suffered persecution. Moreover,
although one can usually observe established migration networks between
neighbouring countries, the lack of other pull factors, e.g. economic ones,
can constitute a disincentive for asylum seekers that might outweigh
network factors.

These findings mean that one has to refrain from generalising the results
of single country case studies (like that by Holzer, Schneider and Widmer,
2000) which strongly emphasise the importance of geographic proximity as
a pull factor in the case of Switzerland. Clearly there are instances when
geographic proximity does matter, especially when geographic pull factors
interact with other pull factors such as existing historical ties (as was the
case with refugees from former Yugoslavia fleeing to Germany or
Switzerland in the 1990s). However, the broader analysis across time and
space reveals that geographic factors are more limited in their effect than
other pull factors.

Deterrence

The combined effects of deterrence measures, as shown in the deterrence
index, comes out in the expected negative direction and does so at
significant levels. The effect of policy-related factors, however, is not as

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