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

5. Conclusion

This article has shown that some of the most prominent public policy
measures aimed at regulating unwanted migration and at addressing the
very unequal distribution of asylum applications among OECD countries
are less effective than has often been assumed. In addition to the often
mentioned institutional constraints that policy makers are faced with in
this area, this paper suggests four additional reasons:

First, policy making in this area sometimes appears to exaggerate the
degree of choice and the level of information that asylum seekers and their
agents are assumed to have. The evidence presented here suggests that
asylum seekers who are in a position to choose between a number of
alternative host countries do so in a rational manner on the basis of some
knowledge about the real or perceived differences between these states.
However, we found little evidence for the claim that there is widespread
and systematic ‘asylum shopping’ to exploit differences in host countries'
welfare provisions.

Second, the empirical analysis has shown, however, that the most
powerful explanatory factors for an asylum seeker’s choice of host country
are clearly not consideration of short-term welfare maximisation by the
asylum seeker but legacies of migrant networks, employment
opportunities and asylum seekers' perceptions about the relative
'liberalness' of a particular host country, i.e. more 'structural' factors that,
at least in the short and medium term, are beyond the reach of asylum
policy makers. There are a number of plausible reasons why it might not
be greatly surprising that individual deterrence measures will be
overshadowed by these other pull factors. Ties with friends or family are
likely to prove very strong even in the face of a country's not so welcoming
asylum regime. Moreover, path-dependent processes can be expected to
play strong roles because of the sunk costs involved in the creation of

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