forced migration networks. Restrictive immigration control policies create
a profitable niche market for those exploiting the black market of
international migration. Organised trafficking gangs and individual
'entrepreneurs' provide a range of services to migrants for which they are
able to charge often extortionate fees.33 Networks between these
traffickers, agents, potential migrants and legal residents or citizens of
destination countries are costly to build and are unlikely to be given up
lightly. In a similar vein, a country's liberal reputation, which will have
emerged over decades, is also unlikely to be called into question
overnight.34
Third, as states tend to copy deterrence measures introduced by other
states, the desired impact of such attempts by one state to make its
asylum policy more restrictive relative to other potential host countries, is
often limited to a very short-term first mover advantage. The rapid spread
of 'safe third country' provisions across Europe in the 1990s (Thielemann
2003a), is perhaps the most prominent recent example of such processes of
cross-country policy transfer which have become very common in this
area.
Finally, the effectiveness of unilateral policy measures will therefore be
further undermined by multilateral efforts of international policy
harmonisation. Given the structural character of many of the pull factors
identified above, we can expect attempts to harmonise asylum rules across
receiving countries, such as those currently developed by the European
Union, to consolidate rather than effectively address existing disparities in
33 According to IOM figures, fees for services such as the smuggling across borders,
arranging forged documents and visas, organising employment and lodging range from
several hundred to over 30.000 US dollars depending on which country of origin and
which host country are involved and it is estimated that more than 70 percent of asylum
seekers make use of such services. .
34 In interviews, asylum seekers in the UK regularly mention the UK's long-standing
democratic tradition as one of the factors that attracted them to Britain (Robinson and
Segrott 2002)—a reputation that the introduction of a voucher scheme is unlikely to
challenge.
33