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Letting Asylum Seekers Work Is Not a “Pull Factor”

In many countries new asylum seekers are not allowed to work for a certain period of time after arriving. The UK has one of the longest such periods: 12 months. Perhaps not coincidentally, the UK is also an outlier in the amount the state has to spend on supporting refugees. Advocates have long called for the government to “lift the ban,” a call repeated earlier this month by the chairman of the UK government's Migration Advisory Committee Brian Bell. Allowing asylum seekers to work gives them the chance to support themself, reducing the burden on the public purse (some estimates suggest by billions) and improving their own situation at the same time.

So why hasn’t it happened yet?

Both the current Labour government and the Conservative opposition claim that letting asylum seekers work sooner would act as a “pull factor”, increasing the number of refugees arriving. But that is an empirical claim which can be tested. Does it stand up to the data? A 2016 overview found that “not one study reviewed has found a long term correlation between labour market access and destination choice.” A more recent paper published last year by Valentina Di Iasio and Jackline Wahba provides perhaps the best direct test of the “pull factor” theory to date. They look at data on all asylum applications to 27 EU countries and the UK between 2008 and 2020. They compare this with a wide set of potential “pull factors”. As it turns out, while lots of other factors do matter, the relationship between asylum applications and the length of bans on working is not statistically significant. The insignificant estimate is at least in the expected negative direction. If we generously ignore the fact that the estimates are not statistically significant and look at their magnitude, they imply that reducing the ban from 12 months to 6 months would increase asylum applications by between one and four percent.

Much more important are bigger structural factors: the stock of existing migrants and refugees, the strength of the economy (GDP and unemployment rates), geographical distance, and historical links (colonial ties and common language). Policy plays a much smaller role. And the policies that matter most are processing times, likelihood of acceptance, and access to social security. Repatriation risk is, like work bans, not statistically significant.

So, the best way for a country like the UK to reduce its number of asylum applications would be either to build a time machine and go back and not colonise half of the planet, or alternatively to tank its economy. Perhaps more feasible:  reduce acceptance rates and increase processing delays, neither being particularly attractive options.

Determinants of asylum applications in the EU/UK, 2008-2020

Determinants of asylum applications in the EU/UK, 2008-2020

This table is reproduced from Di Iasio and Wahba (2024).

There is of course a bigger debate to be had on the wisdom of trying to minimise arrivals. The UK currently hosts just five refugees per 1,000 people, far fewer than most other European countries. Asylum seekers were just one in every 14 migrants moving to the UK in 2023. There aren’t any quantitative studies on the effect of refugees on UK natives, because there just aren’t enough refugees to create a measurable effect on anything. Studies on actually large refugee flows, such as from Syria to Türkiye and Jordan in the 2010s, have generally found minimal effects on natives.

My own view is that migrants make the UK a better and more interesting place and we should be doing all we can to encourage more of them, by actively embracing “pull factors”. But the data shows that stopping asylum seekers from working is just not a meaningful policy lever for influencing destination choice.

See here for more on CGD’s “Let them work” initiative

Thanks to Helen Dempster, Thomas Ginn, Sam Huckstep, and Jackie Wahba for feedback and suggestions on a draft of this post.

Disclaimer

CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.


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