Active Refugee Admission Policies: Towards Conceptual Clarity?

Abstract A shipwreck in October 2013 off the island of Lampedusa, which caused the death of 366 migrants, pushed the question of legal pathways to admission for persons in need of international protection to the foreground in Europe. Different concepts broadly describe the same policy concept: alternative legal channels for people in need of protection outside the traditional asylum system and in addition to traditional UNHCR-led resettlement. Such pathways include labour, education, and family reunification pathways, as well as humanitarian admission programmes. Building on the notion of “active refugee admission policies” (ARAP) as an analytical category providing an umbrella term for legal pathways for people in need of protection, we discuss how different admission channels – available immigration pathways that may be used by persons in need of international protection on their own accord, active refugee admission policies, and spontaneous asylum relate to each other, in order to delineate the scope of active admission policies and identify the specific features that distinguish ARAPs from the two other pathways. We suggest two features as central: namely, the provision of refugee-specific mobility option (legal admission) on the one hand, and the facilitation of mobility (that is the “active-ness” in the ARAP concept), on the other.