The nature and evolution of EU funds for migration and asylum: introducing the MigFund dataset 2000–2023

Abstract This article introduces the MigFund dataset, a comprehensive resource that traces the European Union’s financial commitments to migration and asylum from 2000 to 2023. Developed in response to long-standing calls to ‘follow the money’ in EU migration governance, the dataset records over 1,700 funding measures across internal and external programmes, disaggregated by sub-policy area, target group, geographic scope, and degree of restrictiveness. Drawing on the literature on policy tools, the article conceptualises EU funding as an expression of institutional preferences, bureaucratic negotiation and strategic framing, shaping and shaped by evolving policy priorities. A key contribution of the dataset is its coding of each measure along a restrictive-to-open continuum, enabling researchers to assess how EU financial tools promote either mobility and protection or containment and control. The article details the dataset’s structure and coding logic and presents key descriptive findings on the evolution of EU funding, showing a steady expansion of resources and increasing complexity in the programming landscape. Through this empirical lens, the article invites a reconsideration of financial instruments as autonomous policy tools, capable of reinforcing, offsetting or reconfiguring broader migration policy logics. MigFund thus provides a basis for macro- and meso-level analyses of funds in EU studies, migration studies and public policy more broadly.