Meet our postdocs: Interview with Filip Savatic
Filip Savatic joined CERI in September 2022 as a Postdoctoral researcher for the Migration Governance and Asylum Crises (MAGYC) project, working with Hélène Thiollet. He specializes in the study of international migration and European integration. Filip’s work for the MAGYC project focuses on the externalisation of migration control by European states and the impact of public policies on migratory flows. He answers our questions about his research interests and involvement in the MAGYC project.
You have recently defended your PhD (December 2021), would you mind presenting your argument and work?
Last December, I obtained my PhD in Government (political science) from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In my dissertation (entitled “Open and Shut Cases: Irregular Migration Management and Policy Convergence in the European Union”), I examined why European states have addressed irregular migration in increasingly similar ways over time, despite social, political and economic differences that would lead one to expect substantial variation in public policies on this issue.
To explain this puzzling outcome, I first developed a typology of what I call “approaches to irregular migration management.” I argue that policies targeting irregular migration have two overarching characteristics: (1) they can either address irregular migration that has already occurred or prevent it from occurring in the first place, and (2) they can coerce individuals into compliance with migration regulations or incentivize individuals to transition back to regularity or avoid falling into an irregular status. This creates four ideal-type management “approaches” that are defined by the adoption of specific types of public policies (regularisations, employer sanctions, deportations, etc.). I then constructed an “Irregular Migration Policy Dataset,” which codes the policies targeting irregular migration adopted by 16 European states since 1945 and quantifies the degree to which those states rely on particular “approaches” defined by my typology. Using this dataset, I show that states have converged towards coercive approaches since the 1980s. Finally, I conducted archival and documentary research to determine why this convergence occurred. I argue that it stemmed from the unfounded beliefs held by French (and to a lesser extent German and Benelux) policymakers that the creation of a borderless area of free movement would lead to greater irregular migration unless there was convergence in the way states addressed it. Due to these beliefs, they established the Schengen Area outside the structures of the European Union (EU) and threatened to exclude partners from it unless they adopted coercive irregular migration policies.
My research thus reveals the role of causal beliefs and threats of exclusion in processes of political integration, which may play a role beyond the specific case of the EU and Schengen Area.
You have joined CERI as a postdoc for the MAGYC project, focusing on the externalisation of migration control by European states and the impact of public policies on migratory flows. Can you tell us more about this focus?
My work for the MAGYC project is tied to Work Package 8 (“External dimension of the crisis”), which seeks to understand how public responses to the so-called “migration/refugee crisis” of 2015 have affected migration to Europe. Starting in the years prior to the dramatic scenes from 2015, during which over 1 million individuals came to Europe by sea or on foot, European states have increasingly sought to develop cooperative policies with migrant origin and transit states to reduce migration flows. This “externalisation” of migration control aims to co-opt origin/transit states into keeping potential migrants and refugees within their territories in exchange for some promised benefits (visa liberalisation, development aid, etc.). While these policies have been deemed successful at reducing migration by certain institutions and decried as inhumane by civil society organisations, there has been limited empirical evaluation of their actual impacts.
Together with a team of MAGYC researchers, I have worked on developing a new dataset of externalization policies adopted bilaterally and multilaterally by European destination states on the one hand and all possible migrant origin/transit states on the other hand. Using various statistical techniques, we are evaluating how these policies have affected flows defined by data on “irregular border crossings” (IBCs) published by Frontex, the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency, since 2009. We posit that externalisation disproportionately affects individuals who will probably receive asylum in Europe, as they are less likely to be able to anticipate border closures and find alternative migration pathways. This puts these policies in direct tension with the obligations of European states to protect individuals fleeing violence and persecution as well as the asylum policies that they implement domestically. By empirically identifying these effects and highlighting this tension, we develop a critique of externalisation and show that it is not very successful at achieving its supposed primary goal (reducing irregular migration) and harms vulnerable individuals who would otherwise obtain humanitarian protection.
In a research paper you are currently working on with the MAGYC team regarding the portrayal of migration at borders through data, you apply a method you call “straightforward” and “novel”. Can you explain this method and if it is applicable to other research questions?
As part of our research on the impact of policies on migration, we developed a simple method to divide data on migration flows into individuals who would likely obtain asylum in their ultimate destination (“likely refugees”) and those who would not (“likely irregular migrants”). In short, we calculate an annual average acceptance/rejection rate of asylum requests given the nationality of asylum seekers in migrant destination states and use that rate to divide data on flows into our two categories. Given that asylum policies in destination states determine who gets refugee status, we argue that asylum acceptance rates are the most appropriate tool for categorising migrations, while also recognizing that those categories are social constructions defined by states.
In the case of the crisis of 2015, we compute a weighted average acceptance rate across 31 European destination states relying on Eurostat data regarding first instance asylum decisions by nationality. We first calculate the percentage of all decisions pertaining to a particular nationality adjudicated in each destination state. We then multiply the percentage of decisions with the percentage of first instance asylum acceptances per nationality and sum the results to obtain the weighted average acceptance rate for each origin nationality. Finally, we use this weighted rate to split the number of “irregular border crossings” (IBCs) identified by Frontex—one measure of migration flows—into the number of likely refugees and likely irregular migrants. In this way, we estimate that over 75% of all IBCs were “likely refugees” in 2015, highlighting the humanitarian nature of that crisis. This further calls into question the efficacy and appropriateness of externalisation policies adopted by European states to address IBCs.
Our method could evaluate the nature of migration flows in contexts beyond Europe. We would expect that many of the individuals attempting to enter any state during peaks in flows would likely obtain asylum—but that is something that needs to be tested. We are also using our method in our statistical analyses examining whether policies have a differential impact on likely refugees or likely irregular migrants. More broadly, our method highlights the need to critically reflect on data labeling and use in both public discourses as well as scholarly research. Frontex data that labels border crossings as “irregular” or “illegal” is misleading given that individuals have the legal right to cross borders without prior authorisation to request asylum, and many would obtain refugee status after filing their request. This type of reflection could be valuable in other contexts where data production and labeling could be politicized or pertain to socially constructed political categories.
Another area of research you are pursuing deals with the politicisation—or political mobilisation—of diasporas in their countries of residence. Would you mind presenting this research?
Together with a former colleague at Georgetown who is now an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hertie School in Berlin—Shubha Kamala Prasad—I have been studying the political engagement of diaspora communities in their countries of residence. In 2021, our research on diaspora mobilisation in the United States (“ Diasporic Foreign Policy Interest Groups in the United States: Democracy, Conflict, and Political Entrepreneurship ”) was published in the journal Perspectives on Politics under open access. In short, we seek to understand why certain diaspora communities mobilise to try to influence the foreign policies of the countries where they reside while others do not.
Using novel data we collected on diasporic interest groups in the United States, we identify a correlation between the existence of an interest group and violence in diaspora countries of origin as well as higher degrees of democratic governance in those countries, making it more likely that individuals are cognizant of opportunities and methods for political engagement. Our in-depth case studies of the historical and contemporary Indian-American lobbies, for which we collected original archival and interview evidence, further demonstrate that conflict and experience with democratic governance are drivers of mobilisation. We have thus identified additional, transnational factors that influence whether people engage politically in democracies.
Looking forward, we aim to continue our research on the political mobilisation of diasporas and its different forms. We are currently studying mobilisation in other democratic countries of residence in Europe, further testing our theoretical arguments developed in the American context. Given that our arguments initially emerged through inductive theorising, we now aim to see whether or to what extent they are generalisable. We are also interested in examining the substance of diaspora mobilisation—namely what it aims to achieve and why. Through our research, we seek to shift the focus away from whether diaspora communities are successful at changing policies, which often focuses on a number of high-profile political organisations, and we work on comparing mobilisation across countries of residence. We ultimately plan to apply for a European Research Council (ERC) grant for early-career scholars to support our research.
Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.
