Applying for asylum from abroad? The ethics of migration management externalization

Should states allow people to seek asylum from the territories of other states? This proposal has been repeatedly floated by politicians as a possible reaction to the increasingly perilous and deadly journey that refugees embark on to seek asylum in the EU, but has not yet been the subject of ethical interrogation. What would such a proposal entail? Would it lead to fewer deaths and to safe migration routes or would it allow for the cheap production of mass-rejection of asylum seekers without dealing with the negative fall-out? Does it constitute an aspect of humanization within the current asylum regime, or does it contribute to and facilitate a regime of migration externalization that aims at the dissolution of the institution of asylum? How would this impact rescue missions in the Mediterranean? These are the questions that this paper aims to answer. It will consider the literature on the ethics on refugees and asylum to investigate whether the outsourcing of asylum applications to the territories of other states leads to harm reductions, or whether it exposes asylum seekers to more harm. It also considers the fall-out from such a decision, taking into consideration what this may mean for rejected asylum seekers and whether this is morally defensible. The paper will argue that it is not. Outsourcing asylum decisions will (likely) not lead to fewer applications in liberal democracies where outcomes of asylum decisions are unsure, exposes asylum seekers to additional risks wherever they apply for, is likely to generate more encampment and detention, and risks the further criminalization of rescue missions and migrants that aim to lodge an asylum claim on the state’s territories themselves. Applying for asylum from afar will make it tremendously easy to reject asylum claims without having to care for what happens to the rejected. It constitutes another aspect in the externalization of migration management and contributes to the outsourcing of harming migrants.