Shaping an Uncertain Future: First Insights from a Mixed-Methods Study about the Im/mobility Aspirations of Rejected Asylum Applicants

The number of rejected asylum seekers has been continuously high across Europe over the past decade. Rejected asylum seekers are legally obliged to leave the country, yet many are tolerated to stay for reasons of non-deportability. This frequently results in a state of limbo between regularity and irregularity, often for lengthy periods of time. After several years of im-/mobility, people are caught between integration and deportation, while at the same time not being able to return to their countries of origin. How migrants deal with this process, what aspirations and capabilities they have is scarcely known, as they are hard-to-reach and hard-so-survey at the same time. At the BAMF Research Centre, we conducted an app-based Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) with rejected asylum seekers from anglophone West Africa from June to December 2023. The app contained all elements necessary for running an RDS, including a factorial survey, and did not require any personal data from the participants. The survey was preceded by an extensive 10-month formative assessment, which included ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews with "seeds" who later spread the RDS as initial respondents into the target group. In addition, randomly selected people from the target group were drawn from the Central Register of Foreigners and invited to take part in the app survey. In this contribution, we bring together the results of the qualitative interviews and the factorial survey, which asked respondents to recommend hypothetical people in hypothetical situations whether they should stay, return or migrate onwards. This innovative mixed-methods analysis allows new insights into the negotiation of im-/mobility processes among rejected asylum seekers and potentially contributes to a more informed policy making.