Why Do States Restrict Refugee Rights? A Cross-Country Comparison of the Socio-Economic Rights of Refugees

What explains variation in states’ policies regulating the rights of refugees after their admission? This paper argues that if, as with regular immigration control, host states perceive extending certain rights to refugees as costly, such a perception will prompt them to curtail (some of) refugees’ post-entry rights once being involved in a large-scale refugee intake. This presumption is reflected in an anticipatedly negative relationship (i.e., trade-off) between the "number" and post-entry "rights" of refugees in a given host country. Several complementary hypotheses are proposed and tested using newly constructed data on the de facto protection of refugees’ post- entry rights in major refugee-hosting countries from 2004-2016. The results give partial support to the "number-vs.-rights" trade-off dynamics in refugee and asylum policies but also suggest that the baseline negative relationship between the two variables can be either alleviated or aggravated by other factors such as refugees- host government ethnic kin connections or host states’ aid/trade-dependency levels. In keeping with existing qualitative evidence in the forced migration literature, the findings lend useful insight into why host states restrict refugees’ rights, and what factors could intervene in their decisions to do (or not to do) so.