Philipp Lutz

University of Geneva | UNIGE

UN refugee agencies depend heavily on the funding of just a few Western States. While reforming the funding system may help to fulfil the agencies’ mandate and maintain autonomy, preserving their legitimacy is crucial.

While a growing number of refugees is in need of humanitarian protection, most states are reluctant to admit them. For more than two decades, scholars have thought to understand this intricate challenge of international governance through the prism of collective action theory and the concept of refugee protection as an international public good. Ho...

Many citizens in liberal democracies are concerned about immigration and its impact on their countries. Governments often seek to address these concerns by restricting the post-entry rights of immigrants such as the right to permanent settlement or access to welfare benefits. Thereby, it is expected that immigrants with an inferior legal status are...

The European Union has progressively communitarised its migration policy. The formation of public support for this integration of a core state power presents an intricate puzzle. On the one hand, immigration is part and parcel of the conflict around the opening and closing of nation states, and thereby mobilises nativist views and Euroscepticism. O...

The European Union (EU) increasingly seeks cooperation with transit and sending countries to prevent irregular migration and enforce returns. Yet, these countries have little incentives to engage in such cooperation. To overcome interest asymmetries, the EU has sought to link trade and migration control in its preferential trade agreements (PTAs)....

States struggle to establish multilateral cooperation on migration – yet they include more and more migration provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This article sheds light on this phenomenon by introducing the Migration Provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements (MITA) dataset. Covering 797 agreements signed between 1960 and 2020, t...

Intense pressure for international solutions and weak support for multilateral cooperation have led the EU to increasingly rely on its strongest foreign policy tool in the pursuit of migration policy goals: preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Starting from the fragmentary architecture of the migration regime complex we examine how the relevant co...

Western democracies have an economic interest in admitting immigrants but at the same time they fear the political costs of doing so. A recurring idea to help reconcile this tension is to allow for temporary mobility of immigrants while restricting their permanent settlement. Trying to shed light on this matter, this article studies whether and whe...

EU decentralised agencies dispose of a wide network of external relations giving third countries various degrees of access to their management boards, secondary bodies and/or operational cooperation. These venues constitute hitherto under‐explored opportunities for third country influence on EU laws and policies. Based on an original dataset, this...

Migration and its consequences for the legitimacy of the welfare state have been the subject of a number of controversial discussions over the past several decades, and remain highly salient issues today. To be legitimate, welfare states need to function well and to deliver what is expected of them (“output-legitimacy”), but they also need to do so...

In times of contested globalization, democratic governments have increasing difficulties to reconcile international obligations with domestic political demands. Unresponsiveness to domestic constituents due to international constraints may threaten to undermine democratic legitimacy. We assess how citizens react to non-responsive governments in the...

Across Western democracies, immigration has become one of the most polarizing and salient issues, with public discourses and individual attitudes often characterized by misperceptions. This condition undermines people's ability to develop informed opinions on the matter and runs counter to the ideal of deliberative democracy. Yet, our understanding...

Many refugee-receiving countries have restricted their asylum policies and stepped up their border control policies to prevent asylum seekers from reaching their territories. At the same time, the resettlement of refugees has gained popularity. Many states have introduced resettlement schemes or have increased the number of refugees they resettle....

In den letzten drei Jahrzehnten hat sich Migration von einem vornehmlich innenpolitischen Politikfeld zu einem Kernbereich der internationalen Politik entwickelt. Dabei navigiert die Migrationsaussenpolitik der Schweiz im Fadenkreuz gegensätzlicher Dynamiken. Einer anhaltend hohen wirtschaftlichen Nachfrage nach internationaler Mobilität stehen gew...

The international governance of asylum requires states to cooperate to provide the public good of humanitarian protection. The need to establish responsibility-sharing resembles the collective action problem in climate change mitigation. While there is a general consensus on the differentiation of state responsibilities in most environmental agreem...

The idea that internal inclusion requires external exclusion features prominently in many theoretical accounts of modern statehood and citizenship. In a similar vein, it has been argued that internal freedom of movement in the European Union requires strict immigration control at its external borders. This article sheds light on the relationship be...

Western democracies have developed complex policies to manage migration flows. Much of the scholarly literature and political discourse assume that countries have become increasingly selective and that they prioritise economic intakes. Despite clear efforts by policymakers to distinguish between refugees and migrant workers, we know surprisingly li...

Migration verbindet Gesellschaften und Volkswirtschaften. Durch diese Transnationalität wirken Migrantinnen und Migranten als Katalysatoren für Entwicklung und Wohlstand von Herkunfts- und Zielländern. In der Schweiz verhindert gegenwärtig die restriktive Einwanderungspolitik für Drittstaatsangehörige die Ausschöpfung dieses Entwicklungspotenzials:...

Western democracies have developed complex policies to manage migration flows. Much of the scholarly literature and political discourse assume that countries have become increasingly selective and that they prioritise economic intakes. Despite clear efforts by policymakers to distinguish between refugees and migrant workers, we know surprisingly li...

The tensions between responsible and responsive government have increased in the age of populism. How do politicians deal with this challenge? Do they give priority to short-term voter demands or are their strategies guided by the Weberian ethics of responsibility? We study this dilemma in the case of the Swiss popular vote establishing a constitut...

The right of citizens to live and work in any member state is a foundational pillar of the European Union. The views of EU citizens on free movement are characterized by a puzzle: the border-free Europe is seen as the most important achievement of European integration but also appears as a main driver of Euroscepticism. In this article, I argue tha...

How does demographic change influence immigration policies in Western welfare states? In this chapter, I discuss two perspectives on the relationship between demographic ageing and labour immigration policies. Welfare states are under financial strain and face a trade-off between too little immigration that could undermine their economic foundation...

The recent surge of refugee arrivals in Europe has accentuated the malfunctioning of the Common European Asylum System: Non‐coordination between nation states and a failed common protection of refugees were the main outcomes of the so‐called ‘refugee crisis’. This paper builds on public good and policy compliance literature in order to explain the...

Much of the literature on migration policy has proclaimed a gap between what parties say and what parties do. The “gap-hypothesis” expects political parties to deliver “tough talk” and “weak action” on the issue of migration. This article tests this idea empirically by asking whether political parties keep their electoral promises in migration poli...

Die Schweizer Asylpolitik fluktuiert zwischen humanitärer Solidarität und politischer Abwehrreflexe. Gegenwärtig gelangen Geflüchtete meist durch irreguläre Flucht in die Schweiz, wobei deren Aufnahme die Bevölkerung spaltet. Um dieses Dilemma der Schweizer Asylpolitik zu adressieren, schlagen die foraus-AutorInnen ein neues Zulassungsmodell für Re...

How do radical right populist parties influence government policies in their core issue of immigration? This article provides a systematic analysis of the direct and indirect effects of radical right anti-immigration parties on migration policy reforms in 17 West European countries from 1990 to 2014. Insights from migration policy theory serve to e...

How do radical-right populist parties influence government policies in their core issue of immigration? This article provides a systematic analysis of the direct and indirect effects of radical-right anti-immigration parties on migration policy reforms in 17 West European countries from 1990 to 2014. Insights from migration policy theory serve to e...

Sustainable spatial planning strongly depends on efficient policy measures. A successful implementation of efficient policies, in turn, crucially depends on their public acceptance. This paper examines whether the way the public is provided with information on spatial planning policies influences the latter’s acceptance. Policy makers employ policy...

The effectiveness of immigrant integration policies has gained considerable attention across Western democracies dealing with ethnically and culturally diverse societies. However, the findings on what type of policy produces more favourable integration outcomes remain inconclusive. The conflation of normative and analytical assumptions on integrati...

The humanitarian crisis at the internal and external borders of Europe and the dysfunctionality of the Dublin Regulation call for political responses to the challenges posed by humanitarian migration to Europe. The European countries are deeply divided on how to reform the Common European Asylum System. Attempts to relocate asylum seekers across Eu...

Die Schweiz ist ein Migrationsland, global vernetzt und mit einer erstaunlichen gesellschaftlichen Vielfalt. Der Think-Tank foraus – Forum Aussenpolitik liefert fundierte Einblicke in diese Migrationsrealität und zeigt neue Perspektiven auf. Die Modernität der Schweiz in Sachen Migration hat jedoch noch nicht Eingang gefunden ins helvetische Selbs...