Making asylum work? Civic stratification and labor‐related regularization among rejected asylum seekers in Germany

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Elina Jonitz,Arjen Leerkes
• Date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12182

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Making asylum work? Civic stratification and

labor-related regularization among rejected

asylum seekers in Germany

Elina Jonitz

1

| Arjen Leerkes

1,2

1

Department of Public Administration and

Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam,

Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

2

UNU-MERIT/Maastricht Graduate School

of Governance, Maastricht University,

Maastricht, Limburg, The Netherlands

Correspondence

Elina Jonitz, Department of Public

Administration and Sociology, Erasmus

University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Zuid-

Holland, The Netherlands.

Email: jonitz@essb.eur.nl

Abstract

Rejected asylum seekers often do not return to their

countries of origin and face precarious living conditions

in destination countries. Taking Germany as a strategic

case, we investigate whether labor-related regulariza-

tion, or “laborization,”may serve as a solution for such

migrants. We analyze the factors determining access to

such regularization and how labor-related regulariza-

tion relates to migrants’needs and aspirations. Based

on extensive desk research and interviews with stake-

holders, including (rejected) asylum seekers in Stutt-

gart, we find that laborization provides resourceful and

“deserving”individuals with valuable opportunities to

realize their aspirations, but it is insufficient to fully

address non-deportability.

1|INTRODUCTION

Since the mid-1990s, deportation of “irregular”migrants has become one of the highest political

priorities in many European Union (EU) member states and in the United States (Lietaert,

Broekaert, & Derluyn, 2015; Martinez & Ortega, 2019).

1

However, despite its political salience,

the enforcement of returns remains limited because of several factors, including the unpopular-

ity of deportation in local communities, constraints under international and human rights law,

and bureaucratic obstacles such as the lack of identification documents (Ambrosini, 2016;

Castañeda, 2010; Leerkes & Van Houte, 2020). Looking at the European Union context,

Rosenberger and Küffner (2016) and Leerkes and Van Houte (2020) highlight the significant

The authors would like to thank Kim Caarls, Maria Schiller, and Thomas Swerts as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful

and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12182

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License, which permits use,

distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

©2022 The Authors. Law & Policy published by University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Law & Policy. 2022;44:23–43. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo 23

gap between the number of rejected asylum seekers who are supposed to leave the country and

the number of people actually leaving.

The number of rejected asylum seekers is likely to remain high in the foreseeable future.

Ongoing political, economic, and technological transformations, violent conflicts, and increas-

ingly frequent natural disasters induce security-related cross border movements that are often

not fully covered under international (refugee) law (Castles, De Haas, & Miller, 2014; The Nan-

sen Initiative, 2015; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2020). Com-

pared with the United States, the European Union offers somewhat increased possibilities for

international protection because such protection can be based on both the Refugee Convention

and the European Convention on Human Rights (Lambert, 2005). However, both in the

United States and the European Union, many asylum applications—in most years, the major-

ity—are and will continue to be rejected, even when the applicants have migrated for the

abovementioned security-related reasons, possibly in addition to other reasons (Baugh, 2020;

Eurostat, 2020; for a discussion of migrants’mixed motives, see Long, 2015).

Responding to the international protection regime’s current limitations, various countries

have developed instruments “to increase mobility options—such as labor mobility—for refugees

and migrants in vulnerable situations”(Wagner, Schultz, & Allemann, 2019, p. 57). These

include regularization mechanisms that target rejected asylum seekers after their arrival, and

that follow, broadly speaking, either a humanitarian or an economic logic as the basis for

granting “irregularly”staying migrants a legal residence permit (for an overview, see Gonz

alez

Beilfuss & Koopmans, 2021; Kraler, 2019). Such regularizations are also often seen as a means

to respond to labor market demands in an “aging”Europe using the supply of those already

present (European Migration Network [EMN], 2015; Schammann, 2019; Schultz, Wagner, &

Allemann, 2018). For rejected asylum seekers, regularization offers opportunities to leave their

“liminal legality”(Menjívar, 2006, p. 1008) and obtain more legal security and social, economic,

and political rights (Bauer & Schreyer, 2019; Kraler, 2019; Landolt & Goldring, 2015;

Rosenberger & Küffner, 2016).

Germany is a compelling case to investigate situations facing “non-removed”persons and

their experiences with, and evaluation of, existing regularization mechanisms (cf.,

Schultz, 2020). The German case also sheds light on the broader discussion of whether regulari-

zation can provide a solution for rejected asylum seekers and help address the issue of non-

deportability in Europe and elsewhere, in the context of a considerable demand for (skilled)

labor. Germany is the major European destination country for asylum seekers (UNHCR, 2020)

and has a relatively high number of “non-removed”rejected asylum seekers. Stuttgart, the capi-

tal of the German regional state Baden-Württemberg, serves as an especially strategic location

for our exploration: the city’s strong economy and relatively inclusive local-level integration

policies

2

seem to provide rejected asylum seekers with promising opportunities, in particular

due to the region’s growing labor shortage.

3

While findings presented here may not necessarily

be generalizable, it seems probable that if labor-related regularization mechanisms do not

“work”in Stuttgart, they are unlikely to become a major solution for rejected asylum seekers

elsewhere.

Germany has a “targeted”enforcement regime, selectively deporting certain categories of

migrants while formally “tolerating”the stay of others (Leerkes & Van Houte, 2020). Rejected

asylum seekers who cannot leave or be deported typically receive a Duldung (toleration), mean-

ing that their deportation is temporarily suspended. Because of its temporariness and precari-

ousness, the Duldung is comparable with some of the temporary humanitarian legal statuses in

the United States, such as Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Action for Childhood

Arrivals, that are “short of residency and citizenship”(Abrego & Lakhani, 2015, p. 268), with

the difference being that the Duldung is not an actual legal status (Castañeda, 2010). However,

people with a Duldung have several options to gain a residence permit (European Migration

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