Integration Policies and Secondary Movements in the European Asylum System

In the last two decades, European countries, while working for the establishment of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS) to harmonise the legal frameworks of the member states and establish common minimum standards, have rather pursued domestic goals at times, imposing restrictive policies on forced migrants to deter inflows and deflect refugees to fellow countries. Within migration policies, integration programmes in EU countries might affect the well-being and the quality of life, inducing migrants to move from one country to another. We thus investigate the effect of integration policies from 2006 to 2018 on secondary movements of asylum seekers. We argue that integration policies show significant correlations with secondary movements in European countries, while more general migration policies may rather affect first entry flows into EU.