Pushes and Pulls: Asylum Migration the Allure of the Simple Explanation

Since the early 1990s asylum policy in many European states has become increasingly dominated by the concept of the economic ‘pull factor’: that asylum seekers are drawn to states where they will be able to work and receive welfare benefits. The economic pull factor has consequently been the focus of extensive research. This paper presents a critique of the application of the economic pull model to forced migration. Drawing on a systematic review of the research evidence on economic pull factors it demonstrates that this theory of forced migration remains unproven and is centrally flawed in its inability to account for the complexity of such phenomena. Rather than searching for more, or better, evidence that asylum seekers are ‘pulled’ to wealthy countries by welfare and work opportunities using models which simplify complex phenomena, the paper argues that it is theories which seek to account for complexity which more adequately explain patterns and processes of forced migration. That policymakers remain deaf to theories of complexity such as the asylum-migration-nexus is explained, drawing on work in Cultural Political Economy and supported by interviews with policymakers and politicians in the UK, in terms of the existential necessity for complexity reduction in policymaking. This need for complexity reduction in acting within and upon the social world (here: governing forced migration) limits the possibility that theories which work with rather than against complexity are ever able to be widely taken up in policy circles.