Seeking Asylum in Germany: How Social Stratification Affects the Length and Outcomes of Asylum Processes

In this paper we investigate whether and how the social stratification of refugees and their access to social and economic resources such as ethnic networks determine the length and the outcome of asylum recognition processes. We employ the IAB-BAMF-SOEP-Survey of Refugees in Germany for this purpose. The IAB-BAMF-SOEP-Survey enables us to draw representative inference on the refugees which arrived from 2013 to the beginning of 2016 in Germany, i.e. it covers the recent surge in refugee migration there. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper which analyzes systematically how the social stratification of refugees and other economic and social aspects affect the outcome of asylum recognition processes. Our findings indicate that the length and the outcomes of asylum recognition processes are determined by human capital and behavioral characteristics of refugees, their economic and social status in home countries, their access to personal networks of the same ethnic group in Germany and other social aspects after controlling for origin country fixed effects and individual concerns about persecution in home countries. We thus conclude that the social and economic selectivity of refugees affects the outcome asylum recognition processes.