The EU is interested in regulating as to where and how long migrants may remain on its territory. If deemed necessary, the EU rules regulating the mobility of migrants can be enforced by coercive means e.g. through a forcible return procedure or a Dublin transfer of asylum seekers back to their point of entry in Europe. The ERC runner-up-project will be ground-breaking as it analyses and critically reflection upon the application of these rules. It will create a unique dataset featuring country-to-country cooperation patterns on coercive mobility within Europe (on Dublin transfers) and from Europe to the rest of the world (on return cooperation) over a period of twenty-one years (1999-2020). Different statistical methods, first and foremost regression analyses, will help explain the patterns of cooperation (and non-cooperation) over time and across all regions in the world. This will determine the impact of factors such as a third country’s democratic standards or administrative capabilities. The dataset on coercive EU mobility rules will also assess the extent to which incomplete or unreliable data distorts our knowledge and understanding of migration governance in Europe. No-one has yet systematically compared and complemented European and national data on migration even though complaints about the quality of the data are frequent. By making the dataset open access, the ERC runner-up-project will have a high public impact and strengthen the capabilities of policy-makers and academics.
