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So, what can be done? Bias in European Refugee Systems: Part IV This is the final part of a four-part series on refugee systems in the European Union. Part one can be found here , part two  here and part three  here . As the world watched, the European Union (EU) welcomed many of the refugees from Ukraine with open arms. Seven short years earlier, the Syrian Crisis brought equally terrified and desperate people to the EU’s borders, and many were met with skepticism and fear. That asylum and help were extended to those scared and anguished Ukrainian people isn’t the issue at the heart of this argument: the disparity in the attitudes, policies and treatment between these two groups is. It is understandable that one could be anxious about having people who appear foreign in one's community.  Humans traditionally fear the unknown and change; seeing an influx of people can make one anxious and distrustful.  Remembering that we...

No not them! But yes over there. Bias in European Refugee Systems: Part III This is part three of a four-part series on refugee systems in the European Union. Part one can be found here and part two  here . As Ukrainian refugees rushed across the borders into their neighboring countries, the European Union (EU) rushed to pass policies and guidelines to handle the large influx of displaced families and people. The Syrian Crisis had already stretched resources in many EU member countries, making the situation more challenging. The European Union (EU) had established a Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) after the Balkan wars in the 1990s (Mickelsson, 2025) however it was not used until the Ukrainian crisis started in 2022. The Syrian Crisis, notably, did not trigger this policy. The policy initially grants the asylum seeker one year of protection which can be extended in six month increments for up to two more years (Mickelsson...

What is a refugee? Bias in European Refugee Systems: Part II This is part two of a four-part series on refugee systems in the European Union. Part one can be found here . Can someone please tell me exactly what constitutes a refugee? Chowdhury (2024) defines refugees as people who are forced to flee their country and seek refuge in another. This definition seems straightforward however political climates and the country of origin play a role in how the public defines a refugee or asylum seeker.  As we will see, policy makers and government officials view the definition with many nuances. Mickelsson (2025) goes a step further and includes three aspects of what he calls “promising victimhood”: security, economic performance, and cultural fit. Now one can start to see how refugees from one crisis might be viewed in a different light than those from another.  Security asks that the refugee be evaluated on t...

Please, sir, may we enter? Bias in European Refugee Systems, Part I Far from home and anything familiar, a family desperately seeks a safe place to lay their heads. A young boy and his sister huddle together in a tent with several other families.  Their parents try to secure passage to one of the countries allowing displaced persons in. This could describe a family from Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine or Afghanistan; refugees from war torn countries and/or brutal regimes. For this four-part series, we will focus on the policies, systems and perceptions of refugee and asylum seekers in the European Union (EU). 2015 saw an influx of more than a million refugees to the EU and forced leaders to consider their asylum policies. This was further complicated in 2022 when Russia engaged in a war with Ukraine, and many were forced to flee that country. It is estimated that by mid-2022, the Syrian Crisis resulted in approximately 6.8 million refugees and the Ukrain...