Please, sir, may we enter?

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 Ukraine War added another 5 million (Sipahioğlu, 2023).
On the surface one could think that all refugees are created equal.  They are human beings who are in peril and in need of a helping hand.  The reality is that appearance and origin play a huge role in how they are viewed.  We all have our own biases and when we first meet someone, we form an opinion.  The same is true for officials when approached by a refugee family.  In particular, the EU has a stringent visa system that makes it hard to obtain the necessary Schengen visa needed to enter EU countries legally (Sosa Popovic & Welfens, 2025). 
The Syrian Crisis brought refugees who were primarily Muslim and Arabic.  They were fleeing a brutal regime which led to a fragmented civil war.  The different regions were fighting each other as well as the Assad regime.  Those who were seeking asylum in neighboring EU countries were "foreign" and "different", thus creating an environment of distrust.  
When the Ukraine War started, it brought primarily Christian and Caucasian asylum seekers.  The war is seen as Russian aggression on a peaceful nation, therefore a humanitarian crisis.  The neighboring EU countries saw themselves in these refugees which lead to a more welcoming environment.  Sosa Popovic & Welfens (2025) characterized this dichotomy as "racialised discrimination versus explicit prioritization".
In the next post, I will explore the definition of what a refugee is and what rights should they legitimately expect from a potential host country.

Sipahioğlu, Buket Ökten,. “A Review of Discrimination and Labeling of Refugees Using the Example of Syrian and Ukrainian Refugees.” Journal of Social Policy Conferences, vol. 0, no. 84, 2023, pp. 191-198, Google Scholar, doi:10.26650/jspc.2023.84.1172157

Sosa Popovic, Lara, and Natalie Welfens. “Same, Same but Different? A Discourse Network Analysis of the EU’s Framings of Refugee Arrivals in 2015 and 2022.” Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, vol. 51, no. 3, Feb. 2025, pp. 609–32, EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/1369183X.2024.2431053.

Location: Austin, TX, USA

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