Measuring National Refugee Policies: Recent Trends and Implications for Future Development

Abstract

Refugee issues are among the most imminent and important problems facing mod-ern societies. This review essay systematically reviews recent social scientific literature that quantitatively measures national refugee policies. In so doing, we compare several recent and prominent cross-national data sets on this topic, namely those constructed by the International Migration Institute (IMI; 2015), Hatton (2016), Helbling et al. (2017), Blair, Grossman, and Weinstein (2021), and Savun (2021). We point to both the advantages and disadvantages of the respective data sets while providing suggestions on how to practically apply them and how to merge their scopes and perspectives in a more comprehensive manner in order to better fit researchers’ and practitioners’ scopes of interest. We conclude this article by suggesting future research agendas by highlighting the significance and feasibility of a compilation of a more extensive data set based on the existing ones.