Family Strategies in Refugee Journeys to Europe

Abstract

This article contributes to the literature on refugee journeys and decision-making by providing an exploratory study of the strategies adopted by refugee families in order to overcome controls on their movement and access to asylum. Refugee family strategies are analysed in the context of dynamic policy changes along the Eastern Mediterranean route, drawing on semi-structured interviews with Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian family members who were on this route between 2015 and 2018. The results demonstrate, first, how refugee families negotiate the physical and financial barriers to their movement—often by separating, which emerges as a key adaptive strategy. Second, concomitant with the decision to separate, family reunification policies become important in shaping—and determining the outcomes—of these asylum-seeking trajectories. Third, the article reflects on the consequences of family separation on the families themselves, particularly in an environment of limited family reunification possibilities.

Introduction

Accessing asylum in Europe has become increasingly difficult for refugees. Strengthened physical barriers at borders constrain movement while new administrative controls—such as restrictions on family reunification—have narrowed access to legal statuses. Although these policies have impacted the journeys and experiences of asylum-seeking families, a dearth of research limits current understandings of how refugee families navigate these challenges. This article addresses this research gap by providing an exploratory analysis of how refugee families respond to these migration controls—often by deciding to separate (in the hope of eventually accessing family reunification provisions), and by moving onwards irregularly when formal family reunification seems uncertain or impossible.

The expanding literature on the decision-making processes of refugees and other migrants in the context of their fragmented journeys (Collyer 2007) focusses largely on the individual as the ‘lead’ decision-maker. Scant attention has been paid to the ways in which families jointly navigate mobility regimes in order to achieve their migration aspirations. Whilst the focus on individual decision-making might be highly relevant within some irregular migration contexts, the peak inflows to the EU via the Eastern Mediterranean in the autumn and winter of 2015 comprised increasingly large proportions of women and children, often travelling with their families (Kofman 2019).

Family strategies in wider migration flows are commonplace—it is accepted that the first generation often migrates for their children’s future opportunities; that individual family members may migrate in order to provide for the rest of the family; and that the choice of destination may be a strategic decision based on the family’s perceived opportunities there (see, for example, Waters 2005; Ryan et al. 2009). This literature emphasizes the importance of family in migration decisions and strategies.

However, few studies have discussed the role of refugee families’ strategies in seeking asylum in the EU. It has been found that, whether or not conceived deliberately (or indeed as the result of rape), pregnancy may be considered useful by women (and their partners or smugglers) as a way to improve their chances of a successful sea crossing and rescue in the Western Mediterranean, or to avoid deportation or gain residence and family reunification rights upon arrival in Spain (Carling 2007; Stock 2012; Tyszler 2019). Stock’s (2012) in-depth exploration of gender dynamics among female refugees and other migrants in Morocco found that young children may also form part of family mobility strategies. One single mother believed her children would help to strengthen their claim to UNHCR resettlement from Morocco; another sent her son ahead to France via smugglers hoping he would be granted citizenship and she would then be allowed to join him legally (Stock 2012). This latter type of ‘staged’ migration has also been observed in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean route where men or young boys travel first, intending to apply for family reunification upon arrival in the EU (REACH 2017; Kamp and Kuschminder 2019; Kvittingen et al. 2019; Chandler et al. 2020). There has been minimal research beyond this to understand and conceptualize refugee family mobility strategies.

This study contributes to the literature on refugees and other migrants’ decision-making through an investigation of the ways in which refugee families have been affected by policy developments along the Eastern Mediterranean route, and the mobility strategies that they have adopted in response to these policies. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian family members who were on this route between 2015 and 2018. The remainder of the article is structured as follows. First, the next section on changing conditions on the Eastern Mediterranean route provides an overview of the structural conditions and policy developments that characterized the route between 2015 and 2018. Second, the methodology is summarized. Third, the results section analyses refugee families’ decisions to separate, and their decisions made in response to the barriers to their reunification. The consequences of refugee family separation are discussed before the conclusions section finally summarizes the paper’s key findings and reflects on their implications.

Changing Conditions on the Eastern Mediterranean Route

The Eastern Mediterranean route was the site of rapidly increasing migration flows that peaked in 2015, precipitating a political crisis. In this section, we provide a brief overview of the policy developments that took place along the route between 2015 and 2018. The Eastern Mediterranean route refers to the route from Turkey into the EU via Greece, Bulgaria, or Cyprus. We also include in this analysis changes which occurred further along the route, in the Western Balkans and key Western European destination countries, due to their impacts on decision-making upstream. A comprehensive review of all the migration-specific and migration-relevant policies introduced in this period is beyond the scope of this paper; this summary focusses on those policies which, as will be demonstrated, have shaped refugee family strategies.

In mid-2015, when the first round of fieldwork was conducted in Turkey and Greece, most of the policy interventions introduced in response to the accelerating number of people on the route had not yet occurred. An important exception is Turkey’s closure of its land border with Syria. Since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in early 2011, Syrians displaced by the crisis had been seeking refuge in neighbouring Turkey, where they were offered temporary protection and basic humanitarian assistance by the Turkish government (Dinçer et al. 2013). However, from 2013 onwards, Turkey gradually revoked its open border policy for Syrians. 2013 and 2014 saw a partial hardening of the border, which became full securitization in mid-2015, making it extremely difficult—and potentially fatal—to attempt the land crossing from Syria to Turkey (Okyay, 2017).

Notwithstanding these restrictions, in 2015 Turkey hosted more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees and over 250,000 refugees of other nationalities (UNHCR 2020). Although some refugees and migrants came to Turkey with the intention to stay, others wanted—or subsequently decided—to move onwards. Over 800,000 refugees and other migrants left Turkey in 2015 in order to reach the EU, most commonly via the short sea crossing to Greece, which necessitated the use of smugglers and was undertaken at the risk of drowning (UNHCR 2015).

Some refugees and migrants left Turkey planning to settle in Greece, however, the majority planned to migrate onwards to further destinations in Europe (Koser and Kuschminder, 2016). It was well known that the vast majority of asylum seekers had no access to adequate reception conditions in Greece (AIDA 2015); Greece was facing its own economic crisis and the government did not provide accommodation or other basic humanitarian services. As will be described in the results, some families separated in Greece in order to access family reunification in another EU country in accordance with the Dublin Regulation’s family unity criteria.

However, refugees and other migrants seeking to move onwards irregularly from Greece in early and mid-2015 faced significant risks and obstacles to reach their desired EU destinations. Until June 2015, Greece’s northern border with North Macedonia was heavily securitized. Those who managed to move forwards into Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary were at continued risk of abuses including illegal pushbacks, detention in overcrowded and degrading conditions, and ill-treatment by authorities (Amnesty International 2015). The route onwards from Greece changed significantly from mid-2015 when Greece’s northern border was opened and for a short period of time refugees and other migrants could leave Greece and travel onwards relatively freely to other European destinations.

October 2015 saw a peak in the number of irregular arrivals in Greece. The rapidly increased inflows prompted the EU to introduce new restrictions on movement. The implementation of the November 2015 EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan (JAP) and the March 2016 EU-Turkey Statement resulted in: controls on movement within Turkey towards the coast; increased patrolling of the Aegean Sea and Turkey’s land borders with Greece and Bulgaria; and the detention of new arrivals to the Greek Aegean island ‘Hotspots’. In the months and years following the official closure of the Balkans route and the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement, Western Balkan transit countries have strengthened and expanded their border controls in order to further secure existing routes and to counteract the emergence of new sub-routes (see Kuschminder et al. 2019 for a detailed account of these policies).

In response to the large number of arrivals, EU destination countries adjusted their asylum policies to reduce inflows. These have included, inter alia: granting asylum-seekers subsidiary protection rather than 1951 Convention refugee status; granting temporary rather than permanent residence permits or shortening already temporary residence permits; new integration requirements; and new restrictions on family reunification (Konle-Seidl 2018). In March 2016, Germany temporarily suspended the right to family reunification for beneficiaries of subsidiary protection (Konle-Seidl 2018). This was accompanied by a major shift towards granting subsidiary protection rather than ‘full’ refugee status: in 2015 only 0.6% of Syrian asylum seekers were granted subsidiary protection status in Germany; this increased to 42% in 2016 (Konle-Seidl 2018). Germany reintroduced family reunification procedures for subsidiary protection beneficiaries in August 2018 but imposed a cap of 1,000 family members a month—a quota which has not always been filled, in spite of high demand (InfoMigrants 2019).

Finally, it has become more difficult for Syrians to join their families in Turkey. Following the full closure and militarization of Turkey’s land border with Syria in mid-2015, in January 2016 Turkey introduced visa requirements for Syrians entering Turkey by sea and air. In the absence of an effective family reunification procedure for Syrians under Temporary Protection in Turkey (Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights 2017; AIDA 2020), these border controls have further constrained opportunities for reunification with family members already in Turkey.

Methodology

This paper draws on datasets from two research projects which capture individual refugee decision-making along the Eastern Mediterranean route. The first study was funded under the Collaborative Research Programme between Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Australian National University. The data for this study were collected in Greece (Athens) and Turkey (Istanbul) between May and July 2015 and include 30 in-depth interviews with respondents from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. The second study, titled ‘Fluctuations in Migration Flows on the Balkans Route’ was commissioned by the WODC (the Research and Documentation Centre) of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. This second dataset was collected between February and May 2019 and includes 96 in-depth interviews with Syrians and Afghans. These 2019 interviews were conducted in various locations in Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Netherlands. Like most Northern EU countries, the Netherlands has been a significant destination country for refugees. Although other EU Member States received much higher numbers of asylum applications, it emerged from the interviews conducted in the Western Balkans that the Netherlands was nonetheless considered a key destination by Syrian refugee families. The two datasets moreover include decision-making regarding a wider range of EU destination countries onwards from Greece (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland), which respondents were still hoping to reach, or to which they had already sent family members.

The recruitment of both sets of respondents was necessarily based on a combination of network and intercept-point sampling (at migrant accommodation and asylum centres, and on the street in communities where the target groups were known to stay), complemented by snowball sampling within respondents’ own networks. Interviews were conducted with the assistance of translators where necessary. All interviews were based on informed consent, given verbally. The interviews took a migration lifecycle approach, starting with the respondents’ initial decisions to migrate, their experiences and decision-making en route, and finally their current situation and aspirations. The interviews generally lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. Interviews were audio recorded and simultaneously translated and transcribed into English.

This article is based on an in-depth analysis of 29 interviews that included specific information on family-level decision-making. Of these respondents, 19 were Syrian, eight were Afghan (including Afghans whose country of usual residence was Iran), and two were Iraqi. 20 interviews were conducted with men; nine with women. The data was coded inductively in Atlas.Ti. The scope of the analysis was limited to refugee mobility strategies formulated in response to policies and policy-related developments. It is the respondents’ perceptions of policies and how these perceptions shape their decision-making that is of primary interest here; although we seek to understand respondents’ decision-making in relation to the changing policy environment, it is not our intention to assess the accuracy of their perceptions. Mobility strategies common to both family units and refugees migrating independently of their families are not presented here, and neither are the impacts of non-policy related events. Pseudonyms are used to refer to individual research participants directly cited in the following analysis.

The term ‘refugee’ is purposely used in relation to the respondents included in this study. The majority were Syrian, and a smaller number were from Afghanistan or Iraq. All described feeling forced to flee their countries of origin. All were seeking or planning to seek asylum in the EU (and many of the Syrian respondents interviewed in the Netherlands had already received refugee or subsidiary protection status). Of course, it is not certain that the other respondents would eventually be granted protection status (indeed, some may not manage to reach and submit an asylum claim in a country that accepts asylum-seekers). Nonetheless, we refer to the research participants presumptively as ‘refugees’ based on their self-described international protection needs, as well as the relatively high rates of international protection granted to these nationalities in the EU. We therefore use the term ‘refugee’ broadly to refer to all likely or actual beneficiaries of international protection—not only under the 1951 Convention. This is because we recognize that terms such as refugee, asylum seeker and subsidiary protection are bureaucratic labels; the assignment of one or the other to an individual does not reflect clear conceptual or empirical distinctions but is rather shaped by political interests that vary across place and time (Council of Europe and Commissioner for Human Rights 2017; Zetter 2007). This can be seen in the diverse recognition rates for the same nationalities across the EU, as well as, as discussed above, the sudden shift towards granting subsidiary protection rather than refugee status to Syrians in Germany in 2016.

We acknowledge that these labels have implications for the different rights to family reunification afforded to asylum seekers, refugees, and holders of other international protection statuses. Family reunification for refugees in the EU is governed by a legal framework that primarily includes the Family Reunification Directive (FRD, which only explicitly applies to Convention refugees), the Dublin Regulation (which applies to asylum seekers), the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The FRD leaves substantial discretion to Member States in the formulation of national policies and practices. Consequently, the rights and conditions governing family reunification (including which family members are deemed eligible, usually interpreted narrowly) vary according to the individual’s legal status, country of destination, and certain vulnerability criteria (e.g. for unaccompanied minors within the Dublin system). Nonetheless, in most EU Member States subsidiary protection beneficiaries are granted similarly favourable rights and access to family reunification as refugees—including in the Netherlands where both groups have the same rights. Moreover, any differences in the rights afforded to refugees and subsidiary protection beneficiaries have been criticized by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights as being ‘difficult to reconcile’ with Article 14 of the ECHR, which guarantees against non-discrimination (2017: 25).

Refugee Families’ Separation and Decision-Making

Family groups wanting to seek asylum together are particularly affected by the spiralling costs and challenges of irregular journeys, as overviewed above. Families engage in complex decision-making to overcome these difficulties; separation emerges as a key adaptive strategy. The following section examines this decision-making, which includes: family separation at origin; family separation in transit during the journey; and onwards irregular movement in response to barriers to family reunification.

Family Separation at Origin

A few respondents explained that their families had separated from the outset of their journeys because they did not have the financial means to pay for everyone to be smuggled. For some families, separation was therefore the inevitable outcome of financial constraint, imposed by the high costs of irregular routes. Fathers and/or their sons undertook the journey on their own, hoping to bring their families to join them through family reunification provisions once they arrived in their intended destinations. The decision-making explained by Aalem, an Afghan respondent, is typical:

I didn't have enough budget to bring all my family. I left with my oldest son, when we arrive to our final destination we will apply for asylum and then I will apply to bring my family.

All migrant journeys—and particularly irregular journeys—are to some extent determined and shaped by the financial costs of the journey and the available resources to meet these costs. However, in the context of the refugee journeys examined in this paper, the impact of conflict on household finances should be noted as a cause of family separation. Nadeem, who left Syria in 2015 at 16-years-old, explained that the war in Raqqa had a direct impact on his family’s financial situation, and on their resulting decision that Nadeem would undertake the journey alone:

[…] when we took the decision [to leave Raqqa] it was either I leave or my father and younger brother leave together. […] Because our financial situation was in the middle, but after the incidents in my city, they stopped paying my parents’ salaries, so our living standard became weak, so only one of us could leave.

For some families, separation in the country of origin was not—or not only—due to financial constraint, but rather emerged as a response to the physical barriers imposed by border controls (see also Chandler et al. 2020). This was particularly evident in the case of Syrians, whose journeys had been significantly impacted by the full closure of the Turkey-Syria border and its increasing militarization from mid-2015 onwards. Two Syrian respondents who had tried to cross the Syria-Turkey border together with their families in mid-2015 and 2017 were separated at the border. This was the case for Salem, who described his experience when he left in 2017:

I stayed with my wife and daughter for three and a half months trying to cross to Turkey. […] The Turkish Gendarmerie would shoot a lot of bullets at us but we had set a goal that we will be leaving to Turkey, and from there to Europe. In the meantime, my wife was six months pregnant and she was suffering a lot, and I saw death in her eyes so I decided to send her back to Damascus. So she returned to Damascus and was interrogated ‘where is your husband?’ and I was able to leave to Turkey and to Greece from there.

Karam’s family were similarly separated at the Syria-Turkey border in August 2015, when only he and one of his sons made it across without interception by border guards. Although his wife and other children managed to cross at a later point, Karam and his son continued their journey to Greece. They calculated that it would be better for the rest of the family to stay in Turkey and join them in the EU later through family reunification, due to the physical challenges posed by border crossings further down the route. Karam explained: ‘Even if the family had come with me from the start, they could not have come because we had to run, they can’t run.’ For refugee families aspiring to seek asylum in EU countries, leaving the country of origin is therefore often just the first of many physical and financial hurdles along the route.

Family Separation in Transit and Sending Unaccompanied Minors

For the families who reached Turkey and Greece together, conditions there and in the Western Balkans continued to pose significant obstacles to their onwards movement. These barriers were often the combined effect of strict border controls—resulting in difficult and dangerous overland crossings—and poor economic conditions in these main transit hubs, where the costs of living are high while there are scant opportunities for income generation or humanitarian assistance. As a result, some families separated in Turkey and Greece, choosing to prioritize the onwards movement of one or a couple of family members.

Mohib, an Afghan respondent, was interviewed in Greece in mid-2015 where he had been living for one year with his family. In Turkey he had paid 3500 USD to send his wife and their two young children ahead of him to Greece, whilst he stayed behind in Turkey in order to earn sufficient money to finance his own passage. He struggled to put aside any substantial savings in Turkey, and was eventually sent money from relatives outside Turkey, at which point he paid 2000 USD to the same smuggler to join his family in Greece. In Greece Mohib realized that job opportunities were scarce, and that if his family continued to remain stuck in Greece they would quickly exhaust their remaining 4000 euros only on their day-to-day survival, leaving nothing to fund their onwards trajectory to Finland, which was their intended destination. He therefore negotiated with a smuggler to take his oldest daughter (who was then around six years old) to Finland, where her aunt could look after her and where she could apply for asylum and for reunification with her family. Mohib explained that he would have preferred his wife to be the one sent ahead to Finland, but he did not consider it feasible for him to look after his two small children on his own in Greece.

Squeezed between the high financial costs of the irregular journey onwards from Greece, and the costs of staying put in Greece (with limited opportunities for replenishing their savings through income generation), Mohib’s decision-making demonstrates a careful deployment of the family’s resources in order to maximize their chances of successful refuge whilst minimizing the potential risks. The family invested in the oldest daughter’s onwards movement as a way of getting a foot in the door of Finland’s asylum system before their resources were depleted. The careful (re)distribution of the family’s financial capital was key to this strategy, but the family’s human capital and social resources were also carefully managed to ensure that the two children—now separated between Greece and Finland—continued to receive adequate care from their parents and aunt.

Similar accounts from other refugee families who separated in Greece and Turkey demonstrated the ways in which the decision to send one or more family members ahead was devised as a strategy to maximize the family’s prospects of successful migration (through formal reunification) and minimize the risks of the irregular journey, within the family’s available budget. In some of these cases, the decision was made to send the member of the family perceived as most likely to be granted asylum and access to family reunification. For example, Amin, an Iraqi father interviewed in Turkey in 2015 explained:

For an amount of money, we were able to send my daughter, she's fifteen years old, the youngest of the two girls. The money we had was enough to send one person only. And because she is young she can do family reunification. That's why we chose her.

In other cases, families chose to send ahead the family member who was perceived as most vulnerable, for whom the costs of the protracted transit experience were therefore potentially greatest. Fereshta, an Afghan woman, was interviewed in Athens in 2015 where she had arrived with her two children (a daughter and son) some months earlier. Around three months into their stay in Greece, the opportunity arose to send her daughter onwards to Norway, through a social connection made in transit. Fereshta explained that she took this opportunity because it allowed her to further the family’s migration trajectory, and to protect her teenage daughter from the irregular overland route, within the family’s financial means:

At the beginning we wanted to leave all together, three of us from the land way, but then we thought that it was not a good idea for the daughter who is at a very sensitive age. It was dangerous for her. And we didn't have enough money for the three of us to go with the airplane. But we had money enough only to send one person. […] We knew it was a good choice, because if someone from the family can get asylum in a country, we could make family reunification. So, that was why we sent my daughter there.

This type of in-transit decision-making—to separate in Greece or Turkey, prioritizing the onwards movement of one family member who, it is hoped, will be able to access asylum and family reunification in the EU destination country—was only discussed by respondents interviewed in 2015 (and by one Afghan woman interviewed in 2019 who had been in Greece with her family in early 2016). This is likely because, although the law of the Dublin III Regulation has not changed, in practice, family reunification under Dublin III is no longer being effectively implemented. In particular, since 2017, Germany has systematically rejected take charge requests regarding families who split subsequent to arriving together in Greece (AIDA 2018; RSA/PRO ASYL 2019). Resultingly, it seems that it is no longer a common strategy to separate in Greece in order to later reunify in another EU Member State under the Dublin provision.

Barriers to Family Reunification

For families that separate, family reunification is an essential part of their long-term strategy, however, family reunification has become increasingly difficult in both Turkey and EU Member States. The findings demonstrate that Turkey’s militarization of its border with Syria had further impacts on the onwards trajectories of the husbands and fathers who ended up alone in Turkey. Turkey’s imposition of tight administrative and physical controls on entry from Syria has created a situation in which men who have successfully reached Turkey face the prospect of indefinite separation from their wives and children. For Salem (discussed above) and two other young Syrian men interviewed in 2019 (in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Netherlands), who had all left Syria between 2016 and 2017 without their families, Turkish border controls were an important determinant of their decisions to move onwards from Turkey to the EU. Given the extreme risks posed by the Syria-Turkey land border and their perceptions that they would not be able to obtain visas for their families to enter Turkey legally, these respondents did not consider it possible for their families to join them safely in Turkey. The need for a safe means of family reunification was therefore a critical incentive for their journeys onwards to the EU, where they understood that refugee status-holders have rights to family reunification.

Turkey’s migration policy—specifically, the closure of its border with Syria, the costs of irregular entry for Afghans (to which Iranian policy also contributes), and the very limited prospects for legal family reunification to Turkey—thereby directly motivates onwards movement to the EU by ‘lead’ refugees who perceive that they will be able to access formal family reunification in EU countries. Jalal explained that he had not initially planned to migrate further than Turkey: he stayed in Turkey for a year and a half while he tried to register for Temporary Protection and make a new life for himself and his family. When he realized that Turkey was never going to be a new ‘homeland’, because he could not get legal status there or bring his family to join him, he decided to continue onwards to the European Union. This consequence of Turkish government policy therefore runs counter to the stated objectives of the EU-Turkey Statement, which aims to end irregular onwards movement from Turkey, in part by improving the conditions faced by refugees in Turkey. While the EU’s Facility for Refugees in Turkey is designed to provide humanitarian assistance, education, health, municipal infrastructure, and socio-economic support, it does not help to protect the right to family life in Turkey.

The data collected in 2019 shows that disappointed expectations regarding EU family reunification have resulted in the development of another strategy—that of irregular onwards movement by left-behind family members. An often narrow definition of family results in the exclusion of close family members—such as adult children and non-married partners—from family reunification in many EU Member States. As mentioned, many of the main EU asylum destination countries responded to the higher-than-normal asylum inflows in 2015 by introducing further restrictions on family reunification. Consequently, many family members who aspire to join their family in the EU have not been granted the right to family reunification or have been faced with a long or indefinite wait to access the procedure. This was the case for three young Syrian women interviewed in transit in the Western Balkans in 2019, whose husbands, fiancés and other family members had already been granted protection status in Germany.

One of these women, Yara, explained that she had waited in Turkey for a year and a half hoping for family reunification with her husband who had been granted subsidiary protection in Germany. At the end of 2018 she gave up waiting. She decided to attempt onwards irregular movement along the Western Balkans route because ‘it’s better than staying in Turkey wondering whether the reunification will happen or not.’ Although family reunification rights for subsidiary protection beneficiaries in Germany had resumed in March 2018 and Yara was therefore eligible for reunification at the point that she left Turkey, it would seem that the large number of applications to process—and monthly quotas imposed—meant that reunification remained a distant prospect for Yara (and likely many others in her situation) – or at least this was her perception.

The impacts of EU Member State restrictions on family reunification were particularly obvious in the case of Syrians, given that many had family members who had reached the EU in recent years. However, it is likely that strict EU family reunification policies have had similar impacts on other refugee groups and have resulted in similar strategies. This was the case for Abed, a young Afghan man, whose aspirations to join his family in the EU were frustrated by the fact that, as an adult child, he was ineligible to join his mother and younger siblings in their country of destination. Unwilling to be separated from them, he attempted the irregular overland route to Europe. In this way, restrictions on family reunification do not necessarily change the migration aspirations of left-behind family members. Instead of passively accepting the lack of legal pathway or the prospect of an indefinite wait, left-behind family exercise their right to a family life by undertaking the irregular journey. The UNHCR has observed similarly that barriers to the timely implementation of family reunification under the Dublin Regulation resulted in the irregular onwards movement of unaccompanied minors and other family members left behind in Greece (UNHCR 2017).

Consequences of Family Separation

Refugees’ separation from family can be a source of great distress, loneliness and sometimes guilt, particularly when absent family members are perceived to be at risk or in difficulty (Savic et al. 2013; Beaton et al. 2018; Cantekin 2019). The loss of familial support can be especially challenging for refugee women who have children to care for (Savic et al. 2013). At the time of interview in Greece, Fereshta’s family was suffering multiple separations. First, it was ‘not easy’ for her and her children to be away from her husband, who had remained in Iran due to financial constraint and responsibilities to his parents. Second, Fereshta was worried about the daughter she had sent onwards to Norway, and who had been admitted to hospital in Norway as a result of her poor psychological health. Fereshta explained:

Psychologically we are not feeling good, because I have the stress of my husband who is back there. And my daughter, she is almost three months away from me, she is in Norway. And she did not get asylum yet. So, I am stressed here and my daughter is stressed there.

Similarly, Amin’s daughter, who was sent ahead from Turkey to Sweden, also suffered a deterioration in her mental health as a result of the separation:

She has a psychological issue now, she's having nightmares. They took her to a psychologist […] they asked one of the supervisors to stay with her in her room, and she got a little better. She needs us so much. She's tired because of the separation, she's still a little girl and she's not used to migrating and being away from her family, but it's something we had to do.

Studies which have compared outcomes for unaccompanied refugee minors to those of refugee minors accompanied by family members have found that unaccompanied minors more frequently experience traumatic events, more frequently suffer serious mental health disorders, and are more likely to drop out of school—although it is not clear whether the causes of these problems precede or stem from the child’s unaccompanied migration experience (Huemer et al. 2009; Fazel et al. 2012; Çelikaksoy and Wadensjö 2019). Separation from nuclear family members has also been associated with poorer mental health outcomes for adult refugees in countries of destination (Löbel 2020).

The absence of family members may require difficult adjustments; young people may find themselves under particular pressure to assume adult roles and responsibilities (Savic et al. 2013; REACH 2017). Nadeem emphasized that his journey from Syria to the Netherlands, which he undertook alone in 2015 at 16-years-old, had caused him immense strain: ‘it was very long, and it exhausted me physically, psychologically and in every way’. Even once they have successfully arrived in the destination country, unaccompanied minors may struggle to cope with the burden of their families’ hopes and expectations for family reunification, which they may not be able to secure quickly, or at all (Nardone and Correa-Velez 2016; Kamp and Kuschminder 2019).

Separation may also increase the physical risks to which family members are exposed. Unaccompanied children and women travelling without male companions may be particularly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse (Hopkins and Hill 2008; Stock 2012; Cantekin 2019). Mohib was very aware of the risks he had to navigate in sending his wife and children ahead to Greece; he feared putting his family in the hands of a smuggler who would take them hostage for extortion. Heightened risks in terms of income security, access to education and healthcare, and physical safety may also be faced by family members left behind in the country of origin or another country of transit (often women and children) (REACH 2017).

It should furthermore be understood that separation, and the accompanying anxiety, pressures, and risk, is not necessarily short-lived for the families who adopt these strategies. The Syrian respondents interviewed in the Netherlands who had successfully brought their families over to join them had had to wait between one and two years for reunification (additional to the time they had already spent separated during their journeys). Anxieties relating to separation, and to uncertainty regarding reunification procedures, may negatively affect refugees’ ability to focus on their own processes of integration (Wilmsen 2013; Beaton et al. 2018). It is worth considering that destination countries that delay or deny family reunification may therefore incur greater public costs (for example, in terms of status-holders’ reduced labour market participation and greater social security needs). Delays in the asylum or family reunification procedure can also jeopardize the family’s unity in the longer-term, for example if a minor ‘ages out’ of eligibility. Amin’s family had been waiting a year for an interview appointment for family reunification with his daughter in Sweden. Amin was anxious that any further delay might result in his oldest daughter being unable to join the family in Sweden: ‘I have one daughter who's almost 18 years old. I hope she will get the reunification and go with us, because she won't be able to once she's 18.’

Decisions based on inaccurate information may have severe consequences for refugee families. For example, Nabil, a Syrian man, decided in Turkey that he could not expose his wife or daughters to the dangers of the sea crossing to Greece, and so sent his sons ahead to Sweden in 2015 to apply for family reunification. However, his understanding of asylum and family reunification policies in Sweden seems to have been misinformed: the family’s request for reunification was denied because both sons were over 18 years old. Nabil’s family therefore faced indefinite separation. Similarly, Fereshta explained that, after sending her daughter to Norway, she heard about a new policy which restricted family reunification for asylum seekers in Norway:

There is the new law in 2015 which made some amendments, and according to this new law, if she doesn't get the asylum, she cannot help us. Earlier, when you made the application, you could also take the family there during the process, before being recognized.

She further explained that, had she known about this policy, she would not have sent her daughter to Norway: ‘we didn't know [about it]. We knew that something was going to change there, but we didn't know that the change would be this. If we knew, we wouldn't send her to Norway’. Although it was not clear what policy change Fereshta was referring to (Norway’s proposals for restrictions on family reunification were only proposed in late December 2015, and only came into effect in 2017, whereas this interview took place in mid-2015), nor what the consequences of Fereshta’s family strategy would be (at the time of interview, they were waiting for a decision on the daughter’s asylum application), this example illustrates the confusing landscape of shifting policies and misinformation that refugee families have to navigate in order to make extremely high-stakes decisions. A calculated risk based on inaccurate information may turn an intended temporary disruption to family life into a painful long-term or permanent separation (see also REACH 2017).

These findings pose a number of questions for policymakers. The most obvious contradiction is between multilateral commitments to facilitate ‘safe, orderly and regular’ migration as set out in the Global Compact for Migration and the Sustainable Development Goals and the reality of increasing migration controls that impel irregular movement, including of refugee family members who have a right to family reunification under international human rights standards and legislation. In the European context, it is particularly striking that EU policy to incentivize refugees to stay in Turkey fails to meet refugee families’ urgent need for family unity, which is not addressed through the EU Facility for Refugees in Turkey and which is, moreover, undermined by Turkey’s hardened migration controls.

Conclusion

This paper has explored refugee families’ decision-making regarding family separation and reunification as a mobility strategy on the Eastern Mediterranean route. The Eastern Mediterranean route has become more difficult for all migrants as a result of recent policy developments designed to further restrict opportunities for legal movement and to more strongly prevent and deter illegal movement (Kuschminder et al. 2019). Given the lack of legal routes to claim asylum as a family, refugee families separate in order to overcome the physical and financial barriers on the irregular route. In this context, the right to family reunification offered to status-holders in EU countries becomes a lifeline: for separated families, or families who cannot travel together due to the risks and obstacles, formal reunification offers the only means of safe and inexpensive passage for the rest of the family.

The decision to separate is therefore informed by an understanding of EU asylum policies, and of family reunification rights and procedures specifically. However, like those of other migrants, refugees’ understandings of these policies may be ill-informed (Kuschminder and Koser 2017). First, the actual implementation of policies may differ substantially to their description in governmental legislation or other documentation. Second, this is a dynamic policy environment, in which policies may change quickly, easily resulting in confusion and outdated information. Third, even if it is publicly available, refugees do not necessarily have access to reliable information about policies, due to literacy or language barriers, or lack of access to information and communication technologies. Fourth, rumours based on misinformation often circulate in transit and destination migration hubs, muddying the informational environment.

This paper’s analysis of the ways in which refugee families pursue their mobility aspirations in spite of extreme risks and constraints adds to and reflects the broader emerging literature on irregular refugee and other migrant journeys. The cases of Amin, Fereshta and Mohib, which demonstrate that often it is not the child’s own decision to migrate unaccompanied by their families, are consistent with the literature on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The accounts of family members who have refused to accept restrictions on family reunification for adult children add further weight to criticism that EU countries impose an unfairly narrow conception of family (see Bastaki 2019 for a fuller discussion). These insights are further contextualized by this paper’s family-centred analysis. As this study illustrates, what is particular to the decision-making and experiences of refugee families is that separation offers the possibility to overcome mobility constraints—to be weighed up against the grievous risks and consequences that family separation entails. It is further shown that family separation is never the preferred choice. Separation is rather a last resort, undertaken out of desperation when financial resources are depleted, the journey seems impossible to complete together, and there is no other way to find refuge and a viable future for the family.

Current policies in the EU have created an environment in which families must separate at immense emotional costs and at the risk of long-term harm in order to be able to seek asylum. The trauma of the journey becomes protracted when families are not able to settle together in the country of destination. The emotional costs of family separation could be eased through faster and more efficient family reunification policies, in particular for minors. Family separation will likely continue to be a strategy for refugee families seeking asylum.

This article was written between June and August 2020.

Funding

The data used in this article were collected as part of the Fluctuations in Migration Flows to Europe project commissioned by the Research and Documentation Centre (WODC) of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, and as part of the Irregular Migrants Decision Making Factors in Transit Project funded by the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Australian National University’s Collaborative Research Programme on the International Movement of People. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent those of the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, the Australian National University, or the WODC.

Acknowledgements

We thank Mohammad Khalaf and Nasrat Sayed for their valuable research assistance for this study, as well as our collaborators on these projects: Ahmet İçduygu, Aysen Üstübici, Eda Kirişçioğlu, Godfried Engbersen, Olga Mitrovic, and Khalid Koser. We are also immensely grateful to all of the translators who worked with us and most of all to the respondents that took their time to speak with us and share their experiences.

References