I would like to thank Angela Ju for her thorough review of our book and her constructive criticism, as well as the opportunity to engage in a written conversation about our two books. I was pleased to see that, despite their different topics—the identity politics of third-generation migrants in the case of Identities Matter, and political discourse on the admission of refugees in the case of Framing Refugees—both books contain a similar message. Both emphasize that it is important to look beyond the usual cases in the “Global North” for new insights, and both emphasize that it is important to study national contexts in depth to add nuance to theoretical generalizations.
Angela Ju’s first remark is related to exactly this issue. She asks for further clarification on the rationale guiding our selection of cases. Our book is based on a qualitative analysis of political debates about the admission of refugees in six countries across the world. In the first step, we studied the different responses to Syrian refugees in Germany, Poland, and Turkey. In the second step, we included cases from other world regions facing major refugee movements, namely Chile (and its response to refugees from Venezuela), Singapore (and its response to Rohingya refugees), and Uganda (and its response to refugees from South Sudan). Ju is right in implying that this selection of cases cannot generate causal explanations of refugee admission policies because our cases vary along several dimensions, including the origin of refugees. Instead, our case selection follows a more exploratory logic. We sought to explore the variety of possible frames mobilized in debates on admitting refugees, especially in countries not typically studied in the literature.
Second, Angela Ju rightly points out that governments and political parties may be influenced by how the media frame the refugee issue. This is something we did not study in our book, where we focused on political speeches, parliamentary debates, and party programs. Indeed, the media not only report how politicians frame an issue but politicians also respond to the media’s agenda setting and framing. I would note, however, that this observation is not at odds with our main argument, which emphasizes that politicians are constrained in the way they frame the refugee issue, and that they cannot randomly pick frames disconnected from the cultural repertories embedded in a country’s political culture. How exactly media frames may affect political frames on the admission of refugees is a question for further study.
Finally, Angela Ju also suggests that we should have moved our concluding discussion on what we call the “liberal script” to the first pages of our book. Indeed, one of the aims of our book is to engage with the relationship between the liberal script and refugee admission policy. By “liberal script” (see Börzel, Tanja et al., The Liberal Script at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Oxford University Press), we mean normative ideas derived from liberal philosophy about how to organize societies (like democracy, markets, human rights). We argue that the duty to admit refugees fleeing war and persecution—as it is enshrined in international human rights and refugee law—is a core component of the liberal script because this is the last resort for protecting the right to individual self-determination in a world of sovereign nation-states. However, one of the findings of our book is that the liberal script is rarely invoked in political discourse to justify the admission of refugees. Furthermore, we find that liberal democracies—where the liberal script should be institutionalized most strongly—are not necessarily more open to admitting refugees than authoritarian regimes.
We think that our book helps us understand such cases. To conclude, this brings me to the main argument we make. Rather than “objective” factors like regime type, we highlight the importance of conceptions of national identity and country-specific cultural repertoires as drivers of refugee admission policies.
