A new proposal for a centralised 'matching system' for refugees put forward by Will Jones of the Refugee Studies Centre and Alex Teytelboym of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford has been highlighted in an article in the New York Times.

In the article on the Opinion Pages titled "Ending the Refugee Deadlock", author Dalibor Rohac suggests the matching approach could offer a solution to "intractable gridlock" in the European Union's asylum system.

The current system, which permits refugees to apply for asylum in only one European Union country, "encourages countries to pass refugees on like hot potatoes, and places the burden of registering and processing asylum seekers on a small number of countries on the Union’s border," Rohac writes.

Under the system propsed by Jones and Teytelboym, states and refugees would submit their preferences – about which refugees they most wish to host or which state they most wish to be protected in – to a centralised clearing house which would then match them according to those preferences.

"Some countries, such as Germany or Sweden, would likely remain oversubscribed," Dohac writes. "But because applicants would be submitting a complete ordering of European Union countries they are applying for, they could still be matched with, say, their second, or third choice, instead of being rejected outright."

According to Jones and Teytelboym, who set out their proposal in an article for Forced Migration Review, "The way in which we allocate students to schools, junior doctors to hospitals and kidneys from living donors to recipients is by 'matching' the two sets. Refugees need to be ‘matched’ to states in precisely the same way in order for them to be protected."

The system would also remove the incentive for refugees to risk the dangerous journey to Europe and the extortion of people smugglers, as in principle they could submit their preferences from anywhere.

"Asylum seekers ought to be able to choose the states where they want to spend their lives," Jones and Teytelboym write. "The Refugee Match would be a good start."

• Read the New York Times article:
• Read the FMR article

Photo: Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia commons