The Politics of Migration in Host Societies

Large refugee inflows routinely become central issues in host-country domestic politics, often reshaping party systems and electoral outcomes well beyond the specific policy questions of asylum processing. Germany's response to the 2015 peak of the Syrian crisis is among the most studied cases: in September 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to suspend the EU's Dublin Regulation returns for Syrian asylum seekers stranded along the Balkan route, effectively opening Germany's border and famously declaring "Wir schaffen das" ("We can manage this"); Germany went on to register roughly 890,000 asylum applications that year alone. The decision drew both an outpouring of civil-society volunteering, the so-called Willkommenskultur, or "welcome culture," and a sharp political backlash that fueled the rapid rise of the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), a party that entered the German Bundestag for the first time in the 2017 federal election and has since become a significant electoral force, illustrating how a single high-profile policy decision can realign a country's party landscape for years.