Exploring persistent policy practices: Germany’s dispersal policy and the accommodation of asylum seekers

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the apparent tension between the German dispersal policy practice and the allocation and accommodation of asylum seekers. Within the context of the 2015 ‘summer of welcome’, Germany received the highest number of asylum applications not only in its own history, but also in European history. Consequently, it is facing the challenge of accommodating and integrating more than 1.2 million asylum seekers in the coming years. While the practice of dispersal of asylum seekers is based on the Königsteiner Key in line with the discourse of fair and equal distribution and therefore sharing the social and economic burden caused by the cost of accommodation and integration, there seems to be a tension when regarding the limited possibility of providing adequate housing and accommodation. Drawing from experience and fieldwork in Freiburg, a mid-size city with an overwhelmingly green and progressive political orientation in the German federal state of Baden- Württemberg, this thesis, using the Neo-Gramscian understanding of common sense à la Bruff, demonstrates how a persistent common sense logic on equally dispersing asylum seekers is creating tension with the need of accommodating them. By analyzing how and why historically synthesized common sense rooted with the practice of dispersion is locally sedimented and manifest in the accommodation of asylum seekers in Freiburg, this analysis provides a critical understanding of the systemic relationality between dispersal and accommodation and the tension created.