The Local Refugee Match: Aligning Refugees’ Preferences with the Capacities and Priorities of Localities

Abstract

Once refugees are granted protection in a particular host country, there is little concern about where in that country they are settled. Yet this matters enormously for refugees' chances to prosper in the new country and for the willingness of the local community to welcome them. We propose a centralized clearinghouse-a 'two-sided matching system'-to match refugees with localities. Drawing on the success of matching in domains such as public school choice, we outline principles underlying matching-system design, and illustrate in general terms how they could be applied to refugee protection. This matching system respects the priorities and capacities of localities and gives agency to refugees. As an example, we describe in detail how such a system could work to meet the British government's commitment to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020.

Marketplaces, Markets, and Market Design

“…This has a resemblance to school choice, but the differences are as important as the similarities (cf. Delacretaz, Kominers, and Teytelboym 2016;Andersson and Ehlers 2017;Andersson, Ehlers, and Martinello 2018;Bansak et al 2018;and Jones and Teytelboym forthcoming).…”

Towards a Fair Distribution Mechanism for Asylum

“…Fernández-Huertas Moraga and Rapoport [3][4][5] use a matching system embedded in the tradeable immigration quotas system they propose for, among other things, the distribution of refugees over EU countries. Furthermore, Jones and Teytelboym advertise the implementation of matching systems both on a local [6] and on a global [7] scale. Delacrétaz, Kominers and Teytelboym [9] propose specific mechanisms for locally matching refugees with communities in different institutional and informational settings; and Andersson and Ehlers [10] design a matching system in the context of assigning private housing to refugees in Sweden.…”

“…Since these issues do not seem to have a definite solution at present, penalties will be neglected in the following. 6 Whenever (ST) and (MC) are in conflict, we must bite the bullet and give up one of the desiderata. Which one?…”

“…Since priority is given to the 5 Penalties are proposed in [3] in the context of a market of tradeable immigration quotas, where the penalty is a function of the difference of the quota negotiated and the number of refugees assigned to the country under µ C . 6 For more arguments against penalties, cf. [7].…”

“…Formulating the asylum market in this way allows us to use tools from matching theory to provide a more precise understanding, and may eventually contribute to the implementation of more fair or efficient policies. Various social scientists have recently argued for imposing centralised matching systems and have investigated mechanisms that could be implemented in different stages of distributing asylum seekers [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. While we are sympathetic to this line of research, this paper does not directly contribute to it.…”