Policy Paradigms and the German migration strategy for the Presidency of the Council of the European Union

There is an abundance of reports on inhumane treatment of refugees at the European external borders, but somehow all this publicly available evidence fails to reach policymakers. This paper will analyse why this is the case and how different policy paradigms – ‘the rights-based approach to migration’ and ‘migration management’ – might influence the (lack of) evidence used in strategies on migration. Germany, a powerful actor in the European Union – especially considering their recent Presidency of the Council of the European Union – is the exemplary unit of analysis. By critically analysing the content of their strategies on their paradigm-relations, on what evidence is available, assessing what evidence was used, and how it correlates with the different policy paradigms, the thesis aims at giving new insights into the role of evidence in migration policies. The hypotheses set up for this expect that the documents and the evidence used would show influences of ‘migration management’ and no to little relation to ‘the rights-based approach to migration’. These expectations were proven to be true. Surprisingly, the documents did not use the expected kinds of evidence but only referenced other governmental data. The influence the policy paradigm ‘migration management’ has on the documents is, therefore, immense.