1. Introduction
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14.1). However, neither the Refugee Convention (Geneva 1951) nor its additional Protocol (New York 1967) nor any other standard of international law deals with how this should be done. It is the responsibility of sovereign states to regulate based on the obligations acquired at the international level as included in the Spanish Constitution of 1978 (art. 149.1.2). In this way, both the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (adopted in September 2015) [
1] and the New Urban Agenda (adopted in December 2016, which sets a new global standard for sustainable urban development) [
2] specifically recognize, in their 29th and 28th bullet points, respectively, refugees as actors and subjects of sustainable development and make leaders responsible for the achievement of its objectives, by establishing measures that help migrants, refugees and IDPs make positive contributions to societies “at the global, regional, national, subnational and local levels”.
There is today a clear consensus that migration contributes to the development of countries of origin and destination. The New Urban Agenda states that “although the movement of large populations into towns and cities poses a variety of challenges, it can also bring significant social, economic and cultural contributions to urban life” (28th bullet point), which obviously impact on the sustainable development of cities. The results of the OCDE project “Interrelations between Public Policies, Migration and Development: Case Studies and Policy Recommendations (IPPMD)” [
3], also confirm this statement and evidence that the potential of migration is not yet fully exploited because “policy makers do not sufficiently take migration into account in their policy areas”, in such a way that there is an urgent need “to integrate migration into development strategies, improve co-ordination mechanisms and strengthen international co-operation”.
Despite the existence of an international legislative framework and the interest of international bodies in developing a global refugee policy [
4], the way each state advances its internal policy is quite different [
5]. Jacobsen [
6] argues that multiple political, economic, and social factors may influence the development of national policies that are more or less in line with international recommendations. Betts and Orchard [
7] found that, depending on the context, the same international standard may be applied in different ways. Yoo & Koo [
8] note how different states continue to prioritize the principle of sovereignty in refugee matters more than with any other global policy, putting forth arguments of national security, cultural integrity, and economic success.
The European Union is not immune to this controversy. Neumayer [
9] describes the major variations and lack of alignment among Western European countries as they develop their formal responsibilities towards those pursuing asylum and how the political and economic conditions can result in unjust and discriminatory treatment. Since the Treaty of Amsterdam and the monetary union came into effect in 1999, the EU has been attempting to unify member state criteria on asylum and immigration. In the same year, there was an agreement to create the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), and the right to asylum was included in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights of 2000 (Article 18).
Despite the attempt to standardize community policies by passing directives, the varying interpretations states have made of their obligations and responsibilities has meant the European Court of Human Rights has had to legally intervene to define the collective responsibility of all of the member states [
10].
The Treaty of Lisbon coming into effect in 2009 and the new Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) were major drivers to create CEAS with a common asylum procedure and uniform regulations for people with international protection (Article 78 of the TFEU). This serves to ensure minimum benefits in access to jobs, education, healthcare, and accommodations. The Stockholm Program was adopted with this goal and several EC directives on asylum were recast. Directive 2013/33/EU [
11], which establishes standards for applicants for international protection, sets the minimum common standards to adequately receive protected people and protection seekers and reach an appropriate standard of living (Art 17.2). This first refugee phase is when seekers are the most vulnerable and accommodations is one of the most important concerns, a cross-cutting issue that touches on social integration and inclusion, health, and employment [
12,
13]. If sufficient institutional support is lacking, seekers may end up in overcrowded houses or sleeping on the street. Their lack of cultural and language skills means they face enormous difficulties in finding housing [
14].
Despite the interest in creating common standards, the directive’s application is quite flexible and allows for different housing methods to make applying it in each country easier, adapting to its circumstances and legislation [
15]. This results in an extremely heterogeneous system [
16]. First, there is no single benefits model. It may be in kind, though there are different accommodation models, initial reception centers, temporary refugee centers, private homes, apartments, hotels, or other adapted locations. If no accommodation is available, benefits may be provided through economic allowances for rent fixed by the minimum income established at the national level [
17]. Second, the reception processes do not have the same structure or set duration. Every state establishes different stages and processes and estimates the time a person will spend in each phase. Third, reception centers or premises are not categorized. Naming is not common and reception centers do not respond to standardized models or specific locations. They may be intended for involuntary detention, control, or return in single or multi-functional buildings. They may be open or closed according to different degrees of freedom. Management and staff have very diverse backgrounds and living conditions inside are very diverse. Consequently, how standards are applied varies widely from one state to the next. On top of this, reception capacity, poorly sized by many states, is insufficient, resulting in an inability to provide proper living standards [
18].
The current refugee crisis is an enormous challenge for the European Union. This is not about how to respond to individual asylum requests as laid out in the Dublin System. It is about how to manage the mass influx of displaced persons. The European Commission’s proposal in 2015 to set up distribution quotas to relocate refugees from the most affected states to other member states is not having the expected results [
19]. As of 6 December 2016, of the 160,000 asylum seekers agreed to by the member states to be relocated from Italy and Greece, only 1950 have been relocated from Italy and just 6212 from Greece [
20].
The failure of the EU’s common policy is prompted by the failure of the different national polices of its member states. Without a coordinated strategy, the system is inefficient and the situation unsustainable.
This article analyzes how the Spanish refugee system operates with respect to housing supply in the first stage, especially the policy developed by the Spanish government, a policy that is not working, to increase the amount of accommodation to assimilate the spikes in demand over the last three years due to the conflict in Syria.
The purpose of this article is to understand the causes behind the failure of these policies and develop recommendations to resolve today’s system meltdown. The study’s limitations should be borne in mind, however, since housing is just one factor in the overall international protection seeker integration and reception system. Several players and different circumstances play a part in how the system operates and exert influence at the same time: political predisposition; request, requirement, and procedure management; massive peak arrivals; reception conditions; social integration services; etc. Although this article focuses on accommodation in the first stage of reception as a key factor in seekers’ future integration, any future reform will have to contemplate the system globally.
The incredibly high percentage of denials for requests registered in the Spanish refugee system until 2009 was one of the reasons behind the creation of our current asylum law [
21], since transforming the European directive—four years after the fact—with procedures in force at the time [
22] on application processing. In an analysis included in the request for European funds for the refugees [
23], the Ministry of Labor expressed the need to increase the number of places that our refugee system offered in 2007 for the first integration phase as well as to have a reserve on hand to respond to a potential massive influx of displaced people. The current meltdown of the refugee system has been denounced by some of the NGOs that participate in its operation [
24,
25] and by other NGOs outside of our management system [
26]. Regarding accommodations, the existing literature on the Spanish reception system is fundamentally descriptive and has been drafted by the stakeholders that manage it. The organization Aida (Asylum Information Database), coordinated by the ECRE (European Council on Refugees), has been releasing annual reports since 2013 on asylum procedures and reception conditions regarding housing for several EU countries. The first report on Spain [
27] in 2016 was drafted by one of the NGOs that manages our reception system, ACCEM. The European Commission, through the EMN (European Migration Network), has released a report [
28] on the characteristics or standards for reception centers that analyzes the lack of uniform minimum reception conditions at the European level. This report does not assess how member states’ reception systems work and uses information culled from a questionnaire completed by each of the member states.
This report is thought-provoking in that it brings together the practices applied in standardized situations as well as the exceptional measures adopted by different member countries to handle high-pressure situations (see
Tables S1 and S2 in the
Supplementary Materials) not just relating to the kind and quality of the facilities but also to how they are managed.
The report also underlines best practice in exceptional measures, prevention strategies, how to have an emergency plan and enough of a buffer capacity, mitigation strategies, how to have an early warning mechanism to monitor capacity, speeding up the decision-making process, having a flexible budget to deal with unexpected situations, and response strategies to scale up capacity and the number of facilities. The system’s efficiency will depend on a balance between the applicant flow through the reception system and the long humanitarian view.
However, according to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) [
18], many of the member states’ reception systems are far from fulfilling the Reception Conditions Directive, so that respect for the right to live with dignity cannot be guaranteed as stipulated in the Charter of the EU. Overcrowding in reception centers, a low quality of basic material conditions or destitution during the asylum procedure are serious concerns, especially in the case of vulnerable persons with special needs.
The ECRE also points out that, although the Directive and the Dublin III Regulation restrict the placement of applicants for international protection in detention centers, as a measure of last resort and under special conditions, the majority of states members have detention premises. These are either in special centers, transit zones, police stations, or in prisons, and do not always offer the conditions necessary to safeguard human dignity; they are sometimes overcrowded, long-term destinations, and the detainees have very restricted freedom of movement.
The situation in the emergency camps in Greece and Italy is precarious after asylum seekers have been blocked from continuing to the northern European states [
29], and tens of thousands of people have been trapped without access to asylum procedures and refugee protection due to the ineffectiveness of the reception systems in Europe.
Even so, according to Human Rights Watch, the EU Commission Action Plan published in December 2016 recommended a return policy under the assumption that Turkey was a safe country, that they expand detention on the Greek islands, and curb appeal rights [
30].
Our reception system has a mixed offering of housing, with public centers and centers managed by NGOs. The strategy followed by the Spanish government to increase the supply of accommodations over the last few years in the first reception stage was based exclusively on increasing places managed by NGOs by raising their subsidies. In this article we critically analyze that strategy and conclude that it is ineffective and unsustainable. As a direct result, today at least 60% of seekers with the right to asylum cannot access housing due to a lack of places; more than 20,000 seekers are waiting for a response to their request, and more than 16,000 refugees from camps in Greece and Italy that Spain pledged to receive—a modest effort in comparison to other European countries—have not been able to reach our country.
To alleviate this bottleneck, we propose a change in policy that includes planning and rolling out a public accommodations program able to cover today’s peaks in demand—including our European commitments—and to scale back to adapt to lower demand in the future. Proper planning should include quantitative (volume to build) and qualitative (minimum standards) estimates for operation, a full end-to-end life cycle study (manufacture, assembly, disassembly, recycling), execution time frame, expense control, etc.
Our hypothesis is that industrialized construction could offer a shelter solution able to leverage the possibilities offered by industrial production methods to cover enormous demand in the least amount of time possible. The efficiency of industrialized systems considerably reduces manufacturing times with respect to traditional building methods, and those systems can mass produce [
31]. Despite a slightly negative perception of prefabrication caused by poor practices, lack of knowledge, or lack of awareness [
32], the truth is that industrialized construction has the ability to offer excellent conditions of quality, comfort, and durability [
33,
34], so long as technical viability and production capacity [
35] and the sustainability of the process in all of its economic, social, cultural, environmental, and institutional facets are taken into account [
36,
37].
5. Conclusions
The migratory crisis in Europe has meant a notable increase in the number of international protection seekers with the right to enter the Spanish reception system. The strategy developed by the Spanish government to increase the system’s capacity is ineffective and, therefore, unsustainable. It is ineffective because the impact of the programs launched in 2015 and 2016, based exclusively on increasing spaces that NGOs manage, has not had the desired impact: the percentage of seekers with the right to enter the system who have been left out of it is the highest in the period (80% and 70%).
Because it is ineffective, it is also unsustainable in terms of the social pillars of sustainable development, but also from the economic point of view, because these percentages can be read on the personal scale as 12,787 people in 2015 and 19,012 in 2016 who were not cared for by the system. The majority of one of the most vulnerable immigrant communities was left to their own devices and the almost sure fate of marginality and poverty, which has two specific negative consequences directly related to sustainable development, firstly because reception centers not only provide shelter and food, but also social intervention, psychological care, training, legal advice, interpretation, and translation, tools needed for undertaking the second (integration) and the third (autonomy) phases, without which no sustainable integration is possible. Secondly, because, as is stated in the New Urban Agenda for Sustainable Development, a proper basis for the refugees’ integration into the civic and working life of the host societies is an asset that “can bring significant social, economic and cultural contributions to urban life” [
2].
The measures to respond to increased demand over the last two years, besides directly not working, have changed the management model in our reception system. It has gone from one made up mostly of collective centers supported by a reduced percentage of centers in rented apartments to a system in which collective centers are the minority; from being a system composed of almost 50% public centers and subsidized centers managed by NGOs to being a system almost exclusively managed by NGOs; from being a system managed by the state with the collaboration of three NGOs with more than 20 years’ experience in the area to being a system managed by more than 10 NGOS (seven of which have absolutely no experience).
These changes have not come about as the result of a debate between private and public management or between the private and the collective: They are the unplanned product of extending exceptional measures supported exclusively by outsourcing the management of our reception system. Meanwhile the regulations, statutes, and standards that govern the internal operation, benefits, features, and legal regime of the reception centers included in the asylum law go undeveloped. This lack of definition, combined with an increase in the actors who manage the reception system, causes a lack of uniformity in the system and makes it harder to control.
The possibility of increasing the capacity of our reception system through intensifying subsidies to NGOs is showing signs of nearing its end. NGOs are facing enormous problems with increasing their network of apartments (in 2016, the SRC and ACCEM made public calls to encourage citizens to offer their apartments up for lease), since refugees are seen as a risky population by private landlords [
12]; and the result has not only been clearly insufficient (747 new places a year from the seven new NGOs combined, some of which have offered a ludicrous number of places: 2, 21, or 31) but it has also uncovered innumerable problems derived from these organizations’ lack of experience (Dianova amassed 18 complaints for putting international protection seekers in the same centers as drug addicts [
102]).
The end of the road of outsourcing spaces to increase capacity in the reception system, combined with the certainty that our reception system will experience demand increases in coming years (pressure continues through the usual channels and 16,000 refugees will come from Italy and Greece), forces us to draw the conclusion that the only possible way to increase the system’s effectiveness is for the central administration to undertake an increase in our reception capacity.
Only the state—the central government—has enough political, organizational, and economic power and capacity to develop and coordinate a program with the rest of the regional and local administrations to build reception centers like the one needed today. Some major Spanish city governments (Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, etc.) are driving initiatives to receive refugees. Despite the political willingness of those city halls and their importance in the area of local administration, these initiatives have been shown to be insufficient (for instance, Madrid, whose town hall has only been able to offer 42 apartments to Syrian refugees).
Delays in resolving international protection requests explain the present collapse of the Spanish system. Any modification of the system will have to lead to the improvement of the management system as the basis for reducing the number of unresolved applications and to avoid new accumulations in the future.
If we continue with our current policies, and do not adopt short-term exceptional measures to increase the system’s capacity, the Spanish government has to assume: First, that by the end of 2017, 70% of applicants for international protection by ordinary procedure will not enter the system; and second, that Spain is refusing to receive refugees from camps in Italy and Greece, despite its commitment to the EU.
The question is: How can the Spanish government respond to an urgent need in a timely manner and in line with the Sustainable Development Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals?