Abstract

Migration law between acceleration and efficiency

Efficiency and speed of decision making have been a recurrent theme of German administrative law reform since the 1970 s. Although migration law has long been the subject of acceleration efforts, this occurred largely outside the general efficiency discourse. In an effort to connect these two strands, this article first retraces the trends that the administrative efficiency discourse has undergone since the 1970 s and points out how the sectors of law driving it – environmental law, emission control, and economic regulation – as well as an economic paradigm have promoted an truncated understanding of efficiency as mere acceleration. In a second step, it shows that while the devaluation of procedure in the interest of speed does align with a German focus on subsequent judicial review, it neither does justice to the relevance of the procedure to the realization of fundamental rights, not to its specific performances: the development of substantive requirements, transparency, participation, legitimacy.

Asylum law in particular has experienced a surge of acceleration measures since 2015, pushed by the consulting firm McKinsey. But its existential relevance for protection seekers and the particular dependency of the right to asylum on the asylum procedure require an especially rigorous examination. An efficiency concept geared merely toward acceleration cannot do justice to these specific challenges, as the McKinsey measures have demonstrated; the burden has simply been shifted on the courts.

In its last part, this article therefore proposes a qualitative efficiency concept that bears in mind the entirety of the functions of the administrative procedure, takes into account the different requirements of the procedure in different sectors of law, and does not lose sight of the reciprocity between administrative and judicial procedure. Meanwhile, pilot studies from the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany show that a qualitatively efficient asylum procedure is not necessarily a slower or more costly procedure.