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search projects to provide empirical evidence to begin to fill these gaps. The final part of the paper considers the wider implications of these findings.

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Refugees and the State Asylum-seekers and refugees have become a touchstone issue on political agendas across the industrialised world and especially at the moment in Europe. One reason is sheer numbers; a second is that significant proportions of asylum applications are not lodged by people in genuine need of protection, thus making the so-called ‘migration asylum nexus’ increasingly hard to disentangle in order to identify those on whom assistance should be targeted. As a result, another element of concern is how to return rejected asylum-seekers to their countries of origin (Koser 2001a). What lies at the heart of political concerns is the issue of control. Predictions at the end of the 1990s that asylum-seekers were harbingers of mass South North migration (Loescher 1989) have categorically proven to be misplaced, and media and popular panics about asylum-seekers are largely unfounded. Nevertheless, it is clear that, in contrast to ‘quota refugees’, the arrival of asylum-seekers is ‘spontaneous’ and ‘irregular’ *neither their numbers, characteristics nor conditions of arrival are any longer under the strict control of receiving states (Koser 1997a). In this way asylum-seekers and refugees epitomise the ‘threat’ that uncontrolled immigration is sometimes viewed as posing nation-states. ‘One reason migration enters political agendas with greater frequency and salience now’, argues Martin Heisler, ‘is that, at least in some host societies, it disturbs the sense of boundedness’ (Heisler 2001: 229). For others, uncontrolled immigration can challenge nation-state
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 235 ideals such as social cohesion (Fitzgerald 2000). According to the so-called Copenhagen School, immigration can represent a threat to national identity and to ‘societal security’ (Waever et al. 1993). There is even an ongoing debate about whether dual citizenship or nationality threatens to undermine states (Hansen and Weil 2002). A more obvious threat that has been associated specifically with asylum-seekers after 11 September 2001 is that of terrorism*even though there is virtually no substantiation for this. Across the industrialised world, the response uniformly has been to strengthen border controls, although specific measures have varied widely *as have success rates (Cornelius et al. 1994). For many commentators, however, it is asylum and not the state that is now ‘under assault’. Gil Loescher (2001: 16) has argued that ‘at the end of the twentieth century, refugees became a symbol of system overload, instead of a symbol of what was always best in the Western liberal tradition’. Some of the claims of asylum advocates are largely unsubstantiated*for example there is little evidence in the industrialised nations that asylum applications by people genuinely in need of protection are being turned down. But it is true that it has become harder than ever for ‘genuine’ refugees to apply for asylum in these countries in the first place. In North America and Australia resettlement quotas provide a legal route of entry for relatively small proportions of refugees, but effectively exclude others from applying independently for asylum. For those not selected for resettlement, and for those seeking asylum in countries w