Between Compassion and Security: Do Permissive Asylum Regimes Affect Transnational Terrorism?

Abstract

This paper examines whether such a trade-off exists by analyzing the relationship between asylum policy liberality and transnational terrorism for a global sample of 173 countries from 1968 to 2022. Across four empirical approaches (two-way fixed-effects models, a panel event-study design, Bayesian model comparison, and an instrumental-variables approach), we consistently find no evidence that more permissive asylum policies affect the likelihood of transnational terrorism.