Recognizing how national government actors frame refugees is essential to understanding why different countries have adopted the refugee policies that they have in place. In Daniel Drewski and Jürgen Gerhards’ Framing Refugees: How the Admission of Refugees is Debated in Six Countries across the World, the primary question they ask is how can we make sense of different government responses to admitting refugees? In answering this question, the central argument they make is how the “we” or the collective identity and characteristics of the host country is defined with respect to the “they” or the identity and characteristics of the refugees frame the country’s political debates on admitting refugees. The six frames in which the “we” and “they” are defined and characterized are economic, cultural, moral, legal, security, and international. Using these frames to structure their country analyses, Drewski and Gerhards draw on discourse analysis of parliamentary debates and expert interviews to provide insight into the refugee policies of Turkey, Germany, Poland, Uganda, Chile, and Singapore. Each of these chapters is largely self-contained with its own bibliography.

In Turkey, the right-wing ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by President Erdogan, and the new left People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which represents the interests of the Kurds, favor an open-door policy for refugees. The AKP’s support for accepting refugees is based on a view of Turkey as a regional power that bears responsibility for what happens to neighboring countries. The HDP views Turkey as a multiethnic state, committed to universal human rights and international law. In contrast, until 2018, the Kemalist Republic People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) favored a nationalist version of Turkish identity that saw Syrian refugees as an economic burden, a cultural and security threat, and unwelcome guests. In 2018, the MHP began supporting the AKP government and thereafter emphasized solidarity with those of similar ethnic background to Turks while excluding those who are from a dissimilar background (e.g., Kurds).

Germany’s motivation for accepting Syrian refugees in the late summer of 2015 was humanitarian. The government’s discourse emphasized its cosmopolitanism and solidarity with people fleeing civil war, commitment to universalist norms such as asylum and international refugee law, and its status as a member of the European Union committed to European values. Left-wing opposition parties in Germany supported the Merkel government’s response and largely shared the issue framing. However, this broad consensus on accepting refugees opened the door for the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which entered the German Bundestag after the 2017 federal elections. The AfD rejected universalist value commitments and demanded a full closure of German borders to asylum seekers.

The last of the possible Syrian refugee-receiving cases is Poland. While the Polish government restricted Syrian and Middle Eastern refugees during the crisis of 2015–2016, it welcomed Ukrainian refugees during the same period. The right-wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) framed the country as a culturally homogenous, Christian country that could not assimilate Muslim refugees and that did not have a moral obligation to help these dissimilar refugees. Complementing this frame is the conception of Poland as an “underdog” European Union member whose national sovereignty is threatened by larger EU states imposing “their” refugees on Poland. This defiance stems from Poland’s long history of foreign occupation. In contrast, the PiS Party frames Ukrainian refugees as fitting the “we” as fellow victims of Russian aggression and culturally similar to Poles.

Moving the analysis away from Europe, the authors turn their attention to Uganda, which has an open-door policy toward refugees despite being one of the world’s poorest countries. Within Africa, it is the country that hosts the most refugees, mostly from South Sudan. Both the government and the opposition parties define Uganda as an African country culturally and ethnically like other countries of the continent. Refugees are framed as “brothers and sisters” as well as people in dire need of help. An additional frame that has encouraged the open-door policy towards refugees is anticolonial identity construction that sees borders as artificially constructed by colonialism. Finally, an open-door refugee policy helps the authoritarian government’s pursuit of international prestige and recognition.

Drewski and Gerhards’s discussion of Chilean president Sebastián Piñera right-wing administration’s restrictive approach to forced migrants from Venezuela between 2018 and 2022 frames Venezuela as an ideological Socialist rival to Chile’s stable democracy and healthy market economy. While this framing suggests an openness to those who want to emigrate from Venezuela, the Chilean government emphasized Chile’s national sovereignty, a reluctance to comply with international refugee law, and the country’s economic success. The implications of this framing were that displaced Venezuelans were not to be considered refugees under international law but should be selectively admitted based on their ability to contribute human capital to Chile’s economy. In contrast, the left-wing opposition parties had frames that theoretically encouraged a humanitarian migration policy committed to international refugee law, but they criticized the government’s admission preference for displaced Venezuelans via visas de responsibilidad democrática (democratic responsibility visas) because due to Chile’s divisive history, they saw it as hypocritical to consider Venezuela’s government an ideological rival of Chile’s.

The authors’ last case of Singapore paradoxically openly accepts labor migrants but closes itself off from refugees. This paradox is explained through the government and opposition parties’ framing of the “we” on four characteristics of national self-determination leading to its nonsignatory status of the Geneva Refugee Convention, an economically successful country that has been one of the world’s great economic development stories leading to its rejection of refugees as a potential economic burden, an integrated multiethnic society leading it to reject refugees and a surplus of migrants that might upset the balance, and communitarianism leading to the expectation that the state protects its citizens rather than foreigners. In Singapore, both the government and opposition parties are completely united in their strict rejection of refugees. In contrast, while the government favors admitting more migrants with human capital, the opposition led by the social democratic Worker’s Party (WP) does not share this view and instead frames migrants as a threat to Singapore’s multiracial balanced identity and as competitors for scarce resources against native Singaporeans.

Organizationally, the book is clear, which makes it easily readable like a textbook. Each case study in Part II “Responding to the Exodus of Syrian Refugees” and Part III “Responding to Refugee Crises in Other World Regions” is clearly structured around the conceptual framework. However, some of the discussion of the liberal script in the concluding chapter could have been moved to the first two pages of the first chapter to provide a fuller explanation of this central concept and how it intersects with refugee and immigrant admissions at the onset of the book.

Methodologically, it is beneficial that Drewski and Gerhards include such a diverse group of countries with different regime types in the study, and the case selections of Turkey, Germany, and Poland as recipients of refugees from the Syrian Civil War are logically explained. However, further elaboration on the reasoning behind the case selections of Uganda, Chile, and Singapore as non-European countries that have received refugees from their respective world regions might have enhanced the clarity of the research design.

The final critique I have about this generally well-executed and extensive study of comparative refugee debates is that, in addition to government frames, it could have possibly benefited from a complementary discussion of media frames about refugees and the related agenda-setting function of mass media. After all, the countries’ governments and opposition parties are both affected by media framing. Media frames impact refugee policy by shaping the language and context in which governments justify their responses. For instance, studies in Germany and Czechia find that a shift from humanitarian or victim media frames to security or threat media frames coincides with more restrictive government policies toward refugees. Furthermore, the interplay between media, political actors, and policy networks is bidirectional; political priorities and local contexts sometimes shape dominant frames, which in turn reinforce policy decisions (see Futák-Campbell, Beatrix and Mira Pütz. 2022. “From the ‘Open Door’ Policy to the EU-Turkey Deal: Media Framings of German Policy Changes during the EU Refugee ‘Crisis’,” International Relations 36(1)).

In summary, this is a comprehensive book that adds theoretical value with tightly structured case studies. Moving beyond typical understandings of cleavage theory that argue that framing of immigration and asylum is structured by a new cleavage between “cosmopolitans” and “communitarians,” the authors emphasize an understanding of country-specific cleavage structures (or lack thereof ) rather than one universal model. Through their study of six countries differing in world region and regime type, Drewski and Gerhards make a valuable contribution to the body of scholarship tackling why different countries have adopted different refugee policies.