This doctoral dissertation examines how asylum decision-makers are able to operationalise the existing legal framework to control migration, by using their discretionary power, and what implications the use of discretionary power in the asylum procedure may have for applicants who are made vulnerable – in particular, for those applying for asylum on the grounds of sexual orientation.

Street-level implementers, or public employees (e.g., caseworkers and judges) and the organisations that employ them, make decisions regarding access to asylum. The scale, complexity, and invisibility of street-level implementers’ discretionary power render it difficult to scrutinise. Yet, as this dissertation shows, this scrutiny is crucial, as the authorities’ interpretive shifts may risk protection for entire asylum applicant populations.

Previous empirical research on discretion focuses largely on the output of the individual street-level bureaucrat. This dissertation contributes to knowledge on discretion by highlighting how street-level discretionary power in asylum decision-making may be collectivised, or used on a large scale to control migration, and some of it delegated to third parties, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The dissertation finds that the asylum procedure is rendered difficult for asylum applicants to navigate especially when policies are shifty and opaque, when protection criteria are abstract and difficult to grasp, or when approaches are inconsistent from one level of asylum decision-making to the next. This dissertation argues for a novel way of framing vulnerability in the asylum procedure: vulnerability should not only be understood as an inherent characteristic or the circumstances of the individual claimant, but also as procedural vulnerability, or a set of structural risks for the claimant that relate, for instance, to the aforementioned shortcomings of the asylum procedure itself.

The dissertation consists of this synthesis and three substudies. The data include asylum decisions concerning 18-34-year-old Iraqi applicants and interviews with legal actors, such as asylum decision-makers and NGO workers, working with asylum-seekers in Finland. Substudy I employed a mixed-method approach, combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and substudies II and III used qualitative approaches, such as thematic analysis and qualitative content analysis.