Tucker Comparative Migration Studies (2018) 6:29 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0094-2 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Open Access Why here? Factors influencing Palestinian refugees from Syria in choosing Germany or Sweden as asylum destinations Jason Tucker Correspondence: jason.tucker@mah.se Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM), Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden Abstract This paper presents the findings of 33 interviews, carried out in 2017, examining the factors influencing Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS) in choosing Germany or Sweden as asylum destinations. The findings showed that there was a very high degree of destination specificity towards Sweden for nearly all of the participants. This was based on their desire to reach Sweden due to its accessible citizenship as compared to other European or Arab states. This paper details how most of the refugees had conducted research, drawing on information from social networks and other sources, in order to establish in which European country they could most easily and quickly acquire citizenship. As a consequence of the prioritisation of resolving their and their families’ statelessness as quickly as possible, the interviewees often devalued social and human capital. Considerations related to economic or educational opportunities played only a marginal role in the decision making. This research finds that in order to better understand the migration of stateless refugees, their desire to resolve their statelessness should be considered as a potentially significant aspect of their choice of asylum destination. Keywords: Asylum destination, Citizenship, Germany, Sweden, Stateless refugees, Palestinian refugees from Syria Introduction Statelessness, or not having citizenship of any state, is beginning to be recognised as an area of interest in forced migration studies. In 2016, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that there were 22.5 million refugees globally, of which at least 6.6 million were stateless (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion [ISI], 2014; UNHCR, 2017). The lack of a legal bond of citizenship to a state, as faced by stateless refugees, should not be confused with the loss of ‘effective’ citizenship. Non-stateless refugees lack effective citizenship. Indeed, their need for international protection stems, in part, from this. For stateless refugees, it is not a case of ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’ citizenship as legally and or factually they have no citizenship. Despite a quarter of all refugees being stateless, research on the impact of statelessness on refugees (or indeed refugee-ness on the stateless) is notably scarce. This research sought to address one gap in our understanding by questioning if statelessness impacts the asylum destination decision making of refugees. To achieve this, 33 © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.