During the closing ceremony of the digital Dutch Demography Week, the 2021 Master Thesis Award was granted to Claire Sze Eng Tan for her thesis titled “Returning to a home without a future: The effect of migrant trajectories and experiences on the reintegration of Albanian rejected asylum-seekers”. This award honours the best Master thesis in the Netherlands in the field of population studies
Claire Sze Eng Tan wrote her thesis at Maastricht University, as a student of the Double Degree master’s in Public Policy and Human Development. Her supervisor was dr. Katie Kuschminder.
In her thesis, Claire conducted a thorough analysis on an understudied yet highly relevant topic in the social and political debate: the return of rejected asylum seekers and their reintegration. The committee praised the extensive literature review and strong analytical framework to analyse the semi-structured interviews that were conducted by Talitha Dubow (Researcher at UNU-MERIT). Claire produced innovative insights into the factors at play before, during, and after asylum seekers’ return to their origin country. In her study she identified and disentangled complex links between the economic, psychological and security dimensions of these migrants’ trajectory—and, at the same time, offered insights on a human level of their perceptions and aspirations.