Abstract
At the height of the migration crisis, around 2.4 million asylum claims were submitted in the European Union Member States. The enormous weight of a massive inflow of migrants and immigration‐related threat perceptions prompted Member States to start reintroducing border controls at EU internal borders, which resulted in a ‘temporary suspension’ of the Schengen agreement on open borders. With the use of zero‐sum phenomena and application of public goods theory to asylum policy, the article seeks to explain the influence of a structural limitation of European integration in the form of asymmetric integration of asylum policy on the sustainability of the Schengen agreement on open borders. To eliminate this structural limitation and thus strengthen the sustainability of the Schengen agreement on open borders, the article proposes a fully functioning Common European Asylum System (CEAS) based on a unified asylum system and governed by a centralized EU institution.