Europe can learn from Latin America on refugee labour pathways

BRUSSELS — As European countries grapple with worker shortages and shrinking refugee resettlement quotas, a new Migration Policy Institute Europe policy brief points to Latin America and the Caribbean as a ‘compelling testing ground’ for integrating labour mobility into displacement responses. 

The brief, Making Labour Migration Pathways Work for Displaced People: Lessons from Latin America, argues that Latin America's experience managing large-scale migration and displacement offers concrete, actionable lessons for European governments seeking to build labour migration pathways that include refugees and other displaced people, who are otherwise excluded from mainstream visa and employment channels. 

Latin America and the Caribbean hosted 48 million people living outside their country of birth in 2024, with migration occurring in many directions at once: 'The same country is often sending workers abroad, receiving people displaced from neighbouring states, serving as a transit point for migrants heading further north or south and working to reintegrate returnees or internally displaced people’, Zanzuchi writes. 

These experiences have given Latin American governments deep, hands-on experience managing large, mixed migration flows that Europe has yet to match. Yet the track record also suggests room for improvement, including the fact that refugees and others in need of protection have rarely been considered in the design of Latin American labour mobility schemes.

The brief notes that European (and other) countries recruiting from the region — including through bilateral labour agreements that Spain holds with Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Honduras — stand to benefit doubly: filling labour gaps while extending protection to displaced workers. 

The policy brief, which is part of the EU-funded Skills, Talent and Empowerment through Pathways (STEP) project facilitating labour mobility for displaced people to Italy, Ireland and Spain, notes that the Latin America-linked pilots, while small in scale, already provide direct models for European action: 

• Spain's Resettlement Plus programme resettled Nicaraguan refugees with renewable-energy experience from Costa Rica to work in Spanish solar farms.
• The STEP project has placed displaced Venezuelans from Colombia and Ecuador into Italian jobs such as airport operations and health care assistance, with a pilot expansion into Spain underway.

These efforts, the analysis finds, demonstrate proof of concept but were often hampered by fragmented legal arrangements, limited employer engagement and inconsistent consular support — gaps European governments can address as they scale up. 

The brief lays out specific priorities for origin and destination countries alike, urging them to: 

• Improve worker outreach and placement: Departure countries should improve awareness of mobility pathways and predeparture support for displaced workers; destination countries should engage employers, including by providing recruitment guidance and facilitating connections with candidates.
• Remove travel constraints: Departure countries should help displaced people obtain travel documents; destination countries should recognise temporary protection status or other nonstandard form of documentation as sufficient proof of residence and identity for mobility purposes and offer expedited visas for applicants with confirmed job offers.
• Build accessible credential recognition: Both sides should adopt skills-based assessments over paper credentials given refugees’ difficulty accessing original education transcripts, expand portable certification through training programmes and design admissions pathways that link access to work to the completion of specific training. 
• Set up coordination architecture: Interoperable data systems and joint platforms should connect governments, employers and civil society at origin and destination around shared objectives, to resolve bottlenecks and to match workers with opportunities. 
• Making partnerships work: Destination countries should consider investing resources and technical support in partner countries' training, employment and consular systems to ensure mobility corridors serve both economies and ease brain-drain concerns. 

The brief also highlights a recent MPI Europe visa evaluation framework, developed under STEP, designed to help European governments identify and remove documentation barriers facing displaced applicants.

Read the policy brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/mpi-europe/publication/labour-migration-displaced-people-latin-america.