As countries expand labour pathways for qualified refugees, new evaluation tool permits assessing the degree of openness or barriers to work visas

BRUSSELS — Poorly designed work visa requirements and procedures risk excluding otherwise qualified applicants at a time where countries are competing for international talent. As the European Union implements its new visa strategy and other countries explore their own reforms, a new tool developed by Migration Policy Institute Europe can help assess how accessible work visas are for refugees and other international applicants.

Helping well-qualified refugees access work visas holds benefits for both displaced people and destination countries. For refugees, a work visa can serve as a route to safety and stability while easing pressure on oversubscribed resettlement systems. For destination countries, tapping into this underutilised pool of talent can help fill labour gaps in key sectors, including health care.

To date, at least nine countries — Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Italy and the United Kingdom, among them — have launched small-scale pilot projects to facilitate the admission of refugees via the employment pathway. And several countries, including France, Germany, Slovakia and Spain are in the process of designing such programmes.

But the very need for tailored support offered by such bespoke and small-scale initiatives, which to date have collectively facilitated the arrival of fewer than 2,000 people, speaks to the ongoing difficulties that qualified refugees can encounter when trying to access mainstream work visas, a new MPI Europe report notes.

Building Refugee-Inclusive Labour Mobility Pathways: A visa evaluation framework provides a detailed evaluation framework and is accompanied by an innovative tool that governments, civil-society organisations and employers can use to self-assess how the design and procedural elements of specific work visas can either open — or inadvertently close — labour pathways to well-qualified displaced people and other workers.

The framework and scorecard, which were developed as part of the EU-funded Skills, Talent and Empowerment through Pathways (STEP) project, also help users identify potential adjustments to work visa eligibility rules, work and residence conditions, application requirements and the visa process itself that could make work visas more accessible for displaced workers. These reforms may include accepting alternative travel documents, waiving financial proof requirements for applicants with a job offer, offering remote or online application systems, allowing biometric information collection upon arrival, providing dedicated consular support for displaced applicants or publishing transparent processing timelines.

‘As demand in many countries grows for workers in key sectors, the economic case for recruiting refugees with relevant qualifications and experience is compelling, though doing so has proved difficult in practice’, analysts María Belén Zanzuchi, Kate Hooper and Abigail Goldfarb write.

‘Moving beyond the bespoke, resource-intensive forms of support that have facilitated refugee labour mobility to date and instead improving the accessibility of mainstream work visa systems can help reduce costs, make procedures more predictable and ensure that mobility opportunities are not limited to small, highly tailored schemes’, they conclude.

Read the framework here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/refugee-labor-mobility.

And the accompanying scorecard here: www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/datahub/mpie-step_visa-scorecard-2026_final.xlsx.