WASHINGTON, DC — The international protection regime is under increasingly untenable pressure, and the obsolescence of the post-World War II policy architecture on which it relies is becoming more and more evident. The territorial asylum system, which requires asylum seekers to reach another country’s territory in order to seek protection, has proven itself to be a blunt tool with which to address the protection challenges of the 21st century.
New crises, protracted displacement situations and expanding norms about who merits protection have created a growing population globally of individuals in need of humanitarian protection. At the same time, other mobility pressures—including those rooted in demographic shifts, economic inequality and climate change—have produced high levels of mixed migration, adding to the strain on border and asylum adjudication systems.
In The End of Asylum? Evolving the Protection System to Meet 21st Century Challenges, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) sets out a transformative vision for how the international protection system can evolve, with a focus on the future of asylum. The report analyzes promising developments and best-in-class ideas around facilitating orderly entry, ensuring system efficiency and building regional capacity. It also examines how these elements could foster a system that is better at providing protection for those who need it while also securing public trust by reducing chaos at borders and ensuring that enforcement and the rule of law remain core elements.
“There is an urgent need to shift the focus of protection responses away from an exclusive reliance on territorial asylum and toward a diversified set of policy tools,” MPI analysts Susan Fratzke, Meghan Benton, Andrew Selee, Emma Dorst and Samuel Davidoff-Gore write. “Territorial asylum will, and should, remain accessible as a safety valve, but states should seek to proactively facilitate access to protection as soon after and close to a displacement crisis as possible—and well before dangerous journeys become necessary.”
To address the increasingly complex displacement challenges and mobility pressures, the report recommends governments should further lean into:
The report concludes the three-year Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative undertaken by MPI and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. The initiative has sought to address challenges to asylum systems that are under immense pressure and seize the opportunity to explore and test new ways to facilitate access to protection that better support equity and result in more flexible, sustainable infrastructure.
Earlier reports have examined meaningful ways to manage international protection needs at borders; offer flexible approaches to protection; build meaningful refugee participation in policymaking; assess the growing use of external processing and the role for digital tools in international protection, as well as the use of refugee travel documents; and sketched the difficulty shifting public narratives about refugees.
Read today’s report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/asylum-system-21st-century.