Reimagining Mobility Systems for a Safer World

This three-year project (July 2026–June 2029) is examining how legal migration pathways, recruitment systems, and integration investments can be redesigned to reduce irregular movement, exploitation, and the influence of criminal or corrupt actors in fragile settings.

Around the world, dramatic restrictions on legal migration—coupled with disinvestment in integration—are pushing more migrants into irregular, dangerous routes, with a record number of deaths in 2024. At the same time, an increasingly sophisticated global infrastructure of organized crime is exploiting weak or poorly governed spaces—from Libya and the Sahel to Colombia and parts of Southeast Asia—by facilitating irregular journeys and profiting from trafficking and related abuses.

By contrast, legal migration done right can be a force for stability and peace, undercutting informal economies that sustain organized crime, creating alternatives to recruitment by armed and criminal groups, and easing intergroup tensions. But poor design or implementation of legal pathways can fail to meet demand from migrants or employers, representing a missed opportunity both to create systems that can respond to economic needs and which offer viable alternatives to irregular journeys. Meanwhile, many corporate and philanthropic actors have stakes in labor mobility, integration, and supporting innovation, yet more work is needed to unlock their contributions at scale.

This project, supported through a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, is designed to generate practical evidence on how better designed legal pathways and integration systems can reduce the incentives and opportunities for irregular migration, exploitation, and corruption. It aims not only to diagnose where current systems are failing, but also to produce usable—including AI-enabled—tools, test new solutions, and provide both diplomatically and politically savvy advice and concrete operational guidance for governments.

The project will:

• Map risks in fragile settings. Analyze key migration corridors in Latin America, East Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa to identify where irregular movements emerge, how criminal and armed actors exploit them, and where investment in legal pathways and integration could reduce those risks.
• Develop an evidence-based pathways decision matrix. Examine how the availability and design of legal migration routes influence migrants’ choices and employers’ needs, producing a practical framework to help governments balance different objectives, from economic needs to migration management and anti-smuggling goals.
• Remove bottlenecks in mobility corridors. Conduct corridor mapping and “sludge audits” in selected routes to identify operational barriers—such as excessive waits, opaque consular processes, appointment black markets, weak digitization, and problems with credential recognition—and identify practical reforms that make regular pathways faster, more predictable and harder to corrupt.
• Design AI-enabled tools for fairer recruitment. Map recruitment systems in major international labor migration corridors and work with employers, workers’ representatives, recruiters, and technology partners to develop safeguards, standards, and pilot concepts that improve transparency, reduce dependence on predatory intermediaries, and protect migrant workers.
• Build community stability through non-state partnerships. Work with employers, NGOs, and other local partners in selected countries in Latin America and Africa to adapt employability and livelihood programs so they also reduce prejudice, encourage meaningful contact between groups, and strengthen social cohesion in conflict-prone communities.