Expanding Protection Options? Flexible Approaches to Status for Displaced Syrians, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians
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Highlights
Flexible protections for displaced Syrians, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians show temporary status can work at scale, but durable solutions remain elusive for millions.
- More than 12 million Syrians, 7 million Venezuelans, and 8 million Ukrainians have been displaced by crisis. Host countries often turned to flexible temporary statuses rather than full refugee procedures to process these newcomers.
- In Latin America, neighbors granted Venezuelans large-scale temporary status with work rights, integrating millions without formal asylum, while the EU Temporary Protection Directive gave Ukrainians immediate protection and access to services.
- Syrians in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan held diverse and often precarious statuses—from temporary protection to informal tolerance—frequently leaving them with limited access to work, schooling, and legal security.
- Temporary statuses are most effective when paired with work rights and pathways to permanence; without durable solutions or realistic return prospects, long-term temporary populations risk marginalization and policy fatigue.
Faced with displacement crises that have stretched asylum systems to their limits, countries have increasingly begun to use alternatives to traditional protection tools to provide displaced individuals with legal status and access to certain rights and forms of assistance. Often, the status offered is temporary and does not rely on adjudication of individual cases.
While such approaches are not completely new, they have gained prominence through national responses to three of the largest displacement crises of the post-World War II era: displacement from Syria, Venezuela, and Ukraine. The principal host governments in these three crises—Turkey, various South American countries, and EU Member States—chose to provide legal status to millions of protection seekers by using existing immigration policies or new temporary statuses, rather than refugee or asylum systems.
This report—part of the Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative led by MPI and the Robert Bosch Stiftung—examines each of these three cases, identifying similarities in the approaches taken to offering protection while recognizing the differences between the cases. The study explores the factors underpinning government decisions and their medium- to long-term implications, concluding with thoughts on what can be learned for future international displacement crises.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Displaced Syrians in Turkey
3 Displaced Venezuelans in Latin America and the Caribbean
4 Displaced Ukrainians in the European Union
5 The Promises and Perils of Temporary Protection
A. An Emerging Model for Crisis Response?
B. Calculating the Costs and Benefits of a Temporary Approach
6 The Best of Both Worlds? Building on the Lessons of Temporary Protection for the Future
About the Global Program
The Global Program bridges policy advice, research, and candid dialogue to design effective migration policies, drawing on global evidence and anticipating the forces reshaping how people move.
About the Beyond Territorial Asylum Initiative
This MPI-Robert Bosch Stiftung initiative explores innovative approaches to asylum and refugee protection amid growing global pressures.
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