The End of Asylum? Evolving the Protection System to Meet 21st Century Challenges
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Highlights
Territorial asylum is increasingly inadequate to meet 21st-century protection needs. A diversified policy toolkit, including regional cooperation, expanded legal pathways, and streamlined procedures, is urgently needed.
- As of mid-2023, just five countries hosted nearly 40 percent of the world's refugees. Territorial asylum forces dangerous journeys, skews toward those with means to travel, and creates markets for smugglers.
- Governments are shifting from territorial asylum toward managed legal pathways. The Homes for Ukraine and Uniting for Ukraine programs facilitated rapid entry into the United Kingdom and United States for nearly 250,000 Ukrainians in the year after Russia's 2022 invasion.
- Asylum systems must be resourced, triaged, and modernized to handle rising demand. Switzerland's 2019 reforms cut average processing times fivefold to 93 days, showing what streamlined, well-funded systems can achieve.
- A 21st-century protection system requires regional cooperation, expanded pathways, orderly border processing, and legal migration alternatives that redirect pressure away from asylum systems.
The international protection regime is under increasingly untenable pressure, and the obsolescence of the policy architecture on which it relies is becoming more and more apparent. 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 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.
This report, which concludes the Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative led by MPI and the Robert Bosch Stiftung, sets out a vision for the ongoing evolution of the international protection system, with a focus on the future of asylum. It analyzes promising developments and best-in-class ideas around facilitating orderly entry, ensuring system efficiency, and building regional capacity, and how these elements could foster a system that is better at providing protection for those who need it and at securing public trust by reducing chaos at borders and within public systems that must manage migration.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The Asylum Labyrinth and Its Consequences
3 A Protection System for the 21st Century: What Could an Agenda for Action Look Like?
A. Address Displacement at a Regional Level through Longer-Term Capacity-Sharing
B. Encourage the Use of Safe and Orderly Means of Entry to Seek Protection
C. Provide Sufficient Resources for Asylum Processing and Streamline Procedures
D. Create Orderly Processes at Borders
E. Expand Non-Protection-Based Avenues for Migration
4 Conclusions
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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