Flexible Approaches to Protection for Displaced Individuals Bring Benefits in Certain Circumstances but Must Not Replace Refugee Status

WASHINGTON, DC — Faced with displacement crises that have stretched asylum systems to their limits, countries increasingly are turning to alternatives to traditional refugee protection to provide displaced individuals with legal status and access to certain rights and forms of assistance. Often, the status offered is temporary and is granted to a class of vulnerable individuals, forgoing the need for person-by-person adjudication.

These flexible approaches 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 turn to refugee or asylum systems.

A new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) report out today, Expanding Protection Options? Flexible Approaches to Status for Displaced Syrians, Venezuelans and Ukrainians, examines each of these cases in detail, identifying similarities and differences in the approaches taken to offering protection.

Turning to flexible but temporary strategies has advantages, analysts Andrew Selee, Susan Fratzke, Samuel Davidoff-Gore and Luisa Feline Freier write, not least that they proved politically and practically easier to implement quickly. “The policies’ temporary nature eased domestic concerns about large-scale permanent settlement,” they write of the three case study responses. “Meanwhile, by avoiding individual status determination, these systems allowed swifter access to legal rights and socio-economic benefits. Finally, each approach had a relatively open-ended timeframe, allowing them to account for subsequent rounds of displacement as the situation in the country of origin worsened.”

Yet the temporariness of the approaches created downsides, the report notes, chiefly that beneficiaries have been left without the long-term certainty that comes from a more permanent status and that the policies may be easily reversed amid political leadership changes.

Given this reality, the analysts argue that flexible approaches to providing protection are ultimately best used in a narrow set of circumstances: when the pace of arrivals will likely overwhelm local asylum systems or when individuals in need fall outside the categories specified in existing protection frameworks. These approaches may also offer lessons that can be adopted within the traditional asylum system—namely, the potential added value of using a lighter touch, group-based approach to status determinations in circumstances where there is a clear need.

Among the considerations policymakers should take when designing and implementing such flexible approaches, which the authors underscore should not replace refugee status, should be:

• Including explicit protection from refoulement, as occurred in the Turkish and EU responses.
• Providing the framework for local longer-term integration from the outset, even if the status is ostensibly temporary.
• Building opportunities for displaced individuals to transition to long-term status to reduce precarity.
• Taking a coordinated approach to providing protection with other countries in the region.

“Meeting the needs of the global protection system requires creativity to account for the system’s limitations. By using existing tools in new ways and developing new tools to overcome existing obstacles, governments can expand opportunities for protection in ways that benefit both protection seekers and host societies,” the authors conclude.

The report is part of the three-year Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative undertaken by MPI and the Robert Bosch Stiftung. The initiative seeks 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 build refugee participation in policymaking, the growing use of external processing, role for digital tools in international protection and difficulty shifting public narratives about refugees.

Read today’s report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/protection-options-flexible-approaches.