Unlocking Mobility: Analysis Examines Refugees’ Limited Access to Travel Documents and Recommends Ways to Overcome Challenges
WASHINGTON, DC — Governments increasingly are experimenting with new mobility pathways for refugees, beyond traditional resettlement operations. These include complementary pathways that connect refugees with work or study opportunities in a country other than the one in which they first sought safety. Yet this push to expand refugees’ future prospects by creating more and safer mobility options is running into the reality that refugees’ ability to travel internationally is often restricted.
Refugees are not able to safely use the most common travel document—a passport issued by their country of origin—and therefore are often unable to travel internationally safely and legally. This restricts their agency and keeps pressure on top refugee-hosting countries by blocking refugees from taking up opportunities abroad.
There are some other travel document options for refugees, the most common of which is the Convention Travel Document issued by a country of asylum. In practice, though, refugees face a range of challenges acquiring and using these travel documents, as a new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) policy brief explores.
In The Mobility Key: Realizing the Potential of Refugee Travel Documents, MPI Associate Policy Analyst Samuel Davidoff-Gore explores the types of travel documents available, the challenges refugees face in acquiring and using them and the steps governments and other stakeholders could take to overcome these challenges.
Countries of asylum should make refugee travel documents easier to acquire and use by aligning them with national passports, streamlining the application process and reducing logistical challenges for refugees. Destination and transit countries could address discrepancies in handling refugee travel documents, enhance trust in the security of these documents and train officials to recognize and process them appropriately. Donors and international organizations could provide capacity support and funding to countries of asylum for travel document processes, including machinery, software, training and institutional strengthening. This support could also be extended to regional mobility integration processes such as those being undertaken in East Africa and the Horn of Africa.
“While some of these changes can be done by individual countries unilaterally, the complexity and interconnectedness of travel document policy requires that countries coordinate with each other to achieve these reforms in a cohesive and systematic way,” the author notes.
The brief is the latest analysis produced under 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, difficulty shifting public narratives about refugees, and flexible approaches to protection.
Read today’s brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/refugee-travel-documents.