Blog post by Jeff Crisp, RLI Affiliate; Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford; and former Head of Policy Development and Evaluation at UNHCR.
Irregular arrivals
For the past 40 years, the governments of wealthy countries in the Global North have been striving to curtail the arrival of refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants from less prosperous parts of the world. In the eyes of these states, such movements represent a serious threat to their sovereignty, security and social stability, especially when they involve young men originating from Muslim societies that may be associated in the public mind with terrorism. Asylum seekers are perceived to impose intolerable burdens on scarce government resources and overstretched public services. At the same time, the systems used to assess their refugee claims involve lengthy administrative and judicial procedures that often lead to unsatisfactory outcomes for the states concerned.
In an attempt to address these perceived problems, the world’s most prosperous states have pursued a variety of restrictive strategies. These include the reinforcement of border controls; the use of new technologies to enhance the surveillance and interdiction of people who are on the move; pushbacks on land and at sea; the externalization of migration management functions to poorer countries; and initiatives designed to mitigate the ‘root causes’ of displacement and irregular migration in countries of origin, first asylum and transit.
International organizations such as UNHCR and IOM have, for two different reasons, become increasingly involved in these efforts. On one hand, they are highly dependent on the financial and diplomatic support of the industrialized states. UNHCR, for example, receives around 90 per cent of its budget from fewer than a dozen countries in the Global North, and has consequently felt a need to engage with their governments in the effort to reduce the number of irregular arrivals. On the other hand, they have serious concerns about the impact of such restrictive measures on the ability of bona fide refugees to seek asylum in other states, and have therefore been ready and willing to support initiatives that manage the movement and arrival of people with unfounded claims to refugee status.
A new concept
In the past five years, a new concept has emerged in relation to the challenge of reconciling the objectives of migration management and refugee protection. It is known as the ‘route-based’ or ‘whole-of-route’ approach, and has been articulated by UNHCR in a June 2024 statement:
Responding more effectively and predictably to the challenges of mixed movements requires a broader, whole-of-route approach. Applying innovative approaches to engage states to ensure international protection and solutions for refugees, while upholding rights and creating opportunities for migrants, along key routes, is critical. To this end, states should put measures in place to ensure that all people on the move are treated with dignity and their rights are respected, and that international protection is ensured for refugees all along the routes, including in countries closer to places of origin.
In simpler terms, rather than waiting for refugees and asylum seekers to arrive at a distant destination and providing them with protection once they get there, every step possible should be taken to ensure that they can find safety and material security at earlier stages of their journey.
This approach appears at first sight to be an eminently reasonable one. There is evident value in a strategy that enhances the protection and assistance available to people who are on the move, irrespective of their legal status and at every stage of their journey. As states in the Global North have often suggested, refugees and other migrants stand to benefit by remaining in countries that are relatively close to their own, where the language, culture and way of life are familiar, and from which it is easier to repatriate, if and when they choose to do so. At the same time, there is a need for a critical analysis of the route-based approach.
Global inequalities
First and foremost, the notion of a route-based approach must be viewed in the context of global inequalities and power relations. While understandably presented by UNHCR in terms of its humanitarian motivations and outcomes, the whole-of-route concept is very much associated with the interests and concerns of the Global North. Like externalization, it has the ultimate objective of limiting the number of refugees and asylum seekers who arrive in the industrialized states in an irregular manner. Hitherto, it has not been embraced by countries in the Global South, nor have active efforts been made to explain what benefits it might bring to those states and their citizens, as UNHCR claims it will do.
As far as refugees and migrants themselves are concerned, there is a need to ask whether it will really be possible to stabilize such mobile populations in the insecure and often hostile countries through which they currently travel, especially if they have access to diaspora networks in the Global North. Even if their access to humanitarian assistance and protection can be improved somewhat, will an Afghan who is determined to be reunited with family members in France, Germany or the UK really be content to remain in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey or the Balkans? And why would an Eritrean choose to stay in Sudan, Niger or Libya if their goal is to reach Italy?
Second, and as with many supposedly ‘new’ concepts in the field of migration and asylum policy, the whole-of-route approach is less novel and innovative than is often assumed by its proponents.
In the early 2000s, European governments and UNHCR espoused the concept of ‘protection in the region’, an approach based on the principle that refugees and asylum seekers should be able to access protection and solutions in the parts of the world from which they originated, thereby averting the need for them to undertake risky and irregular journeys to more distant countries and continents.
But what did this strategy accomplish? It is difficult to find examples of its practical implementation, and its impact appears to have been quite limited. It is true to say that the number of asylum seekers arriving in Europe stabilized to some extent in the opening decade of the 21st century, But in 2015-16, more than a million refugees arrived in Europe from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria, indicating that that they had not been able to find the protection they needed or the opportunities they sought in their regions of origin.
Did these developments take place because the ‘protection in region’ approach was not implemented with sufficient vigour, or because it was based from the outset on false hopes and assumptions? To what extent was ‘protection in the region’ a performative strategy, intended to reassure the public and policymakers themselves that something was being done to address the issue of irregular arrivals? To what extent is the ‘whole-of-route’ notion simply a rebranding of protection in the region? And have any lessons learned from the implementation of that approach been considered in the development of the supposedly ‘new’ whole-of-route concept?
Nebulous nature
A third and closely related critique of the route-based approach lies in the nebulous nature of the concept and a failure to specify how it might be operationalized. This becomes apparent in the abstract wording of the UNHCR statement cited earlier, which asserts that “the route-based approach proposes a set of comprehensive, targeted and coordinated interventions to be taken by States, UNHCR, IOM, other UN agencies, civil society partners, migrant and refugee organizations and other stakeholders, along main routes in countries of origin, asylum, transit and destination.”
This very general statement of intent, which has not been further elaborated since it was issued, leaves numerous questions unanswered. For example:
- which routes should be prioritized – those used by the largest number of people on the move, or those where the protection problems are most serious?
- what kind of programmes and projects are most likely to have the intended effect of averting the need for onward movement?
- should such initiatives assume a different form in relation to refugee flows, mixed migrations and cross-border movements prompted primarily by economic and environmental distress?
- what difficulties will be encountered in establishing fair and effective asylum systems in countries where the route-based approach is being applied, given the limited outcomes of UNHCR’s previous capacity-building initiatives?
- will the resources and capacities needed to implement the route-based approach be available, especially in a context where US humanitarian funding has already been cut and aid budgets in general are already under unprecedented strain?
- will human smugglers whose business model is threatened by the route-based approach find ways of undermining it and maintaining the size of the market for irregular forms of movement?
In conclusion, if the route-based approach can mobilize additional support and better protection for refugees and other migrants who are deprived of both in the countries that they have reached, then a case can be made for it to be taken forward. But if it fails to address the questions raised in this article, and if it is motivated predominantly by a determination to reduce the number of asylum seekers reaching the industrialized states, then its value must be questioned.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author/s and do not necessarily reflect those of the Refugee Law Initiative. We welcome comments and contributions to this blog – please comment below and see here for contribution guidelines.