Blog by Dr Kalyani Yeola
When states reform immigration law, they often claim to be restoring order, efficiency, and public confidence. India’s recently enacted Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 follows this familiar script. By consolidating earlier legislation and centralising authority under the Ministry of Home Affairs, the law promises streamlined governance, stronger enforcement, and greater control over non-citizens. Yet, much like recent asylum policy reforms elsewhere, the question is not whether the law will be effective, but what problem it believes it is fixing, and at what cost.
India hosts one of the largest refugee populations in Asia, despite not being a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Refugees from Sri Lanka, Tibet, Afghanistan, and Myanmar have lived in India for decades, many in urban settings, embedded within local economies and communities. Protection has historically been extended through constitutional interpretation, executive discretion, and adherence to international human rights norms rather than through a formal refugee law. This has produced a fragile but functioning system – uneven, yes, but one that allowed refugees to remain, work informally, and access basic services.
The new law fundamentally reframes this arrangement.
Diagnosing the Wrong Problem
At the heart of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 is a unifying move: all non-citizens are now governed under a single legal category – “foreigners.” Refugees, asylum-seekers, migrants, students, and visitors are collapsed into one administrative subject. The law strengthens registration, surveillance, and enforcement, presenting mobility itself as a problem to be managed.
This approach suggests a particular diagnosis: that disorder arises from insufficient control over non-citizens. But this framing obscures a more fundamental reality. The core challenge in India’s refugee regime has never been the presence of refugees as such, but the absence of legal pathways that distinguish protection from migration control. Refugees are not undocumented because they evade the system; they are undocumented because the system does not recognise them.
Much like asylum policies that blame backlogs on asylum seekers rather than administrative failure, India’s new law risks addressing symptoms rather than causes. Irregularity becomes the problem, rather than the lack of a protection framework that can accommodate displacement as a distinct legal condition.
When Protection Becomes Precarious
India has long relied on discretion rather than codification. While this allowed flexibility, it also meant that protection was contingent. India has long relied on discretion rather than codification. While this allowed flexibility, it also meant that protection was contingent. Although the law did not recognise refugees as a distinct legal category, they were differentiated in practice by executive discretion, administrative recognition, and informal protection arrangements. The new law narrows that contingency further. By collapsing all non-citizens into a single legal category, it transforms refugees from conditionally recognised subjects into governable risks. Recognition gives way to monitoring; tolerance gives way to compliance. This shift has particular consequences for refugees who already occupy ambiguous legal spaces such as those from Myanmar and Afghanistan, many of whom are registered with the UN refugee agency but lack state recognition. Under the new regime, their presence becomes easier to regulate, restrict, or revoke, without the procedural safeguards that refugee-specific frameworks typically provide.
What is at stake here is not simply legal status, but the nature of protection itself. Protection that is not anchored in law becomes vulnerable to political recalibration. As global experience shows, once migration governance is securitised, humanitarian considerations tend to survive only insofar as they do not interfere with enforcement.
Deterrence Without Durable Solutions
The promise of control often rests on deterrence. But deterrence assumes that people move because systems are permissive, rather than because displacement is structural and produced by conflict, persecution, and instability beyond the control of host states. Tightening legal categories does not resolve displacement; it merely reshapes how vulnerability is managed.
India’s law, like many contemporary migration reforms, is strikingly silent on durable solutions. There is no pathway to long-term legal residence for refugees as refugees, no framework for local integration, and no recognition of second-generation displacement. Instead, temporariness is normalised, and uncertainty becomes institutionalised.
This raises a deeper concern: is the law designed to manage people, or to resolve displacement?
A Question for Refugee Law and for India
India has often been praised for hosting refugees without being bound by international refugee law. That narrative now requires reconsideration. The Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 signals a shift away from pragmatic humanitarianism toward a governance model rooted in uniformity and control. In doing so, it risks undermining the very flexibility that once allowed protection to exist in the absence of formal refugee law.
The lesson here is not that India needs to replicate refugee regimes elsewhere. Rather, it is that refugee protection cannot survive indefinitely when it is treated as an administrative inconvenience rather than a distinct legal and moral responsibility.
As with other recent asylum reforms globally, the danger lies not only in what the law does, but in what it assumes. If refugees are governed as problems to be fixed rather than people to be protected, the system may become more orderly yet profoundly less just.
Dr Kalyani Yeola is Visiting Faculty at Fergusson College Pune, India. She is also research affiliate at Refugee Law Initiative, University of London.
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.