Wretched, refused
The global asylum system is falling apart
What should replace it?
Miguel arrived in Britain from Latin America in 2018.
He applied for asylum, saying he was fleeing gangsters who would kill him if he returned.
Seven years later, his case has still not been resolved.
British officials have taken ages to reach a decision because they have no easy way to determine whether the danger he says he faces is real.
Gangsters do not publish their hit lists.
If the danger is genuine, could Miguel have escaped it by moving to a different city or a neighbouring country, rather than flying all the way to Europe?
Lawyers have spent seven years debating unverifiable facts about distant criminals.
Across the rich world, politicians of the left and the right decry the dysfunction of the global asylum system.
In May the leaders of nine EU countries, including Italy and Poland, signed a letter complaining that international conventions on migration no longer “match the challenges that we face today”.
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s conservative chancellor, complains that asylum is a “shambles” in his country.
Donald Trump has closed off asylum in America for practically everyone except white South Africans.
Even those who strongly support a right to sanctuary fear that the apparatus for allocating it is rusty.
Amy Pope, head of the International Organisation for Migration, a UN body, calls it “outdated, slow and vulnerable to abuse”.
Flight risk
Several factors have stretched the system to breaking point.
First, the number of people who have been forced to flee their homes to escape war or persecution has tripled since 2010, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), reaching 123m at the end of 2024.
Rules forbidding armies from targeting civilians are more widely flouted than in the past, laments Filippo Grandi, the head of UNHCR.
And wars are lasting longer, so fugitives stay away for longer.
Meanwhile, the share of the world’s adults who would like to migrate permanently, for any reason, has risen from 12% in 2011 to 16% in 2023, or roughly 900m people, according to Gallup.
The rich world is not prepared to let in anything like 900m permanent immigrants; that would be 140 times as many as it admitted in 2023.
In fact, it is almost impossible for workers from poor countries to migrate legally to rich ones, unless they have close family ties or exceptional skills.
So many move without permission.
A couple of decades ago, such illicit migrants tried hard to avoid detection.
But recent ones realised that if they walked up to a border guard in Europe or America and asked for asylum, the host country would then assess whether they faced persecution back home.
This can take years, during which time the claimant can often vanish into the shadows and find work.
Claims for asylum in the rich world shot up.
In 2023, 2.7m new applications were lodged in OECD countries, more than the nearly 1.7m a year during the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 (see chart 1).
Many claims are dubious.
In the EU the proportion that succeed has fallen from 57% in 2016 to 42% in 2024.
Nearly half of applicants come from countries that have a success rate of below 20%.
Twice as many asylum recipients in Britain said they were 17 when they applied as said they were 19, presumably because they think the system is kinder to children.
There is nothing wrong with seeking a better life.
But when jobseekers and refugees both crowd into the same funnel, malign consequences follow.
Voters in rich countries start to feel they are being defrauded; that many asylum-seekers are lying about the horrors they face back home.
And even if they are telling the truth, many voters do not see why the fear of persecution in, say, Venezuela, entitles someone to cross from Mexico into the United States.
A sense that the refugee system is being gamed saps support for it—and for liberal migration policies in general.
How could the world’s asylum system be redesigned?
What is the least-bad way to offer sanctuary to those in peril that is also politically feasible?
Conventional folly
Attempts to answer these questions usually start with international law.
The UN Refugee Convention of 1951 says that those who flee their country owing to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” are entitled to refuge and may not be sent back to face danger.
The convention originally applied only to post-war Europe, to spare fugitives from the Soviet Union from being sent back to face Stalin’s wrath.
It was extended to the whole world by a protocol in 1967.
Most countries have signed both documents.
But they uphold them in wildly different ways.
Europe and North America have long been fairly generous.
The principles of the UN convention are incorporated into EU law and enforced by national courts.
When Italy recently began sending asylum-seekers to Albania while their claims were processed, judges ruled the scheme illegal.
In contrast China, though a signatory to the convention, treats its principles as optional.
It admitted only 296 refugees in 2023, fewer than tiny Liechtenstein.
It routinely sends fugitives from next-door North Korea home to face prison camp or execution.
“Most countries fail to comply” with the convention, argued Paul Collier and Alexander Betts, two Oxford professors, in “Refuge”, a book published shortly after the refugee crisis of 2015-16.
Conversely, several non-signatories, such as Jordan, Lebanon and Pakistan, host large numbers of refugees without being legally obliged to.
It would be an exaggeration to say the convention is irrelevant, but not a wild one.
Whatever the convention’s shortcomings, many people are fleeing real horrors.
Take Sukra, a young woman who escaped Sudan’s civil war.
She recounts how gunmen burst into her house and murdered her brother.
An Arab militia ordered black residents like her to leave the country immediately or be raped.
Sukra fled on foot across the desert to Chad, a country next door, part of a terrified crowd of refugees dodging bullets in the dark.
When she arrived, she realised her sister had not made it.
So she went back to find her, and was raped at gunpoint by three militiamen.
She never found her sister.
The vast majority of people like Sukra remain in the developing world.
Of the 123m people uprooted by conflict or terror, more than half are still in their home country.
The UN calls them “internally displaced people” (IDPs).
Among those who eventually cross an international border (“refugees”), 67% go to a neighbouring country and 73% remain in low or middle-income countries.
The reason is simple: distance.
Most fugitives go as far as they must to find safety and shelter, but little farther.
Thus, refugees are heavily concentrated in countries that border war zones.
These places are often poor.
Chad is miserably so—yet surprisingly welcoming to people like Sukra.
It cannot realistically close its long, porous border with Sudan and it would cost a fortune to try.
Instead, taking advice from donors, it lets refugees in, issues them with IDs and lets them work.
It hosts 1.3m of them: relative to its population, 55 times as many as America; relative to its GDP, more than 5,000 times as many.
There has been no political backlash to speak of.
Locals find the refugees culturally familiar—many tribes and language groups straddle the border.
No one doubts that the new arrivals are fleeing mortal danger.
And no one imagines they are moving to Chad to exploit its generous welfare system, because it does not have one.
Instead, they receive some basic help from donors, but largely support themselves.
Around Adré, a border town where perhaps 250,000 refugees live, Sudanese welders wield blowtorches, seamstresses stitch clothes and cooks fry beignets.
They are free to move around in search of jobs, or to rent land, of which there is plenty, to farm.
Wages are low.
Sukra earns 50 cents a day making mud bricks by hand, a common occupation in Adré, since refugees have sharply raised demand for housing.
Chad exemplifies one of the few positive trends for refugees.
Old-fashioned refugee camps, where residents are shut away for years and forced to subsist on handouts, are gradually going out of fashion.
More host countries are making it easier for refugees to work legally and to move around.
Colombia handed out huge numbers of work permits to Venezuelans after their country collapsed into chaos.
Kenya is letting a big refugee camp become a formal town.
However, some of the places that host the most refugees and asylum-seekers, such as Iran, Turkey and Germany, still make it hard to work legally.
Chad, a landlocked slice of the Sahel, has little in common with any rich country.
Yet the reasons Chadians tolerate refugees apply equally elsewhere.
Proximity helps a lot.
Europeans are more welcoming to Ukrainians than, say, Syrians, because Ukrainians are culturally close, everyone knows they are genuine refugees and Europe is the nearest place for them to flee to.
Likewise, Colombians have generally welcomed Venezuelans, and Ugandans have let in fugitives from neighbouring Congo.
It is much cheaper to help refugees in poor countries than in rich ones.
New York was recently spending $380 a night to house a typical refugee family in a hotel; the UNHCR in Chad budgets less than $1 a day per refugee to cover everything.
Studies find that refugees who travel only a short distance are more likely one day to return home.
Sukra says she would go back to Sudan “if there is peace”.
For these reasons, the world should try to help refugees as close to home and as quickly as possible, argues Susan Fratzke of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank.
The debate in rich countries focuses on the tiny share of the displaced who reach Europe or America, rather than the vast majority who do not.
This group tends not to be the most desperate: people-smugglers are expensive, so only the better-off can afford them.
Illicit boat rides are risky; those who attempt them are disproportionally young, male and healthy.
A study of Syrian refugees in 2015 found that those who made it only as far as Turkey were a normal cross-section of Syrian society; those who reached Europe were 15 times more likely to have a university degree.
Germany’s generous welcome of Syrian refugees in 2015 had “deeply ambivalent consequences”, argue Messrs Collier and Betts.
Around a million people who had already reached safety in Turkey were tempted to board risky boats and head for somewhere richer.
Thousands died.
Those who reached Germany mostly prospered.
But the episode spurred a global backlash against refugees and migrants.
There is no chance that rich countries will admit more than a small fraction of the world’s refugees.
If the aim of refugee policy is to provide safety to all who need it, the focus will have to be on the first safe places they reach.
If those havens are far away and poor, rich countries can fulfil their “duty of rescue” to more people by offering financial help in those places than by spending the same money on asylum-seekers on their own territory.
Rich countries should not only defray the short-term costs of admitting refugees, argue Messrs Collier and Betts.
They should also offer carrots (such as favourable trade terms) to persuade host governments to give the new arrivals a path out of dependency.
That means letting them work or, if they used to run a business, making it easier to rebuild that business in exile.
The rich world is starting to do some of these things, but not all.
Even as overall aid budgets dwindle, donors are prioritising payments to the last countries migrants pass through before arriving in the West.
Europe has lent money to Turkey and showered cash on North African states to stop people-smugglers from setting sail across the Mediterranean, for example.
However, aid to the conflict zones from which refugees first flee has suffered.
The UN’s budget for humanitarian assistance in 2025 is only 15% funded.
Mohamed Refaat, the IOM’s chief of mission in Sudan, warns of an even bigger exodus if the looming famine there is not checked.
Meanwhile, rich countries are making strenuous efforts to reduce the incentive to show up and claim asylum.
A year ago President Joe Biden barred anyone who crossed America’s southern border without permission from being considered for asylum.
Instead, he told migrants to apply from Mexico, using an app called CBP One, which let them enter biometric data and book an appointment for an interview.
This, plus a deal struck with Mexico, helped bring calm to America’s southern border.
Apprehensions there peaked at 300,000 in December 2023 and have since fallen by 96% (see chart 3).
Robert Ardovino, a restaurateur in El Paso, Texas, says illicit migrants used to cut through his fence all the time.
Now, glancing at Border Patrol helicopters circling Mount Cristo Rey, a former hotspot for crossings, he says that “these guys have been bored” since last summer.
Mr Trump tightened further, declaring a national emergency and completely halting asylum applications at the southern border.
On July 2nd a judge ruled that he lacks the authority to do this.
The White House will surely appeal.
“A marxist judge has declared that all potential FUTURE illegal aliens on foreign soil (eg a large portion of planet earth) are part of a protected global ‘class’ entitled to admission into the United States,” complained Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr Trump’s anti-immigration policies, on X.
Other rich countries are edging away from “territorial asylum”—the idea that people can apply for protection when they arrive.
Australia has long sent asylum-seekers to remote Pacific islands.
Various European governments are pondering schemes like the one blocked by the courts in Italy, to send asylum-seekers to Albania.
Such initiatives should be legal, argues Michael Spindelegger of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development in Vienna, another think-tank.
Albania is safe.
Hearing cases there will deter migrants whose cases are likely to fail from applying: they will not have access to Italy’s labour market while waiting.
Cases will be heard by Italian officials; those granted asylum will be allowed to come to Italy.
Rich countries are also getting more assertive about removing failed asylum-seekers, even if their home countries do not want them back.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has said the EU may limit visas for countries that do not co-operate.
Other governments have privately threatened to cut development aid.
Mr Trump, predictably, wields tariffs.
In January he menaced Colombia with 25% levies for refusing to accept deportees; Colombia quickly caved.
Third country’s a charm
When repatriation proves impossible, more failed asylum-seekers are being deported to third countries.
On March 11th the EU proposed a legislative framework to allow its members to build camps for failed asylum-seekers in safe but unappealing third countries, and to keep them there until they agree to go home.
The Netherlands is reportedly planning one in Uganda.
Mr Trump emphasises “unappealing” more than “safe”.
He has sent allegedly criminal migrants to a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador and to war-torn South Sudan.
The big question for reformers is how ruthlessly they should try to disentangle asylum from labour migration.
Rich countries with ageing populations need extra hands and brains, and refugees need jobs.
But it does not follow that refugees are the workers that rich countries most want.
More likely, they will give work visas to the people with the most desirable skills, not the saddest stories.
In theory, it would be possible to separate the two categories of migrant almost completely.
Suppose, for example, that rich countries refused to consider any asylum claim from a migrant who arrives without prior permission.
(Unless, like Ukrainians, they are fleeing from a war in the country next door.)
Suppose, also, that rich countries properly funded the UN-led system for coping with influxes of refugees in the first safe country they reach.
If rich countries also wanted to host some refugees, they could select some from those first safe countries, where their stories are usually easier to check.
Such a system would, in theory, offer safety to those who need it.
It would allow rich countries to manage labour migration in a more orderly fashion, and so perhaps gain voters’ consent for a reasonably welcoming approach.
It would be far from perfect, but surely better than today’s mess.
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