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Lack of access to services and information, including changed border processes, repatriations, poor health care, among other factors, place South Asian migrants at risk. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the vulnerability of Afghan, Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants, and rendered accurate information even more necessary. ICMPD’s Migrant Resource Centres reach out and provide reliable information to empower migrants in an effort to address this challenge.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic many organisations sounded the alarm for protecting the rights of the most vulnerable categories of population, including victims of human trafficking. With little tangible data available at the time of the outbreak, now is the right time to take stock of the impact and plan the next steps.

It is February 2024. Ahead of elections to the European Parliament, several commentators are pointing to the unlikely success of the EU’s migration policy. How did it happen?

The widespread national lockdowns witnessed since March 2020 unveiled the fragility of international cooperation. As Secretariat to four major Migration Dialogues, ICMPD and their respective Chairs mobilised Dialogues’ rich experience, knowledge and networks to counter fragmented responses to a crisis that goes beyond health and the economy.

One of the innovative tools proposed by the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum is the Talent Partnerships conceived as a single framework aiming to “offer cooperation with partner countries and help boost mutually-beneficial international mobility”. In this expert voice series, ICMPD explores how Talent Partnerships could be shaped, put in motion and brought to fruition by sharing experience, research findings and practices. In this first article, reflections are made on the lessons learnt from the implementation of several Pilot Projects on Legal Migration, within the framework of ICMPD’s Mobility Partnership Facility (MPF), funded by the European Commission, Directorate General Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME).

The country has a promising new government under Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi but faces a range of challenges connected to its large refugee and irregular migrant population.

While Europe is holding its breath in anticipation of another COVID-19 related lockdown, with people still adapting to closed borders and movement restrictions, the people of Afghanistan are all too familiar with this situation. For Afghans, the pandemic is merely one additional threat to health and life to cope with. Taking a holistic approach, this article will look at how COVID-19 might affect the migration patterns of Afghans, and which new threats and opportunities will develop.

With countries, regions and even cities increasingly looking to international talent to drive growth and innovation, the case of Lithuania shows how various Member States aspire to become more attractive destinations. What is more, it highlights the importance of responsive and comprehensive talent policies.

Free movement of labour within the EU has led to unprecedented possibilities for EU citizens to improve their lives by moving to higher-income EU Member States. The consequences for Member States who are mostly origin countries have so far received little attention. Facing increasing challenges on their domestic labour markets, a number of EU Member States have started to develop policies in order to attract back citizens to the country.

In the past years, the terms migration and crisis have been closely linked to one another in public discourse, especially since the so-called European migration and asylum crisis of 2015/16, when Europe witnessed a significant increase of inflows of people fleeing, inter alia, war and instability in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In this situation the EU and its Member States faced a wide range of challenges, including an overburdening of institutional capacities, the unpredictability of the migration routes and scope of inflows, as well as political disagreements on the distribution of applicants for international protection. Such crisis situations can severely impact public perception of migration and policy-making, but also provide an important learning opportunity that allows us to draw lessons on the migration and asylum systems currently in place and what is needed in terms of crisis preparedness and contingency planning.

The EU is strongly divided over the question of how to address international protection within the EU. The high numbers of mixed flows arriving at the borders of the EU in 2015/2016, transiting through several EU Member States (MS) and eventually seeking refuge in a handful of destination countries showed how vulnerable the EU's migration and asylum system is.

In October 2019, the first multiannual framework kicking off the development of the Common European Asylum System, the Tampere Programme, celebrates its 20th anniversary. Since then, three further multiannual programmes followed: the Hague Programme, the Stockholm Programme and the European Agenda on Migration. Each of the programmes emerged from very specific situations – either dominated by the accession of new Member States to the EU or by an increased inflow of applicants for international protection. During all these years, the vision of Tampere remained untouched; but is it still shared and backed by all of today’s EU Member States? This article is an extract of a chapter taken from the working paper “Harmonising asylum systems in Europe – a means or an end per se?” published in the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 funded research project, CEASEVAL and is accessible at its webpage.

References to skills of refugees with the aim of creating pathways for protection can be found in the context of the Global Compact on Refugees. But they were (at least initially) also intended to lead to a more purposeful relocation of asylum seekers from Italy or Greece to other EU MS under the EU relocation programme which ran from September 2016 until September 2018. Recently, several publications additionally addressed the question of refugee protection and a possible connection with labour market considerations.

One of the more sinister aspects of the global pandemic is the spread of deliberately misleading information online. ICMPD’s Regional Office for the Mediterranean considers how disinformation networks work to falsely portray migrants as vectors for the disease.

Millions of people are stranded abroad by COVID-19. The pandemic has triggered the largest repatriation operation in history. As a result, consular services are under tremendous pressure and are forced to work together.

The pandemic is teaching border agencies in Europe important lessons about operational preparedness in times of crisis. This has implications for the future in terms of training, staffing, cross-border information sharing and the use of technologies.

ICMPD field operatives track the ramifications of Covid-19 for migration in more than 90 countries. Over the past weeks, they have reported on developments in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. Here are some of the most important.

Migration ranks among the most important and contested public policy issues in many countries. In this context, the policy development process is often far away from the ‘ideal scenario’ and prone to being influenced by election cycles, public opinion or crisis situations.

On 29 January 2018 the AU adopted the Protocol to the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Right of Residence and Establishment, and its Implementation Roadmap. The movement of people for work and trade is central to the AU’s mission of economic integration, which it views as a key pathway to development. The drive for the continental free movement of persons originates from the Organisation for African Unity Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa, 1980-2000, and is perpetuated by leading AU development instruments, including the Abuja Treaty, Agenda 2063, and the Continental Free Trade Area Agreement.

Just recently, discussions on the future of the Dublin Regulation have come to a halt. The Bulgarian presidency reacted by installing an expert group to elaborate a zero draft on the future of the Dublin system. To recall, the Dublin Regulation is one of the core instruments of what is altogether referred to as the “Common European Asylum System (CEAS)”. All key CEAS instruments (the Asylum Procedures Directive, the Qualification Directive, the Reception Conditions Directive as well as the Regulation on the European Asylum Support Office (EASO)), are under discussion again along with the Dublin Regulation. The new legal framework shall find an agreement by the end of the Bulgarian presidency in June 2018.

The approach of states to managing immigration and asylum relies to a significant extent on the assignment of categories to people entering from abroad. Yet many adults and children travelling along migration routes do not fit neatly into just one of these categories. A new ICMPD Working Paper examines the challenges, and some possible ways forward, in dealing with the nexus between asylum, migrant smuggling and human trafficking in mixed migration contexts.

Trafficking in human beings (THB) is a complex issue. At the heart of trafficking is the exploitation of one human being against their will by another, yet a large number of legal and social issues are linked with this process. As a result, trafficking can simultaneously be considered an organised crime challenge, a human rights violation, an issue linked with migration, labour market dynamics, gender or economic development. Each of these perspectives applies a different “narrative” to explain what human trafficking is and why it occurs. These different narratives sometimes present challenges for media professionals and journalists reporting on THB, and can lead to inaccurate or damaging representations of trafficking in the media.

State cooperation on migration and mobility has intensified significantly in the last decade, not least at the regional level where it can take the shape of fully-fledged formal mobility frameworks, such as free movement within the European Union, or economic cooperation frameworks that only facilitate specific aspects of mobility, or informal migration dialogues, such as Rabat Process or Budapest Process.

Only a few weeks left until the European Council’s imposed deadline for finding an agreement on the third generation of the CEAS will be due. At the centre of discussions, once more, is the Dublin proposal.

18 October 2017 is the 11th EU Anti-Trafficking Day. At ICMPD, we take this opportunity to analyse the linkages between migration, asylum and human trafficking, to stress the importance of the distinctions between human trafficking and migrant smuggling, and to address the vulnerabilities of migrants and refugees to trafficking.