A Genocide Case, Seven Decades in the Making

In January 2026, the International Court of Justice opened full hearings in The Hague on a genocide case against Myanmar, brought by The Gambia. On the opening day, Gambian Justice Minister Dawda Jallow told the court that the Rohingya, a predominantly Sunni Muslim population from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, “have been targeted for destruction.” Myanmar’s military government, which seized power in a 2021 coup, rejected the case as “flawed and unfounded in fact and law.” Its Foreign Ministry statement on the proceedings did not use the word “Rohingya” at all, referring instead to “persons from Rakhine state.”¹

That terminological refusal, performed in 2026 on the floor of an international court hearing a genocide case, is not incidental. It is the latest iteration of a strategy assembled over seven decades. The genocide charges before the ICJ are anchored in the events of August and September 2017, when Myanmar’s security forces and local militia conducted a clearance operation in Rakhine State that drove approximately 750,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh within months. It is those operations, and the decades of deliberate legal construction that made them possible, that The Gambia has placed before the court as the evidentiary core of its genocide case. Survivors reported mass killings, rape, and the systematic burning of villages. On September 11, 2017, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, addressed the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva stating “Because Myanmar has refused access to human rights investigators,” he told the council, “the current situation cannot yet be fully assessed, but the situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”³

That statement did two things simultaneously: it named the crime and it named the strategy used to obscure it. More than eight years later, approximately 1.17 million Rohingya remain in overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, a figure that includes pre-2017 arrivals and births in the camps, in conditions the UN Secretary-General has described as a “stark reminder of the world’s collective failure to find solutions.”⁵ Without urgent new funding, the UN’s World Food Programme has warned that monthly rations could be halved to as little as six dollars per person. Meanwhile, there is no credible path of return.⁶

What the world witnessed in 2017 was not an eruption of spontaneous communal violence, nor simply a disproportionate military response to the attacks by Rohingya armed groups on police posts that preceded it. It was the terminal expression of a project constructed over seven decades: the deliberate, legally encoded effort to ensure that the Rohingya would possess no citizenship, no recognized identity, no land, and no legal standing from which to resist their own removal. It is precisely this terminal act, the 2017 clearance operations, that forms the evidentiary center of the case now before the ICJ. The Gambia’s legal argument rests on the premise that 2017 was not an isolated atrocity but the foreseeable culmination of a state policy spanning decades, and it is that argument this report is designed to examine. The ICJ hearings are not the beginning of that story. They are a late reckoning with a process that has been visible, documented, and largely unaddressed since Myanmar’s independence in 1948.

This report traces that process. It is a case study in how states manufacture the conditions for genocide and mass displacement: not through single acts of violence but through the patient accumulation of law, bureaucracy, propaganda, and institutional erasure. It is also a case study in the structural failure of the international legal framework designed to protect the forcibly displaced: a framework built for a different era, a different geography, and a different conception of how persecution operates.

Who Are the Rohingya

The Rohingya are a distinct ethnic and religious community with a documented presence in the Arakan region (now Rakhine State), extending to at least the fifteenth century.⁷ Prior to the displacement crisis that accelerated after 2012, their population in Myanmar numbered approximately 800,000 to one million, concentrated in the townships of northern Rakhine State along the Bangladesh border. They speak their own dialect, practice Sunni Islam in a majority Theravada Buddhist country, and constitute one of over 100 ethno-linguistic groups within Myanmar’s heterogeneous population.⁸

What distinguishes the Rohingya from other ethnic minorities in Myanmar is not simply their religion or ethnicity but their legal position. From the earliest years of the independent Burmese state, the ethnically Burmese national government refused to recognize them as one of the country’s constituent peoples. The term “Rohingya,” which surfaced as a self-identifying political term in the 1950s, has been consistently rejected by successive governments as an invented identity. The preferred designation “Bengali” functions to pre-emptively classify the group as immigrants from Bangladesh rather than indigenous residents of Rakhine. That terminological dispute is not semantic. It is the foundational argument on which all subsequent legal exclusions rest, and the one still being deployed, without revision, before the ICJ in 2026.

Building the Machine

Post-Independence Exclusion and the International Framework It Preceded

Myanmar’s Union of Burma declared independence from British colonial rule in 1948. Within months it was mired in civil conflict. Competition between the ethnically Burmese national government, the Communist Party of Burma, and a range of ethno-nationalist armed groups produced what Ashley South has described as the longest-running internal conflict of its type in the twentieth century.⁹ It was against this backdrop of contested sovereignty and fractured national identity that the legal infrastructure of Rohingya exclusion began to take shape.

The British colonial system had organized the populations of Burma according to racial and ethnic taxonomies that distinguished “sons of the soil” (taingyintha) from populations of Chinese and South Asian origin. The latter had been favored under colonial administration and as a result, Elliott Prasse-Freeman has observed, rendered convenient objects of populist anger by the post-colonial state.¹⁰ The 1947 Constitution of independent Burma inaugurated a common citizenship but granted it automatically to members of specified indigenous races. As Amanda R. Cheong has documented in her ethnographic study of the crisis, the 1948 Union Citizenship Act named eight groups as automatically qualifying, among them the Arakanese, Burmese, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah, Mon, and Shan, as well as any group settled permanently prior to 1823. The Rohingya were not named.¹¹ They were, from the moment of independence, vulnerable to discrimination through policy, persecution, limitation of movement, land appropriation, and denial of citizenship rights.¹²

It is worth pausing to note what was happening simultaneously in international law. In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Three years later, the UN convened at a high-level conference in Geneva that produced the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees: the foundational legal instrument of the international protection regime.¹³ The convention defined a refugee as any person with a well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, who is outside their country of nationality and unable or unwilling to seek its protection.

The convention was geographically and temporally circumscribed in ways that reflected its origins rather than the scale of the problem it claimed to address. It applied only to persons displaced by events before January 1, 1951, and initial application was largely European. The convention’s drafting was dominated by the most powerful states in the early postwar UN: states that were simultaneously colonial empires with limited interest in extending protection obligations to non-European populations.¹⁴ India’s delegate objected explicitly during drafting, pointing to millions displaced by the 1947 partition. Those objections were set aside.¹⁵

The result was a framework that formally recognized the principle of non-refoulement and the right not to be returned to persecution, though the framework had been constructed with no regard for the conditions of manufactured statelessness already being imposed on populations in Southeast Asia. When the Burmese state began assembling the legal architecture of Rohingya exclusion, the international system designed to protect such populations was written for a different geography and a different crisis. The two systems developed in parallel, and the gap between them was, from the outset, structural.

The 1962 Coup and the Logic of Manufactured Threat

The 1962 military coup brought General Ne Win and the Tatmadaw to power and marks the beginning of what Mary Patricia Callahan has described as a state “predicated on, constructed around, and ultimately held hostage to organized violence.”¹⁸ The Tatmadaw, in Callahan’s analysis, must be understood as war fighters first: an institution that perceives any organized expression of political difference as a threat to a historically fragile state that has never fully monopolized violence, and that therefore employs it as the primary instrument of authority.

Within this structure, the Rohingya occupied a particularly exposed position. Niloy Ranjan Biswas characterizes Myanmar as a “garrison state,” one “compulsively concerned about constructed existential threats to itself.”¹⁹ The Rohingya served as ideal targets for exactly these manufactured threats. As Kevin Bi has argued, ethnic armed organizations such as the Kachin and Kokang were met with a different military calculus precisely because both maintained significant armed capacity, controlled resource-rich territory, and shared a border with China.²⁰ The Rohingya shared a border with Bangladesh, posed no comparable geopolitical deterrent, and lacked both the resource base and armed strength that might have afforded protection. Their vulnerability was not incidental. It was structural, and the state’s targeting of them was deliberate.

The constitutional crystallization of this exclusion came in 1982 with the Burma Citizenship Law. Ne Win framed the legislation as a solution to the problem of foreigners introduced by British colonization. The law disaggregated citizenship into a three-tier hierarchy and defined full citizenship as automatically available only to members of recognized national races. The Rohingya were excluded. Significantly, the Kaman, another Muslim minority in Rakhine State, were recognized as a national race, which, as Cheong notes, demonstrates that the exclusion was constructed specifically around the Rohingya rather than motivated purely by religious prejudice.¹⁶

The 1982 law was implemented through an expansion of documentary control. New citizenship scrutiny cards, unlike prior National Registration Cards, contained a space for the holder’s race and religion filled in by a Ministry official. As Rohingya communities in Rakhine State exchanged old cards for new ones through the 1980s and 1990s, they found themselves classified en masse as non-citizens. Cheong’s interviews with Rohingya activists document the disorientation of this process: many had possessed National Registration Cards that functioned as de facto proof of national belonging. The card exchange unfolded gradually and inconsistently across communities, but its effect on the Rohingya was systematic.¹⁷

The 1967 Protocol: Expansion Without Reach

The same decades that saw the Rohingya’s legal status systematically dismantled saw the Tatmadaw entrench an institutional posture of systematic resistance to international legal accountability. Myanmar has never ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol,²¹ leaving those displaced across its borders without formal protection obligations binding on the state from which they fled. Its non-ratification is not an oversight but a consistent pattern.

As David Steinberg has documented, Ne Win’s 1974 constitution institutionalized an isolationist foreign policy premised on non-interference and the rejection of external scrutiny as the foundational principle of military governance. Writing on Myanmar’s foreign policy, Renaud Egreteau and Larry Jagan coined the phrase “isolationism without isolation” to describe the Tatmadaw’s approach: the systematic rejection of participation in international institutions while cultivating bilateral relationships with China and Russia that provided diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council.³⁰ Even as Myanmar engaged selectively with international bodies when it served its interests, the military government refused access to UN human rights investigators for decades, denied the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and characterized every international legal proceeding as a violation of sovereignty rather than an application of law.

Myanmar signed human rights treaties whose obligations it had no intention of translating into enforceable domestic law, accruing the diplomatic benefits of formal participation in the international system while systematically insulating itself from its enforcement mechanisms. This is not an anomalous strategy. It reflects what Jack Donnelly has described as the foundational paradox of the international human rights regime: states are simultaneously the primary violators of human rights and the primary entities identified as responsible for upholding them.³⁵ International human rights law is built on the consent of the states it is designed to constrain.

It is against this background of deliberate legal non-participation that the 2017 clearance operations must be understood: they were conducted by an institution that had, for decades, operated on the premise that no external legal framework could reach it.

Myanmar was not bound by these expanding frameworks, and the 1951 definition’s architecture created specific problems for the Rohingya case. The convention requires a nexus between feared harm and five enumerated grounds. The Rohingya could plausibly claim several simultaneously. But the 1982 Citizenship Law had constructed a legal argument that denied the very premise of such a claim: if the Rohingya were not citizens, not a recognized national group, and classified as foreign nationals, the state’s position was that they could not be persecuted as Rohingya by Myanmar, because Myanmar did not recognize them as belonging to Myanmar in the first place. Stateless persons can in principle invoke protection by reference to their country of former habitual residence, though neither Myanmar nor Bangladesh has ratified the 1951 Convention, leaving enforcement dependent entirely on political will that has consistently been absent. The deeper structural problem, as Donnelly identifies it, is that the very architecture of international human rights law reproduces this dependence at every level: rights are declared universal, but their implementation is returned to the states most likely to violate them.³⁵

Operationalizing Persecution

Waves of Displacement and the Logic of Erasure

The legal architecture described above was not simply discriminatory. It was operational. It created the conditions under which organized, state-directed violence against the Rohingya could be conducted at scale without triggering effective international legal response. The pattern of displacement that followed is consistent and extensively documented.

In 1978, Operation Nagamin drove over 200,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. A further campaign in the early 1990s displaced approximately 250,000 more.²⁴ Both waves resulted in partial repatriation agreements. Those agreements returned displaced persons to the same conditions of legal exclusion that had produced displacement in the first place. Repatriation, in this context, was not resolution. It was the resetting of conditions for the next cycle.

Cheong’s archival and ethnographic research reveals the specific mechanics of what she terms “bureaucratic omission”: the strategy by which states pursue racial exclusion not through the institutionalization of racial categories but through the deliberate withdrawal of administrative recognition. Rather than classifying the Rohingya as a stigmatized group and persecuting that group — a strategy that generates documentary evidence and legal exposure — the Myanmar state pursued a strategy of making the population invisible to state systems, then using that invisibility as the basis for removal. This distinction matters enormously. Persecution leaves traces. Omission is designed not to.¹¹

The 2014 Census: Institutionalizing Erasure

Nowhere is this strategy more visible than in Myanmar’s 2014 census, the country’s first in over thirty years. In its formal agreement with the United Nations, the government, in the words of UNFPA (which co-funded the exercise), “explicitly and repeatedly agreed” that each person would be able to declare their own ethnicity, including those identifying as Rohingya. The day before enumeration began, the government reversed course. Anyone wishing to identify as Rohingya would be forbidden to do so and could instead identify as Bengali. Buddhist nationalist groups had threatened a boycott; the government capitulated.²⁵

UNFPA stated publicly that it was “deeply concerned about this departure from international census standards, human rights principles and agreed procedures.”²⁶ The result, documented in Myanmar’s own census report, was that approximately 1,090,000 people in Rakhine State went uncounted. The provisional government report described this as a “security measure to avoid the possibility of violence.” The full census report, published the following year, omitted the word “Rohingya” entirely, stating only that certain communities were not counted because they were “not allowed to self-identify using a name that is not recognized by the Government.”²⁷

The significance of this framing cannot be overstated. By not counting the Rohingya, the state did not simply fail to collect data. It actualized, through the legitimizing power of official census figures, a demographic reality that supported its foundational narrative: that this population does not exist as a recognized group within Myanmar. To obliquely acknowledge but deliberately not count a people communicates a precise symbolic declaration: that persons who attempt to identify as Rohingya do not qualify as persons to be recognized. Documentation of a population’s non-existence is, paradoxically, one of the most effective instruments of erasure.

Documentary Dispossession: The 2015 Card Cancellations

The census erasure was compounded in the months that followed. In February 2015, ahead of Myanmar’s first general elections since 1990, President Thein Sein issued an executive order invalidating the Temporary Registration Cards held by Rohingya communities in Rakhine State, effective March 31. For most Rohingya, these cards had been their only form of official identification since the 1982 Citizenship Law’s implementation. An estimated 390,000 surrendered their cards; what they received in exchange were documents the government itself acknowledged were not proof of citizenship.²⁸

Cheong’s fieldwork documents the political calculus: the military-backed Union Solidarity and Democratic Party moved to disenfranchise the Rohingya to appease Buddhist nationalist factions ahead of a competitive election. What transpired was more fundamental than disenfranchisement. A population that had been stripped of citizenship, denied census recognition, and now deprived of its last documentary identity found itself holding papers that explicitly stated they proved nothing, in the months immediately preceding the 2017 clearance operations that form the evidentiary core of the genocide case now before the ICJ. The sequence was not coincidental. It was preparatory. Each step in the documentary dispossession contributes to The Gambia’s legal argument that what followed in 2017 was not spontaneous violence but the deliberate execution of a policy made possible by decades of manufactured legal exclusion.

2017 and After: The Culmination of a Constructed Crisis

The August 2017 attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on police posts provided a pretext for the military campaign that followed. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, addressing the Human Rights Council three weeks into the operation, described the response as “clearly disproportionate” and conducted “without regard for basic principles of international law.” He called on the government to “stop claiming that the Rohingyas are setting fire to their own homes and laying waste to their own villages,” characterizing this as a “complete denial of reality.” He also cited the fact that successive Myanmar governments had, since 1962, been progressively stripping the Rohingya of their political and civil rights, including citizenship. The 2017 crisis was not a rupture. It was the product of a system.³

A UN fact-finding mission subsequently concluded that the 2017 offensive had included genocidal acts and that there was sufficient basis to warrant investigation and prosecution for genocide. The Minority Rights Group has documented how persecution operates simultaneously on ethnic and religious dimensions, with community members routinely vilified as “Bengalis” while the targeting of Muslim religious practice compounds the ethnic dimensions of exclusion.²⁹ The democratic transition period, rather than relieving this pressure, intensified it. The years between 2012 and 2018 saw increasingly violent dispossession precisely as civilian rule threatened to undermine the Tatmadaw’s dominance. The clearance operations drove approximately 750,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh within months. These individuals were not fleeing a sudden catastrophe. They were fleeing the terminal expression of policies assembled over seven decades.

Renaud Egreteau and Larry Jagan have characterized Myanmar’s foreign policy orientation as “isolationism without isolation”: the systematic rejection of participation in international institutions while cultivating bilateral relationships, particularly with China and Russia, that provide diplomatic insulation from accountability.³⁰ The consequences of that posture are documented in the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar’s 2023 report, which found that the UN’s own internal review concluded the system was “relatively impotent” to work effectively with Myanmar’s authorities to reverse human rights trends, a product of “systemic and structural failures” within the UN itself.³¹ Myanmar’s government had constructed a diplomatic environment in which the international protection regime could observe displacement, document it, and express concern about it but tt could not stop it.

The ICJ Case and What It May and May Not Mean

The January 2026 hearings in The Hague placed before the court a formal legal argument that the events of 2017 and the decades preceding them constitute the systematic destruction of a people. This is the first genocide case the ICJ has taken up in full in more than a decade, and its outcome will have implications beyond Myanmar, likely reshaping how the 1948 Genocide Convention is interpreted and applied for years to come. The case argues, correctly, that genocide is not a single act but a process, and that the process in Myanmar is documented, traceable, and constructed over seven decades. Whether the court ultimately finds in The Gambia’s favor matters enormously. But the framing alone — placing responsibility not on rogue commanders or a moment of communal violence but on the deliberate architecture of a state — represents a significant development in international legal thought.

A finding of genocide would also create binding legal obligations: to cease genocidal acts, to restore citizenship, to allow safe return, to provide reparations. Myanmar’s military government, which brought the same terminological strategy to The Hague that it deployed in the 1982 Citizenship Law, the 2014 census, and the 2015 card cancellations, has given no indication that it would comply. The court’s enforcement mechanism depends on Article 94(2) of the UN Charter, which allows the Security Council to act if a state defies an ICJ judgment. China and Russia, which have consistently shielded Myanmar at the Security Council, hold vetoes. The route from legal determination to political consequence runs directly through a wall that two permanent members have every incentive to maintain.

What the case has already accomplished — simply by existing and proceeding to full merits — is to enter into the permanent international record a legal argument that cannot be undone by Myanmar’s non-compliance. The ICJ’s provisional measures of January 2020, ordered while the full case was pending, were defied continuously. The court proceeded regardless. If a merits ruling follows, it will stand as a legal determination of state responsibility for genocide regardless of whether it produces immediate political change. That is not nothing. It is the basis on which future accountability claims, sanctions regimes, and diplomatic pressure can rest, and it forecloses the space for deniability that has for decades been the Tatmadaw’s primary diplomatic asset.

Myanmar’s response to the proceedings is itself instructive. Its government described the case as based on “biased reports” and “unreliable evidence” while simultaneously presenting itself as cooperating “in good faith” as a sign of respect for international law.³² The statement’s refusal to use the word “Rohingya,” deployed with consistency before an international court, confirms that the bureaucratic erasure strategy has not been abandoned. It has been brought to The Hague.

What the Ruling Will Not Change: The Camps and the Question of Return

Cox’s Bazar is the largest refugee camp complex in the world. The Rohingya have been there in significant numbers since 1978 — before many of the people currently living in those camps were born. The settlements that expanded dramatically after 2017 were never intended to be permanent. They have become permanent by default, because no state has created the conditions under which they could be otherwise. The ICJ proceedings, whatever they produce, do not change this directly.

The Rohingya in Bangladesh have no formal legal status. Bangladesh has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, meaning the country’s obligations are defined by political will rather than legal compulsion. The Rohingya cannot work legally, cannot move freely, and cannot access the national school system. They are held in a camp from which there is no defined exit: not integration, which Bangladesh has not offered and cannot sustain, and not return, which remains impossible.

Return is impossible not only because of the 2021 military coup and the civil war it produced. It was impossible before the coup. The legal conditions that generated displacement — the 1982 Citizenship Law, the documentary dispossession, the demographic denial — remained entirely intact through every period of Myanmar’s ostensible political transition. Repatriation without restored citizenship and legal recognition is not return. It is a different form of the same erasure, and the Rohingya who experienced forced returns in the 1990s can attest to what that cycle produces.

In principle, an ICJ ruling establishing state responsibility for genocide should create the legal architecture for demanding those conditions change. The compliance paradox runs deep: Myanmar’s generals are acutely aware that political transition means personal legal exposure. International accountability proceedings put those leaders on notice that stepping down does not mean safety. That notice can harden resistance rather than producing compliance that might ultimately mean prosecution for individual leaders. The conditions in Cox’s Bazar have been deteriorating regardless: WFP rations cut repeatedly since 2023, with warnings that monthly allocations could fall to as little as six dollars per person, while the UN Secretary-General has described the situation as “a stark reminder of the world’s collective failure to find solutions.”⁵ The Rohingya in those camps are not waiting for a legal argument to be won. They are living the consequence of arguments that were won on paper and then ignored.

Conclusion

The Rohingya were counted out of a census in 2014. They were rendered legally stateless in 1982. They were excluded from recognition as a national people in 1948. Each of these acts was deliberate, documented, and conducted in the presence of international institutions that lacked either the authority or the will to intervene. The 2017 clearance operations were not the beginning of this story. They were its culmination: the terminal act of a state policy assembled over decades, a policy of exclusion so methodically constructed that it produced, without ever requiring a single explicit order to commit genocide, the material and legal conditions in which genocide became possible. That, in substance, is The Gambia’s argument before the ICJ: that genocidal intent must be inferred from the pattern of conduct, and that the pattern is unambiguous. The court will determine whether the evidence meets the legal threshold. This report concludes that it does.

The 2026 hearings may well produce a ruling that matters to international law in ways that extend far beyond Myanmar. The case presses the court to determine whether the systematic, decades-long manufacture of statelessness, reinforced by state-sanctioned violence constitutes genocide under the 1948 Convention. If it finds that it does, the ruling will reshape how the convention is applied to future cases involving gradual state-directed exclusion rather than sudden mass killing. It will establish that the pattern of documentary dispossession, demographic denial, and manufactured legal non-existence is not merely discriminatory policy but a form of destruction recognizable in international law. That would be a genuine and significant development, with implications for populations facing analogous strategies of erasure in other contexts.

What it will not do, on its own, is change the conditions of Cox’s Bazar. The Rohingya have been in those camps, in some form, since 1978. The settlements that grew after 2017 represent not a temporary crisis awaiting resolution but the institutionalized consequence of a protection regime designed to observe displacement rather than reverse it. The 1.17 million people there are stateless. They have no legal status in the country hosting them, no right to work, no path to integration, and no viable route of return to a country that erased them in law before it expelled them in fact. WFP rations have been cut repeatedly; the UN Secretary-General has described their situation as a failure of collective responsibility; and the international community has, with considerable consistency, described the problem accurately and then declined to solve it.

The legal case has been made, and it is damning. The evidentiary record assembled over three decades of UN investigations, fact-finding missions, and legal proceedings leaves no serious doubt about what happened to the Rohingya or why. What remains is the oldest and most intractable problem in international affairs: the distance between a legal determination and a political consequence, between an institution that can name a crime and a world in which the states with the power to stop it have calculated reasons not to. Whether the January 2026 hearings represent a genuine reckoning or another entry in a long archive of documented failures will not be decided in The Hague. It will be decided in Beijing, in Dhaka, in ASEAN capitals, and in the foreign ministries of the states that intervened in this case to declare their commitment to the Genocide Convention and must now determine what that commitment costs.

The Rohingya have been waiting for that answer since 1948. They are still waiting.

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Endnotes

1. Adam Hancock, “Myanmar says Rohingya genocide case at The Hague is flawed, unfounded,” Al Jazeera, 14 January 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/14/myanmar-says-rohingya-genocide-case-at-the-hague-is-flawed-unfounded

2. Ibid.

3. Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, Statement to the UN Human Rights Council, 11 September 2017, UN News, https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/09/564622-un-human-rights-chief-points-textbook-example-ethnic-cleansing-myanmar

4. Ibid.

5. Vibhu Mishra, “After mass exodus, limbo: Rohingya refugees test international resolve,” UN News, 29 September 2025, https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1162166

6. Ibid. The $6 figure was described by Muhammad Yunus, Chief Adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government, in his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2025, citing a World Food Programme warning.

7. Mehebub Sahana, Selim Jahangir, and Md. Anisujjaman, “Forced Migration and the Expatriation of the Rohingya: A Demographic Assessment of Their Historical Settlements,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 38, no. 1 (2018): 39–56.

8. Michael Aung-Thwin and Maitrii Aung-Thwin, A History of Myanmar Since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations (London: Reaktion Books, 2012).

9. Ashley South, Mon Nationalism and Civil War in Burma (London: Routledge, 2013), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203037478.

10. Elliott Prasse-Freeman, “The Rohingya Crisis,” Anthropology Today 33, no. 6 (December 2017): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12389.

11. Amanda R. Cheong, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar,” Social Problems 70, no. 2 (2023): 340–359, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spab054.

12. Sahana et al., “Forced Migration and the Expatriation of the Rohingya,” 46.

13. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, July 28, 1951, 189 U.N.T.S. 137, art. 1(A)(2). Entered into force April 22, 1954.

14. The National Archives (UK), “The 1951 Refugee Convention,” https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/explore-the-collection/stories/the-1951-refugee-convention/

15. Ibid.

16. Cheong, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission,” 345. The 1982 law disaggregated citizenship into full, associate, and naturalized tiers. The Kaman’s recognition as a national race is documented in the official list of 135 recognized national races published by Myanmar’s government.

17. Cheong, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission,” 345–346. The new citizenship scrutiny cards introduced in the 1980s, unlike prior National Registration Cards, contained a space for the holder’s race and religion filled in by a Ministry official, enabling the administrative reclassification of Rohingya as non-citizens.

18. Mary Patricia Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2–3.

19. Niloy Ranjan Biswas, “Myanmar’s Military and the Garrison State,” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 5, no. 2 (December 2019): 158–173, https://doi.org/10.1177/2057891119843842.

20. Kevin Bi, “The Politics of Slaughter: Why Myanmar’s Military Targets the Rohingya,” Harvard International Review 39, no. 4 (2018): 14–15.

21. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, January 31, 1967, 606 U.N.T.S. 267. Entered into force October 4, 1967.

22. OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, September 10, 1969, 1001 U.N.T.S. 45, art. I(2).

23. Marina Sharpe, “The 1969 African Refugee Convention: Innovations, Misconceptions, and Omissions,” McGill Law Journal 58, no. 1 (January 2013): 95–147.

24. Human Rights Watch, “Burma/Bangladesh: Burmese Refugees in Bangladesh — Historical Background,” Human Rights Watch, 2000, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/burma/burm009.htm

25. Cheong, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission,” 347–348. The figure of approximately 1,090,000 not enumerated in Rakhine State is drawn from the Department of Population’s own provisional census report.

26. UNFPA, “Making Sense of Myanmar’s Census,” 31 March 2014, https://www.unfpa.org/news/making-sense-myanmars-census.

27. Cheong, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission,” 348. The full census report’s language — that communities were not counted because they were “not allowed to self-identify using a name that is not recognized by the Government” — appears in the Myanmar Population and Housing Census 2014, Volume 2C, Rakhine State report.

28. Cheong, “Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission,” 349–350. The figure of approximately 390,000 TRC-holders surrendering cards in 2015 is cited from UNHCR documentation.

29. Minority Rights Group International, “Muslims and Rohingya in Myanmar,” January 29, 2024, https://minorityrights.org/communities/muslims-and-rohingya/

30. Renaud Egreteau and Larry Jagan, Back to the Old Habits: Isolationism or the Self-Preservation of Burma’s Military Regime (Bangkok: IRASEC, 2008).

31. Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), “How the UN Is Failing Myanmar,” October 2023, https://specialadvisorycouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/SAC-M-How-the-UN-is-Failing-Myanmar-Oct2023-ENG.pdf

32. Hancock, “Myanmar says Rohingya genocide case at The Hague is flawed, unfounded.”

33. UNHCR, “The 1951 Refugee Convention,” https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/overview/1951-refugee-convention.

34. Arthur C. Helton, The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

35. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 33.

Climate Change and Forced Displacement

Experts consider climate change the biggest threat to human life worldwide.¹ Among the most affected are internally displaced persons (IDPs), people forced to leave their homes because of environmental changes caused by climate change. Bangladesh, like many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, is disproportionately impacted by climate change-driven displacement.² Due to its distinctive geography and overcrowded population, Bangladesh is on the front lines of the climate crisis, facing frequent disasters such as floods, storm surges, droughts, and cyclones.³⁻⁴ According to the latest figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), climate related extreme weather events internally displaced 2.4 million people in Bangladesh in 2024.⁵ Looking ahead, the World Bank projects that the number of people displaced within the country could reach 13.3 million by 2050 due to climate change.⁶

Consequently, internally displaced persons experience various human rights violations such as the deprivation of suitable housing, education, and healthcare. This report takes a closer look at how climate change is affecting the rights of internally displaced people.

Key Sections:

• Climate displacement patterns and trends in Bangladesh establishes the context of the growing predicament.

• Climate impacts on the rights of internally displaced persons.

• Human rights based assessment of the global/local legal framework, pointing out where policies fall short.

The core finding of this report is that while Bangladesh has taken important steps to incorporate human rights considerations for climate-induced displaced people into its climate change policy framework, significant gaps remain in both the articulation and implementation of these protections. Although policies such as the National Strategy on Internal Displacement (2021),⁷ the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (2009),⁸ and the National Adaptation Plan (2023-2050)⁹ acknowledge the plight of IDPs, they often lack the specificity, enforcement mechanisms, and resource allocation necessary to translate policy commitments into tangible protections on the ground. The shortcomings become particularly evident when examining how IDPs’ fundamental rights including the right to life, health, education, and adequate housing, are compromised in practice, despite existing policy frameworks.

Climate Displacement in Bangladesh: Patterns and Trends

Climate displacement refers to the movement of people driven by significant environmental changes.¹⁰ It can occur from different events such as sudden disasters like floods and cyclones or slower-onset events such as prolonged droughts and heatwaves.¹¹ Most often, this displacement is forced, and a major portion of it is classified as internal displacement, occurring when people are uprooted within their own country’s borders. The scale of displacement in Bangladesh has reached alarming levels. The recent report of the IDMC highlighted that in 2024 alone, disaster-induced displacements climbed to 2.4 million, marking the fourth consecutive year of increase and the third-highest figure ever recorded in the nation.¹² Since global monitoring began in 2008, IDMC has recorded approximately 21.2 million displacements triggered by disasters in the country.¹³ Moreover, this report documented a total of 123 disaster events, with the overwhelming majority caused by weather-related hazards.¹⁴ Cyclones and floods remain the primary drivers.

Displacement is not a single, uniform experience; it takes various forms. Temporary displacement is one common pattern of internal displacement. When sudden disasters like hurricanes and storm surges happen, people are often forced to leave their homes temporarily, but people usually cannot go very far because they don’t have enough money to travel long distances.¹⁵ This is because they are already struggling with poverty and other difficult economic situations. Temporary displacement is a strategy that many rural poor people in Bangladesh use to survive for a longer period of time.¹⁶ In many situations where people have to leave their homes temporarily, they typically return to their homes over time. People who live in rural areas also often move temporarily during different times of the year to perform seasonal work.

However, there are many people who are moving away permanently due to climate change. There are several reasons why more people are moving permanently, including socio-economic factors.¹⁷ But climate change has made this process happen faster. Permanent moves create a new set of challenges for people in densely populated developing countries like Bangladesh. According to statistical evidence, Dhaka receives about 400,000 low-income migrants each year.¹⁸ Livelihood systems are severely impacted by flooding, severe storms, droughts, or more gradual but equally significant changes in the area’s climate.¹⁹ When people are forced to permanently relocate, they often arrive in urban areas without adequate resources, social networks, or legal protections. This displacement strips them of the stability and support systems they once relied upon in their communities of origin. Many find themselves living in informal settlements where access to basic services is limited and where their fundamental human rights become increasingly vulnerable. The loss of livelihood, combined with inadequate living conditions in their new locations, creates a cascade of human rights challenges that affect every aspect of displaced persons’ lives, from their physical safety and health to their children’s education and their ability to secure adequate shelter.

Effects of Climate Change on the Rights of Internally Displaced Persons

Effect on the Right to Life

The right to life is the most fundamental human right. Climate change’s broad and overlapping effects directly undermine key aspects of this right.²⁰ The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC projects that an increase in climate change induced heat waves, floods, and droughts will directly cause a rise in suffering from death, disease and injury.²¹ This report also states that the effects of climate change in certain regions may result in hunger, malnutrition and related disorders that affect child growth and development, cardiorespiratory morbidity and mortality related to ground-level ozone.²² The number of people killed in Bangladesh due to cyclones comprises around 53% of the world’s cyclone-related deaths.²³ In a 1991 cyclonic storm, 138,866 people were killed and millions were injured, while enormous losses were encountered by properties and infrastructure.²⁴ Among other extreme events, the super Cyclone Sidr in 2007 killed 4,236 people and caused huge damage to agriculture, fisheries, forestry, health facilities, water supplies and sanitation infrastructure. Since 2007, other cyclones have taken approximately 4,000 lives.²⁵

Research has demonstrated that displaced persons in Bangladesh face significantly elevated mortality risks compared to non-displaced populations. Studies show that climate-displaced households experience substantially increased health expenditures and heightened vulnerability to climate-sensitive diseases including diarrhea, dengue, malaria, and respiratory infections, with approximately 45% becoming unhoused for extended periods averaging 38 days.²⁶ Climate change places the right to life of displaced people more at risk than non-displaced people because displaced people lose the usual resources required for living and adaptation. Thus, the right to life is transformed from a guaranteed entitlement into a fragile contingency shaped by geography and poverty.

Effect on the Right to Education

During Cyclone Aila, educational institutions like schools and colleges in the areas were flooded by storm surges.²⁷ Besides these institutions are relatively higher than the locality and so many forced migrants took shelter in them. As a result, regular education ceased in those institutions. As this hazard occurred in the middle of the year, government and non-government institutions have shown their reluctance to readmit the migrant children. As per the latest report of the UNICEF, about 5.4% of these children have already abandoned the schools due to the climate displacement.²⁸ This data was received from 5930 educational institutions that are located in climate hot-spots located in 31 districts.²⁹ Moreover it has been mentioned that 28.1% indicated that children do not go to school regularly after the climate displacement.³⁰

Effect on the Right to Health

With the erosion of river banks, there has been an increase in the threats to human health. Recent research highlighted that IDPs in Bangladesh were infected with new ailments they had not been exposed to before being displaced due to riverbank erosion.³¹ Several IDPs have high blood pressure, diarrhoea, malnutrition, and cardiovascular disorders that primarily originate from displacement to unhealthy environments.³² A lack of access to drinking water and a scarcity of fresh water causes an increase in skin diseases and diarrhea. For example, clean water is often unavailable to IDPs who dwell in areas like open spaces, roadsides, or river embankments.³³

Riverbank erosion not only has a negative impact on their socio-economic conditions and physical well-being, but also harms the mental health of IDPs. Internal displacement is a significant contributor to depression, anxiety, and stress. Due to riverbank erosion, most respondents experience anxiety, stress, and depression. Many IDPs turn to narcotics to cope with their mental health issues.³⁴ According to several female respondents, “Family quarrels were not a frequent occurrence in my family before riverbank erosion, but following the incident, we often engage in family quarrels and are occasionally beaten by our husbands. The financial crisis, loneliness, anxiety, and depression about life are the main reasons for family quarrels.”³⁵

Effect on the Right to Housing

Climate change directly affects the right to adequate housing in several ways. Generally, displaced people experience serious problems when trying to ensure their right to adequate housing. Climate change leads to increasing rural-urban migration when it affects housing.³⁶ People usually move to urban slums and informal settlements, where they are often forced to build shelters in hazardous areas due to lack of government support. There are no specific statistics on the number of people who have already been displaced due to climate change. Flooding occurs almost every year in Bangladesh, causing devastation to housing and acting as a contributing factor in the decision to migrate because people may be left with no other option.³⁷ However, once every few years a major flood occurs, forcing even more migration.

Gendered Impact: Women and Girls

Climate-induced displacement reshapes women’s roles and exposes them to compounding vulnerabilities. Researchers for Refugee Law Initiatives highlighted that in Shyamnagar and similar coastal regions, women once contributed approximately Tk. 42,000 annually—around 43.52 percent of household income—through agriculture and fisheries.³⁸ However, rising salinity and repeated flooding have submerged shrimp farms and reduced fish production due to excessive heat, eliminating employment opportunities for women while wages remain low and unstable.³⁹ When climate disasters force families to abandon their homes and relocate—often to urban slums in areas like Mirpur and Mohammadpur in Dhaka—displaced women and girls face heightened vulnerability as families lose both livelihood and security.⁴⁰

Research tracking these displaced populations reveals that approximately 2,000 people migrate daily to Dhaka from coastal areas, with 70% driven by natural disasters and climate change.⁴¹ Within this context of climate-driven displacement, early marriage emerges as a survival strategy rather than a cultural choice. Climate-related displacement in coastal districts has been associated with a reported 39 percent increase in child marriage, with studies documenting that more than two-thirds of child marriage victims had encountered at least one natural disaster event before marriage.⁴²

When displacement disrupts income and forces school closures, daughters become perceived as economic burdens, and families facing acute survival pressure accept dowry-free proposals or promises of employment elsewhere. In the worst cases, marriage becomes a pathway to trafficking and unpaid labour, as displaced girls are moved across districts or borders and absorbed into domestic servitude or exploitative work.⁴³ The Bangladesh government has officially acknowledged this pattern, reporting that climate-induced displacement is increasing vulnerability to trafficking, with an estimated 700,000 people displaced annually over the past decade due to natural disasters.⁴⁴ Climate-induced displacement, therefore, functions as a multiplier of gendered harm, systematically undermining the rights and safety of women and girls.

Climate-induced internal displacement therefore operates not as an isolated environmental phenomenon but as a structural mechanism through which multiple human rights are simultaneously violated and perpetuated across generations.

International and National Legal Frameworks

International Framework

At the international level, IDPs affected by climate-induced displacement have important instruments that support their human rights claims. The 2005 Inuit Human Rights Petition was the first time that a community officially linked climate change to human rights violations, petitioning the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.⁴⁵ Later, the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report established a clear link between climate change and human rights, stating that climate change has consequences for “many of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the right to life, to the means of subsistence, to health, to property, and, in some cases, to the homeland itself.”⁴⁶

The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement provide the most comprehensive framework for protecting IDPs.⁴⁷ These principles establish that states have the primary duty and responsibility to provide protection and humanitarian assistance to IDPs within their jurisdiction, and that IDPs retain all the rights and freedoms under international and domestic law enjoyed by other citizens. The IASC Operational Guidelines on Human Rights and Natural Disasters further clarify that the rights-based approach applies equally to natural disasters as to conflict-induced displacement.⁴⁸

Key international human rights instruments also apply to climate-induced IDPs. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) protects the right to life, liberty, and security of person.⁴⁹ The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) guarantees the rights to adequate housing, food, water, health, and education.⁵⁰ The Convention on the Rights of the Child ensures special protections for displaced children.⁵¹ In 2025, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion confirming that states have obligations under international human rights law to take positive measures to prevent foreseeable human rights harm caused by climate change.⁵²

National Framework: Bangladesh

Bangladesh has made progress by incorporating a human rights-based approach (HRBA) in the National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management (NSIDM), explicitly recognizing the rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in climate-related contexts.⁵³ The strategy addresses prevention, protection, and durable solutions. However, gaps remain in implementation, monitoring, and mainstreaming across national policies.

The Disaster Management Act 2012 provides the legal foundation for disaster risk reduction and response in Bangladesh.⁵⁴ However, it focuses primarily on emergency response rather than the long-term protection needs of displaced persons. The Act grants broad powers to government authorities but does not explicitly recognize the rights of IDPs or establish mechanisms for their protection during and after displacement.⁵⁵

The Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP 2009) was one of the first national climate policies to acknowledge climate-induced displacement.⁵⁶ However, when evaluated through a human rights lens, the BCCSAP falls short in several areas. While it mentions migration as an adaptation strategy, it lacks specific provisions for protecting the rights of displaced persons. The strategy does not address participation rights, non-discrimination, or accountability mechanisms that are central to a human rights-based approach.⁵⁷

More recent policy developments show some improvement. The National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management (NSIDM 2021) represents a significant step forward by explicitly adopting a human rights-based approach.⁵⁸ The National Adaptation Plan (NAP 2023-2050) and the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan (2022-2041) acknowledge displacement as a critical issue, but they still lack detailed implementation frameworks and do not fully integrate the NSIDM’s human rights commitments.⁵⁹⁻⁶⁰

Frameworks like NAPA, BCCSAP, National Plan for Disaster Management, Disaster Management Act 2012, National Adaptation Plan (NAP 2023–2050), and the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan either overlook IDPs or fail to fully protect their rights. These shortcomings leave vulnerable populations at risk, undermining rights to life, shelter, health, food, and participation. From the standpoint of the effects of climate change in Bangladesh, the human rights-based approach can provide numerous benefits, including claims for compensation from developed states, claims for financial assistance for climate change adaptation and mitigation, and the development of national policies and adaptation strategies. Failure to do so could lead to prolonged displacement, resulting in humanitarian catastrophes with significant social and economic repercussions. As a result, both the government of Bangladesh and the international community must promptly address this issue in a long-term and proactive manner.

Recommendations

1. Revise Existing Policies: Amend NAPA, BCCSAP, Disaster Management Act, and National Plan for Disaster Management to include provisions explicitly protecting IDPs and adopt a full human rights-based approach.

2. Mainstream NSIDM: Integrate NSIDM into NAP (2023–2050) and the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan to embed displacement concerns in national climate policies.

3. Strengthen NTFoD Implementation: Introduce an Implementation Guidance System with a lead ministry, clear responsibilities, cross-sector data sharing, collaborative platforms, timelines, and a review mechanism to monitor progress.

4. Protect Rights of IDPs: Ensure IDPs’ participation in decision-making, uphold free, prior, and informed consent, guarantee access to housing, food, water, healthcare, and livelihoods, and implement non-discrimination safeguards for vulnerable groups.

5. Monitoring and Evaluation: Conduct regular monitoring and use data-driven evaluation to continuously improve NSIDM implementation and alignment with human rights obligations.

Conclusion

Climate-induced displacement in Bangladesh represents not merely an environmental challenge but a profound human rights crisis that demands urgent policy intervention. As this report has demonstrated, the 2.4 million people displaced by climate-related disasters in 2024 alone face systematic violations of their rights to life, health, education, and adequate housing—violations that are particularly severe for women and girls who confront compounded vulnerabilities including child marriage and trafficking. While Bangladesh has taken important steps toward recognizing these challenges through the National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management, the gap between policy articulation and implementation leaves millions of displaced persons without meaningful protection.

The recommendations outlined above provide a clear pathway forward: mainstreaming human rights protections across all climate and disaster policies, strengthening coordination mechanisms, and centering the voices and needs of displaced communities in decision-making processes. Without decisive action, climate-induced displacement will continue to strip vulnerable Bangladeshis of their fundamental rights, perpetuating cycles of poverty, inequality, and marginalization that undermine the nation’s broader development goals. The human rights-based approach is not simply a legal obligation—it is a practical necessity for building resilience, ensuring dignity, and creating durable solutions for the millions of Bangladeshis on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

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Endnotes

1. Earthjustice, “Inuit Human Rights Petition Filed over Climate Change,” December 7, 2005.

2. Stephen Humphreys (ed), Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 10.

3. Ibid.

4. Kisinger Chakma and Kenichi Matsui, “Responding to Climate-Induced Displacement in Bangladesh: A Governance Perspective,” Sustainability 13, no. 14 (2021): 7788.

5. IDMC, “Disaster displacement risk in Bangladesh: An overview of the risk of future displacement,” February 10, 2026.

6. World Bank, Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration (2021); Daily Star, “Climate Impact on Country’s Coastal Region: 13.3 million at risk of displacement by 2050,” September 14, 2021.

7. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, The National Strategy on Internal Displacement (NSIDM), 2021.

8. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan 2009, Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2009.

9. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, National Adaptation Plan of Bangladesh (2023-2050), Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2022.

10. Conectus Human Rights, “What is climate displacement? Understanding the causes and consequences,” March 7, 2024.

11. Ibid.

12. IDMC, “Disaster displacement risk in Bangladesh.”

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Tasneem Siddiqui, “Climate change induced displacement: Migration as an adaption strategy,” Daily Star, November 14, 2011.

16. Ibid.

17. Koko Warner, “Assessing institutional and governance needs related to environmental change and human migration” (2010).

18. Mohammad Tarikul Islam, “Disaster and Climate-Induced Migration in Bangladesh: A Potential Threat to Human Security,” Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, September 22, 2024.

19. Ibid.

20. UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the relationship between climate change and human rights, A/HRC/10/61, January 15, 2009.

21. IPCC, “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (2007), p. 104.

22. Ibid.

23. Matthew Walsham, “Assessing the Evidence: Environment, Climate Change and Migration in Bangladesh,” IOM (2010).

24. Ibid.

25. Staff Correspondent, “11 cyclones claimed nearly 4,000 lives since 2007,” The Financial Express, May 4, 2022.

26. Md Iqbal Kabir, Masud Billah Rahman, Wayne Smith, Mst Asma Ferdushi Lusha, and Abul Hasnat Milton, “Climate change and health in Bangladesh: a baseline cross-sectional survey,” Global Health Action 9, no. 1 (2016): 29609.

27. Government of Bangladesh, “Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh Damage, Loss and Needs Assessment For Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction” (2008).

28. UNICEF, “Climate Change Displacement and Right to Education: Bangladesh Country Case Study” (2022).

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Z. R. M. Abdullah Kaiser, “Analysis of the livelihood and health of internally displaced persons due to riverbank erosion in Bangladesh,” Journal of Migration and Health 7 (2023): 100157.

32. Ibid.

33. Thomas W. Crawford, Md Sariful Islam, Munshi Khaledur Rahman, Bimal Kanti Paul, Scott Curtis, Md. Giashuddin Miah, and Md. Rafiqul Islam, “Coastal Erosion and Human Perceptions of Revetment Protection in the Lower Meghna Estuary of Bangladesh,” Remote Sensing 12, no. 18 (2020): 3108.

34. Kaiser, “Analysis of the livelihood and health.”

35. Ibid.

36. Displacement Solutions, “Climate Displacement in Bangladesh: The Need for Urgent Housing, Land and Property Rights Solutions,” June 13, 2011.

37. Ibid.

38. Aminur Rahman and Rehanuma Tabasum, “Climate Change and Internal Displacement: Women’s Voices from Bangladesh,” Refugee Law Initiative, June 10, 2025.

39. Ibid.

40. “Invisible Victims: Bangladesh’s growing climate displacement crisis,” The Climate Watch, July 9, 2025.

41. Mehedi Hasan Marof, “’One less mouth to feed’: Climate disasters linked to child marriage in Bangladesh,” PreventionWeb, May 17, 2024.

42. International Rescue Committee, “Bangladesh: IRC study reveals a staggering 39% surge in child marriage due to climate change,” December 6, 2023; Khandaker Jafor Ahmed, Abu Hayat Md Saiful Islam, Khurshid Alam, and Jeff Gow, “Child marriage, climate vulnerability and natural disasters in coastal Bangladesh,” Journal of Biosocial Science 53, no. 6 (2021): 948-967.

43. Dr Reetika Revathy Subramanian, “Climate Brides: (Un)Tying the knots between climate change and child marriage,” Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 25 (2025): 52-70.

44. U.S. Department of State, 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report: Bangladesh, June 24, 2024.

45. Earthjustice, “Inuit Human Rights Petition Filed over Climate Change,” December 7, 2005.

46. IPCC, “Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability—Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (2007).

47. UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, July 1998.

48. IASC, “IASC Operational Guidelines on Human Rights and Natural Disasters” (2006).

49. UN General Assembly, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Treaty Series, vol. 999, p. 171 (1966).

50. UN General Assembly, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 993 UNTS 3 (1966).

51. UN General Assembly, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Treaty Series, 1577, 3 (1989).

52. Corina Heri, “Human Rights in the ICJ’s Climate Opinion: A Comparative Evaluation,” VerfBlog, August 1, 2025.

53. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, The National Strategy on Internal Displacement (NSIDM), 2021.

54. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, The Disaster Management Act 2012, Act No 34 of 2012.

55. Ibid.

56. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan 2009, Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2009.

57. Matthew Scott, “Human Rights-Based Tool for Evaluating Legal and Policy Responses to Displacement in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change,” Raoul Wallenberg Institute, 2020.

58. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, The National Strategy on Internal Displacement (NSIDM), 2021.

59. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, National Adaptation Plan of Bangladesh (2023-2050), Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2022.

60. Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan 2022-2041, Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2022.

What are Mexico’s primary immigration laws and policy documents?

The Mexican Constitution establishes the fundamental principles governing immigration in Mexico. The Ley de Migración (Migration Law) is the most significant piece of federal legislation addressing immigration matters in Mexico, while the Reglamento de la Ley de Migración (Regulations of the Migration Law) provides detailed rules and procedures for implementing the Ley de Migración. Additionally, the Ley sobre Refugiados, Protección Complementaria y Asilo Político (Law on Refugees, Complementary Protection and Political Asylum) governs asylum procedures and defines who qualifies for refugee status in Mexico, including an expanded definition based on the Cartagena Declaration, which is a non-binding regional document that broadened the definition of a refugee in Latin America to include those fleeing violence, internal conflicts, and human rights violations, in addition to persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion. [1]

The National Migration Policy outlines the Mexican government’s strategic decisions for addressing migration, encompassing Mexico as a country of origin, transit, destination, and return. [2][3] International treaties also shape Mexico’s immigration framework, as the country has signed various agreements and conventions related to immigration, including the Global Compact for Migration and the Cartagena Declaration, which impact its immigration policy. [4][5] The U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities supports cooperation between the two countries on border security, combating cross-border crimes such as migrant smuggling and human trafficking, and managing migration flows. [6]

Additionally, the Interagency Commission for Comprehensive Assistance in Migration Matters was created to temporarily shift responsibility for migration management from the Secretaría de Gobernación (SEGOB) to a commission composed of multiple government agencies, as outlined in the working paper Institutional and Legal Migratory Framework of the United Mexican States by Ana Paulina Ornelas Cruz and María Jesús Mora under the Migration Policy Institute. [7]

The key institutions involved in migration governance in Mexico include the Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM), which is responsible for executing, controlling, and supervising migration matters, including regulating the entry, stay, and exit of foreign nationals. The Secretaría de Gobernación (SEGOB) plays a role in formulating and overseeing Mexico’s migration policy, while the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) is involved in promoting and subscribing to international instruments on migration and managing visa issuance. The Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (COMAR) is responsible for the asylum process in Mexico. [8][9]

Government agencies and departments overseeing immigration and refugee affairs

The Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) is the body of the Mexican government that controls and supervises migration within the country. It is responsible for regulating the entry, stay, and exit of both foreign and Mexican citizens in Mexico, monitoring compliance with immigration laws, conducting migrant interdiction operations, and performing biometric screenings at detention centers. The Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (COMAR), Mexico’s Commission for Refugee Assistance, is responsible for the asylum process and related protection measures. COMAR receives, analyzes, and resolves applications for refugee status, provides complementary protection to individuals who do not meet the refugee definition but still face danger in their home countries, and works to ensure the protection and integration of asylum seekers and refugees in Mexico. Both the INM and COMAR fall under the Secretaría de Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior). [10][11]

Other relevant agencies include the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), which is responsible for granting citizenship through naturalization and manages communications between the INM and Mexican embassies and consulates, according to the Baker McKenzie Resource Hub on Global Immigration and Mobility Handbook: Mexico. [12] The National Guard has also been deployed for migration enforcement, leading to increased migrant apprehensions. [13] Additionally, Child Protection Authorities are tasked with designing and implementing programs and policies that address the protection needs of migrant and asylum-seeking children. [14]

Recent reforms and pending legislation affecting migration policy

Recent shifts and reforms in Mexico’s migration system include a focus on human rights and family reunification, as the Mexican Ministry of the Interior has emphasized special programs centered on family unity and upholding immigrants’ rights. Mexico has also implemented changes to ensure all foreigners in the country have legal authorization to stay and may engage in activities permitted to residents. In response to a large influx of migrants from Central and South America, authorities have increased migrant interdiction operations and added visa requirements for certain nationalities. Mexico’s Commission for the Aid of Refugees (COMAR) has significantly expanded its capacity to process asylum applications, supported by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). [15]

Additionally, Mexico has strengthened international cooperation with the United States to manage migration flows and combat cross-border crimes, including migrant smuggling and human trafficking. [16][17] Pending legislation and potential changes include the impact of U.S. policy shifts under the Trump administration, which took office in January 2025. The administration has implemented increased deportations and reinstated policies affecting migration flows. Mexico has increased staff at its consulates in the U.S. to assist Mexican migrants facing removal, and the Sheinbaum government has worked to improve Mexico’s capacity to receive and reintegrate Mexican deportees while negotiating enforcement cooperation with President Trump. [18] Additionally, the U.S. Congress has the potential to impact U.S.-Mexico migration cooperation through legislative actions. [19][20]

Centralized vs. decentralized immigration decision-making (federal, state/provincial, municipal roles)

Federal Level (Centralized Authority)

• National Institute of Migration (INM): The INM, under the Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB), is Mexico’s primary authority for migration management. It oversees the processing and resolution of entry, stay, and exit of foreign nationals, enforces immigration laws, and maintains the National Registry of Foreigners.

• Federal Executive: Sets the overarching framework of immigration policy, including categories of stay, regulatory requirements, and conditions for foreign nationals seeking entry or residency. The executive branch determines national policy priorities regarding admission, stay, and labor authorization.

• Federal Law: The Migration Law and its Regulations form the core legal structure governing immigration. They outline entry requirements, conditions of stay, visa categories, and penalties for non-compliance. [21]

• Federal Policy Focus: Federal immigration policy primarily emphasizes regulating and managing migration flows, including establishing admission standards and defining categories such as visitor, temporary resident, and permanent resident. [22]

State and Municipal Levels (Decentralized Elements)

• Advocacy and Service Provision: States and municipalities play growing roles in advocating for migrant populations, particularly in areas of social protection and local integration. [23]

• Support Services: Local governments may provide services such as issuing local ID documents, offering legal orientation, facilitating access to education and health services, and supporting initiatives related to remittances and community development.

• Local Initiatives: Some municipalities—Mexico City being a key example—have introduced proactive programs to support migrant inclusion, including financial assistance, specialized training for public servants on migrant rights, and incorporating migrant needs into city planning. Mexico City’s government has provided support to approximately 500 migrants and people in transient situations. [24]

• Limited Direct Immigration Decision-Making: Despite expanded local involvement in migrant support, states and municipalities do not have authority to decide on immigration status, entry, or residency. These functions remain exclusively under federal jurisdiction through the INM and other federal entities. [23]

Border Management & Enforcement

Mexico’s border control and security measures

Mexico’s border control and security measures are carried out primarily by the National Migration Institute (INM), which plays a key role in migrant interdiction, processing, and enforcement, increasing operations along transport routes, improving border crossing infrastructure, and implementing mobile highway checkpoints. INM also utilizes biometric screening for migrants at detention centers, using equipment provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Additionally, INM has aimed to improve the professionalism of its agents and enhance coordination with federal, state, and local security forces, though concerns about corruption and abuse of migrants persist. [25]

Northern Border (with the U.S.): Mexico collaborates with the United States on various border security measures, including joint operations and information sharing to combat cross-border crime like migrant smuggling and drug trafficking. Mexico has increased its enforcement efforts along its northern border, leading to a decline in migrant encounters in the U.S. Mexico has focused on disrupting smuggling operations, including targeting cartels and transnational criminal organizations involved in illegal migration and drug trafficking. Modernization of ports of entry through investment in new technology and infrastructure aims to improve security and facilitate legitimate trade and travel. [26][27][28][29]

Southern Border (with Guatemala and Belize): Mexico has enhanced its security presence along its southern border, including the establishment of naval bases on rivers and security cordons north of its borders with Guatemala and Belize. Mexico utilizes drone surveillance in its border regions, contributing to monitoring and security efforts. [30]

Concerns and Challenges: There are several concerns and challenges related to Mexico’s migration policies and enforcement. Human rights reports of mistreatment of migrants have increased, raising human rights concerns, especially following the deployment of Mexico’s National Guard for migration enforcement and the practice of busing migrants from northern to southern Mexico. Increased enforcement and restricted access to humanitarian visas have caused migrants to resort to more dangerous routes and rely heavily on smugglers. [31]

What is the approach to irregular migration (detention, deportation, alternatives to detention)?

Detention

Mexico operates a large immigration detention system, with several dozen detention centers, sometimes referred to as “migration stations.” These facilities have housed hundreds of thousands of people annually, with numbers exceeding 300,000 in 2022. Despite legal provisions for brief stays and due process, migrants often experience lengthy detentions in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. Mexican immigration law considers irregular migratory status an administrative infraction, not a crime. However, the system still allows detention for those without proper documents. Recent reforms in 2020 aim to prohibit the detention of migrant children, shifting responsibility for their care to family development agencies. [32][33][34]

Deportation

Mexico actively deports irregular migrants, often under pressure from the U.S. Mexico has been a significant deportation actor in the region. According to the Migration Policy Institute, Mexico has at times surpassed the United States in apprehensions of Central American migrants, though direct deportation comparisons vary by year and methodology. Guatemala reported receiving over 25,100 deportees from Mexico in 2023, demonstrating Mexico’s active role in migration enforcement. There are concerns that in some instances, migrants are pressured into accepting voluntary returns despite risks they may face in their home countries. Mexico has a program, “Mexico embraces you,” to support Mexican citizens deported from the U.S., offering some reintegration assistance. [35][36][37]

Protection of Mexican Nationals and Returnees

Mexico has developed programs to protect its nationals abroad and support those deported from the United States, though implementation faces significant challenges. The “Mexico Embraces You” (México Te Abraza) program provides reintegration assistance to Mexican citizens deported from the U.S., offering some support for documentation, transportation, and access to services. [38] However, as of early 2025, despite initial expectations of mass deportations under the Trump administration, the program has received relatively few returnees, with President Sheinbaum noting in March 2025 that “’Mexico Embraces You’ has received very few people.” [39]

The Mexican government maintains an extensive consular network in the United States—50 consular offices as of 2025—to provide legal assistance and support to Mexican nationals facing removal proceedings. [40] In anticipation of increased deportations under the Trump administration, Mexico increased staffing at consulates to assist Mexican migrants, with the Sheinbaum government working to improve Mexico’s capacity to receive and reintegrate deportees. [41] Between January 20 and March 3, 2025, Mexico received 19,663 returnees, of which 15,611 were Mexican nationals and 4,052 were foreign nationals. [42]

For Mexican nationals residing in the United States, the Mexican government has prioritized protecting the approximately 436,000 individuals shielded from deportation under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and ensuring that long-established Mexican residents are not targeted for removal. [43] Mexico’s diplomatic strategy has emphasized these protections in bilateral negotiations, recognizing that the welfare of Mexican diaspora communities represents a core national interest affecting millions of families across both countries.

Alternatives to Detention

Mexico has faced calls to implement and expand community-based alternatives to detention, particularly for vulnerable migrants, including children and families. Civil society organizations advocate for greater access to detention centers to provide legal and humanitarian assistance. Mexico also has a refugee system, and asylum applications have significantly increased in recent years, demonstrating a legal pathway to remain in the country for some irregular migrants. However, the refugee system is reportedly overwhelmed and underfunded, leading to delays and challenges for asylum seekers. [44][45]

Key Considerations

Key considerations include the fact that Mexico’s migration policies and practices are significantly influenced by U.S. pressure and enforcement efforts, according to Congress.gov. While Mexico aims to uphold migrants’ rights, implementation of these protections can be inconsistent, leading to reported abuses and challenges in accessing services and legal processes. The “Remain in Mexico” (MPP) policy, while currently terminated, highlights the impact of U.S. policies on migrants in Mexico and the strain it places on Mexican resources and humanitarian capacity. [46][47]

Human Rights Standards

How do policies align or conflict with human rights standards?

Alignment with Human Rights Standards: Mexico recognizes a broader definition of refugee than some other countries, including those facing “generalized violence; foreign aggression; internal conflicts; massive violations of human rights; and other circumstances leading to a serious disturbance of public order.” [48] Non-refoulement is also observed, as Mexico is bound by the policy of non-refoulement, which prohibits the return of individuals to a country where they face a risk of persecution, torture, or other serious human rights violations. Mexico adopted the UN Global Compact for Migration, signifying its commitment to safe, orderly, and regular migration pathways. Additionally, Mexico has focused on protecting migrant children and adolescents, implementing stronger penalties for those involved in crimes against them, and reinforcing strategies for the reintegration of returning Mexican families. [49][50][51]

Potential Conflicts with Human Rights Standards: Conflict with human rights standards includes enforcement and deterrence tactics, as Mexico’s increased enforcement measures, including the deployment of its National Guard for migration enforcement, have been associated with reports of migrant mistreatment. Arbitrary detention is also a concern, as immigration detention centers are often overcrowded, unsanitary, and dangerous, raising concerns about arbitrary detention and lack of due process, according to Human Rights Watch. [52]

Barriers to asylum persist, with asylum seekers, particularly those at the southern border, facing difficulties accessing protection, experiencing delays in processing applications, and often being pressured to accept voluntary returns despite potential risks in their home countries. Migrants in transit through Mexico are vulnerable to violence and exploitation by criminal groups, and human rights organizations have documented numerous cases of kidnapping, extortion, and sexual abuse, according to Human Rights Watch. [53] Reports indicate that migrants face discrimination, threats, physical violence, and sexual assault, sometimes perpetrated by or with the complicity of Mexican state agents, according to Human Rights First. [54]

The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) is overwhelmed by the growing number of asylum applications, leading to backlogs and prolonged waiting periods in precarious conditions for asylum seekers, according to Human Rights Watch. Immigration checkpoints throughout Mexico, despite a May 18, 2022 Supreme Court ruling deeming them unconstitutional and discriminatory, continue to operate because Congress has not removed the unconstitutional provision from the law. These checkpoints disproportionately affect Indigenous and Afro-Mexican people. [55]

External Pressures: External pressures include US policies, as Mexico’s immigration policies are heavily influenced by pressure from the United States, particularly regarding border enforcement and restricting access to asylum at the US southern border. [56]

Methodological Note on Temporal Scope

This report analyzes Mexico’s immigration policy framework as of February 2026, drawing on data and developments through late 2025 and early 2026. Given the rapidly evolving nature of migration policy, particularly in the context of changing U.S. administrations and bilateral negotiations, some statistics and policy positions reflect very recent developments. Where possible, we have relied on official government sources, established research institutions, and credible reporting to document recent trends. Readers should note that migration statistics, enforcement patterns, and bilateral agreements continue to evolve, and figures cited for 2025 represent the most current data available at the time of writing but may be subject to revision as official annual reports are published

The Architecture of Enforcement and Its Human Toll

Mexico’s immigration policy framework in early 2026 exists at a critical inflection point, shaped by developments throughout 2025 that fundamentally altered migration governance in the Americas. The most visible manifestation of this transformation emerged in data from the second half of 2025: migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border fell by 93.3% from February to July 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to Congressional Research Service analysis. [57] This dramatic reduction did not result from improved conditions in sending countries, expanded legal pathways, or enhanced asylum processing capacity. Rather, it emerged from what Human Rights Watch characterizes as Mexico’s “intensified efforts to prevent migrants from traveling through Mexico to reach the US,” including the deployment of more than 31,000 soldiers for immigration enforcement operations and an unprecedented expansion of detention infrastructure. [58]

The current enforcement architecture operates through multiple pressure points that funnel migrants into increasingly precarious situations. Mexico’s cooperation with the United States intensified significantly after President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October 2024. By early 2025, this cooperation took concrete forms: the deployment of 10,000 additional National Guard troops to border regions in February 2025, [59] the acceptance of thousands of deportees from the United States in the first half of 2025—with President Sheinbaum reporting 19,663 returnees between January 20 and March 3 alone [60]—and Mexican authorities apprehending more than 1.2 million migrants throughout 2024. [61]

This enforcement surge operates through immigration checkpoints that the Mexican Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in May 2022 for disproportionately targeting Indigenous and Afro-Mexican people, yet which continue to function because Congress has not removed the invalidated provision from law. [62] The human cost of this system manifests in what Human Rights Watch documents as routine targeting of migrants and asylum seekers “by criminal groups and Mexican officials for serious abuses, including sexual assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, and extortion.” [63] An International Rescue Committee survey found that one in four migrants reported having been kidnapped and experienced severe violence and abuse. [64] The organization warns that “children face threats of sexual abuse, kidnapping and gang recruitment, while women are especially vulnerable to criminal groups involved in human trafficking and exploitation.” [65]

Immigration detention centers, where Mexican authorities detained at least 318,660 people in 2022, [66] remain “notoriously overcrowded, unsanitary, and dangerous.” [67] On March 27, 2023, 40 migrants died in a fire at a detention center in Ciudad Juárez after staff failed to release them from their locked cell. [68] Security camera footage showed immigration agents fleeing the facility as smoke filled the detention area, without attempting to unlock cells or evacuate detainees. [69] The tragedy highlighted systemic failures in Mexico’s immigration detention infrastructure, including overcrowding, lack of safety protocols, and inadequate staff training. [70]

Civil society organizations report that individuals in detention face “threats and degrading treatment, spoiled food, generally bad conditions, and sensory deprivation, deprivation of vital needs, and difficulty sleeping due to lights being turned on full time.” [71] Despite 2020 reforms prohibiting the detention of migrant children, implementation remains inconsistent, and the fundamental conditions of detention have not substantially improved.

The Asylum System Under Pressure

While enforcement capacity has expanded dramatically, Mexico’s asylum infrastructure faces a severe crisis of capacity and resources. [72] The Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (COMAR) resolved just under 26,000 cases in 2023 despite receiving more than 140,000 applications which is the highest number ever. [73] This dramatic gap between applications and processing capacity has created multi-year backlogs, leaving asylum seekers in prolonged precarity. [74] Although the system continues to function, the resource constraints and overwhelming demand render it increasingly unable to meet its protection mandate.

Between January and June 2025, 42,000 more migrants applied for asylum, with 75% being Cubans and Venezuelans—a demographic shift reflecting both U.S. policy changes and deteriorating conditions in sending countries. [75] This surge occurs as COMAR’s 2025 budget of 47.9 million pesos ($2.36 million)—already significantly smaller than the enforcement agency INM’s budget—was cut by 6.5%. [76]

The situation worsened when the Trump administration cancelled Migration and Refugee Assistance funding that had provided more than $163 million from fiscal year 2018 through 2023 to support asylum capacity in Mexico. [77] As the Congressional Research Service reports, these cuts “caused UNHCR to scale back operations in Mexico” and ended U.S. assistance to nonprofit organizations that had supported migrants stranded after the cancellation of CBP One appointments. [78] The International Rescue Committee notes that “significant reductions in funding for migration and humanitarian response projects deeply affected local organizations working on the front lines to support people in transit throughout Mexico.” [79]

Shelters designed to house migrants for three days now support individuals for over a month, operating far beyond intended capacity. [80] In border cities, essential services such as health care and education are scarce, leaving service providers overwhelmed, and growing numbers of people—particularly families with children—are sleeping on the streets, exposing them to violence and exploitation. [81]

Mexico as Containment Zone: The Shift in Regional Dynamics

The enforcement cooperation between Mexico and the United States represents more than bilateral coordination; it signals a fundamental reorientation of migration governance in the Americas. According to the International Rescue Committee, 66% of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Mexico now seek to stay rather than continue to the United States—a 61% increase from the previous year. [82] This shift did not emerge from Mexico developing robust integration infrastructure or expanding protection capacity. Rather, as IRC emphasizes, it reflects “US policy shifts” that have closed borders and eliminated asylum access, leaving people with no alternative but to attempt to build lives in a country unprepared to receive them. [83]

The human impact is captured in IRC’s January 2025 Rapid Needs Assessment, conducted across five Mexican cities with 243 households representing 618 individuals. The assessment revealed “pressing protection, livelihoods, and basic needs” driven by “recent policy changes and a series of executive orders limiting access to asylum at the border including the removal of the scheduling functionality within the CBP One app.” [84] People interviewed described being left “in limbo” without access to work authorization due to asylum system backlogs, lacking social networks to facilitate employment, and unable to verify credentials or work experience. [85]

For those who do manage to work, conditions are precarious. Labor informality in Mexico stands at 45% nationally and exceeds 69% among young people aged 15 to 29 in Mexico City, forcing migrants into work that is “underpaid, uncontracted, and without the proper protections, leaving them vulnerable to potential exploitation by criminal groups.” [86] UNHCR reports that more than 320,000 households changed homes in 2023 as a means of protecting themselves from crime—an increase of more than 40% compared to previous years—underscoring how violence and insecurity affect not only migrants but also receiving communities. [87]

Looking Forward: Risks and Trajectories

The current enforcement model creates several trajectories of concern for migrants, refugees, and human rights defenders. First, the resource disparity between enforcement and protection agencies means that as migration pressure continues, the asylum system will face escalating crisis. COMAR’s capacity to process 26,000 cases annually against 140,000 applications creates a mathematical impossibility where most asylum seekers face years-long waits in precarious conditions. During these delays, Human Rights Watch documents how migrants “are routinely targeted for serious abuses, including sexual assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, and extortion.” [98]

Second, the militarization of migration enforcement normalizes practices that violate due process and exacerbate abuse. The deployment of more than 31,000 soldiers for immigration operations places enforcement in the hands of forces trained for combat rather than protection. [99] As Human Rights Watch notes in its submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Mexico, allegations of “extrajudicial killings and other abuses by the armed forces” are rarely effectively investigated by civilian authorities, and “arbitrary detention remains a widespread practice in Mexico and is too often the catalyst for ill-treatment, torture, enforced disappearance and arbitrary executions.” [100]

Third, the enforcement-first approach does not address root causes—economic insecurity, violence, political instability, and climate change—that will continue generating migration pressure regardless of enforcement capacity. The Migration Policy Institute warns of “regional uncertainty over maintaining existing cooperation levels in the face of growing U.S. pressure and escalating demands, especially if irregular migration spikes again in the future.” [101] If economic conditions deteriorate in sending countries, political violence escalates, or climate disasters intensify, the current enforcement architecture will face pressure it cannot sustainably manage through deterrence alone.

Fourth, the reduction in humanitarian funding creates a cascade effect. IRC warns that without “emergency funding to support a response that meets the scale of this crisis,” essential services will continue deteriorating. [102] When shelters operate beyond capacity, when legal services are unavailable, when asylum processing faces multi-year backlogs, migrants face impossible choices: attempt irregular border crossing and risk exploitation by smuggling networks, accept deportation to countries where they face persecution, or remain in Mexico in conditions of chronic insecurity and illegality.

The Gap Between Framework and Implementation

The analysis presented in this report reveals a profound gap between Mexico’s formal legal commitments and operational realities. Mexico’s Constitution, its Migration Law, the Law on Refugees, Complementary Protection and Political Asylum, and its adherence to international conventions all articulate a framework centered on human rights, non-refoulement, and protection of vulnerable populations. The Cartagena Declaration’s expanded refugee definition—covering those fleeing generalized violence, internal conflicts, and massive human rights violations—positions Mexico as a regional leader in protection standards. [103]

Yet implementation tells a different story. Immigration checkpoints operate despite being ruled unconstitutional. Detention centers remain overcrowded and dangerous despite legal provisions for brief stays and due process. Asylum seekers face years-long processing delays despite laws requiring prompt examination of claims. Migrants experience violence by state actors despite constitutional protections against cruel treatment. This gap between framework and implementation is not merely bureaucratic failure—it represents a structural choice to prioritize enforcement over protection, deterrence over due process, and bilateral cooperation over legal obligations.

The path forward requires acknowledging that sustainable migration management cannot rest on coercive economics and militarized enforcement alone. As the Migration Policy Institute recommends, both countries need “transparent, shared border infrastructure” at the Mexico-Guatemala border, coordinated efforts to “combat cross-national migrant smuggling organizations using follow-the-money strategies,” and “sustainable policy commitments that match demands of each government while recognizing legal limitations and institutional capacities.” [104]

More fundamentally, it requires rebuilding Mexico’s asylum infrastructure to meet the protection needs the legal framework promises. This means matching COMAR’s budget and staffing to actual application volumes, implementing genuine alternatives to detention for vulnerable populations, ensuring civilian oversight of military involvement in migration enforcement, and providing integration support—including legal residency and sustainable income sources—for those seeking to remain in Mexico. [105]

For migrants and refugees, the current moment represents increasing instability and uncertainty. Those who survived violence in their home countries, who endured dangerous journeys through multiple countries, who sought protection under international law now find themselves in a system structurally unable to fulfill its stated purpose. They face what the American Civil Liberties Union and partner organizations describe as “abuse, neglect, and unsafe living conditions” in detention, the constant threat of kidnapping and extortion in transit, the impossibility of legal work during multi-year asylum waits, and the risk of deportation to countries where their safety remains at risk. [106]

The choice before policymakers is clear. The current enforcement surge has reduced migrant encounters but at enormous human cost and unsustainable resource allocation. Mexico can use this moment to rebuild protection infrastructure, develop sustainable integration programs, and establish transparent bilateral cooperation mechanisms. Alternatively, the system can continue prioritizing deterrence, leaving in place an architecture incapable of protecting the vulnerable populations for whom Mexico’s laws and international treaties were designed. This choice will define not only Mexican migration policy but also the broader credibility of international protection frameworks in an era of mass displacement.

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Endnotes

[1] ICLG, “Corporate Immigration Laws and Regulations: Mexico,” accessed January 13, 2026, https://iclg.com/practice-areas/corporate-immigration-laws-and-regulations/mexico; World Bank, “Mexico Country Profile,” 2023, https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/a9fff55cf4ad70ece073ac185d4e97f4-0050062023/original/WDR2023-UNHCR-Mexico-FINAL.pdf; Ana Paulina González and Rey Koslowski, “Reinforcing a Regional Approach to Managing Irregular Migration: The Role of Mexico in North and Central America,” Wilson Center.

[2] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts,” In Focus, accessed January 13, 2026.

[3] UNHCR, “Mexico,” Global Compact on Refugees, accessed January 13, 2026.

[4] Ana Paulina Ornelas Cruz and María Jesús Mora, “Institutional and Legal Migratory Framework of the United Mexican States,” Migration Policy Institute.

[5] UNHCR, “Mexico,” Global Compact on Refugees.

[6] Migration Policy Institute, “One Year After the U.S.-Mexico Agreement.”

[7] Ornelas Cruz and Mora, “Institutional and Legal Migratory Framework.”

[8] UNHCR, “Mexico,” Global Compact on Refugees.

[9] Migration Policy Institute, “One Year After the U.S.-Mexico Agreement.”

[10] UNHCR, “Mexico,” Global Compact on Refugees.

[11] Baker McKenzie Resource Hub, “Global Immigration and Mobility: Latin America - Mexico: Key Government Agencies,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[12] Baker McKenzie Resource Hub, “Global Immigration and Mobility: Mexico - Key Government Agencies Involving Immigration,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[13] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[14] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[15] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[16] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[17] Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Micayla Spence, “Tariff Threats, Trump, Sheinbaum, and Migration,” Migration Policy Institute.

[18] Ruiz Soto and Spence, “Tariff Threats, Trump, Sheinbaum, and Migration.”

[19] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico: Evolution of the Bilateral Migration and Security Challenge,” In Focus.

[20] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[21] University at Albany, “Ley de Migración (Migration Law) - English Translation,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[22] Consulate of Mexico, “Services for Foreigners,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[23] Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan and Susan Fratzke, “Understanding Migration Governance from the Local Level Up,” in Migrants and Cities: Stepping Up to the Challenge.

[24] Mayors Migration Council, “How Mexico City Is Preparing for Inclusive Growth,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[25] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[26] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Border Security,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[27] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Border Security.”

[28] U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Readout: U.S.-Mexico Meeting on Joint Actions to Further Enhance Border Security.”

[29] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “Fact Sheet: DHS Continues to Strengthen Border Security, Reduce Irregular Migration,” June 4, 2024.

[30] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[31] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[32] NY1, “AP Top News,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[33] ReliefWeb, “Immigration Detention,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[34] Strauss Center, “Mexico’s Migratory Detention System,” Policy Research Project 207, 2019.

[35] Human Rights Watch, “Mexico: Asylum Seekers Face Abuses at Southern Border,” June 6, 2022.

[36] Context News, “What’s Mexico Doing to Stop Migration to the US?,” accessed January 13, 2026.

[37] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[38] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[39] Washington Office on Latin America, “Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: tariffs, February migration, military role, mass deportation,” March 10, 2025.

[40] Migration Policy Institute, “Amid Tariff Threats, Migration Management Is Key to the Evolving Trump-Sheinbaum Relationship,” May 15, 2025.

[41] Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Micayla Spence, “Tariff Threats, Trump, Sheinbaum, and Migration,” Migration Policy Institute.

[42] Washington Office on Latin America, “Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update,” March 10, 2025.

[43] Migration Policy Institute, “Amid Tariff Threats, Migration Management Is Key to the Evolving Trump-Sheinbaum Relationship,” May 15, 2025.

[44] NBC News, “Mexico Will Stop Holding Migrant Children in Detention, Wins Praise from U.N.”

[45] Border Report, “Mexico to Stop Holding Child Migrants in Detention Centers.”

[46] American Immigration Council, “Migrant Protection Protocols.”

[47] Georgetown Security Studies Review, “A Nation of Immigrants: The Harmful Legacy of ‘Remain in Mexico,’” January 25, 2025.

[48] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[49] Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Experts of the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families,” April 2025.

[50] International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research, “Migration and Human Rights in Mexico,” 2024.

[51] World Bank, “Mexico Country Profile,” 2023.

[52] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024: Mexico.”

[53] Human Rights Watch, “Mexico: Asylum Seekers Face Abuses at Southern Border.”

[54] Human Rights First, “Remain in Mexico: Unlawful and Ineffective.”

[55] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024: Mexico.”

[56] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Immigration Control Efforts.”

[57] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts,” In Focus IF10215, updated September 10, 2025.

[58] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2025: Mexico,” January 16, 2025.

[59] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts,” September 2025.

[60] Washington Office on Latin America, “Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: tariffs, February migration, military role, mass deportation,” March 10, 2025.

[61] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts,” September 2025.

[62] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024: Mexico,” January 11, 2024.

[63] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2025: Mexico,” January 16, 2025.

[64] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico,” accessed February 9, 2026.

[65] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico.”

[66] Amnesty International, “Mexico: Fatal fire in migrant detention center is result of inhumane policies,” March 30, 2023.

[67] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024: Mexico.”

[68] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Mexico: UN experts call for investigations into migrant deaths at Ciudad Juarez immigration detention centre,” April 5, 2023.

[69] NBC News, “Official details of deadly fire at migrant center in Mexico challenged in investigative report,” March 22, 2024.

[70] Human Rights Watch, “Tragedy at a Mexican Immigration Detention Center,” April 3, 2023.

[71] U.S. Department of State, “2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Mexico,” April 22, 2024.

[72] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2025: Mexico,” January 16, 2025.

[73] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts,” In Focus IF10215, updated September 10, 2025.

[74] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico,” accessed February 2026.

[75] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts.”

[76] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts”; Washington Office on Latin America, “Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: Post-Election Migration, Relations with Mexico, Incoming Administration Plans,” December 2024.

[77] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts.”

[78] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts.”

[79] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico.”

[80] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico.”

[81] UNHCR, “Mexico Fact Sheet,” March 2025.

[82] International Rescue Committee, “As More Refugees Seek Safety in Mexico Amid US Policy Shifts, IRC Adapts to Evolving Humanitarian Needs,” November 3, 2025.

[83] International Rescue Committee, “As More Refugees Seek Safety in Mexico Amid US Policy Shifts.”

[84] International Rescue Committee, “2025 Mexico Rapid Needs Assessment (January),” accessed February 9, 2026.

[85] International Rescue Committee, “As More Refugees Seek Safety in Mexico Amid US Policy Shifts.”

[86] International Rescue Committee, “As More Refugees Seek Safety in Mexico Amid US Policy Shifts.”

[87] UNHCR, “Mexico Fact Sheet,” March 2025.

[88] Migration Policy Institute, “Amid Tariff Threats, Migration Management Is Key to the Evolving Trump-Sheinbaum Relationship,” May 15, 2025.

[89] The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Imposes Tariffs on Imports from Canada, Mexico and China,” February 2, 2025.

[90] Washington Office on Latin America, “Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: tariffs, February migration, military role, mass deportation,” March 10, 2025.

[91] Americas Society/Council of the Americas, “Tracking Trump and Latin America: Trade—Tariffs Threatened on Mexico over Water Sharing,” accessed February 2026.

[92] Migration Policy Institute, “Amid Tariff Threats, Migration Management Is Key to the Evolving Trump-Sheinbaum Relationship,” May 15, 2025.

[93] Michelle García, “Claudia Sheinbaum Is Winning Against Trump—For Now,” The Boston Globe, February 14, 2025.

[94] Associated Press, “Mexico’s President Says She Rejected Trump’s Plan to Send US Troops Across the Border,” NPR, May 4, 2025.

[95] Congressional Research Service, “Mexico’s Migration Control Efforts.”

[96] Migration Policy Institute, “Amid Tariff Threats.”

[97] Migration Policy Institute, “Facing New Migration Realities: U.S.-Mexico Relations and Shared Interests,” October 30, 2025.

[98] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2025: Mexico.”

[99] Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2024: Mexico.”

[100] Human Rights Watch, “Submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Mexico,” July 18, 2023.

[101] Andrew Selee, Rodolfo Cruz Piñeiro, Theresa Cardinal Brown, and Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, “U.S.-Mexico Migration Cooperation in the Trump-Sheinbaum Era,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, June 26, 2025.

[102] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico.”

[103] ICLG, “Corporate Immigration Laws and Regulations: Mexico.”

[104] Migration Policy Institute, “In the Face of a New Migration Reality in the Americas, U.S.-Mexico Cooperation Remains Indispensable,” May 15, 2025.

[105] International Rescue Committee, “Mexico.”

[106] Nic Garcia, “ACLU Reports Physical Abuse of Migrants Held at Fort Bliss,” Texas Tribune, December 10, 2025.

Imagine being born into a world where every nation-state denies your existence. You cannot work legally, access healthcare, attend school, or even marry. Not because of any crime you’ve committed, but because no government recognizes your legal rights as a national of any country. This is the reality for millions of stateless people. Statelessness is not random misfortune. It is often manufactured through laws designed to look neutral while systematically denying entire communities the right to citizenship.

Understanding Statelessness

Nationality is an indisputable right acquired at birth for most people. Yet, many others are deprived of this right, have their nationality or citizenship revoked during their lifetimes or are never granted citizenship at birth. The UNHCR identified at least 4.4 million people who are stateless as of 2024, across 95 reporting countries included in its Global Trends Report.[1] International law considers these individuals stateless persons, or “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law,” and they have very few or none of the rights granted to a legal national or citizen.[2]

The 4.4 million figure substantially underestimates the global population of stateless persons which is likely much higher. The lack of a consensus on how States or organizations choose to define statelessness makes data difficult to acquire, and consequently most statistical figures underrepresent the reality. Importantly, a significant portion of those who are stateless are also forcibly displaced which creates an additional risk of rights violations.

The most prominent of these rights—and the absence of which is felt most acutely by many stateless persons—is the protection provided by states and national legislation. Being denied many citizenship-based rights, like access to education, healthcare, and the legal justice system, often means that day-to-day life can be very difficult for those who are stateless. Additionally, statelessness often endangers individuals’ sense of identity, belonging, and community, creating a sense of isolation.

The causes and consequences of statelessness are numerous and multifaceted, with the experiences of each individual differing from another. It is important to examine the historical, regional, and community contexts as well as individual experiences to understand the impacts of statelessness on one’s lived experience. However, it is also possible to identify patterns across different contexts of statelessness. Many cases of statelessness stem from a combination of discriminatory succession laws, gaps or conflicts within nationality laws, shifts in borders, and complications with registration at birth. Because statelessness is often a highly politicized issue, many implicit state mechanisms that are harder to identify and address, ensure statelessness persists as a global issue.

The UNHCR, alongside other global stakeholders, has initiated much of the work done to understand, prevent, and reduce statelessness. In 2014, the #IBelong Campaign was formed as an UNHCR led initiative, outlining ten action items designed to resolve the main cases of statelessness by the end of 2024 through five core actions that include:[3]

• Resolving the major situations of statelessness

• Ensuring that children are not born stateless

• Removing gender discrimination from nationality laws

• Preventing discrimination-based denial of citizenship

• Preventing statelessness during state-succession

While the campaign led to significant progress towards addressing some of the main causes of the issue, it also demonstrates that ending statelessness is an ambitious, long-term goal that requires collaboration between governments, global and regional organizations, and civil society. Other organizations also contribute efforts to this end, ranging from legal advocacy and research to the amplification of stateless voices—complementing the work of the UNHCR and highlighting gaps in it.

This brief aims to provide an overview of statelessness that examines its scope and legal context, analyzes both overt causes and more implicit mechanisms by which statelessness persists, and considers current efforts to end a largely invisible crisis. The brief will conclude by highlighting the next steps necessary to advance the goal of eradicating statelessness completely.

Scope and Distribution

Stateless persons are not recognized as legal nationals by any state and have no nationality or citizenship. Often they are denied most citizenship-based rights, and lack the full legal protection afforded to nationals under domestic law. Many do not have access to the judicial, educational, and health care systems of the regions in which they reside and are unlikely to receive an education or access healthcare on par with legal nationals. Many stateless individuals or groups are vulnerable to being expelled or deported from the places in which they reside.

Persistent difficulties in obtaining documentation give rise to a range of other complications while traveling, working, and engaging with civil and social services. The adverse impacts of statelessness undermine an individual’s sense of community and belonging, with many reporting feeling abandoned, left behind, or otherwise excluded. Nepalese activist Deepti Gurung, who advocated for her two formerly stateless children to obtain citizenship, explains: “People without citizenship are invisible. […] Citizenship is the door to everything.”[4]

According to 2024 data from the UNHCR, there were at least 4.4 million stateless individuals in the world at the end of the year.[5] An estimated 85% of the stateless population is located in just 10 countries, although this data is acknowledged to be incomplete, since nearly half of all countries do not report statelessness data. These 10 countries are primarily located in South and Southeast Asia, West Africa, and parts of Europe, reflecting patterns of ethnic and gender-based restrictive nationality laws, and the legacy of state succession. This concentration highlights that while statelessness is a global issue and stateless persons exist in nearly every country, the distribution and impact are uneven, with certain regions facing greater and more persistent barriers to legal nationality.

Crucial data gaps in regions such as China and most of northern Africa mean that the real number of stateless individuals is likely between 11 to 15 million.[6] The current lack of data on stateless persons and enduring difficulties in obtaining more reliable figures continues to be a major setback in statelessness studies. There is similarly little available data on statelessness throughout history, making it difficult to establish linearity in growth or note any crucial changes. In the absence of reliable data, developments in the legal and institutional framework since the mid-20th century—beginning with the 1954 UNHCR Convention—provide one of the few concrete bases for tracking how statelessness has been defined and addressed.

Legal Framework

International law recognizes the right to a legal nationality, as is indicated by Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”[7] Two other core instruments establishing the foundational legal framework for addressing statelessness are the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.[8] The 1954 Convention establishes the legal definition of stateless persons and outlines the rights to which they are entitled, while the 1961 Convention highlights measures states must take to reduce statelessness over time. Taken together, they form the basis of the international legal architecture governing the issue.

Although these conventions provide an overarching framework, understanding the lived impacts of statelessness requires distinguishing between de jure (by law) and de facto (by fact) statelessness. This distinction also helps clarify the ongoing lack of consensus around the definition of statelessness and its legal implications. These disagreements do not usually apply to de jure statelessness in which individuals do not legally have citizenship or any rights it would entitle them to. However, the gray area between formal citizenship and de jure statelessness—namely de facto statelessness—encapsulates the experiences of many people deprived of their citizenship rights regardless of their legal status.

The persistence of de facto statelessness largely stems from poor implementation of programs designed to grant stateless individuals formal citizenship. This unevenness extends to regional and national protection systems. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) adopted a plan of action and declared their commitment to ending statelessness in West Africa through the Abidjan Declaration adopted in 2021.[9] The African Union expressed similar goals on a continental scale not long after. Yet progress in adopting and domesticating these legal frameworks into national law generally remains slow, with many of the actions taken being ambiguous as well.

Other regions face similar challenges. Although the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) laid out important measures for the prevention and reduction of statelessness in its 2023 resolution on prohibiting the arbitrary deprivation of nationality, NGOs continue to report discriminative nationality deprivation in countries like the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua.[10] The European Network on Statelessness similarly reports a lack of legal safeguards for stateless persons, citing states like the United Kingdom for not recognizing statelessness due to exclusion criteria beyond that which is outlined by the UNHCR’s 1954 Convention.[11] Thus, the legal foundation constructed by the UNHCR conventions is echoed in many regional legal efforts, but it has yet to be fully translated into enforceable national law.

These regional initiatives underline a key reality, which is that the power to grant or deny citizenship ultimately lies with nation-states, and regional or global efforts are consequently not always translated into enforced, practiced law. In many contexts, restrictive or discriminatory citizenship laws remain one of the primary reasons statelessness persists.

Causes of Statelessness

Explicit Causes

One of the main causes of statelessness is discriminatory nationality law that prevents certain groups of people from obtaining legal citizenship or passing it on to their children. Approximately 24 states have legislation in place that prevent women from conferring nationality to their children on equal terms with men.[12] As a result, many children are born stateless simply because they are not legally considered nationals of their mothers’ states, particularly if their fathers are unknown, also stateless, or otherwise unable to complete the necessary administrative processes to confer nationality to their children. Given the significant role of gender-discriminatory nationality laws in producing statelessness, one of the UNHCR’s ten action items targets them specifically, attempting to reform legislation to ensure equal access for everyone to confer nationality.

While statelessness can arise through other factors like race, ethnicity, religion, language, disability, or other grounds, these factors are also often closely intertwined with conflict. Due to outdated laws or intentional deprivation, many groups find themselves stateless in the regions where they live, because of their status as minorities within that region. Kenya, for example, resolved over ten thousand cases of statelessness in its regions by granting citizenship to the Makonde, Pemba and Shona minority communities.[13] By contrast, the Rundi community is a minority group within Kenya that remains stateless. Progress in securing legal nationality for minority groups is especially slow, as discriminatory social views are generally deeply rooted and difficult to challenge through legal reform. Moreover, displacement related to such discrimination and conflict likewise places many individuals at heightened risk of statelessness.

Conflict and political upheaval may also result in changes to borders, and the dissolution of one country and emergence of another can leave many people uncertain of their legal nationality. Migrants or expatriates of dissolved states, as well as people living near borders, often struggle to obtain or retain citizenship. In some cases, ambiguity over borders results in residents being denied citizenship by both states. The dissolution of the Soviet Union produced several such cases: Russians living in Estonia—formerly a part of the USSR, of which they were legal nationals—constituted a group of “persons with undetermined citizenship.” While some were able to apply for permanent residency and begin the process of naturalization to become Estonian citizens, others, including families of USSR personnel or individuals with criminal convictions, were not permitted to apply and thus remained stateless.[14] A similar pattern emerged in Latvia, where a substantial Russian-speaking minority was excluded by post-Soviet legislation that prevented them from obtaining citizenship.

Similar gaps in nationality laws operate to exclude some groups from nationality even in the absence of border-related ambiguities. These gaps may mean someone or that individuals do not acquire a nationality in the first place, or may have their existing nationality retracted. Citizens who have lived outside their state of origin for extended periods of time may lose or be deprived of their legal nationality. A major cause of statelessness also stems from barriers to registration at birth. The UNHCR confirms that the majority of stateless persons are stateless from birth, emphasizing in their action plan the crucial significance of ensuring that no child is born stateless.[15] Needless to say, people who are stateless cannot confer a nationality to their children, turning statelessness into a persisting, generational issue. Complications with birth registration can mean there is insufficient documentation—such as birth certificates, proof of citizenship, etc.—for some children to be registered as nationals of a state. Being born abroad can further increase this risk, depending on the nationality laws of either countries of origin or residence: if parents cannot confer nationality and their country of birth does not provide one, children are left stateless and are at risk of remaining stateless throughout their lives.

This is the case for many children born to displaced parents: they face uncertainty and legal complications in the countries in which they seek asylum. In an effort to reduce this and safeguard coming generations, Colombia has provided over one hundred thousand children born to Venezuelan parents the necessary nationality and the necessary documentation for successful integration into Colombian society, effective retroactively.[16] This measure aimed to address precarious circumstances of the nearly 3 million Venezuelan refugees displaced in Colombia.

The case of the Rohingya in Myanmar represents one of the most severe and deliberate campaigns of citizenship exclusion in the contemporary world. From independence until 1962, Myanmar’s democratic government under Premier U Nu recognized Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group and granted them citizenship and representation, even creating the Mayu Frontier District (1961-1964) as a separate administrative zone for Rohingya-majority areas.[17] This recognition was systematically reversed after General Ne Win’s 1962 military coup through a deliberate program of ethnic exclusion. Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law excluded the Rohingya entirely from the list of 135 recognized “national races” eligible for citizenship, rendering the majority of the approximately 2 million Rohingya then living in Myanmar stateless overnight.[18] The law created ostensibly procedural requirements—proof of residence before January 4, 1948, or membership in an “indigenous race”—but these served as mechanisms of deliberate exclusion designed to be impossible for Rohingya to satisfy.

Since then, the Rohingya have faced systematic persecution including restrictions on movement, access to education, healthcare, and employment. The 2017 military crackdown intensified this violence dramatically: Myanmar’s armed forces conducted operations that human rights organizations and UN investigators have described as bearing the hallmarks of genocide, deliberately targeting Rohingya communities with mass violence, sexual assault, and forced displacement.[19] Over 1 million Rohingya fled Myanmar as a result, with approximately 1,005,500 now living in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh—the world’s largest refugee settlement. The approximately 619,400 Rohingya who remain in Myanmar exist without citizenship, unable to access courts or legal protections, vulnerable to further violence, and effectively stripped of any legal grounds to advocate for their rights within Myanmar or claim protection under international law.[20]

The Rohingya comprise the world’s largest known stateless population, with roughly 1.8 million displaced across the region. Their statelessness is neither accidental nor incidental—it is the deliberate outcome of a sustained campaign of ethnic exclusion designed to eliminate Rohingya presence and claims to belonging in Myanmar.

Implicit Mechanisms—”Manufacturing Statelessness”

While the majority of overt, easily identifiable causes of statelessness have been discussed, various implicit and sometimes invisible mechanisms continue “manufacturing statelessness” in ways that are more difficult to detect and address. The UNHCR primarily targets overt, visible causes and aims to reduce statelessness by intervening in these areas. However, it has been criticized for its marked focus on visible causes while overlooking less apparent, seemingly neutral mechanisms that deliberately sustain statelessness.[21] These mechanisms often operate beneath the surface, making identifying and mitigating their effects immensely difficult.

Many of the more subtle ways statelessness is sustained is through “neutral” laws or policies that produce statelessness in practice. Generally, this is done through temporal constraints on citizenship, spatial criteria including territorial borders and residential requirements, and bureaucratic processes that hinge on specific forms of documentation. Additionally, states may employ the process of securitization in politically turbulent times, revoking nationality on the grounds of national security or disloyalty, while framing such measures as neutral and even necessary.

Temporal boundaries serve as another tool through which nationality can grant or withhold nationality. Since state formation is restricted by time as well as space, one requirement of legal nationality may be an individual’s presence within state borders at a particular moment. Although this ostensibly neutral, it excludes those who either cannot adequately meet the requirement or cannot obtain documentation or legal evidence proving that they do. The “zero-option rule,” often adopted in periods immediately succeeding state formation, demonstrates this mechanism in practice. Under this rule, a state does not automatically grant citizenship to residents; instead, individuals must complete the necessary legal process within a limited timeframe to secure it.[22] The implementation of this rule disproportionately affects rural or mobile populations, minorities, and communities with historically limited access to registration. Several newly formed states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union adopted zero-option rules, leaving many who were unable to apply for citizenship or faced bureaucratic barriers throughout their application ultimately stateless.

Spatial criteria may similarly create risks of exclusion. In some contexts, individuals may be required to prove residence in a specific place at a defined point in time—generally within the borders of a particular state—to be considered legal nationals. However, instability or discontinuity in borders can make such proof difficult to obtain, such as for groups living near changing borders. Generally, the residency requirement pertains to a point in the past and negatively affects current residents. This was the case with Kuwait’s 1959 Nationality Law: automatic citizenship required evidence of residency in Kuwait since 1920, provided that this residency was uninterrupted through the male line.[23] While for many this requirement alone was difficult to meet, Kuwait’s borders were not clearly defined in 1920. As a result, certain groups unable to demonstrate compliance with these spatial and temporal criteria were rendered stateless. The bidoon (”without nationality”) group is named as such for being stateless due to ostensibly neutral spatial restrictions.

Many of the cases discussed serve as demonstration as to how one of the most pervasive mechanisms sustaining statelessness is the difficulty of obtaining documentation and navigating administrative barriers. Insufficient or missing documentation is often at the root of individuals’ struggles with legal and bureaucratic systems that deny them nationalities. Although many of these cases are framed as accidental, and as isolated administrative failures, documentation issues are not only widespread and structurally embedded, they are often deliberate forms of exclusion on behalf of the state.[24] For example, the UAE Ministry of Interior issued “stateless citizenship” ID cards to Comorian residents, effectively confining them to a long-term status as foreign, temporary residents at risk of deportation.[25] By administratively recognizing their status as “stateless” but not facilitating their process towards citizenship, the UAE demonstrates how bureaucratic mechanisms are also used deliberately to perpetuate statelessness.

Although no two experiences of statelessness are identical, the majority of stateless individuals have been born or remain stateless through a combination of the mechanisms discussed above. International organizations like the UNHCR have tended to focus on eliminating more direct and visible causes—an approach for which they have been criticized. Identifying and understanding how laws that appear, at first glance, to be neutral, sustain statelessness, is crucial both in understanding the complexity of the issue and in directing efforts toward dismantling these practices.

The Present and Near-Future

The #IBelong Campaign

In 2014, the UNHCR initiated the #IBelong Campaign with the goal of eliminating statelessness within ten years. Outlining ten action points through which it planned to achieve this, the campaign set out to address statelessness “by raising awareness and mobilizing global support around that ambition.” By bringing statelessness, a previously largely invisible issue, into international spotlight, it led many governments and organizations to cooperate in addressing the issue in their own regions and brought about many crucial milestones in eradicating statelessness entirely. However, at the end of 2024, the campaign was extended to 2030, and the UNHCR acknowledged the need to redouble efforts in light of persistent challenges.[26]

The action items range from the broad aim of resolving “existing major situations of statelessness” to more specific aims like providing nationality documentation to individuals entitled to it, focusing on reforming discriminatory laws, and ensuring no child be born stateless. Together, these items form a holistic plan that targets the most prominent and well-documented causes of statelessness, suggesting that most cases can be resolved through their implementation. However, not only has this proven to be untrue, as eradicating statelessness also requires dismantling the implicit state mechanisms that sustain it, numerous challenges persist in implementing these action items as well. As the UNHCR itself notes, “Governments’ willingness to act is impeded by a lack of data and limited comprehension of an issue that is often perceived as complex and, in some contexts, politically charged.”[27]

Despite these challenges, the #IBelong Campaign has yielded significant progress. Between 2014 and 2024, a total of 613,100 stateless individuals acquired or had their nationality confirmed.[28] Kyrgyzstan resolved all known cases of statelessness in its region, marking an important milestone and serving as a potential example for other states.[29] Kenya similarly granted nationality to several minority groups and made significant progress in addressing the situation of remaining stateless groups. Additionally, stronger legal frameworks were introduced, with many states and regional bodies making over 400 pledges to prevent and reduce statelessness.[30] Reforms began being implemented to discriminatory laws in several countries, and progress is said to be ongoing.

Unfortunately, progress is also slow and uneven. Approximately 85% of the population of 4.4 million stateless individuals are known to reside in a total of ten countries, many of which show little improvement. The fact that many new children are born stateless each year shows that the situation not only remains unresolved, but also continues to grow. The legal framework strengthened by the decade of work has either not been adopted by some states or not domesticated into their law. The new action item added at the end of 2024—”Ensure that stateless persons can enjoy their rights”—suggests that statelessness was recognized as the persistent challenge that it is, and the ambitious goal of eradicating all cases of statelessness was revised.[31] Nonetheless, the contributions of international organizations other than the UNHCR, as well as their initiatives to reduce statelessness, must also be recognized.

International Efforts Beyond the UNHCR

Although the UNHCR plays a central coordinating role, eradicating statelessness requires collaboration between regional organizations, NGOs, and governments as well. Regional organizations often have unique forms of access and influence that global organizations benefit from, making partnerships between them essential. Many initiatives have been launched both globally and regionally by organizations other than the UNHCR, and it is important to note that many of these have focused on improving data collection—a crucial barrier to effective action.

As an organization dedicated solely to statelessness, The Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) publishes the World Statelessness Report, runs global advocacy campaigns and workshops, and works with regional partners to host the Statelessness Index.[32] A key partner is the European Network on Statelessness (ENS), which focuses on litigation support, policy development, and advocacy across Europe.[33] Newer initiatives all place an increased emphasis on direct engagement with stateless individuals and the deliberate inclusion of their voices in research and advocacy efforts. Efforts have also been expansive at the regional level, ranging from large-scale documentation campaigns like the one carried out in Kazakhstan to the resolution of all known statelessness in Kyrgyzstan.[34] These efforts have also been crucial for providing accurate data at the national level, helping to overcome a major barrier to statelessness research and advocacy.

While a combination of global, regional, and national initiatives have spearheaded much of the progress to date, the UNHCR increasingly emphasized the need to center stateless individuals and groups themselves, ensuring that their experiences shape ongoing efforts. Moving forward, closer collaboration between various actors is indispensable to advancing protection and reducing statelessness worldwide.

Conclusion: Toward the Eradication of Statelessness

In its aims for the coming years, the UNHCR highlights “amplifying the voices of those affected and engaging them in advocacy against statelessness” as crucial in resolving all remaining cases.[35] This marks a shift toward more direct and sustained engagement with stateless individuals. Targeted advocacy is crucial not only in transforming statelessness from an abstract, highly politicized problem into one that shapes the lives of millions, many of whom often report feeling invisible or forgotten. Incorporating these perspectives also ensures data is shaped by input from communities themselves, and ensures that the broader understanding of statelessness reflects the lived realities of those most affected.

While cases like Kyrgyzstan and, increasingly, Kenya demonstrate the possibility of eradicating statelessness entirely, the past decade has also made clear how broad and deeply rooted the issue remains. Understanding statelessness itself continues to pose challenges, as both overt and implicit causes impede efforts to prevent and reduce it. The new action item of ensuring the rights of stateless individuals presents both a priority and a risk for the upcoming years: while improved conditions for stateless persons is indispensable in contexts in which they are routinely denied basic rights, this shift also risks diverting attention from the ultimate goal of resolving statelessness altogether and inadvertently entrenching statelessness as a long-term condition.

The inclusion of the aims of stronger community engagement and targeted advocacy, along with a greater emphasis on data collection in the agenda of the UNHCR and other organizations demonstrates the need for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of stateless populations, communities, and individuals. Finally, accountability remains vital—this means that states and organizations that have taken pledges must adopt the legal frameworks and implement the laws they accepted. Only through genuine implementation can statelessness be reduced, prevented, and ultimately eradicated entirely.

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Endnotes

[1] UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2024 (2024).

[2] UN General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, Article 1(1) (1954).

[3] UNHCR, #IBelong Campaign: Ten Action Items (2014), https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/.

[4] UNHCR advocacy materials, citing Deepti Gurung, Nepali statelessness activist.

[5] UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2024.

[6] Ibid. Estimate reflects acknowledged data gaps, particularly in China and North Africa.

[7] UN General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15 (1948).

[8] UN General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1954) and Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961).

[9] ECOWAS, Abidjan Declaration on Addressing the Challenges of Statelessness in West Africa (2021).

[10] Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 44/23: Prohibiting the Arbitrary Deprivation of Nationality (2023); NGO reports on Dominican Republic and Nicaragua from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

[11] European Network on Statelessness, reports on UK statelessness protections and definitional gaps.

[12] UNHCR and OHCHR documentation on gender-discriminatory nationality laws.

[13] Government of Kenya official records; UNHCR regional documentation on Kenya’s citizenship recognition initiatives.

[14] UNHCR, Ending Statelessness in Europe (2016); European Network on Statelessness materials on post-Soviet statelessness in Estonia and Latvia.

[15] UNHCR, #IBelong Campaign Action Points and Progress Reports (2014-2024).

[16] Colombian government refugee and migration service (Migración Colombia) documentation; UNHCR regional reports on Venezuela displacement crisis.

[17] “Mayu Frontier District,” Wikipedia, accessed December 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayu_Frontier_District; U Nu was Prime Minister of Burma (1948-1962) and recognized Rohingya citizenship.

[18] Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law divides the people of Myanmar on the basis of ethnicity, with 135 “national races” entitled to citizenship. The Rohingya are not included in this list. See Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”: Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Rakhine State (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2013).

[19] UN Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (2019); Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”, op. cit.; Fortify Rights, “They Gave Us Long Sentences for Our Religion”: Religious Persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar (2021).

[20] UNHCR, “Data: Rohingya Situation,” accessed December 2024, https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/rohingya; Amnesty International, Surviving on the Margins: The Plight of Stateless Rohingya in Malaysia (2010).

[21] Academic and NGO critiques of UNHCR approach, including work by researchers like Bronwen Manby on implicit statelessness mechanisms.

[22] UNHCR documentation on zero-option rules in post-Soviet state succession.

[23] UNHCR and human rights documentation on Kuwait’s 1959 Nationality Law and the bidoon population.

[24] European Network on Statelessness and academic research on deliberate administrative exclusion mechanisms.

[25] UAE Ministry of Interior documentation; Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports on Comorian residents in UAE.

[26] UNHCR, #IBelong Campaign Extended to 2030 (2024).

[27] UNHCR, #IBelong Campaign: A Decade of Action to End Statelessness (2024).

[28] Ibid.

[29] UNHCR regional reports; Government of Kyrgyzstan official statements on statelessness resolution.

[30] UNHCR, #IBelong Campaign reports.

[31] UNHCR announcement and campaign materials, 2024.

[32] Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, World Statelessness Report (2023, 2024 ed.), https://www.statelessness.eu/.

[33] European Network on Statelessness, https://www.statelessnessnetwork.org/.

[34] UNHCR regional reports on Kazakhstan documentation campaigns and Kyrgyzstan statelessness resolution.

[35] UNHCR, #IBelong Campaign closing statements and forward-looking agenda (2024).

Immigration Policy in the Spotlight

Migration is shaping North America’s political and humanitarian landscape in unprecedented ways. This comparative analysis series examines how three North American countries address immigration within their borders. The report aims to provide deeper insight into immigration laws, regulations, and humanitarian considerations, highlighting both similarities and differences among the countries. At a time when immigration is a polarizing issue across the region, this study seeks to clarify how national policies and social standards shape the experiences of migrants.

With Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, U.S. border and immigration policy shifted significantly toward stricter enforcement measures. Executive Order 14159 expanded the use of expedited removal to speed up deportations, rolled back protections under programs such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and asylum parole pathways, and restricted funding for sanctuary jurisdictions.¹ By July 2025, the Trump administration had deployed approximately 7,600 members of the armed services to the U.S.–Mexico border, tripling the number stationed at the border on January 20, 2025.²

The U.S. Supreme Court also recently lifted a lower-court ban on immigration “roving patrols” in Los Angeles. In Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, decided September 8, 2025, the Court ruled that immigration officers are permitted to consider race, language, and job type as “relevant factors” when stopping individuals, a shift widely criticized as enabling racial profiling and civil liberties violations.³⁻⁴

Problem Statement

U.S. immigration enforcement is seeing an increasing shift toward militarization and expedited removals, with legal and humanitarian consequences for migrants.⁵ Throughout 2025, deportation operations intensified significantly, with immigration enforcement agencies conducting removal flights and expanding enforcement activities across the country.⁶ These new enforcement measures have weakened constitutional safeguards and expanded racial profiling, arbitrary detention, and family separation.⁷⁻⁸ Migrants, particularly those perceived as non-white, Spanish-speaking, or working in vulnerable sectors, face heightened risks of exclusion and rights violations.

Given these developments, this series opens with an examination of Canada’s approach to immigration, setting the stage for a broader comparative analysis of how the United States, Canada, and Mexico address migration within their borders. The purpose is to identify similarities and differences in legal frameworks, enforcement practices, and humanitarian standards across the three countries. By situating U.S. policies alongside those of its immediate neighbors, the study highlights how North American states are responding to migration pressures and assesses whether alternative approaches offer more effective or humane models.

The analysis will be divided into two major categories:

Policy Frameworks & Governance:

• What are the primary immigration laws and policy documents?

• Which government agencies or departments oversee immigration and refugee affairs?

• Are there recent reforms or pending legislation that might affect migration policy?

• How centralized vs. decentralized is immigration decision-making (federal, state/provincial, municipal roles)?

Each section will include both factual and evaluative analysis to highlight best practices and gaps, ensuring analytical rigor.

Border Management & Enforcement:

• How do border control and security measures differ?

• What is the approach to irregular migration (detention, deportation, alternatives to detention)?

• How do policies align or conflict with human rights standards?

Each section will include both factual and evaluative analysis to highlight best practices and gaps, ensuring analytical rigor.

The series will be released in installments, with each part focusing on one country in depth. This approach allows readers to first understand the policies, enforcement practices, and humanitarian impacts within each national context. The final installment will bring these analyses together in a comparative report, highlighting key similarities, differences, and broader implications for immigration policy across North America.

Canada’s Immigration Policies

Policy Frameworks & Governance

What are the primary immigration laws and policy documents?

The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) sets the legal foundation for how Canada manages immigration, refugee protection, and border enforcement.⁹ As the primary federal legislation governing immigration, it is administered by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). The Act outlines who may be admitted to Canada and for what purposes, the rights and resources available to those authorized to stay, and the procedures for removal when applications are denied.

It functions under three broad categories of permanent residents:

Family Class: Individuals sponsored by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident, including spouses, partners, dependent children, parents, and grandparents, to reunite families. Under the 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan, this class accounts for roughly 21 to 22 percent of all permanent resident admissions.¹⁰

Economic Class: Immigrants selected for their potential to contribute to Canada’s economy, including skilled workers, business immigrants, and provincial nominees. This class is planned to make up about 64 percent of admissions by 2027–2028.¹⁰

Humanitarian and Refugee Class: People admitted for protection or humanitarian reasons, including refugees fleeing persecution and individuals accepted on compassionate grounds. When combined, they represent about 13 percent of total admissions.¹⁰

Along with this, the act establishes the requirements for visitors and provides for work and study permits for those seeking temporary stay.

The Act does not detail immigration programs or procedures but serves as an enabling statute allowing these details to be set through regulation. Through the Act, Parliament delegates authority to make immigration‑related regulations to the Governor in Council. It aims to maximize the social, cultural, and economic benefits of immigration, enrich Canadian society, protect public health and safety, and promote international justice and security through respect for human rights. As the Act states, one objective is “to permit Canada to pursue the maximum social, cultural and economic benefits of immigration.”¹¹

Canada’s key laws and policy documents

While the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) is the primary federal law establishing the framework for Canadian immigration, the country also relies on several other key laws and policy instruments that define how immigration is managed, enforced, and integrated across jurisdictions. Each contributes to balancing national priorities with regional and humanitarian considerations.

Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations (IRPR): These regulations specify how the provisions of the IRPA are applied, detailing procedures for various immigration programs and categories.¹² For example, the IRPR outlines the eligibility criteria and point system for skilled workers under the Express Entry program, the requirements for spousal sponsorship, and the processes for detention reviews and refugee claim assessments. Together, the IRPA and IRPR centralize immigration authority at the federal level while providing the flexibility needed to adapt to changing policy goals and global migration trends.

Ministerial Instructions: Typically issued for limited periods, these directives address a wide range of issues, including temporary resident processing, skilled worker selection, and application intake. They are designed to achieve specific objectives by managing how applications are received, processed, and prioritized within programs such as Express Entry. This allows the government to respond swiftly to labor market needs and humanitarian pressures without legislative amendments.

Canada–Quebec Accord (1991): This agreement grants Quebec significant control over immigration to the province, including the exclusive right to select economic and humanitarian immigrants.¹³ Quebec’s autonomy reflects the province’s efforts to preserve its French language and cultural identity, shaping broader national debates about multiculturalism, integration, and the balance between federal and provincial authority in immigration policy.

Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs): These programs provide a pathway to permanent residence for individuals seeking to settle in a specific province or territory. Each PNP is tailored to meet distinct economic and demographic priorities. The PNP model decentralizes immigration policymaking, empowering provinces to attract workers and address regional labor shortages, complementing federal objectives with localized strategies.

Citizenship Act: This act defines who is a Canadian citizen and sets out the rules for acquiring citizenship through birth, descent, or naturalization, while ensuring equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens.¹⁴ By linking immigration to citizenship, the Act underscores Canada’s broader vision of inclusion and long-term integration as foundations of its national identity.

Government agencies and departments overseeing immigration and refugee affairs

Immigration in Canada is overseen by both federal and provincial/territorial governments. Federal departments and agencies are responsible for administering national immigration, refugee, and citizenship policies, while provinces and territories manage programs that address regional labor and demographic needs.

Federal Departments and Agencies

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC): Has primary responsibility for matters related to immigration, refugees, and Canadian citizenship. The department manages the selection of immigrants, issues visitor visas, and processes citizenship applications. It also determines the eligibility of refugee protection claims made within Canada and refers approved cases to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB). IRCC operates through offices across the country as well as overseas visa offices around the world, ensuring a broad reach in processing applications and supporting global migration pathways.

Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB): Functions as an independent administrative tribunal tasked with making impartial decisions on immigration and refugee cases.

Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA): Responsible for border control, customs, and immigration enforcement. The agency screens people entering Canada, enforces immigration laws, and removes individuals found to be inadmissible.

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC): Oversees social programs and labour-market policy at the federal level. Within the immigration system, it enforces employer-compliance regulations and administers the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which facilitates the entry of foreign workers to meet Canada’s labour-market needs. ESDC’s enforcement activities include inspecting employers, verifying wages and working conditions, and penalizing non-compliance. These measures directly influence immigration outcomes by shaping migrant vulnerability and overall standards of worker protection.

Provincial and Territorial Roles

Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs): Provinces and territories play a significant role through their PNPs. These programs allow regional governments to develop and administer permanent residence streams tailored to local economic and demographic priorities. By doing so, PNPs provide pathways to permanent residency for skilled workers, international graduates, and other economic immigrants, while addressing the unique labor market needs of each region.

Recent reforms and pending legislation affecting migration policy

Each year, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship creates an Immigration Levels Plan (ILP), projecting immigration targets for the next three years. One key goal is to reduce temporary residents to less than 5% of the total population by the end of 2027. To achieve this, the plan lowers permanent resident targets and introduces specific targets for temporary residents.¹⁰ This reflects a tightening of Canada’s immigration posture after years of record growth through temporary pathways. By capping the temporary resident share under 5%, the plan signals stricter controls and a shift away from rapid temporary population growth.

In June 2025, the Government of Canada introduced Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, to target “increasingly complex criminal groups” and strengthen immigration controls.¹⁵⁻¹⁶ The legislation would give the government new authority to modify or suspend immigration documents and limit new applications when deemed in the public interest.¹⁷ While mirroring global trends toward securitized immigration policy, the bill raises civil liberties concerns. Critics, including the International Civil Liberties Group, warn these powers could undermine due process and independent oversight, while civil society organizations caution that vulnerable groups, such as asylum seekers or applicants from politically unstable regions, may face arbitrary delays or denials without sufficient avenues for appeal.¹⁸⁻¹⁹

The act also imposes stricter asylum rules to streamline claim processing. It unifies procedures, refers complete claims to the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), clears inactive cases, expedites removals, and provides support for vulnerable applicants. Two proposed ineligibility measures aim to prevent sudden claim surges, reduce system burdens, and deter misuse.¹⁷ Critics from Amnesty International argue the bill endangers asylum seekers, blocks claims for those in Canada over a year even if at risk, allows cancellation of permits without due process, and expands surveillance powers.²⁰ Government officials maintain these reforms are necessary to protect system integrity and prevent abuse.

Alongside these changes, the government has faced scrutiny over citizenship rules. The first-generation limit means a child born outside Canada is not automatically Canadian if their parent was also born abroad, even if the grandparent is Canadian. In December 2023, the Ontario Superior Court in Bjorkquist et al. v. Attorney General of Canada found this rule unconstitutional but suspended the ruling until November 20, 2025, so the limit still applies.²¹⁻²² As an interim measure in March 2025, affected individuals could apply for discretionary citizenship, with priority for children born or adopted after December 19, 2023, if their Canadian parent has a substantial connection to Canada.²³ This change affects who is considered Canadian versus foreign, influencing eligibility for permanent residence, family reunification, and refugee sponsorship.

Centralized vs. decentralized immigration decision-making (federal, state/provincial, municipal roles)

Federal government: The federal government, through Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), sets overall immigration targets, defines categories (economic, family, refugee), and establishes eligibility criteria. It determines who is admissible and has exclusive authority over citizenship and refugee status. The government also sets foundational rules for immigration, including health, safety, and security screenings. It runs nationwide programs such as Express Entry for skilled workers and manages refugee resettlement.

Provincial/territorial governments: Immigration is a policy area shared between federal and provincial/territorial governments. Provinces and territories (except Quebec and Nunavut) run Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) to nominate individuals for permanent residency based on local labor market needs. They can also set their own selection criteria within these programs, focusing on skills, education, and experience relevant to regional economies. For example, Manitoba’s PNP prioritizes rural retention to support smaller communities, while Ontario’s emphasizes attracting skilled workers in the technology sector. Canada and the provinces/territories have bilateral agreements defining responsibilities and collaboration on immigration, including the Canada-Quebec Accord, which gives Quebec significant authority over its immigration selection and integration policies.¹³

Municipal roles: While municipalities don’t have formal constitutional powers over immigration, they play a crucial role in the settlement and integration of newcomers. They often work with non-profit organizations, employers, and other stakeholders to provide services and support to immigrants. They can advocate for their local needs and participate in programs like the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot. Despite their importance, the municipal role remains largely advisory, with formal powers and funding heavily influenced by federal and provincial policies and programs.

Border Management & Enforcement

Canada’s border control and security measures

Canada has comprehensive measures to maintain secure and efficient borders. These include law enforcement agencies using technologies like ground sensors, cameras, radars, and license plate readers to enhance monitoring. Canada also shares information and intelligence with the U.S. to guide decisions before travelers arrive. This includes joint operations and patrols along shared waterways through Shiprider programs, which allow cross-designated Canadian and U.S. officers to patrol maritime borders and enforce the law on both sides. While these tools strengthen security and cooperation, they have raised concerns about surveillance, data privacy, and potential racial profiling.

In addition, Border Services Officers (BSOs) are stationed at official ports of entry to inspect travelers and goods entering or leaving the country. Many visitors to Canada require a visa, permit, or Electronic Travel Authorization before entering, and an Entry/Exit system tracks most travelers crossing the border. Canada has also expanded its use of biometric requirements.

The CBSA actively works to prevent the trade of counterfeit goods, illicit narcotics, and opioids. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) enforces over 100 acts and regulations to ensure the safety and security of the country. BSOs have the authority to detain and remove individuals violating laws related to immigration, customs, or national security, and they are equipped with defensive tools and firearms to carry out their duties.

The Canadian Government has increased their investment in strengthening border security by introducing a $1.3 billion Border Plan in December 2024.²⁴ The plan focuses on five key pillars:

• Detecting and disrupting the illegal fentanyl trade

• Introducing significant new tools for law enforcement

• Improving operational coordination

• Expanding information sharing

• Minimizing unnecessary border volumes

Canada recently appointed a “Fentanyl Czar” to coordinate efforts against fentanyl trafficking. These initiatives, such as classifying cartels as terrorist entities and establishing a Canada-U.S. Joint Strike Force, are primarily aimed at curbing organized crime but also expand border enforcement capacities. Canada plans to launch its first preclearance operation in the U.S. in 2025, allowing travelers to clear customs and security before reaching Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) also play a crucial role in securing the border, particularly between official ports of entry, using measures such as aerial surveillance through drones and helicopters and collaborating with U.S. law enforcement on joint operations and intelligence sharing. Although framed as anti-narcotics, this increased border policing may indirectly influence migration flows and asylum processing.

The Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement helps manage migration flows by requiring asylum seekers to make their claims in the first safe country they arrive in. Expanded in 2023 to cover the entire land border and internal waterways, the policy has drawn criticism for pushing asylum seekers toward irregular crossings, raising significant safety and human rights concerns.²⁵

What is the approach to irregular migration (detention, deportation, alternatives to detention)?

Detention

Individuals arriving in Canada without proper documentation, or those considered a danger to the public, unlikely to appear for immigration proceedings, or unable to establish their identity, may be detained by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Canada operates three Immigration Holding Centres in Laval (Quebec), Toronto (Ontario), and Surrey (British Columbia) for lower-risk detainees, while provincial facilities are used for higher-risk individuals or regions without IHCs. Detention reviews are conducted by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) within 48 hours, then after 7 days, and every 30 days thereafter.²⁶ Although there is no legal limit on detention duration, these reviews safeguard against indefinite detention. Vulnerable individuals, such as children, pregnant women, the elderly, or those with serious medical conditions or disabilities, are generally detained only if justified by safety or security concerns.

Deportation

Individuals found inadmissible or removable from Canada, such as those posing security, human rights, or criminal risks, are subject to removal by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). The removal process prioritizes individuals who represent a threat to public safety or have violated serious immigration or criminal laws. The agency works to carry out removals in a fair, transparent, and efficient manner while respecting human rights and Canada’s international obligations. In managing irregular migration, the CBSA’s approach balances enforcement and public safety with procedural fairness and humanitarian considerations, using detention and removal only when necessary to uphold the integrity of Canada’s immigration system.

Alternatives to detention (ATD)

Recognizing the potential harms of immigration detention, Canada continues to detain individuals under its enforcement framework. In the 2024 fiscal year (April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024), 4,929 people were detained under the immigration detention program.²⁷ In response, Canada emphasizes alternatives through the Canada Border Services Agency’s Alternatives to Detention program, introduced in 2018. The program manages individuals in the community while ensuring compliance with immigration requirements and system integrity. Depending on risk, alternatives may include regular reporting, participation in the Community Case Management and Supervision (CCMS) program, posting bonds or guarantees, and, in some cases, electronic monitoring. These measures provide more humane and proportionate responses to enforcement, particularly for vulnerable individuals, while addressing public safety and flight risk.

Recent developments

Recent developments in Canada’s approach to irregular migration signal a shift toward less punitive, more community-based strategies. All ten provinces have committed to ending agreements with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) that allowed immigration detainees in provincial jails, a step framed as a win for migrant and refugee rights. This move reflects recognition of the harms of detention, especially in facilities designed for criminal incarceration, and a growing preference for alternatives that respect dignity and human rights. At the federal level, this development pressures the government to adopt policy or legislative changes to phase out provincial jail use. If implemented effectively, this shift could position Canada as a model for rights-centered immigration enforcement.

How do policies align or conflict with human rights standards?

Alignment with human rights standards

Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), the government commits to protecting individuals fleeing persecution or at risk of cruel or unusual treatment, reaffirming Canada’s adherence to international refugee protection principles.²⁸ Canada’s framework also prioritizes family reunification, ensuring families can live together and contribute to society. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees equality before the law and protection from discrimination for all individuals, including non-citizens.²⁹ While these commitments align with human rights standards, gaps remain. Ongoing concerns about immigration detention, the Safe Third Country Agreement, and barriers to family reunification show areas where Canada has yet to fully meet its obligations.

Potential conflicts with human rights standards

Several immigration and refugee policies have drawn criticism for falling short of international standards. Canada’s use of provincial jails to hold immigration detainees, where they may be confined alongside individuals accused or convicted of crimes, has been widely condemned as punitive and inconsistent with international human rights obligations. According to the joint report “I Didn’t Feel Like a Human in There”: Immigration Detention in Canada and Its Impact on Mental Health, concerns have also been raised regarding discrimination and inadequate support for immigration detainees with disabilities, with reports indicating insufficient access to care and barriers to self-determination within detention facilities.³⁰

Access to the asylum system remains uneven. Individuals with pending removal orders or other procedural challenges may struggle to access protection mechanisms, raising concerns about fairness and due process. Delays in family reunification, due to lengthy processing times and stringent proof-of-relationship requirements, prolong separation and emotional distress for refugees and their families. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), which enforces immigration laws and manages detention facilities, operates without independent civilian oversight, prompting calls for greater transparency and accountability. The system of designated representatives for immigration detainees with disabilities has also been criticized for limiting autonomy and undermining individuals’ rights to make personal decisions, highlighting the need for reform to align practices with human rights standards. These tensions reflect Canada’s ongoing challenge of balancing humanitarian values with securitized governance. Federal and provincial policies aim to maintain system integrity and border security but sometimes fall short of fully meeting human rights obligations. This sets the stage for examining enforcement measures, detention alternatives, and broader implications for rights-centered migration policy.

As the series continues…

Canada’s immigration system reflects a complex balance between humanitarian commitments, federal–provincial governance, and evolving enforcement practices. While the country maintains strong legal protections and a comparatively rights-oriented framework, recent reforms and securitized trends reveal areas of tension that mirror broader regional debates. Understanding these dynamics provides an essential foundation for comparing North American approaches to migration. The next installment in this series will examine Mexico’s immigration policies, offering a deeper look at how another key regional actor manages migration pressures, enforcement challenges, and humanitarian obligations.

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Endnotes

1. Executive Order 14159, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” Federal Register 90 (January 29, 2025): 8443.

2. Al Jazeera, “US Military Expands Enforcement Role at Mexican Border under Donald Trump,” July 25, 2025.

3. Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, No. 25A169 (U.S. Sept. 8, 2025).

4. American Immigration Council, “How the Supreme Court’s Latest Decision Clears the Way for Racial Profiling During Immigration Raids,” September 9, 2025.

5. Migration Policy Institute, “A New Era of Immigration Enforcement Unfolds in the U.S. Interior and at the Border under Trump 2.0,” accessed November 16, 2025.

6. Human Rights First, “ICE Flight Monitor: September 2025 Report,” accessed November 16, 2025.

7. National Immigration Forum, “Fact Sheet: Expanded Expedited Removal,” June 18, 2025.

8. Congressional Research Service, “Immigration Enforcement and Related Legal Processes,” LSB11300, accessed November 16, 2025.

9. Canada, Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, S.C. 2001, c. 27.

10. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Supplementary Information for the 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan,” accessed November 16, 2025.

11. Canada, Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, S.C. 2001, c. 27, s. 3(1)(a).

12. Canada, Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, SOR/2002-227.

13. Canada-Quebec Accord, February 5, 1991.

14. Canada, Citizenship Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-29.

15. Bill C-2, Strong Borders Act, 1st Sess., 45th Parl., 2025 (first reading June 3, 2025).

16. Public Safety Canada, “The Strong Borders Act - Government of Canada Strengthens Border Security,” news release, June 3, 2025.

17. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Additional Information about the Strong Borders Act,” June 17, 2025.

18. TIME, “What’s in Canada’s Immigration Bill, Why It’s Causing Worry,” June 5, 2025.

19. Canadian Council for Refugees, “Over 300 Organizations Unite to Demand Complete Withdrawal of Bill C-2,” June 18, 2025.

20. Amnesty International, statement on Bill C-2, June 2025.

21. Bjorkquist et al. v. Attorney General of Canada, 2023 ONSC 7274 (Ont. Sup. Ct. J. Dec. 19, 2023).

22. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Canada Will Not Appeal Decision that Strikes Down First Generation Limit to Canadian Citizenship by Descent,” news release, January 22, 2024.

23. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, “Canada to Request a Further Extension to Maintain First-Generation Limit to Canadian Citizenship by Descent,” statement by Minister Marc Miller, March 13, 2025.

24. Public Safety Canada, “Canada’s Border Plan,” December 2024.

25. Canada, Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement, expanded March 25, 2023.

26. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, detention review procedures, Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

27. Canada Border Services Agency, “Immigration Detention Statistics,” fiscal year 2023-2024.

28. Canada, Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, S.C. 2001, c. 27.

29. Canada, Department of Justice, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982.

30. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, “I Didn’t Feel Like a Human in There”: Immigration Detention in Canada and Its Impact on Mental Health, 2021, 4–5, 62.

The world is facing an unprecedented displacement crisis. The number of refugees forced from their homes across an international border has doubled from 20 million globally in 1994 to 43.7 million in June of 2024.[1] Refugees are a diverse group of people, with varied backgrounds who share the experience of fleeing life-threatening danger to seek the protection of refugee status in another country. From the 1980s onward intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in cooperation with state level governments, have largely focused refugee policy on strategies of refugee containment through encampment.[2]

Today, a shift has occurred with most of the world’s refugees now found in urban environments. More than 60% of refugees seeking safety from war, climate-induced disasters, ethnic or religious persecution, and other grave conditions can be found in cities around the world.[3] While urban settings provide more autonomy than camps, cities can also create vulnerabilities for refugees unique to their diverse contexts including arrest and detention, refoulement, human trafficking, labor abuses and exploitation, lack of shelter, gender-based violence (GBV), discrimination, and other serious safety risks.^4]

This report is part of a two part series providing an overview of the shift from camp based to urban policy prescriptions for refugees, insight into the unique challenges faced by urban refugees, and policy recommendations for stakeholders working to address refugee vulnerabilities. The second installment will examine Turkey, which hosts one of the world’s largest refugee populations of which over 90% live outside of camps, as a case study. The challenges that are specific to urban refugees in Turkey illustrate identifiable patterns of concern that may be shared in other urban settings experiencing inflows of refugees.[5]

Creshendo works alongside its partners in Turkey to provide services to refugee communities and draws from data gathered through fieldwork, as well as secondary data gathered by refugee focused NGOs, IGOs, and states. The report’s second installment concludes with policy recommendations for policymakers, stakeholders, and refugee centered organizations on how to refocus operational models built into the global refugee response system towards the on-ground realities of urbanization.

Understanding Urban Refugees

Who are Urban Refugees?

The increasing percentage of refugees who seek safety in cities around the world follows the broader demographic, economic, and sociopolitical trends of population growth and urbanization. The world’s urban population has grown from 750 million in 1950 to 4.2 billion in 2018 with 68% of the global population projected to live in cities by 2050.[^6] Urban refugee experiences can be as diverse as the contexts from which they flee and the cities in which they resettle. However, some shared characteristics of urban refugees highlight the risks they face and the motivations they may have to seek shelter in cities. The term “urban refugees” holds primarily spatial meaning, indicating the location of refugees within an urban or peri-urban environment. Urban refugees often arrive through a process the UNHCR defines as “self-settlement,” in which individuals flee danger and resettle in cities without the direct placement by state or intergovernmental actors.[7]

Unlike refugees in camps, urban refugees face unique challenges such as lack of legal recognition, higher living costs, and exposure to urban-based risks like trafficking and labor exploitation. Many urban refugees leave camp settings, which provide emergency shelter but offer limited long-term opportunities for self-sufficiency. Depending on the routes urban refugees take to flee and where they intend to settle, they often lack formal legal recognition, which can put them at risk of detention, refoulement, and harassment by local authorities. They may also be taken across remote and dangerous geographic territory or sea-borne routes. In addition to formal legal barriers, urban refugees frequently struggle to secure housing, healthcare, and employment due to the absence of structured aid mechanisms. Urban refugees often build resilience through social networks that provide informal support, employment, and cultural familiarity. These networks may consist of community members from their country of origin who share linguistic, cultural, or religious ties.

The Syrian community represents a group of largely urban refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey whose shared experience fleeing the destruction and danger of civil war helped form strong communal ties in neighborhoods of resettlement across the region. In 2011, Turkey operated on a visa-free, open-door policy that granted temporary protected status for Syrian refugees, representing a progressive model for inclusive refugee policy.[8] However, between 2011-2016, Syrian refugees were barred from obtaining legal work status, which forced them into the informal economic sector. A policy shift in 2016 allowed for Syrians to apply for work permits and enter the formal economy, reshaping opportunity and creating pathways towards restoring autonomy. While it is important to recognize that each refugee crisis, the conditions of flight, and receptivity of the host community differs significantly, the shift toward urban refugee resettlement highlights the urgent need for a change in global refugee policies, humanitarian responses, and advocacy strategies.

Distinctions between camp-based and urban refugees

Although many refugees continue to seek emergency shelter and safety in camps, encampment models are increasingly being critiqued as a model built on dependency rather than economic integration and restoring autonomy. Historically, camps are a contested space that evolved from sites of containment, such as prisoner-of-war (POW) and internment camps, to the contradictory “care and control” paradigm that loosely defines refugee camps.[9] In reality, the distinction between urban environments inhabited by refugees and refugee camps is often blurred. Palestinian refugees in countries like Jordan and Lebanon are one of the oldest refugee communities in the region who were resettled into refugee camps since the 1940s across Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan that now resemble segregated, yet densely populated urban sites that often lack basic infrastructure and public services.

Another example of the blurred lines between urban and camp-based refugees is the Dadaab refugee camp located in Kenya, which was established in 1991 to temporarily house 90,000 displaced Somalis fleeing the country’s civil war.[10] Since, Dadaab has incorporated successive waves of refugees to grow to almost a half million people living in a city-sized demarcated area that is deprived of formal employment opportunities and rife with violence. In 2025 the Kenyan government began implementing the Shirika Plan, designed to transform large refugee settlements like Dadaab and Kakuma into integrated, self-reliant municipalities that grant refugees access to formal health, and education services, and economic opportunities.[11]

This transformative policy shift recognizes that while these sites are designated as camps, they share features with urban environments in terms of size, and population. The reality is that many refugees spend decades living in quasi-camp settings without more durable resettlement options available to them as states ignore the value of the human capital refugees possess by denying them access to documentation, employment, and education. In the context of these restrictions and the dangers of camp life, many refugees instead flee to more formal, established cities.

Why Do Refugees Move to Cities?

Cities often provide greater opportunities for refugees to access critical social networks, economic opportunities, better healthcare, education and other services that can be tightly regulated or denied in camps. Unlike refugee camps, cities allow for more autonomy and mobility, which many refugees prioritize in rebuilding their lives. Because most refugees also flee from cities, their experiences, skills, and life goals are often best suited to living in urban environments. Egypt hosts close to one million refugees from Syria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and other countries among 58 nationalities represented in the officially registered refugee population. Egypt also does not and never has had formal refugee camps in the modern era and instead strategically pursues a policy of urban integration which has concentrated the majority of the country’s refugee population in Cairo, Alexandria, Sharkia, and Damietti.[12] Although urban refugees in Egypt face barriers to employment and affordable housing, the government’s strategy recognizes urban integration as a viable alternative to camp-based assistance in the ongoing global refugee crisis.

Refugees often flee with very few material resources across international borders to seek safety from war, famine, persecution or other grim conditions as their main priority. However, effective response systems must shift from the initial emergency and humanitarian reaction that often focuses on providing shelter and basic needs, towards long-term endurable solutions to displacement. In the absence of formal options for work, education, adequate healthcare, and meaningful personal development, refugees who are trapped in camps with limited alternatives are more likely to pursue self-settlement in urban settings. It is important to recognize that refugees are political actors whose choice to flee is an active form of self-preservation and political resistance to some of the most appalling conditions a human may face. When refugees do flee, they often are challenged by significant needs, but they also bring valuable skills and knowledge with them. Often the goal of urban refugees is to restore their autonomy by pursuing dignified work in places of opportunity with the hopes of alleviating the burdens of dispossession.

Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, and lacks a comprehensive national refugee policy. As a result, refugees from Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and other nations who flee to Thailand are not legally recognized and often face criminalization. Many refugees overstay different categories of visas and relocate to urban areas like Bangkok. However, without any formal legal channels to apply for asylum, they are vulnerable to exploitation, detention, or deportation that denies them legal employment, schooling, and basic services. This contrasts starkly with countries like Egypt, which, despite its economic challenges, has strategically pursued urban, inclusive integration policies. Although urban refugees in Bangkok do not have legal status many of them attempt to support themselves through irregular or informal means and partially rely on NGOs, social networks, and religious organizations for support.

Protracted displacement can result in camps and informal settlements that take the form of urban environments, however there are significant differences between camp-based refugees, informal settlements, and urban refugees. Because of those differences and the increasing shifts towards the urbanization of displacement it is important to recognize the unique challenges that urban refugees face in order to understand how stakeholders at the nexus of advocacy, policy development, and support services can work towards durable solutions.

Key Challenges for Urban Refugees

Urban refugees face several challenges that undermine their wellbeing and create vulnerabilities that are unique to the experience of resettlement in city centers. This section provides a broad overview of the most pressing issues urban refugees encounter, with supporting evidence from different country contexts. It is important to recognize that refugee needs evolve over time from the period of initial flight to resettlement, prolonged resettlement, and permanent resettlement.

Although every refugee does not experience each of these phases of displacement, some do, and there are unique challenges inherent to each temporal context. Refugees in disparate regions, and states can also experience these challenges differently, however most refugees are currently hosted in developing to medium income states which can have resource and infrastructure constraints specific to the Global South.

Refugees who resettle in wealthy states also experience challenges unique to their context and a decade-long rise in anti-immigration in the United States, Australia, Europe has created compounding challenges and risks for refugees in these geographic regions. Broadly, the most common challenges urban refugees face are a lack of documentation and legal barriers, limited access to social services, barriers to employment and risks associated with working in informal sectors, and impediments to social integration including discrimination and xenophobia. Each of these challenges is described in more detail in the following subsections.

Lack of Documentation & Legal Barriers

Refugees in both camp and urban settings often lack documentation that is necessary to establish their identity. In the process of fleeing to safety essential documents like birth certificates, passports, drivers’ licenses and other identification documents can often be lost. This can present the first of many obstacles to establishing their identity for the purpose of applying for legal refugee status in the countries that receive them. For urban refugees the challenges presented by a lack of documentation are complex because many places offer limited or no legal pathway to permanent or even temporary residency for refugees. In places that do not legally recognize asylum seekers or refugees as a legal migration category, accessing legal documentation can be close to impossible. The absence of legal status can have devastating consequences. Without formal recognition as asylum seekers or refugees, many are left in legal limbo, unable to access employment, housing, or even healthcare.

Afghan refugees in Pakistan are currently facing challenges related to legal documentation. Millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan in successive waves across decades of war and economic fragility in Afghanistan. However, many of these refugees are at risk of detention and refoulement because of limited legal protections and documentation. In 2015, the government of Pakistan created the Proof of Registration (PoR) card that granted 1.7 million Afghan refugees temporary protected status yet, this legal recognition did not offer a pathway to citizenship or permanent residency and was designed to expire.[13] Since the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, millions more refugees have fled to Pakistan prompting a widespread deportation campaign that places the lives of millions of refugees in imminent danger. Large-scale deportation of refugees and asylum seekers is dangerous, exacerbates anti-refugee sentiment, and often leads to refugees once again being dispossessed. Afghan refugees in Pakistan currently live in fear of deportation without any legal means to advocate for themselves and legal residency in Pakistan. Documentation is often a first, but important step towards providing refugees with the means to reestablish autonomy. It is often a challenge to access documents that will ensure their safety, mobility, access to work and education, and other vital resources.

Limited Access to Essential Services

Refugees often lack access to essential services necessary for adjustment to a new urban context in the aftermath of flight. In 2009, the UNHCR released its first comprehensive policy report relating to urban refugees. It presented a foundational pivot in the influential organization’s approach to identifying and supporting urban refugees, host communities, and aligned organizations. However, researchers and practitioners find that the policy shift has not yet made a significant nor positive impact on the lives of urban refugees beyond some of the most vulnerable because of the lack of a more efficient operational model for urban refugee support. Many refugees arrive to urban areas of resettlement with limited local language skills and without a basic knowledge of how complex, nuanced institutions that provide healthcare or schooling operate.

Uganda has one of the world’s most progressive national policy frameworks for incorporating refugee populations that grants the legal right to work, freedom of movement, and legal access to social services. This allows refugees who may initially seek safety in a camp setting to migrate to cities like Kampala to work towards restoring their autonomy. However, even in countries with socio-legal policies meant to support refugees rather than criminalize them, urban refugees in Kampala still face barriers to accessing legally available services. A 2019 research study conducted by Young African Refugees for Integral Development trained refugees in Kampala to gather data on their experiences accessing healthcare, among other services, and found that even when healthcare services were technically available, discrimination, lack of local systemic and operational knowledge, and language barriers prevented refugees from receiving adequate social support services.[14]

Some of those challenges reflect the reality that, despite progressive refugee policy, Uganda remains an economically developing state with limited resources to provide both its citizenry and incoming refugees. This is important to note because the vast majority of the world’s refugees are hosted by lower income to medium income countries who themselves rely on donor and operational support from agencies like the UNHCR. Large-scale international organizations are struggling to shift towards a refugee support model that can address basic needs while recognizing that most refugees are increasingly found in urban settings. Meanwhile, barriers to access remain in place for refugees in host countries that utilize their local legal systems to criminalize refugees, but these service gaps also exist in states like Uganda that have progressive refugee policies in place.

Economic Struggles & Informal Labor

Pathways to economic security are perhaps the most important byways through which refugees can restore self-sufficiency. Although the 1951 Refugee Convention guarantees socio-economic rights, many countries that ratified it still deny refugees access to formal labor markets. Urban refugees are also often denied the right to work or face insurmountable legal and administrative barriers to work. Further, refugees can also be excluded from formal economic systems such as banking and finance. These exclusions limit their ability to access basic banking services such as debit cards and savings accounts as well as more complex financial instruments such as home and vehicle loans. Each of these limitations reinforce poverty in refugee communities and create significant risks and vulnerabilities. Denied access to the formal economy, refugees, and particularly urban refugees are often relegated to dangerous and exploitative labor conditions where they risk their lives for an opportunity to provide for themselves and their families.

In the United States, research demonstrates that the economic success and upward mobility of refugees is shaped on four levels of social integration: the individual shaped by personal traumas or linguistic skills; the culture informed by both one’s country of origin and ethnic identity and the contours of American culture refugees encounter on arrival; organizational, which includes service providers and employers; and, the systemic level comprised of complex systems including policy, housing, and labor institutions.[15] Integrative challenges threaten urban refugee access to adequate work at each level. While economic opportunity is essential to refugee autonomy, in the United States critics suggest that a neoliberal overemphasis on work, funnels refugees into the labor market without the tools for successful upward mobility. As a result, refugees in the U.S. often remain trapped in low-wage, exploitative work.

For refugees who lack documentation or the legal right to work in many places around the world, they can easily become victims of wage theft, workplace discrimination, or other labor abuses. The vulnerability of work within the informal sectors means that refugees lack pathways for legal redress when their rights are violated and may live in fear of self-advocacy for higher wages or better treatment at their places of work. Urban refugees typically seek resettlement in city centers for accessing economic opportunity, like numerous others of the millions of people worldwide driving the global shift towards urbanization.

Yet, refugees are often unfairly blamed for the economic impacts of displacement drivers like drought or conflict. Following the outbreak of civil war in Syria the economies of Jordan and Lebanon were negatively impacted by decreases in regional tourism, collapsing trade, and fragility in financial networks. However, the World Bank found that incoming refugees typically increase GDPs by stimulating the local labor supply and domestic consumption.[^16] Importantly, urban refugees who do work, pay taxes, and contribute to economies are a valuable development asset and it must be recognized that systems of inclusion function both to support pathways to refugee upward mobility and the economic viability of host communities.

Social Integration & Discrimination

Social exclusion and discrimination can present significant barriers to safety, integration, and the wellbeing of urban refugees. Research has consistently demonstrated that refugees often struggle with mental health challenges that stem from a sense of isolation and deprivation as they work to establish new lives in different cultural contexts that can feel unwelcoming. The traumas of pre-migration can be deepened by the experiences of discrimination in post-migration urban settings. In many parts of the world urban refugees experience de jure segregation because of interrelated factors including economic limitations and xenophobia.

While this trend may create strong in-group social networks within refugee communities, it can also alienate refugee communities from their broader social context by creating urban neighborhoods that are neglected. Urban localities with dense refugee populations can lack resources in ways that further exacerbate anti-refugee sentiment by reinforcing negative stereotypes about refugee communities as a burden on societies. The blurred lines between refugees and other categories of migrants can create social confusion about the legal responsibility signatory states to the 1951 Refugee Convention have to asylum seekers and refugees under international law. In legal contexts that recognize refugee rights by law, discrimination can result in refugees being attacked, denied essential services, or becoming victims of other forms of anti-refugee discrimination.

Discriminatory attitudes towards refugees can intensify each of the previously described challenges from accessing legal documentation to obtaining dignified work in complex and nuanced ways that result in refugees being relegated to the margins of society. In camp settings refugees are often isolated and contained, forcing them to rely on humanitarian aid, however for urban refugees, integration into the broader social context is key to their ability to not just survive but achieve stability and self-sufficiency. Inevitably, in the urban environment refugees come in frequent contact with host communities who have a significant impact on how urban refugees experience resettlement in their daily lives. Research on the experiences of Somali refugee communities who have resettled to urban locations in the United Kingdom highlight how refugees in the U.K. are increasingly the targets of hostile policies in a socio-political climate that views refugees as an unsustainable burden.[^17]

Conclusion: Toward an Urban-Centered Refugee Response

The urbanization of displacement is a defining shift in the contemporary global refugee crisis. As this report demonstrates, more than 60% of the world’s refugees now live in cities, yet many of the international refugee response system remain structured around outdated camp-based models that fail to address the realities of urban refugee life. This disconnect between policy and practice leaves millions of urban refugees vulnerable to exploitation, discrimination, legal limbo, and economic marginalization.

Evidence across diverse contexts from Syrian refugees in Turkey to Afghan refugees in Pakistan in both receptive and increasingly hostile environments reveals both the scale of the challenge and the need for meaningful change. Urban refugees are not passive recipients of aid but active agents seeking to rebuild their lives with dignity and autonomy. They bring skills, knowledge, and economic potential to host communities. Removable systemic barriers that can be changed through effective policy reform prevent them from achieving self-sufficiency and contributing fully to their host societies.

The path forward requires a fundamental reimagining of refugee support systems. Policymakers, humanitarian organizations, and host governments must move beyond emergency responses toward sustainable, urban-integrated approaches that recognize refugees’ agency and potential. This means creating legal pathways to documentation and work permits, ensuring access to education and healthcare regardless of legal status, protecting refugees from exploitation in informal labor markets, and actively combating xenophobia and discrimination in host communities.

Countries like Uganda and Egypt demonstrate that progressive refugee policies are possible even in resource-constrained contexts. Turkey’s 2016 policy shift allowing Syrian refugees to obtain work permits illustrates how legal frameworks can be adapted to reflect on-the-ground realities. These examples offer roadmaps towards reform for countries that remain reliant on outdated camp-based models. Although implementation gaps remain significant even in progressive policy contexts sustained international support can help to support areas in need of improvement.

In the next installment of this two-part series Turkey will be used as a case study for urban refugee integration, its challenges, and insight into the experience of refugees who have found stability and community in cities across Turkey.

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Endnotes

[^1]: UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency, “Figures at a Glance | UNHCR,” UNHCR, n.d., https://www.unhcr.org/about-unhcr/who-we-are/figures-glance.

[^2]: Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (Oxford University Press, 2017).

[^3]: Anneleen Vos and Helen Dempster, “Most Refugees Live in Cities, Not Camps. Our Response Needs to Shift,” Center for Global Development, 2021, https://www.cgdev.org/blog/most-refugees-live-cities-not-camps-our-response-needs-shift.

[^4]: UNHCR, “UNHCR Policy on Refugee Protection and Solutions in Urban Areas,” UNHCR, 2009, https://www.unhcr.org/media/unhcr-policy-refugee-protection-and-solutions-urban-areas.

[^5]: Glenda Santana De Andrade, “Beyond Vulnerability: Syrian Refugees in Urban Spaces in Turkey,” International Journal for Crime Justice and Social Democracy 9, no. 3 (August 5, 2020): 34–46, https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v9i3.1589.

[^6]: United Nations, “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban Areas by 2050, Says UN | United Nations,” 2018, https://www.un.org/uk/desa/68-world-population-projected-live-urban-areas-2050-says-un.

[^7]: UNHCR Emergency Handbook, “Informal Settlements,” UNHCR, November 5, 2024, https://emergency.unhcr.org/emergency-assistance/shelter-camp-and-settlement/settlements/informal-settlements.

[^8]: Kemal Kirişci, “Syrian Refugees in Turkey: The Limits of an Open Door Policy,” Brookings, June 27, 2013, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/syrian-refugees-in-turkey-the-limits-of-an-open-door-policy.

[^9]: Kirsten McConnachie, “Camps of Containment: A Genealogy of the Refugee Camp,” Humanity 7, no. 3 (January 1, 2016): 397–412, https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2016.0022.

[^10]: Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (Oxford University Press, 2017).

[^11]: Kenya, Government of, and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, The Refugees (General) Regulations, 2024, Rights Mapping and Analysis Platform (RiMAP), UNHCR, https://rimap.unhcr.org/node/295.

[^12]: “Refugee Context in Egypt - UNHCR Egypt,” UNHCR Egypt, n.d., https://www.unhcr.org/eg/about-us/refugee-context-in-egypt.

[^13]: Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees, Punjab, “Proof of Registration (PoR) Card,” Government of Punjab, Pakistan, accessed February 24, 2025, https://car.punjab.gov.pk/proof_of_registration_card.

[^14]: IIED, “Refugees in Cities: Grassroots Researchers Shed Light on Basic Needs,” International Institute for Environment and Development, https://www.iied.org/17643iied.

[^15]: M Linjean Kim et al., “Economic Integration of Refugees in the USA: A Scoping Review Using the Socio-Ecological Model (2007–2023),” International Migration & Integration (2024), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-024-01192-3.

[^16]: Paolo Verme, “Theory and Evidence on the Impact of Refugees on Host Communities,” Development for Peace, World Bank Blogs, March 28, 2023, https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/dev4peace/theory-and-evidence-impact-refugees-host-communities.

[^17]: Guntars Ermansons, Hanna Kienzler, and Peter Schofield, “Somali Refugees in Urban Neighborhoods: An Eco-social Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing,” Frontiers in Psychiatry 15 (February 19, 2024), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1307509.