This report — part of the Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative led by the Migration Policy Institute and the Robert Bosch Stiftung — explores what motivates states, international organizations, and other actors to implement refugee participation initiatives, what forms these initiatives take, and what their limitations are. The study also proposes a preliminary theory of change (how such activities are intended to achieve their goals), a set of indicators to measure the influence of refugee participation on policy effectiveness, and recommendations for how such tools can be leveraged to improve refugee engagement and protection policies.

Germany needs skilled labor migration. This requires effective migration authorities with scalable capacities. After all, the quality and speed of the application process also depend on the staffing and technical resources of the authorities. The digitalization of the application and decision-making processes can make a decisive contribution in this regard. This policy brief therefore focuses on the various institutions and actors involved in the immigration process. Taking a closer look at the existing communication channels and the state of data exchange in particular. Different data management systems and inconsistent forms of communication emerge as hurdles in the process. Accordingly, the policy brief makes concrete suggestions for improvements to simplify the immigration process, such as a personal data pool or the publication of the current processing time.
The publication is part of the "Dialogue on Tech and Migration, DoT.Mig." of the "Migration Strategy Group," a joint initiative of the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Bertelsmann Stiftung and the German Marshall Fund.

This policy paper provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the challenges and potential policy options concerning climate-related migration. Climate change will have a significant impact on migration movements at all levels, including national, regional, and international level. In many cases, they are already becoming apparent. While most migration movements affected by climate change will occur within national borders, the international system is inadequately prepared for the changes and migration movements that are to come. Migration is an effective means of adapting to climate change. Yet, political measures are necessary to support the positive impacts and opportunities of climate-related mobility while mitigating any negative consequences. The authors of this publication present concrete policy options in this context.

Migration, displacement and planned relocation in the context of climate change are no longer distant future scenarios. Climate-related migration is already a reality. Global warming of at least 1.5°C will cause more people to migrate in the coming decades, especially within particularly affected countries and regions. Should the earth warm even more, numerous areas, some of which are densely populated today, would become uninhabitable.The policy brief of the German Council on Foreign Relations puts the issue in context and proposes concrete development and foreign policy measures that the German government should take into account in its planned strategy on climate roreign rolicy.

A growing number of people in Germany are stateless or have undetermined nationality. As a result, their social participation is in part severely restricted. This policy brief provides an up-to-date overview of the situation of stateless people in Germany. In addition to an analysis of the socio-demographic composition of this population group and their legal status, the paper also contains recommendations for policymakers. 

The analysis is part of a research project conducted by the Expert Council on Integration and Migration and funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung. The goal of the project is to examine the challenges of statelessness in Germany, raise awareness of the issue of statelessness, and develop recommendations for action to better deal with the phenomenon in politics and administration.

Access to territorial asylum is under significant pressure in many corners of the world. Pushbacks at borders as well as pandemic-era mobility restrictions have prevented many asylum seekers from reaching their destinations. And new and ongoing crises, including those in Afghanistan and Ukraine, have highlighted the need to offer protection closer to where vulnerable populations live, and for high-income countries to find ways to share responsibilities with the low- and middle-income countries that host the overwhelming majority of people in need of international protection.

This has led to renewed interest in external processing, which involves conducting part or all of the asylum procedure outside a destination country’s territory. Notably, even as countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom have adopted policies to offshore asylum processing to countries such as Papua New Guinea and Rwanda in hopes of deterring spontaneous arrivals, there is growing interest in using external processing in ways that complement existing territorial asylum and expand, rather than restrict, protection opportunities.

This report — part of the Beyond Territorial Asylum: Making Protection Work in a Bordered World initiative led by the Migration Policy Institute and the Robert Bosch Stiftung — highlights the opportunities that external processing offers as well as the challenges to its implementation and the risks it could pose to territorial asylum. It explores three categories of external processing policies implemented or proposed to date: humanitarian visas, emergency evacuations, and external processing centers. The report also identifies key conditions that must be present for external processing to occur in a protection-sensitive manner.