Which Countries Walk the Walk on Migrant Rights?

In December 2018, the United Nations General Assembly formally endorsed the Global Compact for Migration, largely spurred by the humanitarian crises that had driven hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers to the borders of the European Union and United States between 2014 and 2016. It was the first U.N. agreement to cover all dimensions of international migration. Although it was nonbinding, the accord created standards and a forum for states to coordinate the “safe, orderly and regular” movement of people across borders—a process otherwise regulated only by a patchwork of national laws and bilateral labor agreements.

The first test for the compact came swiftly. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, instead of organizing a cooperative response, countries acted unilaterally to impose blanket border closures that displaced migrants and refugees, leaving many people in legal limbo and often without humanitarian welfare protections, such as access to health care. In short, the relatively new U.N. agreement was effectively ignored, and its limitations became obvious: States could not be compelled to coordinate their immigration policies and expand their protection of human rights. Nearly five years after its endorsement, with world leaders facing another migration crisis, what is the compact good for?

Although the Global Compact for Migration is nonbinding, states can still be held accountable for the rights they have committed to enforce under a variety of human rights treaties that protect all people. The compact’s preamble makes clear that it is rooted in the principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter, which include the promotion of human rights. But are migrants’ human rights enshrined in national law, and are they implemented by governments? It turns out that migrant rights protections pervade national laws around the world, and they are reasonably well implemented, even if substantial gaps remain.

With little publicly available data or monitoring of migrant rights protections, this year Ian M. Kysel and I launched a database as part of Cornell University’s Migrant Rights Initiative. It catalogs rights across 36 countries that host a significant majority of the world’s migrants. The results allow policymakers, advocates, and others to benchmark state compliance with migrant rights protections. Two independent legal experts coded each country’s immigration policy and cite statutes and case law that implement basic migrant rights; the data is standardized and aggregated. The database offers a peek at a world in which states are held publicly accountable for implementation of the human rights commitments they make.

In our analysis, France leads the world with 85 percent of migrant rights covered in national law, followed by Brazil and Argentina (83 percent); Italy, Spain, and Greece (81 percent); Ethiopia (79 percent); and Mexico and the Netherlands (77 percent). Australia’s national laws protect the fewest migrant rights (30 percent) among the countries observed in the database, although it is worth noting that more rights are protected in some subnational laws there. Saudi Arabia (37 percent) offers the second-fewest protections in its national laws, followed by Ireland (41 percent); Bangladesh (45 percent); Singapore, Indonesia, and India (48 percent); and the United Arab Emirates and Chile (52 percent).

For those rights that national law does protect, legal coders also evaluated the extent to which states implement them based on the experts’ practical experience. Leading the world in consistency of application, Singapore implements 93 percent of the migrant rights it enshrines in national law, followed by Denmark (88 percent); the Netherlands (80 percent); Germany (79 percent); the United Kingdom (78 percent); and Spain and Israel (77 percent). It’s worth noting that many of these countries’ governments are grappling with a wave of populism often focused on anti-immigrant sentiment. In the cases of Italy and the United Kingdom, such populists now occupy top posts. In July, the Dutch government collapsed in a dispute over immigration policy.

Morocco’s migrant rights protections are subject to the least implementation (43 percent) among the countries observed in our analysis. Mexico (44 percent) offers the second-least implementation of those rights it protects in national law—even as it ranks within the top 10 for de jure protection, followed by Lebanon (46 percent); Peru (48 percent); Australia (52 percent); and Russia and South Africa (53 percent). Mexico and Morocco have long been two of the more strident champions of protecting migrant rights. Mexico has been a lead sponsor of the U.N. Human Rights Council resolution establishing an independent global expert on migrant rights, while Morocco hosted the 2018 Intergovernmental Conference at which the Global Compact for Migration was adopted.

If state protection scores are adjusted for implementation, the top performers overall are Denmark (67 percent); Spain and Brazil (63 percent); the Netherlands (61 percent); Italy (60 percent); Argentina (58 percent); and France and Germany (57 percent)—perhaps as much a statement of migrant rights protections as a reflection of effective rule of law in these countries. Recognizing these countries for their achievements can help increase the likelihood of these protections to endure, even as anti-immigrant populists gain influence in some of them. Our database could be deployed by civil society movements seeking to highlight the contributions made by migrants and preserve pathways for migration, including for asylum-seekers.

Perhaps the most powerful revelations from the database are the many areas where there is already broad compliance with international law. For example, rights related to “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief” are protected in 92 percent of the countries considered, and other rights that are well-protected worldwide include those related to “victims of crime” (86 percent), “legal personhood” (81 percent), and “nationality” (81 percent). Although states have avoided binding commitments to migrants’ rights, the data shows they don’t need to be so skittish. Much of what could be imagined in a migrant rights framework is already on the books, and it is relatively uncontroversial.

Political leaders appear to be afraid to delegate power to U.N. bureaucrats on matters related to borders. But our data shows that effective migration governance can advance by simply anchoring multilateral collaboration in what states are already doing well domestically. This is presumably the logic behind the Resettlement Diplomacy Network, launched on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly last week—a grouping of wealthy states that have historically resettled many refugees. (It is worth noting that countries in the global south continue to host most of the world’s refugees.) The Global Compact for Migration winks at this possibility, emphasizing the need to collect and utilize data for evidence-based policymaking and elevating the role of the International Organization for Migration within the United Nations.

At the quadrennial International Migration Review Forum last year, governments agreed to propose to the U.N. secretary-general a set of indicators to evaluate implementation of the compact. One of the early findings of our database is that the more migrants countries accept, the fewer rights they tend to protect. Viewed alongside states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is clear that governments should not continue to operate without scrutiny in the pursuit of a world where human rights are truly protected. As with climate change and other collective action problems, data and accountability mechanisms that monitor governments are needed to encourage states to avoid their worst impulses—and work together to address global challenges.