Wealthy countries want refugees close to home – but make it impossible

The preferred refugee policy of many wealthy countries increasingly rests on a simple idea: Refugees should stay closer to home. There’s just one problem: Those same countries are making it harder for them to do so.

Across Europe and North America, governments are tightening asylum access, shrinking resettlement and legal pathways, cutting humanitarian assistance, and questioning longstanding principles of refugee protection. At the same time, they expect countries neighbouring major crises to continue hosting millions of displaced people, sometimes for decades.

At the end of 2025, UNHCR reported that there are 41.6 million refugees worldwide. Almost 70% of refugees and others needing international protection were hosted in low- and middle-income countries, and 65% were in countries neighbouring their places of origin.

The Western debate about displacement can sometimes resemble a man standing beside a woman in labour, clutching the bedrail and announcing that the pain has become unbearable. Wealthy countries do host millions of refugees and face real pressures on housing, services, and asylum systems. But they do not carry most of the world’s frontline hosting responsibility, and they have far more resources to manage the share they do carry.

The system has long rested on an imperfect bargain: Countries close to conflicts provide most of the territory for hosting and protection; wealthier states help pay for that protection and take a much smaller share of refugees through resettlement and other legal pathways.

That bargain is now fraying from both ends. Humanitarian funding is being cut, resettlement places are shrinking, and legal pathways are narrowing. Yet the demand from wealthy governments remains: Stay where you are.

But what, exactly, is supposed to make staying possible?

An attack masquerading as reform

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments and political parties are insisting that refugee protection has gone too far.

The proposed solutions vary.

In Europe, the emphasis is increasingly on safe third countries, faster returns, and keeping asylum seekers outside or at the edges of the EU. In the United States, refugee admissions have been sharply reduced and asylum protections challenged.

Behind many of these policies sits a broader claim: Access to asylum, legal pathways, inclusion, and even some refugee rights do not simply protect people but encourage them to move.

Simon Hankinson’s recent attack on UNHCR in The Telegraph is a particularly blunt expression of that argument.

Hankinson, a Heritage Foundation fellow whom the Trump administration backed for UNHCR’s Deputy High Commissioner post (before another American candidate was ultimately selected), portrays the agency’s emphasis on protection, inclusion, durable solutions, and legal pathways as evidence of a system facilitating mass migration.

Protection, the right to work, documentation, and durable solutions are not recent ideological additions to the system. They are part of its foundations.

You can argue that the system needs reform, but Hankinson – and the strand of thought he represents – is casting the fundamental architecture of asylum and refugee protection into doubt. Protection, the right to work, documentation, and durable solutions are not recent ideological additions to the system. They are part of its foundations.

Governments have a legitimate interest in controlling their borders. Asylum decisions should be timely, protect those who need it, and, where appropriate, humanely return those without a legal basis to stay. But refugee protection is not the opposite of border control.

Mixed movements include refugees, asylum seekers, trafficking victims, unaccompanied children, stateless people, and migrants moving for other reasons. A route-based approach is meant to distinguish among them: preserve access to asylum, identify protection needs, offer lawful options, and facilitate humane returns.

Calling that “open borders” is like accusing a court of acquitting everyone simply because it gives each defendant a hearing.

There are legitimate concerns about the route-based approach. Many humanitarian actors fear it could become containment with better branding: Wealthy states doubling down on funding countries along migration routes to stop people from moving while further cutting both the aid that helps refugees stay and the resettlement places that allow some to leave.

When is staying possible

The real test of any “closer to home” policy is not simply where refugees are expected to stay, but whether staying there is actually viable.

A family that cannot return home needs somewhere it can legally remain. Adults need the right to work. Children need school. People need documentation, healthcare, and some prospect that displacement will eventually lead somewhere: safe return, integration, resettlement, or another durable solution.

Without those things, “protection closer to home” risks becoming a polite phrase for keeping refugees poor, dependent, and out of sight.

For those of us who have lived as refugees, legal status, documentation, and the right to work are not bureaucratic euphemisms. Legal status means not living in fear of arrest. Documentation can mean enrolling a child in school. The right to work means feeding a family instead of remaining indefinitely dependent on aid.

They are also the conditions that make staying possible.

Imagine a family that cannot safely go home, cannot financially support itself, sees aid disappearing, and has no realistic prospect of permanent status or resettlement. Why should we assume that family will remain where they are indefinitely simply because Western governments would prefer it? Some will move, even if the journeys continue to be made illegal and more difficult.

Without those things, “protection closer to home” risks becoming a polite phrase for keeping refugees poor, dependent, and out of sight.

Host governments make calculations too. Why should a country struggling with unemployment, strained services, and political pressure continue hosting a large refugee population if wealthier countries say integration is undesirable, resettlement should shrink, and international assistance cannot be relied upon?

This is not simply a moral question; it is a question of incentives. If major host countries conclude that the international bargain no longer works, the consequences may be border closures, fewer rights, pressure for premature returns, and more onward movement.

Making migration manageable

So what should reform of the system look like? Host countries need more predictable investment. Refugees need greater access to work and national services. Returns should occur when protection is no longer necessary and conditions permit them.

But reforming refugee protection is different from treating protection itself as the problem.

A functioning system gives governments tools to manage displacement: registration, documentation, asylum procedures, legal status, economic inclusion, voluntary return, limited resettlement, and cooperation along migration routes.

A world in which every government tries to make refugees somebody else’s problem will not produce less displacement. It will produce more onward movement, more smuggling, and less control over where desperate people go.

Wealthy governments are entitled to want fewer chaotic arrivals. But if their strategy is for refugees to remain closer to home, they cannot simultaneously further dismantle the conditions that make staying there possible.

Refugee protection is not the enemy of migration management. Properly designed, it is part of what makes migration manageable.

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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.