By Melanie Gower

‘Safe and legal routes’ are authorised immigration arrangements which enable a person to move to another country for humanitarian reasons. ‘Safe and regular’, ‘safe and regulated’ and ‘safe and lawful’ are common alternative terms. The UK immigration system includes several different safe and legal entry pathways. They can be grouped into four broad categories: Refugee resettlement schemes: The UK Resettlement Scheme, Community Sponsorship and the Mandate Scheme are available to people recognised as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.Refugee family reunion visas: Available to close relatives of people recognised as refugees.Nationality-specific routes: Available to some Afghans, Ukrainians and people from Hong Kong.Labour mobility pathways: The Displaced Talent Mobility Pilot and Healthcare Displaced Talent Program are small-scale initiatives helping refugees overseas obtain UK work visas. Each route has distinct eligibility criteria and conditions. Not all routes grant beneficiaries refugee status. This means that only some people on the UK’s safe and legal entry pathways receive all the protections laid out in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Most schemes are free of charge, but a few require applicants to pay fees. Calls for more safe and legal routes to the UK. Expanding safe and legal routes is often suggested as a policy response to small boat crossings and other forms of unauthorised migration to the UK. Commentators have noted, for example, that very few Ukrainians have made small boat crossings or been detected trying to enter the UK without authorisation since the launch of special visa schemes for Ukrainians. However, some experts have cast doubt on how much increasing the availability of legal routes would reduce demand for people smugglers and levels of unauthorised migration, given the number of people who might want to apply. The Labour government isn’t considering increasing safe and legal routes to the UK. ntroducing an annual limit on humanitarian routes: In 2023, the government legislated to introduce a ‘cap’ (an annual limit) on the number of people to be admitted to the UK through certain safe and legal routes. The size of the cap would reflect local councils’ assessed capacity to support new arrivals. It was expected to take effect from 2025, but the implementing regulations haven’t been made yet. When in opposition, Labour supported the principle of a cap. The Liberal Democrats and SNP both wanted an annual target rather than a cap.

London: UK Parliament House of Commons Library,   2024. 25p,

By Courtney C. Siegert, Molly A. Kaplan, Nicholas P. Herrmann and M. Kate Spradley

This paper details the structural and resource challenges in Texas related to identifying migrant decedents, investigating their deaths, repatriating them, and adhering to legal and ethical requirements in addressing this humanitarian tragedy. While actors working on migrant decedent investigations in Arizona can map and provide accurate counts of migrant deaths, this is not yet possible for Texas cases. Texas’ mixed Medical Examiner/Justice of the Peace medicolegal system suffers from fragmentation across county jurisdictions, lack of resources, and minimal access to investigative tools for transnational families. These challenges produce a landscape where unidentified presumed migrants may structurally disappear (e.g., buried in temporarily marked graves as unidentified persons with no investigation or case tracking). The article highlights the work of Operation Identification (OpID), a humanitarian project formed to assist border counties with recovering, identifying, and repatriating migrant decedents. OpID’s extensive community outreach and collaboration with governmental and nongovernmental partners in the United States and Latin America have improved practices in some Texas counties. However, systemic change is still needed to address this humanitarian disaster. The article proposes that presumed migrant decedents be managed using a disaster victim identification (DVI) approach, which prioritizes identification, rather than how and why someone dies. It also proposes the establishment of regional Migrant Identification Centers (MICs) to streamline identification and repatriation efforts, while ensuring compliance with Texas law by Justices of the Peace (JPs). Centralization, the article argues, can lead to more accurate counts of migrant deaths and lay the groundwork for greater resources. The article also supports increased access to national databases including the National Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS) and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). It argues that transnational families of missing persons be afforded expanded access to investigative tools (e.g., NamUs)

Journal on Migration and Human SecurityVolume 12, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 257-276

By Nicole Hallett

The border has never played a larger role in the American psyche than it does today, and yet it has never been less legally significant. Today, a noncitizen’s place of residence tells you less about what rights and privileges they enjoy than it ever has in the past. The border has migrated inward, affecting many aspects of non-citizens’ lives in the United States. The divergence between the physical and legal border is no accident. Instead, it is a policy response to the perceived loss of control over the physical border. But the physical border remains porous despite these legal changes. People keep migrating even as we continue to draw boundaries within communities, homes, and workplaces far away from the border. This paper explores how U.S. law has evolved to render the border superfluous, even as its symbolic importance has grown, and how it might further evolve in the future.

University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 2023, Article 6.