Immobile, stranded and excluded: the effects of COVID-19 on the international asylum system

Abstract

Disruptions to patterns of international mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have affected refugees particularly severely. This article analyses the impact of the health crisis on international protection, particularly its effects on specific phases of the process: access to the territory, access to the procedure, and reception and its conditions. Using comparative analysis that incorporates the dynamics observed in different geographies, the article takes an in-depth look at the pandemic’s effects on the consolidation of a new international asylum system whose roots lie in transformations observed since the 1990s. It argues that the pandemic has accelerated certain trends that are symptomatic of an even more exclusionary and restrictive turn in the global system of so-called protection.