Refugees as Migrant Workers after the Global Compacts? Can Labour Migration Serve as a Complementary Pathway for People in Need of Protection into Sweden and Germany?

Both the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees commit states to diversify and expand on labour migration opportunities, in particular by facilitating work-based ‘complementary pathways’ for the admission of refugees. Yet, almost four years after their adoption, such pathways remain limited in many cases. It is the aim of this article to examine the constraints posed by existing immigration laws to serve as an admission ground for people in need of protection and the key legal, policy and political issues that need to be addressed to allow the commitments related to labour migration pathways contained in the Compacts to be implemented in national legal systems. In so doing, this article applies a legal and political feasibility lens to evaluate why these pathways for persons in need of protection are often small-scale, underutilized by employers and unwelcoming to potential refugees. It employs a comparative case study methodology drawing on more than 30 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders at the international and national levels in Germany and Sweden. The article concludes that the main challenge to the political feasibility of opening work-based complementary pathways for refugees is politicians’ and policy makers’ traditional thinking of migration and asylum as separate domains. When it comes to challenges to legal feasibility, these stem from entry requirements, lack of sufficient interest among employers who are a key stakeholder in the facilitation of such pathways, as well as issues related to the security of status of potential beneficiaries of such measures.