People wait in line to be registered at Moria's migrant processing centre on the island of Lesvos, Greece. Socrates Baltagiannis/dpa/Press Association. All rights reserved.
Refugees and migrants have long known that the legal pathways in and out of Europe and North America are essentially closed to all but the global elites. Without the right passport, the right qualifications, and enough money, it is extraordinarily difficult to enter and remain in these areas through regular channels, even when seeking protection from violence or persecution under international law. This is not news. Yet it has taken a European 'crisis of reception' and five years of people dying in the Mediterranean, battling asylum systems, and languishing in detention – along with the accompanying political backlash from both the left and the right – to push migration to the top of the global policy agenda.
A symbol of this change was the 'high-level summit to address large movements of refugees and migrants' convened by the United Nations last September. This resulted in the New York Declaration, a statement signed by 193 member states that among other things "acknowledge(s) a shared responsibility to manage large movements of refugees and migrants in a human, sensitive, compassionate, and people-centred manner" and that commits this group to negotiate a "global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration" as well as a "global compact for refugees" by the end of 2018.
