A Regime Approach to Refugee Comparisons: Canada’s Responses to Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine

Comparisons of state responses to recent refugee movements are mostly restricted to the contemporary period and to specific flows, while differing on what is being compared. This limits our ability to account for country-specific approaches to refugees and to extend and apply analyses to other movements. One avenue to overcome these issues is to leverage the concept of “regimes”; regime practices capture core characteristics of a state’s established and historically embedded approach to refugees, providing a useful standard for policy comparisons. Using the case of Canada, we argue that the country’s refugee regime can be characterized by five practices: (1) the use of special programs, (2) target numbers of admissions, (3) secondary admission levels, (4) second country resettlement, and (5) permanent resettlement. Evaluating recent responses against such practices allows analysts to assess if, how, and to what extent responses differ between groups and from past approaches. We illustrate this by comparing Canada’s response to three recent flows (from Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine) showing if and how they differ from each other and from established patterns.