Towards the IMRF: A Feminist Manifesto for Structural Transformation in Migration Governance

We urge member states to use the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) to unequivocally protect the rights, autonomy, and humanity of all persons on the move—rejecting exclusionary politics. States must build a resilient global migration system grounded in human rights, international law, and genuine rights-based, gender-responsive and migrant-centered international cooperation.

This requires moving beyond rhetorical commitments toward concrete, measurable, and time-bound actions—including robust accountability mechanisms and meaningful implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) at national, regional, and global levels. It also demands the political courage to confront policies that criminalize, exclude, and endanger migrants, and to instead center dignity, justice, and solidarity in migration governance. The credibility of the GCM—and of multilateralism itself—depends on whether States choose to act with integrity, coherence, and urgency in the face of escalating displacement and systemic injustice.

We demand a new social contract that acknowledges mobility as a human reality, addresses the root causes of migration, and prioritizes human life over narrow national interests.  States must:

• End Border Militarization: Dismantle militarized border policies and operations that treat migrants as criminals and prevent asylum seekers from reaching safety. They must halt the externalization of border controls, including third country deportations. States must fully uphold the principle of non-refoulement and accept asylum-seekers without discrimination.
• Decriminalize Migration: End the criminalization of migrants and all forms of immigration detention and family separation in all circumstances. These punitive systems inflict severe and lasting harm, particularly traumatize migrant women, children and gender diverse people, endanger pregnant people, and reproduce structural violence.
• Pathways Out of Irregularity: Take meaningful steps to advance and expand rights-based, gender-responsive pathways for regular migration instead of temporary labour migration schemes that are employer-tied, restrictive and exploitative. They must implement broad regularization programs for undocumented persons with clear and accessible pathways to long-term residency and citizenship.
• Recognize, Reduce, Redistribute, Reward and Represent Care Work: Migration policies continue to reflect and reinforce structural gender inequalities that devalue care work. States must recognize, redistribute, and reduce women's unpaid care burden, while recognizing all domestic and care work as highly skilled, essential labour that should be adequately rewarded and formalized, with rights to representation. Measures should be adopted to extend social protection coverage to migrant domestic and care workers, ensuring cross-border portability.
• Decent Work for All: upholding migrant workers right to organize: Ensure that labour rights are upheld irrespective of migration status and working sector. These rights include living wages, safe and dignified working conditions; and the right to organize, unionize, and bargain collectively—with protection from retaliation and free from legal or practical barriers that silence migrant and domestic workers. These protections must be grounded in the International Labour Organization Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and relevant international labour standards. Labour rights should take precedence over migration policy.
• Strict Firewalls: Establish robust, enforceable firewalls between public services and immigration enforcement, ensuring that all migrants—especially women and gender-diverse people—can report violence, access healthcare and education, and seek justice without fear of family separation, detention, deportation, or retaliation. Firewalls must also prohibit data-sharing between service providers, tax authorities, employers, and migration enforcement bodies.
• Non-Discrimination: Eliminate all forms of discrimination embedded in migration governance, recognizing that women and gender-diverse migrants face multiple intersecting forms of discrimination due to gender, migration status, race or ethnicity, anti-Blackness, sexual orientation and gender identity, religion, national origin, age, disability, health condition and more. There must be an end to discrimination in migration policy at all levels, including the elimination of racialization in migratory procedures.
• Climate Pathways: Recognize the climate crisis as a threat multiplier that drives displacement and deepens inequality, disproportionately impacting women's bodies, livelihoods, and human rights. Acknowledge climate-induced displacement and create rights-based, gender-responsive long-term regular pathways for those forced to move by climate disasters, evictions or land dispossession caused by extractivism. Solutions should consider the unique experiences and needs of women and gender-diverse individuals, while recognising their agency and capacity to rebuild their lives with dignity.
• Meaningful Participation: True gender-responsiveness requires the full, equal, safe and meaningful participation of migrant women and gender-diverse people in all policy spaces that impact their lives, avoiding tokenism. States should ensure adequate resources and access (visas, UN credentials, language interpretation, timely information and more).
• Financing Civil Society and Migrant-Led Initiatives: Allocate financial resources to support diverse civil society initiatives by and for migrants and asylum seekers addressing key social, economic and political problems: from enhancing their access to services and enjoyment of their legal rights to civic participation, public education and awareness campaigns fostering non-discrimination, democratic values and social cohesion.
• Protect migrant workers in situations of crisis: States must guarantee that all migrant workers have access to protection, safe evacuation, and inclusive humanitarian support in situations of crisis, conflict, and climate disasters.
• End Data Surveillance and Digital Bordering: States must stop the expansion of digital surveillance, biometric data collection, and AI-driven migration control systems that disproportionately target and criminalize racialized and migrant communities.