Talent Beyond Boundaries — Skilled-Worker Visa Pathways for Displaced Professionals

Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB), founded in 2016, runs a 'Talent Catalog' that lets displaced people register their qualifications so employers abroad can match them to ordinary skilled-worker migration routes, rather than humanitarian resettlement. TBB operates country programmes in Jordan and Lebanon.

By registering, candidates who typically lack passports, employer networks or the means to travel for interviews gain access to the same visa categories as any other skilled migrant.

TBB has partnered with national schemes such as the UK Home Office's Displaced Talent Mobility Pilot (first arrivals December 2021, running to November 2024, initially 50-100 places and later extended to up to 200) and Canada's Economic Mobility Pathways Pilot.

In August 2026, TBB, the World Bank's Innovation Challenge on Jobs & Migration, and researchers from Oxford, Antwerp and UCLouvain published a pre-registered (3ie-registered) impact evaluation surveying more than 1,100 people and conducting over 200 qualitative interviews across Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, Italy and the UK. The study found that skilled-worker visas more than tripled individual wage income and materially raised household income; among the population studied, roughly half held a university degree but fewer than a third worked at that skill level in their asylum country, and 40% were entirely unemployed before migrating through the programme. Candidates also reported feeling significantly safer, more respected and more socially integrated, with knock-on effects such as spouses more often entering paid work. The Talent Catalog itself has over 100,000 registered candidates, but the UK pilot placed only on the order of 100-200 people over three years.

The wage-tripling figure could only be verified through TBB's own write-up of the study rather than a primary document hosted by the World Bank or the university partners directly, so it should be treated as reported-by-implementer pending independent confirmation. The UK pilot's absolute placement numbers are tiny relative to the 100,000-person catalog, meaning the strong outcomes described apply to a small, closely supported cohort rather than to population-level labour-market change.