PRESS CONFERENCE BY GLOBAL COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

PRESS CONFERENCE BY GLOBAL COMMISSION ON INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

International migration was the greatest challenge and opportunity of the twenty-first century, and a coordinated and comprehensive response would be advantageous to all countries and individuals involved, the co-Chairs of the Global Commission on International Migration told correspondents today at a Headquarters press conference.

Established in December 2003 at the suggestion of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the 19-member independent Commission released its report today on international migration, Migration in an interconnected world:  New directions for action, providing a framework for a comprehensive, global response to the issue of international migration.

Briefing the press were the co-Chairs of the Commission, Jan O. Karlsson, Sweden’s former Minister for Migration and Development, and Mamphela Ramphele, former Managing Director of the World Bank from South Africa.  Joining them was Sharan Burrow, President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and a member of the Commission.

Ms. Ramphele said that, in order to address the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities afforded by international migration, it was necessary to recognize the driving forces behind accelerating migration -- the growing disparities between development, demographics and democracy in  different regions of the word.  The number of international migrants had grown to 200 million, and the World Bank estimated their remittances to amount to some $240 billion.

The scale of those remittances indicated the enormous contribution migrants made to the world economy, she stated.  It was a contribution that could be better capitalized upon to the advantage of both labour-rich countries with limited resources and labour-poor countries with great resources.  The Commission’s report captured those opportunities and urged the international community to work towards achieving a “win-win” situation for all stakeholders.

To do that, said Mr. Karlsson, the Commission had concluded that it was unnecessary to create a new framework.  Rather, the international community had the perfect starting point in the seven human rights conventions and a number of existing institutions.  However, those institutions were prone to compete rather than coordinate their efforts, and that would have to change.

In addition to greater consultation, coordination and coherence between parties concerned with migration, he also cited the need for capacity-building to enable States to address international migration.  He called on all international organizations concerned with international migration, including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration, to pave the way for a new “global migration facility” to deal with capacity-building and to accumulate facts to eliminate the myths surrounding migration.

In response to a question, Mr. Karlsson said the report addressed some of the concerns of workers in developed countries, including the fear of losing jobs due to the influx of migrants, by providing facts and placing the issue in a broader context.  That broader context showed how international migration helped developed countries and how a reasoned and cooperative approach to migration resulted in a “win-win” situation for all.

Some countries, said Ms. Ramphele, had lost competitiveness because they had clung to outmoded means of production.  It was important not to confuse issues of competitiveness with the mobility of people.  “They are linked but they are separate”, she said.  “By not analysing properly the cause and effect, we confuse public opinion.”

Ms. Burrow added that the economies of many developed countries would collapse without international migration.  The global challenge was to provide decent work everywhere and to “recognize the contribution all workers make to sustainable economies”.

In response to a follow-up question, Mr. Karlsson and Ms. Ramphele said that xenophobia, arising from concerns about the loss of jobs to migrants, had to be attacked with facts.  People must be made to understand that the global economy would most prosper with a maximal investment in human intellectual capital and with a mobile and global labour force.

“If information percolated throughout economies, people would stop moaning about migrants taking away work. There is a need to show the facts, that there’s something to be gained.  This is what’s missing in most countries”, Ms. Ramphele said.

Asked where the line should be drawn between the concerns of Europeans that their jobs would be taken away by migrants from Africa and the desire of Africans to migrate, Ms. Ramphele said that people should be able to migrate out of choice, not because of life and death issues.  The Commission urged that each country to assess where it stood on the spectrum of development, demographics and democracy; that international organizations do the same to analyse where desperate people were most likely to originate; and that the international community provide debt relief and a fairer trade regime so that people “needn’t jump into the Mediterranean to get better job opportunities”.  Further, there had to be an acknowledgement by European countries that they needed migrants and that they were not as open to migrants as they should be.

Asked whether the international community was hamstrung because it could not agree on the distinction between human trafficking and smuggling, Mr. Karlsson said the problem was that the international community was dealing with migration the way it had dealt with international trade in the seventeenth century.  The solution was not to eliminate international borders, but to establish a system, based on the principles of human rights, which would create true mutuality.

To a question about the problem of brain drain, Ms. Ramphele said that countries in the twenty-first century could not expect to compel people educated within their borders to remain there indefinitely.  The solution to brain drain was for countries to co-invest in the development of human capital.  If, in addition, the global economy was working properly, if trade barriers and subsidies were eliminated, intellectual capital would eventually return to countries, bringing back networks and, in general, more resources than if people had been constrained to remain in place.

Migrants should not be called illegal, but rather individuals with irregular status because, under the principles of human rights, migrants could not be deemed illegal, Ms. Ramphele said in response to another question.

Observing that the report relied heavily on the actions of individual States to achieve migration objectives, a questioner asked how repressive States could be expected to cooperate on certain issues.  Ms. Ramphele said that was a legitimate concern, but that the global community could only do its best to create peer networks and other means of support for emerging democracies.

In response to a question about leadership in immigrant communities, Mr. Karlsson said non-governmental organizations and corporations employing immigrant labour played a role in integrating immigrants into their new countries and in maintaining ties with their communities of origin.  In some instances, corporations were in the forefront in that regard, and Governments were lagging behind them.

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For information media • not an official record