UNITED NATIONS — U.N. head Kofi Annan has urged European states to find ways to better manage migration so it benefits migrants as well as sender countries and receiving states.

"Migrants need Europe. But Europe also needs migrants", the U.N. secretary-general said in a speech to the European Parliament in Brussels in January. "A closed Europe would be a meaner, poorer, weaker, older Europe. An open Europe will be a fairer, richer, stronger, younger Europe — provided you manage migration well."

The continent is facing a serious demographic crisis that endangers its health care systems, pensions schemes and education programmes, Joseph Chamie, director of the U.N. population division, said here.

Without immigration, the population in the soon-to-be 25 member states of the European Union (EU) will drop from today's more than 450 million to under 400 million people by 2050.

The EU will also have to face the consequences of a significantly aged population. In Italy, for example, one out of three citizens will be over 65 by mid-century. "This creates difficulties with financing and taxing", Chamie pointed out.

The EU performs "very badly" in managing its migration flows, says Antonio Cruz from the Migration Policy Group (MPG), a Brussels-based non-governmental organisation (NGO).

"There is no EU migration policy, but a myriad of national policies leading to every nation for itself and the devil with them all", he told IPS.

Annan told the members of the European Parliament their asylum systems were overburdened precisely because many people who must leave their countries could see no other channels through which to migrate.

Less than 20 percent of the 175 million migrants in the world are refugees, according to U.N. statistics from 2000. The majority of migrants leave their home countries searching for economic rewards.

The main streams of migration flow from Asia and Latin America to Canada and the United States, said Chamie.

Although migrants account for only about three percent of the world population, they would form the Earth's fifth largest country were they all in the same place.

"Currently, the EU is pursuing a migration policy focused on control and border security, which is dangerous, expensive, ineffective and exclusionary", Geneviève Gencianos from Migrant Rights International, a Geneva-based NGO, told IPS.

"In harmonising its asylum and migration policy, the EU also has to look at issues of underdevelopment, fair trade and just and equitable economic relations with the rest of the world."

Eight to ten million undocumented immigrants live in both Europe and the United States, according to Chamie. "If ten million people enter without papers the system is not operating", he added.

Gencianos said the EU should open channels of legal migration, instead of building a "Fortress Europe".

Measures such as border control, offshore interception, detention and deportation do not halt clandestine movements, but instead result in higher numbers of border deaths, sexual exploitation, continued labour exploitation and other violations of migrants' human rights, she added.

"This silent human crisis shames our world", said Annan, adding, "the situation is even more tragic given that many states which close their doors actually need immigrants."

In January, the International Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air and Sea entered into force. A supplement to the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, it is designed to fight global networks of organised crime groups that smuggle human beings for profit.

"It is merely one tool to tackle an extremely complex problem. (It is) too early to say whether it is effective", Cruz told IPS. "The protocol is not a magic wand."

While the protocol criminalizes the smuggling of migrants, it recognises that undocumented migration itself is not a crime and that migrants are often victims needing protection. It encourages greater international cooperation in prosecuting smugglers and defines certain legal standards.

Estimates on the volume of human trafficking are very vague. The U.S. State Department suggests that about 700,000 women and children are trafficked over international borders yearly.

The practice can be extremely profitable. According to Chamie, the charges for moving a person from China to Canada can reach 30,000 dollars. "Smuggling and trafficking has become a lucrative but troubling business", he said.

Gencianos says that instruments like the protocol focus too much on control and punishment, instead of understanding the root causes of clandestine migration.

By reinforcing border security — often by using weapons — states are "unintentionally — others intentionally — hurting or killing more and more migrants at the land borders or in the high seas", she added.

According to Chamie, only four developed countries had policies in place to promote immigration in 2003 — Canada, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the United Kingdom — while one-third of all states had policies to reduce immigration. (END/Copyright IPS)

Links:
U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime
Migrant Rights International
Migration Policy Group