POPULATION: Hostility And Danger Faced By Migrants Worldwide

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 13 1996 (IPS) - The growing problem of racially-motivated violence against migrants especially plagues Europe, where dozens of innocent victims have fallen prey to murderous gangs, yet around the world the migrant is vulnerable to abuse, injustice and threat.

“The vulnerability of migrants to exploitation and physical aggression is almost universal,” concludes a new study by the International Institute of Human Rights (IIHR), recording the worst problems in Europe above all, but also citing problems in Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

Most seriously, there is a widening gap between migrants’ legal rights on paper and what they actually receive, says coordinator of operations for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Rolf Jenny.

Speaking at a round table held last weekend linking NGOs, migrant support groups and U.N. agencies in Ferney-Voltaire, France, Jenny and others examined the state of human rights for migrants in various countries.

There is the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families, unanimously approved in 1990 by the U.N. General Assembly, but so far only been ratified by Egypt, Morocco, the Philippines and the Seychelles.

Chile and Mexico have signed, but still must ratify the convention, while Sri Lanka is in the process of ratification.

The convention must be ratified by 20 countries before coming into force, but has been stonewalled by rising hostility to migrants, especially in the industrialised world. Many political forces in these countries regard migrants as a threat to stability, domestic economy, cultural cohesion and even national security.

Mayan Villalba, director of the Centre for Asiatic Migrants in Hong Kong, said the only option left to the Centre was to appeal for embassies to do more to help their citizens working locally as migrants.

Illegal migrants, without entry visas nor work permits, live practically imprisoned in the factories where they work, under inhumane conditions and subject to extortion by the owners, says Villalba.

Women are most affected by the failure of governments to pass legislation protecting migrants, Jenny said. “They find themselves forced into prostitution or to taking domestic occupations under conditions which are incompatible with international standards.”

Since the 1970’s the proportion of women among migrants has rocketed from 15 percent to 25 percent in the 1980s and to 50 percent today. In the Philippines women workers account for about 60 percent of the migrant work force employed legally, excluding sailors. And an estimated 80 percent of Sri Lankan migrants are women, almost all heading to jobs as domestic workers.

Last October, Filipina maid Sarah Balabagan, 16, narrowly escaped the death sentence in the U.A.E. after she was raped by her employer and killed him in self-defence. Her sentence was commuted to 15 months in prison, plus one hundred lashes. In January 1990, Ivorian maid Veronique Akobe, 23, was jailed for 20 years by a French court, after she stabbed and killed her rapist employer.

Illegal immigrants who turn to criminal networks are at particular risk. These organisations supply false documents, transport and lodgings while the emigrants are on the move, charging them anywhere from 500 to 25,000 dollars for these services, says the IIHR survey.

An estimate made in November 1994 says that the illegal traffic in immigrants generated between five and seven million dollars in profits a year for the criminal organisers.

The IIHR report cited the case of 27 Tamils from Sri Lanka who suffocated to death in the back of a closed truck abandoned in July in Hungary. A French court last year jailed a group of east European sailors who murdered a group of African stowaways trying to illegally get to Europe, and threw their bodies overboard. One escaped to tell the tale, lending weight to the view that hundreds of such murders may be committed at sea each year.

A paper by the IOM delivered at the Ferney-Voltaire meeting said that growing xenophobia originates in economic recession and the unemployment it generates, which has served only to exacerbate the hostility of the host countries against immigrants in general.

This xenophobia has resulted in murderous attacks on migrants or ethnic minority children of migrants, particularly in Europe.

But migrant support groups argue that migration is inevitable — even a duty — for developed nations with developing nations on their doorstep.

More to the point, they say, the migrants who come to the developed nations are the ‘best of the best’. The arduousness of the trip, the complexity of the legal system, the simple difficulty of working to raise the money for the fare at home in a depressed economy winnows out all but the most hard-working or well-educated.

“We are not an epidemic,” said Moroccan activist Fatima el- Ghneoui of the NGO Female Migrants from the Maghreb told IPS recently. “We are human beings who want to live and work and benefit our new societies.”