POPULATION: Annan Calls for U.N. Migration Agency

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Deselaers

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2003 (IPS) - A single global agency should be created to deal with the wide range of issues surrounding the increasingly important migration phenomenon, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday.

”We still lack a comprehensive institutional focus at the international level that could protect the rights of migrants and promote the shared interest of emigration, immigration and transit,” said Annan in a lecture at Columbia University in New York.

”There is no complete legal framework in place to deal with this quintessential global phenomenon.”

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an inter-governmental body with more than 100 member states, tries to address migration issues outside of the U.N. system and cooperates with the U.N. in the Geneva Migration Group.

Besides IOM, the group consists of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as well as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Annan’s case was strongly backed by Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of economics at Columbia University.

He proposed creating a World Migration Organisation (WMO), similar to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

But the WMO, he said, could not start by setting rules. ”If you start by saying: ‘here are norms’, you are done,” said Bhagwati.

Instead, the organisation would provide ”systematic, coherent, impartial” information of interest for migrants’ home countries (popularly known as sender countries), host countries, migrants and civil society, comparable to the WTO’s country reports.

”A systematic spread of information has power for change,” Bhagwati argued.

Giving NGOs and governments the possibility of comparing the migration policies of individual countries, he added, would mean ‘bad countries’ could be denounced and ‘good policies’ could be adopted by other governments.

But one expert was hesitant about the proposal. ”Regional migration fora and agencies may be more effective than an international, U.N. body, which tend to be overly bureaucratic, extremely costly, and with limited effectiveness,” said Dale Buscher director of operations at the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in Geneva.

Three percent of the world population – 175 million people – lived outside of their county of birth in 2000, Annan told the audience of students, teachers and ambassadors. Of these, around 16 million were refugees and another one million people were asylum seekers, waiting to be accepted as refugees.

”They (the migrants) are usually not free riders looking for an easy life, but courageous people who make great sacrifices in search of a better future for themselves or their families,” said Annan. ”Many have little choice but to do dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs.”

Annan also expressed his concern about violations of the human rights of migrants, especially by smugglers and traffickers.

”Trafficking is a modern form of slavery in which migrants are coerced and exploited. All too often, people who initially collaborate with smugglers later find themselves in the hands of traffickers.”

Other problems facing migrants and sending and receiving countries, he added, include: labour shortages and unemployment, brain drain and brain gain, xenophobia and integration, refugee crises, asylum seekers and law enforcement.

”Up to now, rich countries have been far too comfortable with a policy framework that allows them to benefit from immigrant labour, while denying immigrants the dignity and rights of a legal status,” said Annan.

And as long as only sender countries have ratified the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families, he added, the treaty will have little effect on the treatment of migrants.

ICMC’s Buscher supports amnesty and naturalisation programs for irregular migrants and suggests ”intensive work with the media on more positive portrayal of migrants”.

”Nation states need to embrace multi-culturalism and deal with their fears about giving up homogeneity and narrow definitions about what constitutes a nationality,” he added.

Annan said he does not expect to create a U.N. migration agency during his term (which ends 2006). But he welcomed an initiative by 11 countries from North and South, led by Sweden and Switzerland, to form a commission on migration to analyse all aspects of the issue and to make recommendation for global cooperation.

The commission will be chaired by Jan Karlsson, former migration minister of Sweden, and Mamphela Ramphele, managing director of the World Bank.

It will start working in January 2004 and finish its report in the summer of 2005.

Migration also has positive impacts on sender and host countries, added Annan.

”Last year alone, migrant workers in developed countries sent at least 88 billion dollars back to their countries of origin – more than those same developing countries received in official development aid, which is 55 billion globally a year,” he said.

”Emigration also relieves the pressures of overpopulation and unemployment, and in time endows sender countries with an educated diaspora, who often bring or send home new skills, products, ideas and knowledge,” he added.