The road to nowhere

As I sat down to write this article, an email arrived from a United Nations official: “A journo just called me complaining that the GCIM report is as dull as dishwater and is full of vapid generalities. Is that your impression?”

I was relieved – someone else had thrown the first punch. “Much of the report”, I replied, “is dross – including its panglossian incantation that people should ‘migrate out of choice, rather than necessity.’ Then there are the instances of naive condescension, including this gem: ‘The Commission calls upon all migrants…to desist from any activity which poses a threat to public order.’ However, I added: “Buried beneath the bureaucratic pabulum (‘The facility will facilitate’ appears not once but twice), are several important ideas on how to deal with our current immigration mess.”

But better to start at the beginning.

The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM ), launched in winter 2004, is an ambitious attempt to mobilise political and public attention on migration. It owes its existence primarily to the will of one man, Jan Karlsson, an admired former migration minister in Sweden. Try though he did, Karlsson could not persuade Kofi Annan to make this a United Nations initiative.

Annan, though passionate about immigration, is no fool: the UN is overstretched and under pressure, and any attempt to include migration in its mandate - by advocating the creation of a new UN migration agency, which had always been the twinkle in the Global Commission’s eye - would fail. The United States in particular has issued several stark warnings, including a characteristic volley in June 2005 from Kelly Ryan, deputy assistant secretary of state for migration, population and refugees: "The US is highly skeptical about the ability of the United Nations to address the migration issue effectively at the global level.”

Karlsson and his eighteen fellow commissioners – a mix of academics, senior policymakers, activists, and foreign-policy luminaries like Mary Robinson and Mamphela Ramphele – could have used the cold shoulder from the UN to liberate themselves from a bureaucratic straitjacket. In the grand tradition of successful commissions, they could have offered essential leadership by focusing the world’s attention on the two or three most important actions that need to be taken, filtering out the extraneous noise.

Also in openDemocracy on migration and movement in the 21st century, a major debate on “people flow” sparked by the innovative ideas of the Dutch thinker and policy adviser Theo Veenkamp.

Among the highlights:

Theo Veenkamp, Tom Bentley, Alessandra Buonfino, “Migration and Europe” (May 2003)

Anthony Barnett, “A world on the move” (May 2003)

Theo Veenkamp, “Taking stock of the first round” (August 2003)

Demetrios G Papademetriou, “Managing migration for everyone: the 21st century challenge” (November 2003)

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Instead, the commission’s report – Migration in an interconnected world: New directions for action – is larded with every notion, novel or clichéd, debated in migration conferences from Toronto to Manila. There is “brain gain,” “brain drain,” “brain circulation,” and even “brain waste” (the nuclear physicist as taxi-driver). In the report, ecological migrants share space with asylum-seekers and child sex-workers. Portable pensions have to make room for the GATS Mode 4 negotiations, and strategies to “train and retain.” A report like this – which aims to look at the entire landscape of global migration – cannot be faulted for having left ideas out. It is marked, rather, by a failure of discrimination.

A political sea-change

The commissioners certainly have done their homework, though they have a tendency to exaggerate for effect. They report, for instance, that there are nearly 200 million immigrants globally, up from 100 million in 1980; but they fail to note this increase is in large part due not to the movement of people, but to post-cold war changes in borders – the breakup of the Soviet Union alone created tens of millions of new immigrants who had never left home.

But much of what they record is arresting and helps explain the growing migration flows. The gap in global living standards is expanding, with per-capita income in the developed world having increased since 1975 from forty-one times that in the poorest quarters to sixty-six times. Migrants, in pursuit of wages that are twenty-to-thirty times what they could earn at home, are finding it ever easier to flow across borders.

This is in part due to diaspora networks that expedite journeys and help immigrants settle in the west, part to an increasingly sophisticated human smuggling and trafficking industry. Jobs are also more plentiful, as the pressure of globalisation compels companies to reduce costs with cheap, flexible labour. The commission expects such pressures to heighten in the coming years (its executive director, Rolf Jenny, even told an audience in 2005 that he expects a billion people to be on the move by 2015).

In the face of this onslaught, the commission underscores the many weaknesses in how states manage migration: from the lack of know-how in ministries, to the failure of coordination among the slew of government agencies that deal with immigrants, to negligence in collecting data. There is, the commission correctly argues, shamefully low investment in integrating immigrants, slackness in protecting their rights, and not nearly enough cooperation between states.

Part of the problem in this report lies in the commission’s claim to be addressing itself to all of the world’s states affected by migrant flows – an impossibly large audience. It’s difficult to persuade a single government (or minister even) to act sensibly about immigration. Trying to come up with a recipe that suits countries as diverse as Sudan, Germany, the Philippines, and the US is an exercise in futility.

Beyond its failure to discriminate amongst all the ideas, the commission struggles so hard to advocate a rights-based approach to managing international migration that it fails to grasp a real sea-change in the politics of immigration – one that could lead to greater public acceptance of immigration, despite the security and cultural fears that have been amplified since 9/11.

In the 1990s, nativist critics wielded the disarming argument that immigrants stole jobs and depressed wages – a hard case for a politician to rebut. But this protectionist position against immigration has lost some of its potency in recent years. Americans, especially, have spent the past decade seeing their jobs “outsourced” to India and China; at least in the past, immigrants came to the United States, worked there, and spent most of their wages on local American businesses. Now the jobs and the wages migrate abroad, and it is no longer possible to blame immigration for those losses.

Europeans, meanwhile, are keenly aware that their populations are both ageing and dwindling, a demographic problem that immigrants can potentially solve. And on both sides of the Atlantic, there is a tangible appreciation of how indispensable immigrants are to the quality of native-born citizens’ lives, caring for their children and nursing them in hospital. Common sense, therefore, tells westerners that they can either watch jobs go abroad to the lowest bidder and see their own countries atrophy – or they can opt for dynamic economies underpinned by immigration.

Majorities would prefer the latter – but they want help in getting there, of two kinds. First, they want their politicians to level with them and enumerate their options: could they opt for later retirement or smaller pensions over immigration, for instance, and is it possible to increase fertility rates through public policy? Why can the Philippines train countless nurses, Nigeria produce plentiful doctors, while western countries’ educational systems can’t?

Second, majorities want a saner immigration policy. The current practice of barring most legal migrants while letting millions of others slip illegally through the back door serves only the worst interests and promotes lawlessness. Smugglers are enriched, immigrants work in oppressive conditions, xenophobia runs rampant, and the lack of integration programmes leads to marginalised and angry communities.

The global and the national

Buried in its report, the commission nods to all these issues. But it utterly fails to address them head on. It does acknowledge a growing sentiment in favour of temporary-worker programmes, and advocates what is trendily called “circular migration.” But it does not offer any ideas to underpin such programmes. How, for instance, can countries best recruit temporary workers; or, an even bolder example, would it be possible to auction visas? Perhaps the reason for this hesitation is that there is something distasteful about temporary-worker programmes – making, as they do, second-class citizens of immigrants – and that as a result the commission could not agree on whether to fully support them. But this is precisely why commissions are needed – for forceful insights and recommendations.

The commission also pulls its punches in the advice it offers developing countries. The nations with the three largest diaspora communities – China (35 million), India (20 million), and the Philippines (7 million) – have very successful, proactive policies to send their citizens abroad. The advantages thus reaped – in the form of remittances, more jobs available at home, knowledge transfer, political influence – are immense. But it would not be politic to be advising countries to model themselves on the Philippines if the consequence is to be accused of promoting brain-drain.

So, given that the Global Commission on International Migration is trying to address too many audiences with its report – and haunted by fears of causing offence – it finds itself advocating two notions: one incomprehensible, and another that is plainly obvious. The latter is that we should respect the human rights of immigrants. The former is the commission’s “big idea”: An Inter-Agency Facility for Global Migration.

This phrase appears on page 73 of the report, which until that point I had read wearily though comprehendingly. But I was stumped by what exactly a “facility” is – until, I realised, it was just another way to advocate the new United Nations agency that is so politically unacceptable. Car-dealers want to sell cars, and international statesmen want to start international organisations that they can lead. Hence the “Facility.”

In the attempt, what is lost is the opportunity to galvanise world opinion around what are in my view the one or two most important aspects of immigration: integrating immigrants (paying special attention to the Muslim divide) and designing effective temporary-worker programmes. Or to promote paradigm-shifting notions like Theo Veenkamp’s “People Flow” proposal, featured in openDemocracy’s 2003-04 debate, that advocate an innovative and radical liberalisation of migration procedures.

In the end, the Global Commission on International Migration unintentionally does its job: for when nineteen very smart people cannot produce even a mildly compelling case for – as their mandate states – “a coherent, comprehensive and global response to the issue of international migration”, then the time probably isn’t yet right for a global response.

The truth is that most countries in the world do need help in devising smart immigration policies. But the focus has to be on building capacity at the national level and on accelerating and amplifying regional initiatives to address the many bedeviling challenges of immigration.