I would open by marking the moment in two ways. First, as an NGO joining you in this meeting of principals. NGO’s may sometimes be looked upon as a “disturbing sound” but as you know they are mainly active in the gaps, often in partnership with your organizations. With staff, programmes and members on the ground worldwide, ICMC has long been working with you and others to improve assistance and protection to migrants in irregular situations, regardless of their faith, race, ethnicity or nationality.

De-blocking the agenda on irregular migration

Second, to mark this moment of de-blocking with you, as a group, high-level inter-agency discussion of protection in contexts of irregular migration. For years, this was a subject that would be considered (at most) in pieces or symptoms. Yet a report of the Council of Europe estimates at 5.5 million the number of unauthorized migrants in the EU alone. The European Commission estimates that the underground/parallel economy represents between 7 and 16% of the EU GDP. It is worrying that many of these people have rights, but not protection; that many are exploited and abused, bound up in new and very ‘flexible’ forms of labour contracts. This meeting, and the keen interest that your presence demonstrates, is a key signal that addressing protection of migrants in irregular status is an important gap, too long overlooked… even if we are well aware that there may not be immediate unanimity in every discussion, articulation, or decision.

In your agencies, you, like us at ICMC, are all familiar with people either in, or considered to be in irregular status, whether refugees or asylum seekers, victims of human trafficking or violence in transit, children, workers and members of their families. Any number of us work in a myriad of intersections in which irregular status categorically generates other irregularities and even chaos: public health, development, education, data, finance, etc. Many of the studies, stakeholder processes and data that you have organized have given us the dimension of the phenomenon today: the structural importance of not just migrants but irregular migrants—i.e., “regular irregulars”—to economies, to whole sectors of work, to employers and households worldwide; north and south, in developed and lesser developed countries. We know their importance to social security schemes in the face of demographic boom and bust. And both the individual, family and societal costs of leaving such an enormous class of people outside the law, outside protection, exposed to exploitation, abuse and expulsion. So we were pleased with the wording in the concept note: “focus on the human rights protection gap faced by irregular migrants”.

Allow me to raise three considerations only.

Please see the pdf below to view this statement in its entirety.

ICMC Statement to the Global Migration Group (406.72 KB)