IOM 103rd Council Meeting
29 November 2013, Geneva

Normalizing responses to migrants, and their
families, movement and role in development of all kinds
John K. Bingham, Head of Policy
International Catholic Migration Commission

Check against delivery

Thank you Mr. Chair, Mr. Director General,

Speaking in our own name and for our network of members worldwide, we first wish to express appreciation to you, Director General Swing, and to Deputy Director General Thompson for your personal leadership. In the hallway just around the corner in front of the Assembly Hall here, there is an exhibit with a line from a writer and scientist: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do” [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]. It should have your pictures on it.

Among the things we appreciate this past year:

• the well-constructed focus in IOM’s World Migration Report 2013 on the well-being of migrants as a smart and needed contribution to the discussion of migration today
• the amazing Diaspora Ministerial Conference: what a milestone and marker, that migrants and diaspora have arrived, where we need to be as actors and agents in migration-related programming and policy-making. When the Eminent Persons and others who were brainstorming the post-2015 development agenda ask for new partners, well here we are: the diaspora is the new partner. In fact, a most dynamic partner: co-leaders; human bridges between the north and south and across other borders, in a world and work that desperately needs connection.
• The IOM- Civil society Consultations in September; with your direct participation. We were so glad to be able to speak with you as well as your senior team. Director General, how do you find the time for so much personal engagement? Surely that is why civil society was ready to propose signing a direct global partnership agreement with IOM for the first time?
• Your fine leadership of the GMG. It should have been easy—the global migration agency leading the Global Migration Group, but we know it wasn’t.

Ourselves, ICMC has been honoured to continue alongside IOM and UNHCR in many parts of the world on identifying and providing protection and assistance to migrants and refugees escaping crises. We are also pleased to be co-leading with IOM and UNHCR multi-year, Europe-wide partnership on mechanisms of resettlement, welcome and integration of increasing numbers of refugees in Europe.

Looking forward then, at four things:

1. The post-2015 development agenda. To make the case for migration and diaspora in that agenda, it’s helpful to ask a few questions:

• regarding remittances. By themselves, and counting only reported flows, migrants and diaspora send home USD $ 500 billion a year as remittances, more than three times official development assistance. But to more fully consider development measure, it is time to count un-remitted migrant earnings as they also contribute to development, especially in countries of employment. Indeed, if remittances average only 10-20% of a migrant’s earnings, then the 80% or more that is not remitted contributes to the economy—spending, saving and investing— where they live. Even before considering the productivity of migrant work itself, remitted and unremitted migrant earnings together contribute enormously to development, both economic and human.
• regarding numbers. We have to do our math better. The international migrant and diaspora constituency of development is far greater than the 230 million reported. First, already 90% of that number is migrant workers and their families living in countries other than their birth for more than a year. But that number needs to add undocumented migrants—most of whom are also working and seasonal and temporary migrants in the country less than a year, and their family members who remain in countries of origin. To the extent diaspora then includes migrants of second and third generations, the number of international migrants, diaspora and their families itself tops a billion, before even considering internal migrants.
• regarding job creation, in countries of employment, it is reported that each highly-skilled migrant creates employment for from two to as many as five other workers. In countries of origin, diaspora individuals and associations are more and more returning to invest and also create jobs and businesses, as explained Mr. Gibril Faal of the British-based diaspora association AFFORD at the session here Wednesday.

In a sentence then, how can migration and diaspora not be centrally considered as a significant factor in poverty reduction and sustainable development in the new agenda when the current Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015?

2. “Migrants in crisis”. We applaud—and join with—IOM’s focus on migrants trapped by conflict and natural disaster, but like many others in civil society and governments, we believe that the synthesis of existing principles and development of frameworks for response absolutely must include migrant victims of violence and trauma in transit. In this regard Mr. Chair, we noted that nearly every delegation here and at the UN High Level Dialogue last month referred to the recent Lampedusa tragedies, many referring also to similar deaths and disappearance in Southeast and South Asia, the Caribbean and across the Gulf of Aden, as well as along land journeys up the Americas and in the Middle east/Europe.

• For practical models of response, we think that IOM should make more of its approach and experience in Lampedusa itself, the so-called “Lampedusa model” of multi-actor partnership: responding to each migrant in distress needs-first, then differentiating for further specialized protection and assistance. Together with seven other NGOs in Spain, Italy, Malta and Greece, ICMC studied that model closely, liked it and recommends it to be replicated elsewhere. We appreciated the reference that Italy made to it yesterday, and agree with the positive evaluation of the work and responsibility-sharing on the ground there among the government, UNHCR, IOM, the Italian Red Cross and the NGO Save the Children.

What we further see, as you Director General Swing and UN Deputy Secretary General Eliasson have mentioned at this meeting, is the increasing cruelty of criminals and organized crime against people on the move. To report further, from the ground, we, our members and partners have seen the spread this year of a type of exploitation that goes beyond even that of human trafficking, to a new level of barbarism: human fracking. Like fracking for oil and gas, this fracking also is designed to violently squeeze every last value that can be gotten out of nature, except that in human fracking the violence is against men, women and children: being robbed and assaulted without end; raped—often serially and in group rape; kidnapped and being tortured while their relatives listen on the telephone until they pay ransom; and suffering the forced extraction of organs for sale. We need to look at this urgently, with firm intent to work with states to stop this now.

• Under it all, surely we all know that we need to take a fresh and hard look at the causes for so much desperate migration. On one hand, policies of closed migration channels and hard enforcement that funnel migrants into such life-threatening forms of migration; on the other, the lack of sustainable development and decent work at home that forces so much of this movement. In civil society, at IOM and other agencies, and among governments, we have to look harder at what we are seeing, and think further than we have. People who say only that further development only drives migration are floating a casual line that our own members and migrant communities flatly contradict in their own voice and choices.

3. It is time to “normalize” a phenomenon that everyone seems to recognize as both normal and universal. So many of us this room and others say and seem to agree that migration and migrant work are normal and universal. Then it only makes sense that legal status of migrant workers and their family members is also normal, or normalized—especially hard-working, law-abiding workers that a country structurally needs and values for essential work and services, while contributing significantly to the health of cities, industries, taxes and social security.

• Normalizing on the front end: opening legal channels for labour migration that match the need of countries for migrant workers even in rough economic times with the workers looking for those jobs. This is part of the answer to Lampedusa.

  Worldwide, “the stars are lined up” to try to do something about the—as Director General Swing put it—“criminal” and other unacceptable practices in the migrant recruitment industry. We look so directly to work with IOM at this, appreciating also the importance of the International Labour Organization, especially with its mandate for worker protection and standards and its experience in labour rights and systems.

  Separately, for coherence, for opportunity, to save lives and do the right thing, it is time also to do the thinking that brings refugee streams to the labour migration door. Refugees we work with on the ground in the Middle East and elsewhere tell us that once they are safe, their first pre-occupation—for self-protection and dignity as well long-term stability and resurrection, is where and how they can get work.

• Normalizing on the back end: looking at regularization as the most sensible form of labour matching. Again and again we see that the biggest challenge in labour matching is trying to ensure that workers looking for jobs and employers looking for workers find each other. That happens all the time, unaided, including with migrants who are not documented for work or are in an irregular immigration status, who themselves matching all kinds of skills to employment, in the “north” and in the “south”. Why not look at normalizing approaches to regularizing the status of these migrants who are already matched, who are a positive part of the development of the country in which they work, and integrating without problem? We urge IOM to pick up and promote greater consideration of the positive experience of Argentina, France, Spain and so many others—soon, we believe, the US too, in practical regularization programmes and policies.

4. Finally family—at last: family. Thank you IOM for picking family up as a central theme in your important International Dialogue on Migration next year. Talk about a neglected phenomenon of migration! We have long worked, perhaps all of us, on issues of migrant workers, children in migration, the feminization of migration, slices of mobility including refugees, victims of human trafficking, etc., in very important but also sub-atomic ways, as if they exist and move and suffer or succeed outside of family relationships. Nothing could be further from the truth, and our work is neither full nor coherent if we do not incorporate the family context. First always: the natural importance and place of family relationship and unity. The universal rights to family life. And then, the long list of human and social benefits from family: self-protection and sustenance; integration, social order and social cohesion; social and political contribution, human and economic development at home as well as in the community and often two-countries. YES, let’s think and move together on that; let’s family-ize migration, with migration programmes and policies that more fully see, respect, promote and benefit from this first human treasure.

Thank you.