Statement by: John K. Bingham, Head of Policy, the International Catholic Migration Commission

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Acronyms key at bottom

Mr. Chair, colleagues in government,

In November last year, over 800 representatives of civil society organizations met in the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) in Mauritius and in the World Social Forum on Migration in Manila. In plenaries and working sessions, we developed the proposal to you to adopt a 5-year Agenda of Collaboration between governments and civil society as an outcome at this year’s High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (HLD). One of the 8 points on that Agenda is collaborating together, over 5 years, in a practical “reboot” of migration governance.

Preparing specifically for this year’s HLD, civil society organized 21 regional, national and thematic consultations around the world, many working on the 5-year Agenda, including governance.

This weekend, 200 civil society leaders from around the world expressed strong convergence to collaborate with you on this, non-confrontationally, over the next 5 years, as co-actors and cofactors in the dynamics of human mobility and development.

What is “governance”? Governance is dialogue, engagement and, not necessarily single institutions but systems of practical cooperation.

Dialogue on migration we have—more than ever before. And it is good essential: building important trust and promoting concrete action quite notably in regional processes and the GFMD. But this world of globalized mobility and markets, with huge development prospects and consequences, calls us all to a new level of engagement and cooperation: among governments and with civil society, fully including migrants, diaspora, social partners and the private sector.

If governance is dialogue, engagement and systems of cooperation, then at the HLD—and after—let’s together take a rights-centred, tools-based approach to governance of: mobility, migrant labour and development, but connecting the tools—positive, practical and protection tools—and implementing them in a system that works.

In labour:

• what can we together offer to workers whose labour and other contributions are so important to the developed world, but whose skills are under-utilized, whose recruitment and status is often left irregular, whose working conditions and labour rights are widely unequal to other workers or altogether indecent? At the HLD and in our 5-year collaboration after, we might look at greatly strengthening the ILO and in particular its Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration, as practical instruments of complementary governance.
• what can we together offer to men, women and children who are forced to migrate because there is no decent work at home to survive on, and countries that call them to work without opening any legal door for them to migrate? At the HLD and in our 5-year collaboration after, we need to re-examine how the whole UN system and other stakeholders can structure positive, sometimes obvious alternatives to forced and irregular migration.

In mobility:

• as Pope Francis asked last week, what can we say to boat people, and our brothers and sisters grievously injured or traumatized crossing deserts, and other land borders? At the HLD and in our 5-year collaboration after, we might take a fresh look at the good sense of UNHCR’s 10 Point Plan for Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration, and the Praesidium partnership of the Italian government, UNHCR, IOM, Save the Children and the Italian Red Cross. And at IOM‘s new Operational Framework for Migrants in Crisis, which must include protection and assistance to migrant victims of violence or trauma in transit.
• what can we say to the growing scandal of “human fracking” where more and more sophisticated criminal networks are squeezing every last “value” out of migrants in transit—dollars, sex and human organs—increasingly using kidnapping, rape, and even telephoned torture, with relatives listening live. At the HLD and in our 5-year collaboration after, we might together consider surprising common ground in these matters between civil society and enforcement actors, with a look to apply UNODC’s recent frameworks of protection for victims not only of human trafficking but of migrant smuggling also.

In human development:

• what can we do to ensure that the more than 1 billion migrants and diaspora and members of their immediate families—who send 3x ODA home in remittances mainly for classic development outcomes of housing, health and education—are the subject and not object of an obvious post-2015 stand-alone development goal? What can we say to families and communities broken by survival migration, by costs of migration, by migration driven by development strategies mesmerised by remittance flows that actually depend on family scattering? At the HLD and in our 5-year collaboration after, we might consider more serious work and resourcing of UNDP and civil society partnerships on this.
• what do we say to migrants and diaspora who are ready but afraid to invest themselves, their skills and money in countries of origin, looking for better governance even on mobility? Surely this can move at the HLD and in our 5-year collaboration.

In all these matters we have much to learn from positive practices and even models of governance at regional levels, such as in the European Union, and—very much—at local levels: from cities and local authorities.

Figuring out how to connect these tools and cooperate is the hard part. So what is the governance “outcome” we ask from the HLD? A firm commitment of governments and civil society to work these next 5 years, to do that together.

/Thank you.

Find here< the full broadcast of the Interactive Hearings, July 15th, produced by UN web tv.

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Key to acronyms: ILO = International Labour Organization; IOM = International Organization for Migration; ODA = official development assistance; UNDP = United Nations Development Programme; UNHCR = United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; UNODC = United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime