GENEVA November 2, 2007 - John K. Bingham, Head of Policy, the International Catholic Migration Commission

Let's take a look at the times: enormous shifting in labour and production is bringing historic change to societies in ways that are positive to many people but frightening to others. The emergence of new technologies together with a growing reliance on cheap, often unskilled workers has provoked a loud, at times forceful counter-reaction. Though not necessarily a majority, large numbers of workers and families fear that the changes threaten their earnings, working conditions and livelihoods and will actually reduce employment. They find support at the local level and also among certain national leaders who agree that the way to solve these problems is to stop the new technologies and simply throw the new workers out. 

This story takes place the first weekend of November in Europe, but the year was 1811, and the country was England. In fact, on the night of November 4th that year, a small crowd armed with hammers and axes forced their way into a shop in a village in Nottingham and destroyed half a dozen new weaving machines that had recently been introduced to increase production... They called themselves "Luddites": a movement protesting against the dramatic changes brought by the Industrial Revolution.

If it is true that history repeats itself, we may be seeing elements of the same dynamic today in the resistance in some countries to labour changes and migrant workers in the Age of Globalization. The question is: is it any more logical-or effective-today than it was 200 years ago to respond by trying to throw new workers out?

As we talk and think and act on decent work for a fair globalization, I would like to underscore 3 points.

1. It rarely makes sense to blindly resist the inevitable, and migration-both internal and international-is inevitable. IOM is correct that what is needed instead is to manage migration-but of course the challenge there is: what does "manage" really mean? Surely managing migration is not enforcement only. As UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres has said, "people will migrate legally if they can, illegally if they have to." A Governor of one of the states along the US-Mexican border recently remarked, "Show me a 50-foot fence and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder."

Fighting irregular migration with enforcement and return alone is fighting-and losing- yesterday's "war" with yesterday's weapons. Instead of such a "Luddite" reflex of throwing people out, ICMC and its members believe that there are two keys to managing migration. The first is offering greater legal channels for migrants. If we really want less irregular migration, and less smuggling and human trafficking, we need to increase legal migration.

The second key is one that everyone seems to recognize but not necessarily respect: the need to increase development in countries from which large numbers of people migrate. It is amazing to see and hear the growing convergence of States from north and south, NGOs and others insisting that "migration should be a choice not a necessity." Well more than anything else, development is what makes that difference. If we really want to decrease forced migration, we need to increase development.

2. Indeed we are seeing another convergence emerging, on the need to better organize labour migration as well. In both policy and programming, NGOs and migrant groups, labour organizations and broader civil society are increasingly active in this area, together and in direct partnerships with international organizations and States. With respect to internal migration for example, ICMC has collaborated with the US, the EU, the Dutch government and others in microcredit, economic activity support and community building in Albania, the Balkans and Indonesia. With respect to international migration, ICMC and its members have long worked with a number of governments providing pre-departure cultural orientation and security processing and post-arrival reception, employment and integration programming to refugees and other migrants moving to new countries. Such models- tested, refined and proven effective over the years in helping hundreds of thousands of people to move legally all over the world-are immediately available for organizing labour migration. They are the very opposite of "Luddite" responses.

3. But system-building for labour migration requires far more than just efficiency, and more than simply "opening the door." In the age of globalized markets and labour, securing the benefits and diminishing the risks of worker mobility require attention to four fundamentals. The first fundamental is a new honesty. It is time for reality-based responses to global migration. Migration today is a phenomenon of mutual need. Traditional "push-pull" analysis is no longer helpful without acknowledging that it is not just the migrants that are in need, but receiving countries that are also in need-often desperate need-for workers. A genuine recognition of the mutuality of that need will necessarily bring about a paradigm shift in how migrants and migration are treated. In time that paradigm shift may well be provoked by less noble forces, such as ferocious competition for migrants among receiving countries, the emergence of cartel-style bargaining among sending countries, or both.

"Reality-based" also means that countries that structurally need both low- as well as high- skilled labour should not limit the low-skilled workers strictly to lesser legal statuses, such as temporary migration schemes. For that matter, reality throws doubt on whether countries can effectively impose "temporary" or "circular" migration anyway, other than for seasonal or frontier workers and in what may more accurately be defined as "temporary return"
programs. Indeed the more prominent failures of temporariness or integration in such programs over the years call for far greater reflection than has been the case to date.

"Reality-based" says also that the only way to make any kind of "return" genuinely possible is to better address what compels people to migrate in the first place, or re-migrate. That requires new investment, the second fundamental. The single greatest way to diminish risks of worker mobility-including brain drain in countries of origin-is to invest in addressing root causes of migration. 

Now, at a side meeting at the Global Forum in Brussels, some of civil society was actually told that "if we spoke of root causes States would fall asleep." We believe that the near daily reports of migrants drowning and disappearing at sea and dying in desert and other land crossings, as well as the scourge of human trafficking worldwide are among the wake-up calls for us all to address what forces people to take such risks. In fact we believe that there
is a widening consensus that addressing root causes is the only way to reduce forced migration. What is needed is the political will to make that investment.

The third fundamental is a new decency. Here we bow to the ILO, its decent work program and especially the "Multilateral Framework for Labor Migration." What to say? Bravo. What a clear, comprehensive, practical set of principles and guidelines for a rights- based approach to labor migration.

It is also important to appreciate how valuable the Framework is to what many believe is the most volatile aspect of the migration debate today: the challenge of integration. As Antonio Peñalosa, Secretary-General of the International Organization of Employers recently noted, "integration of migrants happens best in the world of work"; and under the Framework that world of work is one where basic rights are respected. ICMC and its members believe that
the sharing of such rights without discrimination is a key to the integration of migrants. It is hard to get more practical than that!

To close, the fourth and overarching fundamental is a new spirit of humanity. This conference and our panel discussions are devoted to decent work for a fair globalization. Beyond workers, we need to talk of every person; beyond individuals, we need to respect the family; and beyond rights, the dignity of each human being, migrant or citizen, working or not. Globalization will only be fair, and work decent, if rather than allowing work to be destroyed and workers thrown away, we raise our structures, our laws, our leaders and ourselves fully-and unrelentingly-to the calling of human dignity.

Thank you.