IOM chief: There is no migration crisis but a political emergency

By Daniela Vincenti

EU leaders need to find the courage of unity to manage migration, which has the potential to help the EU economy grow more than expected. But the window of opportunity is closing fast, William Lacy Swing said in an exclusive interview with EURACTIV.

William Lacy Swing is the Director General of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). He is a diplomat and a former United States ambassador, and a United Nations special representative of the Secretary-General. He spoke to EURACTIV’s Editor-in-chief Daniela Vincenti.

At the upcoming EU summits in February and March, migration will be on top of the leaders’ agenda after failing to reach an agreement in December. What do you think the EU should do to find common ground to solve the emergency, because there is still an emergency, although the numbers are going down?

It is not a migration emergency it’s a political emergency because the numbers are such that if there were a comprehensive European Union plan, the numbers would be manageable.

This is the elusive plan and I give great credit to the European Union and the Commission that are working on it. The leadership is trying to move this forward but there’s such disunity within the Union, among the 28 countries.

In the absence of a plan, they will continue to look at stopgap measures that simply cover the immediate term but don’t project into the future and consequently therefore are unable to build back trust with the people.

The problem is the people in all EU countries have lost confidence in the leadership to manage the question of migration.

So what kind of plan would allow rebuilding trust and confidence?

First of all, there needs to be some agreement on a comprehensive long-term multifaceted policy on migration and asylum that would allow everybody to take the same point of view.

For example, you had 1.5 million migrants who came north in 2015-2016, that is less than 1.5% of Europe’s population, in other words that would have been a manageable number. Secondly, one needs to be more resourceful and creative in the use of migrant policies.

By that I mean that some could qualify for temporary protective status because their country is in turmoil and they can’t go back safely. Some want to reunite with their families, and that should be welcome because people who have their families with them are more stable than those without their families.  Some are victims of trafficking who need support.

Some are economic migrants who may or may not find jobs in the job market. And those who don’t and want to go home, the IOM will take them home for you. We took almost 100,000 of these migrants home last year, 54,000 from Germany alone.

That’s always an option. And they will go back with some money in their pockets so they can start their life again and reduce the possibility that they’ll come back illegally. They are going back with some dignity.

And how do you reduce the chance that they will come back?

Well, bear in mind, the ones that are coming regularly to Europe are not the poorest of the poor. They had enough money to make it to the Mediterranean and to pay smugglers. They probably took all their family’s savings to come in the hope that they’ll find work and can send money home.

The overwhelming majority of migration is taking place in a regular, safe and orderly fashion. Most people are moving without a problem. But you do have 66 million worldwide that are forced to move, about 24 million refugees and at least 22-23 million internally displaced people. The question is how do we deal with them. Surely, we should be able to come up with a policy that is both humane and responsible.

The deal with Turkey or the one that Italy struck with Libya are not really sustainable in the long-term. Or are they?

What everyone thinks about the measures is that they are working, in the sense that the Balkan route is now closed.

There’s been a bit of movement towards the western Mediterranean. The numbers in Spain have gone up, the numbers in the central Mediterranean have gone down and will likely continue to go down a bit. But you still have at least the same number of people dying relative to the numbers who attempt.

So last year was 5000, the year before was 3600, this year is already approaching more 1000, so that’s the tragedy.

What we need is to combine short-term, medium-term and long-term strategies. Our whole effort is related to saving life. That’s our concern. So, in Northern Niger, we’ve taken 8000 people back. We’re replicating that in very modest and modifying forms from Senegal to Cameroon and in other 12 places.

To pick them from the migratory route and, number one, warn them about the risk of smugglers and two to try to identify those who may have a claim to refugee status. Then we turn them over to UNHCR [The United Nations Refugees agency].

You also have a third group of economic migrants who get so far and then say “boy maybe I made a mistake”. To those we offer them the chance to go home voluntarily with some cash to show that they’re not failures.

What do you mean by cash. That will not give them enough not to try again?

It’s a small amount. Anywhere from about €1,000 to as high as €4,000. And now, increasingly, we’re trying also to help them to reintegrate because there’s a lot of hostility towards them when they go back. So we’re also providing some money to the home community.

Isn’t that a form of aid again?

Yes it’s a form of aid, absolutely.

But aid, we know, has not really helped. You need to invest in these countries so that jobs are created, so that people are going to find jobs?

Well, the money we’re giving to help stabilize the community also could help the creation of some jobs but obviously, that’s part of the development program that has to happen.

We’ve got to get much more serious about things like agriculture. You know, Africa should be the breadbasket for much of the world. But today with the way we’re educating people, nobody wants to do agriculture anymore. That’s why we’re trying to work with FAO [Food and Agriculture Organisation] to get youth back into agriculture. But this is going to take a lot of effort. This is going to take a real multi-layered effort by the community.

So the first step is to turn irregular migration into regular migration?

The first effort is to stabilise. The second is to break the cycle of irregular migration and then to…

Are we successful in that?

Well, marginally. We’re missing three things. We’re missing perspective. 1.5 million migrants is not a lot of people for 550 million Europeans. We never say anything in the media about it …the admiration we should have for the six neighbours of Libya and the four neighbours of Syria who kept their borders open at great cost. And a political cost too. You need to have that perspective. And you need to have policy.

Some EU leaders are not going to have that perspective, unless the problem is in their backyard. So how do you change the mindset?

It takes political courage. It takes political leadership. Leadership is all about doing the right thing and that’s exactly what Chancellor Merkel did. She did the right thing when she said refugees are welcome. I think she must have assumed that quite a number of the 27 would help out. It didn’t happen. Sweden helped out as long as they could, Austria for a very brief moment. Italy and Greece have their own problems. So, it would take much more unity within the EU than we have right now.

But quotas don’t work?

No. 160,000 for the relocation. What have we done up to now? 60,000 – 50,000 maybe? They didn’t fulfil their quotas, so even that small number, it didn’t work. And so you have a big division within Europe, between those who want to manage the problem and those who want to avoid it by building walls and gates, you can’t do that. So that’s policy. And you need to have a plan and implement it.

What plan? You obviously have an idea about this plan.

Well, you have to have a programme with public education and public information. You have to tell people about the demographic deficit.

You have to help these people understand why these people are coming, and what your programme is when they come.

Integration has been a big failure, throughout the world, including the U.S., including Europe. Most of the terrorist attacks in the big cities of Europe and the U.S were homegrown. Failed integration.

Immigration was a huge success for the U.S for many decades, and it has created the so-called melting pot. How come it doesn’t work anymore?

It does work. Overall, it is still working. Don’t forget that IOM with our partner UNHCR, we have taken 3.4 million refugees since 1980.

There’s not one public record of them ever committing anything approaching a terrorist act. And these are very good people. They actually sign a promissory note when they go. More than 90% of these refugees pay it back.

So, it’s a great thing for these taxpayers, it’s not a loss for us. It’s a gain for us. The sooner they get a job, the sooner they pay taxes. The sooner they become a citizen, the sooner they can vote. So, the political party should be courting these refugees. The McKinsey Global Institute, one of our partners, have come out with a major study on migration. 3.4% of the world’s population, international migrants, are producing 9% of global GDP. And that’s 4% more than if they stayed at home. So, they add to productivity, they bring you ideas, they’re motivated, they have to send money home.

They could go back home and bring progress to their country too…

Well, they could. There’s no problem. You can be fully integrated in a place like the U.S for example and still be a very active member of the diaspora, sending money home, going back during vacation, helping out a hospital or school, taking trade missions back.

The diaspora is the most neglected part of the whole migration policy. We have a program called RQN, Return of Qualified Nationals, we’ve taken almost 200 Somalis back to Somalia to help develop capacity in the government, private sector, and elsewhere, and it does work.

But you have to have a policy and you have to implement it. And then you have to give evidence to your people and show that the policy brings results.

But you said it needs political courage, it boils down to that. Europe at the moment fails at procuring the courage?

The thing is, we’ve got a long way to come back now, because it’s very hard for a politician to embrace migration too aggressively or vociferously, because it loses elections and it determines coalitions.

So, you have to start the process to make people understand, why it is in the people’s interest to welcome migrants. That’s what Canada’s doing now. They brought in 45,000. They prepared the terrain, they sent their Minister of Migration throughout the country to talk to all the governors, many of the mayors of the major cities to say, here’s your responsibility: shelter, language training, a job, security and to all of the community this is why it’s in your interest to receive these people.

And now, they have families who are very upset because their particular Syrian family hadn’t arrived yet. But I cannot compare Canada to Europe. It’s very different. They’ve got one border, the U.S.

There is a psychological element also, and I’m very sympathetic here. I’m simply trying to reason with them about ways to do it differently and something that would ultimately work politically very well.

Europe has peopled the world for three centuries. Europe has always been a continent of origin. Today, for the last three decades, it’s become a continental destination. Our people aren’t going out, but people are coming to us. They don’t look like us, they don’t speak as we do, they practice a different religion. Rather than saying, how can we manage diversity, we should begin to embrace it, because it’s good for us.

See the problem is the window of opportunity is very small. Because in 2019, Europe is holding the European elections, and there is a risk that the Eurosceptics are going to win big numbers in the European Parliament.

And unless leaders come right now, with some kind of solution, we’re facing a greater danger: a migration time bomb. Because it is a time bomb if you look at Africa and economic migration, rather than refugees. That’s the urgency of having a deal in the next six months.

Right now you have a window of opportunity because the story that appeared on TV about the slave trade has brought everybody together. Right now, the European Union and Africa are working very closely together to solve this slave problem.

They’re working with IOM primarily, but also with UNHCR and we’ve taken 20,000 of the detainees home. We’ll take the other 10,000 home before the end of February and we’ll continue to empty their defenses and try to close them all together to turn detention centers into open reception centers.

Do you think the UN process could push the EU to get its own plan, or is it wishful thinking?

I think the Global Compact on migration is one of the good things to come out of this. We probably wouldn’t have a global compact, if we didn’t have the European Union. We’d be in a crisis. There’s no question that it will be a much more level playing field once we get that signed in December.

*Originally published at: https://www.euractiv.com/section/development-policy/interview/mon-iom-chief-there-is-no-migration-crisis-but-a-political-emergency/

Why the media is a key dimension of global inequality

Authors

1. Nick Couldry
   Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics and Political Science
2. Clemencia Rodriguez
   Professor of Media Studies, Temple University

Global media systems cannot effectively contribute to social progress until opportunities are more widely shared. Internet.org by Facebook/Facebook

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This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

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Every day, much of humanity now holds in its hands the means to connect and be connected across the world: to family, entertainment and the broadcasts of corporations, states and, increasingly, terrorist organisations such as Islamic State.

This connected world has major implications for social progress and global justice, but so too do the media and information infrastructures on which that world depends.

The project of “networking the world” is more than two centuries old.

While it has always been the project of states, it has increasingly become the preserve of some of the world’s largest corporations including Facebook, Google and, less well known in the West, China’s Tencent and Baidu.

Profit, freedom and inequality

Just as economic models rooted in markets and consumption are expanding into ever more world regions and intruding into ever more domains of everyday life, so corporate logics are colonising media and digital platforms.

Take education as one example: concerns are developing regarding school learning materials increasingly provided not by the state but by commercial media companies such as Apple and Google.

More recently, Facebook faced civil society opposition in India when it sought to introduce its Free Basics platform as a default means of internet access for less affluent populations.

However, the same move has gone unopposed in African countries facing greater resource challenges.

Market forces have appropriated the design, regulation and pricing of the platforms we use to connect, portray the world around us, express our political allegiances and even forge our visions for the future (as explored, for instance, in tech evangelist Kevin Kelly’s work).

Profound inequalities

Particularly in the Global North but also the Global South, the information networks and communication protocols that underlie media infrastructures are designed and operated by private, corporate entities.

Direct technical authority over networks and protocols gives these entities an authority that is inherently regulatory.

Global platform companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple – each of which occupies a dominant market position globally – enjoy correspondingly stronger and more pervasive regulatory power. Yet these platforms have so far been driven by only one goal: profit.

The story of expanding global media networks is often told as if they spread freedom everywhere, liberally and evenly. But when we ask freedom for whom, the tale gets more complex.

There are profound inequalities in basic media access within nations and among continents. While global elites may be better connected everywhere, the same is not true of those who work for them. Media systems offer tremendous communication resources to people who can function in Western languages, are able-bodied and have the necessary buying power.

Unfortunately, in Colombia, a home internet connection costs 20% (US$48) of the minimum wage (US$217/month), putting it out of reach for a domestic worker.

Justina, a full-time domestic worker in the city of Barranquilla, told us in a recent interview that she must instead buy a $1 Tigo prepaid card at the corner store that gives her access to precarious internet for only 48 hours at at time.

The inequalities are even greater in media production. Even if a smartphone gives migrants an image of the country they hope to reach, they will most likely lack the ability to influence how their arrival will be represented.

Fox News’ portrayal of immigrants and refugees in particular often narrowly focuses on conservative viewpoints.

Our media representations of the world’s problems are drawn from a very narrow pool of perspectives. Subsequently, our media systems showcase certain voices while marginalising others, especially people of colour, differently abled people, migrants, women and girls.

From Hollywood, where 96.6% of all directors are male and only 7% of films are racially balanced, to digital platforms where elites find new ways to gain a following, the media shows us a world as lived only by a few. The public conversation about access needs to consider how opportunities for content creation and visibility can be shared more widely.

It is a myth that rural communities, Indigenous people and the Global South are not interested in media and the digital world, but sadly our current media infrastructures carry little – if any – input from these large sections of humanity.

Australian Indigenous media practitioners gather at the industry conference to learn skills and discuss opportunities.

What if media infrastructure and digital platforms were designed with communities’ diverse languages, needs and resources in mind?

The results have the potential to be transformative, as when the Talea de Castro Indigenous community in southern Mexico designedRhizomatica Administration Interface (RAI), a graphic interface for a local cellphone network responsive to local information needs, languages and modes of communication.

Rhizomatica members demonstrate how to operate a communal cellphone. Rhizomatica Wiki

Much more often, however, the algorithmic mechanisms that shape what is available to users of digital platforms are driven exclusively by an advertising logic that undermines diversity and reproduces the social capital of those with power.

Two principles for reform

Media and information regulation shows a more subtle, but equally powerful inequality. National and multinational regulatory bodies from the mass media era are struggling to adapt in the age of smartphones and tablets.

Content delivery’s increasing shift to mobile devices gives corporations, not states, the dominant influence over what can be watched, when and by whom. Consequently, it is corporations, not regulators, that now set the parameters of what can be received on what device, and by what means.

The problem is that the regulation of media and digital platforms is too important to cede to a few powerful organisations that make decisions, implement policy and design online architectures behind closed doors. Instead, transparency and greater civic participation should be the guiding principles of internet governance, policy and regulatory frameworks.

Crucial to this is the internet’s capacity for surveillance – not just when we buy goods and services online, but also in ordinary social interaction.

The increasing dependence of all communication flows gives corporate networks the ability to use and reuse the resulting data to make algorithmic discriminations between consumers and citizens.

In many parts of the world and for large parts of the population, everyday life routinely involves online access to a wide variety of purveyors of news, information and popular culture, as well as search engines, social networking platforms and other content aggregators that seek to help users find, organise and make sense of it all.

While access to these resources may be offered at no financial cost to users on an advertiser-supported basis, consumers often pay a price in the form of the automated collection of information about their personal reading, viewing and listening habits. This information can be used for surveillance and censorship, or to target advertising and suggest content more likely to appeal to each user.

Such surveillance has so far been largely beyond public regulation, yet this new ability to deeply modulate how the social world appears to us has not escaped national governments’ notice, for example in China, India and the United States.

The annual Freedom Instead of Fear demonstration in Berlin. Markus Winkler/Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA

It is undeniable that the media’s rapidly changing infrastructure offers huge opportunities for those campaigning for social progress to connect, act and challenge the significant inequalities that underlie media systems themselves.

We propose two principles to guide this expanding struggle.

The first is that media cannot effectively contribute to social progress until opportunities for access and participation in the production and development of media content are more widely shared. The second is that media infrastructure is a common good whose governance and design should be much more open to democratic engagement than currently.

Ignore these principles, and the world’s visions of social progress will be less effective and far less diverse. Start to take these principles seriously, and the global struggle for social justice becomes both deeper and more open to the hopes of populations long ignored.

The authors are coordinating lead authors of Chapter 13 of the International Panel for Social Progress’s draft report. Public comments are welcome here.

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Fonte: https://theconversation.com/why-the-media-is-a-key-dimension-of-global-inequality-69084

BRAZIL'S NORTH-EAST: THE PERNAMBUCO MODEL

Eduardo Campos is both modern manager and old-fashioned political boss. His success in developing his state may make him his country’s next president

IN THE 1980s an American anthropologist, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, carried out fieldwork in Timbaúba, a town in the sugar belt of Pernambuco state, in Brazil’s north-east. She described a place seemingly resigned to absolute poverty. The back-breaking task of cutting sugar cane by machete provided ill-paid work for only a few months of the year. The deaths of young children from disease and hunger were accepted “without weeping”.

Traces of that bitter world survive in Timbaúba. In Alto do Cruzeiro, a poor suburb on a hilltop overlooking the town, Severina da Silva, a maid who also runs a shop in her living room, says that some people still go hungry. She is 48 but looks 20 years older. A 31-year-old cane cutter nicknamed “Bill” has six children—a throwback to the days when people had big families instead of pensions. But Bill has a labour contract, with full rights; he gets a stipend and a small plot from the state government to see him through the idle months.

That is part of a broader social safety net provided by democracy in Brazil. It includes non-contributory pensions for rural workers. Some 6,000 of the town’s poorest residents take part in Bolsa Família, a cash-transfer scheme started by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president from 2003-10, who was born near Timbaúba. Thanks partly to this cash injection, the town now boasts car and motorbike dealers, new shops, a bank and restaurants.

That is a ripple from a broader flood of investment that has made Pernambuco one of Brazil’s fastest-growing states. Once Europe’s most lucrative Atlantic colony, it languished for centuries. While sugar estates on the plains of São Paulo mechanised with world-beating efficiency, those in Pernambuco’s rolling hills struggled.

Revival began with a new port at Suape, south of Recife. Its hinterland is now a sprawling industrial complex. Some 40,000 workers are building a vast oil refinery and petrochemical plants for Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company. A new shipyard and wind-power plants rise among the mangroves.

Suape is a monument to federal money, industrial policy and an alliance between Lula and Eduardo Campos, Pernambuco’s ambitious governor. But the state’s boom goes wider. Rising incomes have helped Mr Campos attract private investment. Fiat is to start work on a car plant beside the main road north of Recife. A host of smaller food, textile and shoe factories are now setting up in the state’s poor interior, including Timbaúba. While the rest of Brazil worries about deindustrialisation, Pernambuco does not: since Mr Campos became governor in 2007, industry’s share of the state’s economy has risen from 20% to 25%, and will reach 30% by 2015, he says.

This boom has brought nearly full employment—and created an acute skills shortage. The refinery is years behind schedule, as is the shipyard’s order book, partly because illiterate former cane-cutters make poor welders.

To try to remedy that, Mr Campos has teamed up with the Institute for Co-Responsibility in Education (ICE), a private educational foundation, to reform the state’s middle schools. More than 200 of these now operate an eight-hour day, rather than the four-hour shifts common in Brazil. In return, the government has raised teachers’ salaries and added bonuses tied to results. It is also trying to chivvy mayors into improving primary schools through extra funds and other incentives. That is vital: on average, pupils arrive in middle schools aged 15 with a three-year learning deficit, says Marcos Magalhães, ICE’s founder. Pernambuco is rising up the rankings of state educational performance.

Mr Campos’s critics say he should do more to tackle poverty. Alongside the opulent residential blocks towering over its palm-fringed beaches, Recife has 600 favelas (slums), and its lagoons are fetid with untreated sewage. He replies that his government is doing what it can to help the generation scarred by the poverty of cane-cutting, particularly in the drought-stricken semi-desert region farther inland. But his bold bet is that infrastructure, private investment and better education will eliminate the causes of his state’s misery. “We are turning off the flow of poverty while looking after the stock,” he says, using his trademark management-speak.

So far that bet has paid off. Mr Campos won a second term in 2010, and his Brazilian Socialist Party did well in this month’s municipal elections, in Pernambuco and beyond. He is nominally an ally of Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor as president. But he is also a potential threat to her winning a second term at the 2014 election.

Mr Campos was born into politics. Miguel Arraes, his grandfather, was an old-fashioned socialist and Pernambuco’s governor both before and after Brazil’s 1964- 85 military dictatorship. Mr Campos says Arraes taught him that politics is about “bringing people together, rather than dividing them.” Some in Recife complain that he has learned that lesson too well and become a modern version of a traditional north-eastern coronel (political boss), shrinking from challenging the old rural order, trading support for jobs and favours and freezing out dissenters.

But his defenders say he gets things done. He was lucky that his less-heralded predecessor laid the foundations of Pernambuco’s renaissance. He has built on them by modernising the state. He faced down the trade unions over school reform and brought private managers to state hospitals. He has set hundreds of targets for his administration, and harries his aides to achieve them. One that he recognises he must meet—or pay a political price—is to finish a new football stadium in Recife in time for next year’s warm-up tournament for the 2014 World Cup. As both the main parties that have run Brazil since 1995 lack new faces, Mr Campos’s success in Pernambuco has turned him into the country’s most-watched politician.

Fonte: The Economist