MigrationControl2
From Noborders Network Wiki
The globalisation of migration control
part 2
Transnational migration control agencies
'Strategies for an international migration regime' and global migration management, are key words in present international politics.[27] What is known from the regulation of finance and goods, in particular the role of IMF or WTO will serve as a blueprint to global migration politics too. In fact, a General Agreement on the Movement of People, equally to those on Transport and Trade (GATT) has already been proposed.[28] It has been frequently acknowledged that the old system of migration control has failed and also that the politics of globalisation requires a new concept.[29] Nation states are crumbling, global traffic increases constantly, borders have become porous and relying on control of external borders does not work anymore, in a flexible world inflexible systems of control such as a nation state's border have become increasingly inadequate. Therefore, the move is towards a comprehensive regime that covers the whole process of migration from the countries of origin, along the pathways and through any country of transit to its final destination. Any such approach lies well beyond the scope of the nation states, which instead have identified the need for supranational and transnational organisations. These are the Intergovernmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugees and Migration Policies (IGC), the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), to some extend the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and some think tanks and regular conferences.
The IGC has been set up in 1985 when the previous Intergovernmental Committee on Migration has become the IOM. The IGC is a small elitist, 'informal [and indeed very secret] forum' of only 16 members 'for the exchange of information and the planning of innovative solutions and strategies'. The IGC is possibly the central think tank in migration control politics, it must be suspected that key strategies and combat cries such as 'human trafficking', and even 'illegal migration' as such has been agreed at their meeting to become internationally accepted concepts. Its organisational basis is the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) in Vienna, which also hosts the secretariat for the Budapest Process, synonym for the extension of the European migration policy eastwards.[30]
The main agency however is the IOM.[31] It has been set up in 1951 as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. That should already trouble any reader about its intentions as its predecessor in name, an Intergovernmental Committee, founded in 1938 as a result of the Evian conference so disastrously failed to rescue European Jewish refugees from what was to come.[32] However, the IOM, although based next to the UN in Geneva, is not part of that structure. Quite the opposite, it was meant as a counter agency to the UNHCR, set up the year before. In contrast to the UNHCR, which is based on humanitarian principles the IOM has been based on economic considerations. It also functioned as another instrument of the Truman doctrine during the cold war period,[33] in that it still reflects the trilateral approach of claiming to represent governments, economy and migrants alike. In fact, migrants do not have a voice, are not represented, and where NGO's are involved they are rather patronised than having an influence.[34] But in 1980, the European in its named was dropped to acknowledge its increasing involvement in Third World matters, and with the collapse of the Eastern bloc the ICM has been finally transformed and renamed to IOM. They have about 100 member states, whose fees fund the organisation and its operations, its resolution and mission statement makes it a membership organisation. However, they claim a right to receive public and private funds, to institute legal proceedings and immunity for their staff. These 'privileges and immunities' guarantee a unique status and makes it a very influencial and powerful agency.[35] The IOM claims to be 'the leading international organisation for migration' and is on the road to the emerging global governance. Over the last couple of years, it has become a very complex transnational agency that not only deals with migration policy design and implementation, the movement and often return of people, but also with the disarmament of guerrillas in Kosovo, Congo and Angola; the formation of a civil administration in Kosovo; the medical screening of emigrants for example accepted for settlement in the USA and Canada; or running the compensation scheme to non-Jewish victims of the Nazi slave workers. By recent pilot projects between Finland and the Philippines and between Spain and Equador, the IOM now also becomes involved in the recruitment of labour and seems to take over this aspect from the ILO. But the main focus remains with migration management, the IOM prides itself to have been interfered with the lives of 11 million people since its first year. In 2000 alone it moved 450.000 people to and fro. Its main destinations read like a list of war torn regions: Kosovo, Northern Iraq, or Sierra Leone. Just before the war, even Afghanistan was listed as a major destination for movements. Indeed, the focus is on return of migrants, often unwanted where they are. For example, 75.000 refused asylum seekers have been flown out of Germany in 2000, but what is disguised as voluntary return can be revealed as a 'cold removal'.[36] For the role, the IOM plaid in the expelling of the Roma people from Western Europe they are accused by the Roma National Congress of being 'the enemy of the Roma people'.[37] And for the irresponsible way, IOM runs, and delays the compensation instalments to Roma victims from the Nazis, the RNC took the IOM to the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Within only two years, the IOM has doubled its number of representatives from 40 to now over 100. Meanwhile, the whole world is separated into 19 migrationwise relevant regions, each headed by a regional headquarter, such as Brussels, Rome, Budapest, Helsinki or Bangkok. Its field offices by implementing the Migration Information Program are understood as posts of a global 'migration warning system', that feed back to countries of destination knowledge about migration movements, patterns, networks, and supporters.[38] The IOM exports the European model of migration control to other parts of the world, such as Western Africa, where the IOM 'and the Economic Community of West African States are to establish a Migration Statistics Unit ...that would improve understanding of migration issues and help the establish effective migration programs and policies'.[39] The same has been going on in South America with the Puebla process and in South East Asia with the Manila process, each synonyms for regional migration regimes. The IOM usually starts off with some research, then a report will be published pointing to the problems identified, such as the seize of an illegal population.[40] These are often neighbouring citizens who live and work in a bordering country, where they are not necessarily perceived as a problem because of the historical and cultural links between countries, as for example the 50 year tradition of open borders between the then COMECON countries. Once the problem has been constructed, the IOM comes in and offers policy advise, support with the design and implementation of new politics, and finally training on new migration control technology such as red-light cameras. For example, in Ukraine, the IOM took border police officers to the Mexican-US border to demonstrate how an efficient control regime looks like.[41]
The IOM not only concentrates, accumulates and in return spreads the state of the art migration control policy and technology from and to any part of the globe (Capacity Building Programs), it also offers a comprehensive approach consisting of a combination of migration discouragement schemes (so called Information Seminars), the erection of border control posts (such as in the Ukraine), building and running detention camps (for example on Nauru), the subsequent removal of unwanted migrants (so-called voluntary return schemes in UK, Germany, Netherlands and many other countries) and the recruitment of wanted labour (such as from Equador to Spain).
IGC and IOM both not only build on economic principles but also strongly reflect very racist ideas of nationality, home and belonging. Some critics argue that it is build on the assumption that 'people shall primarily live where their home is, where there people is and where there soil is'.[42]
The myth of a borderless world
European history tough that economic integration, and mobility and migration can lead to some convergence of wages.[43] Some scholars therefore expect globalisation to lead to nation states and borders fading away resulting in the miraculous appearance of a borderless world.[44] Others assume that the neoliberal politics of deregulation will finally influence migration and allow unregulated flows of people.[45] And neoclassical economic theory try to make us believe that globalisation plus migration will cease inequality and leads to more distributive justice.[46] However, that is far from being realistic. Instead, neoliberal think tanks such as the OECD or the Multilateral Commission insist in the parallel politics of deregulating finance and trade whilst keeping strong systems to regularise the movement of people and labour.[47] That coincides with a tendency to create new states, processes of devolution such as in the UK and Italy, the European concept to introduce Euro-regions replacing nation states, and with new pioneering schemes to police, and if necessary restrict, the movement of hooligans, criminals, asylum seekers and globalisation protesters. These apparent discrepancies need to be explained. Imperialism is based on the exploitation of wage and reproduction differentials between regions and countries, races and gender, and legal and social groups.[48] It has a strategic interest in keeping social or geographical divisions by genderising, racialising or territorialising the humanity. Imagined, socially constructed or physical borders are essential to the world economic order. Migration politics aims to keep the system of borders and territories whilst in the same time exploits the wage and reproduction cost differential between countries. The political economy of the wage ratio between Singapore and Indonesia (1: 289), Mexico and the US (1:50), or Germany and Poland (1:10) are well documented.[49] The enforcement of borders, the control over migration movements and mobility in general, the introduction of new borders (as on the Balkan or the former Soviet Union) or even movement control technology such as CCTV and biometric scanning are aspects of the same concept. There is already a 'hierarchy of mobility'[50] as global elites are allowed to move freely, whilst workers' movements are heavily regulated, but those not having the funds to subside themselves (such as tourists) or not primarily economically active, even more so in case they could become a financial burden to public funds (such as refugees) are prevented from moving at all. The unequal treatment of the highly skilled, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants and displaced people clearly shows the economic rational behind the neoliberalism twin-strategy of deregulation and regulation.
Conclusion: Global migration management is no contribution to global social justice
The 18th and 19th century pattern of final immigration to otherwise unpopulated continents or where it was accepted to simply terminate the indigenous people has long gone. Post second-world-war concepts of guest or migrants workers who have been anticipated to return once the economic boom was over failed and forced countries such as France, the UK or Germany to accept its role as multi-ethnic societies. However, the new German immigration law in its introduction did make clear that this mistake should not be repeated.[51] IOM and EU now accept global migration as matter of fact but insist in its 'orderly management'. Recent schemes in Germany, the UK, Italy or Spain reveal a preference of just-in-time migration that respond to short term economic demands over long-term settlement. Current trends in immigration management rather reflect a hire-and-fire policy, the result will be the flexibilisation of populations rather than an immigration policy. This trend also awakes some reminiscences of strategies known from Keynesianism, namely those elements, which aimed to domesticate and thereby control social conflict by integrating the working class and its demand for better wages and living standards into capitalist growth. Such a strategy, adapted to migration policy aims to distinguish between the productive and the unproductive elements of migration movements and turn the former into a driving force of economic growth. Beyond the globally mobile elites and temporary needed migrant workers international agencies and national governments rather tend to combine the concept of ethnically homogenous nation states, such as Timor, Kosovo, Kazachstan, Ukraine, Kenia etc. with temporary migration between these entities.
The aggressivity by which the EU, the US and the transnational agencies dominated by them enforce their concepts of immigration control reveal an imperialist move towards simply gaining compliance and obedience of third countries through political, economic, financial and even military force. Where it comes to a politics of immigration for example when the EU or the IMF think aloud about how to respond to a drop in populations and even indicate a need for possibly up to 75 million immigrants that reflects a rather different but equally major planning operation not only in Europe but the world as such.[52] Such a vision, as expressed by former French home minister Chevenement tops anything known from any war related displacement, resettlement or population exchange such as on the Indian subcontinent, or the previous German politics of attracting several million ethnic Germans from Russia to 'come back home'. In such a case migration policy turns into a major population policy process. To understanding migration and population politics one finally needs to take into account the lessons from Nazi politics on population within the European space in order to understand the concept of the value of a population, its health and productivity,[53] and thereby the link between genocide, starvation, displacement, population management, social question, problem solving strategies to migration, demographic issues and not at least the overall social productivity of capitalist societies.[54] There is a worrying equilibrium between those who are deported from Europe each year, about 350.000 plus an unknown number of those leaving 'voluntarily because of deterrent politics, and those who are recruited on some kind of a foreign labour scheme. In that light migration politics appears as a modus to run 'UK plc' or 'Deutschland AG'[55] and represents a strategy of social engineering to rationalise and to recompose its population, similar to a workforce. That because of its transnational nature is a new quality in migration control.
And finally, to keep the unwanted out, and that is the majority of the world's population, a cruel global system of deportations and removals, UN-controlled 'safe havens', refugee and internment camps, Pacific prison islands like Nauru, and armed border guards has been established. These are characteristic 21. century symbols of inequality, injustice and the politics of exclusion. On the other hand calls to close down detention centres, stop deportations, no one is illegal, an amnesty for sans papiers, abolish all immigration controls, open borders, as a growing number of activists and scholars alike argue[56] mark the only true way to global social justice and equality.
1 This article summarises some findings from Düvell, F. (ed) (2002): Die Globalisierung des Migrationsregimes. Materialien für einen Neuen Antiimperialismus 7. Berlin: Assoziation A
2 IOM (1995): Migration Information Programme - Transit Migration in Turkey
3 Tageszeitung, 11/5/2000
4 As for example defined in Rawls theory of justice as the second of 'primary social goods'. See Rawls, J. (1971): A theory of justice, Oxford: OUP
5 Kennedy, P., Connelly, M. (1994): Must it be the rest against the west?, in: Atlantic Monthly, 12/1994, p. 61 - 91. Kennedy, Yale Professor and military expert is a follower of Malthusianism and a prophet of the concept of a third world population explosion, see Kennedy, P. (1993): Preparing for the 21. century, London: Random House.
6 Zolberg, A. (2001): Global migrants - global refugees, New York: Berghahn
7 One version is to define it a 'non-military security threat', Pargeter, A. (2001) Italy and the Western Mediterranean, Working Paper 26/01, ESRC "One Europe or Several?" Programme. London: Centre for Defence Studies, King's College
8 See for e.g. International Organisation for Migration (IOM): Assisted Return Service, www.iom.int/new.htm, Siehe Sassen, S. (1996): Migranten, Siedler, Flüchtlinge, Frankfurt: Fischer, own calculation in Düvell, F. (2002): Die Globalisierung der Migrationskontrolle, in Düvell 2002, p. 45 - 168
9 Stalker, P. (2000): Workers without frontiers, London: Rienner
10 Macdonald, J.S. (1993): Agricultural organisation, migration, and labour militancy in rural Italy, in: Economic History Review, No. 16, p. 61 - 75
11 Jordan, B., Düvell, F. ( 2003): Migration - Boundaries of Social Justice, Cambridge: Polity. However, a study about the subjectivity of migration still needs to be done
12 Sivanandan, A. (2000): Refugees from globalisation, in: CARF, no. 57
13 Baumann, S. (2000): Globalisation - the human consequences, Cambridge: Polity
14 Düvell 2002, taking into consideration agricultural-urban migration, border crossing migration, forced migration, the growth of global cities, and the enormous internal migration in China.
15 YaBasta 2001): Breaking the walls of fortress Europe, Italy
16 Kindleberger, C.P (1967): Europe's post war growth - the role of labour supply, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Sassen, S. (1991): Global Cities, Princeton and others
17 Shrestha, N.R. (1987): International policies and migration behaviour: a selective review, in: World Development, Vol. 15, No. 3, p. 329 - 345
18 European Commission (2001). On a Community Immigration Policy - Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament, Mr. Vitorino, Mrs Diamantopoulou", COM 11
19 Daily Telegraph, 4/9/2000
20 www.un.org, www.fao.org, www.worldhunger.org
21 Statewatch Bulletin, several issues
22 Research Society Refuge and Migration (FFM), several publications, for e.g. Ukraine - Vor den Toren der Festung Europas, Berlin: Schwarze Risse
23 See http://europe.eu.int/comm/external_relations/asem/min_other_meeting/mig.htm
24 Commission Staff Working Paper, (16.03.1998): EU action plan on influx of migrants from Iraq and the neighbouring region, SEC(1998) 466, Brussels
25 http://europa.eu.int/comm/development/cotonou/agreement_de.htm
26 For e.g. WEU Ministerial Council: Luxembourg Declaration, Luxembourg, 23.11.99 plus several other documents
27 For e.g. Hollifield, J. F.(1998): Migration, Trade, and the Nation-State: The Myth of Globalization, in: Paper prepared for a conference on "Managing Migration in the 21st Century", Hamburg, June 21-23, 1998
28 Straubhaar, T. (2000): Why Do We Need a General Agreement on Movements of People (GAMP)? HWWA DISCUSSION PAPER 094 Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv (HWWA); see also Ghosh, B. (2000): Managing migration - time for a new international regime, Oxford: OUP
29 Bhagwati, J. (1998): A stream of windows, unsettling reflections and trade, immigration and democracy, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT; Sassen, S. 2000): Immigration im Zeichen der Globalisierung - Ein neues Feld politischer Inhalte, in: Vorgänge, No. 2, p. 3 - 13; Harris, N. (2002): Thinking the unthinkable - the immigration myth exposed, London: Tauris
30 www.igc.ch, www.icmpd.org
31 For detailed information see www.iom.int; for further critique see www.noborder.org/IOM
32 It has to be remembered that at that conference all participating 32 governments ensured that they were unable to take Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. Australia in particular argued openly anti-Semitic. With no escape possible the basis for the 'final solution' was laid, see Heim, S. (1993): "Deutschland muß ihnen ein Land ohne Zukunft sein - Die Zwangsemigration der Juden 1933 bis 1938, in: Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik Nr. 11, Arbeitsmigration und Flucht, Berlin, p. 48 - 81
33 Resolution to establish a Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (1951): Annex; Feldblum, M. (1999): Passage-Making and Service Creation in International Migration, Pasadena: California Institute of Technology; The UNHCR at 50: State Pressures and Institutional Autonomy
34 For example, during a conference on trafficking in Brussels in September 2002, out of 1000 participants, those representing women and prostitutes' organisations virtually had no say and complained about their role as a passive audience they were reduced to.
35 Constitution of the IOM
36 See many reports and documents on www.iom.int, such as the bulletins, the annual reports etc
37 Kawczynski, R./RNC (2001): Compensation German Fund and IOM, Hamburg 8.5.2001, in: www.romnews.com/a/32-01.html
38 IOM (1995): Migration Information Program - irregular migration in Central Europe: the case of Afghan asylum seekers in Hungaria
39 UN/Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), 30/9/2002
40 for e.g. IOM (1999): Migration in the CIS: 1997 - 1998
41 Steve Cook, IOM representative in an interview, transcript from video documentation for Ukrainian TV
42 www.no-racism.net, Festung Europa in der Offensive - Staatliche Flüchtlingsabwehr
43 O'Rourke, Kevin H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson (1995): "Around the European Periphery 1870-1913: Globalization, Schooling and Growth", NBER Working Paper 5392, Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research
44 Kenichi, O. (1999): The borderless world: power and strategy in the interlinked economy, New York: Harper Business
45 Harris 2002, op.cit.
46 As Stalker (2000) is to disprove.
47 OECD (1998): Open markets: The benefits of trade and investment liberalisation, Paris; Trilateral Commission (1993): International migration challenges in a new era. Triangle paper 44, New York
48 See for example Meillasoux, C. (1975): Femmes, greniers et capitaux, Paris: Librairie Francoise Maspero
49 Azzelini, D., Kanzleiter, B. (1999): Nach Norden, Berlin: Schwarze Risse
50 Bauman 1998, op. cit.
51 The new German Immigration bill: restrictive and repressive, in: Statewatch, Vol. 11, No. 5 2001
52 Guardian, 28.7.2000, Europe 'should accept' 75 m new migrants
53 The continuity has been analysed by Agamben, G. (1995): Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, Torino: Giulio Einaudi
54 See Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik Nr. 10 (1992): Modelle für ein deutsches Europa - Ökonomie und Herrschaft im Großwirtschaftsraum, Berlin
55 A Work Permits (UK) staff in an interview; Die Zeit,
56 To name just a few these are organisations such as No Border, No One is illegal, GISTI, ILPA or authors such as Rawls, Caren, Gibney, Coles, Hayter, Bauder, Harris, Jordan and Düvell etc.