International migration and its social and economic development impact

Find here the report of the round table.

Presentations:

- Migration Flows: patterns and explanations - Jessica Hagen-Zanker (ODI)

- Hand out Gender - Jessica Hagen-Zanker (ODI)

- Human rights based approach in international migration - Brigitta Jaksa (DemNet)

- Empirical cases of linkages between migration and development: the Sri Lankan case - CEPA

- MP3 presentation: Migration in Sri Lanka - CEPA

- Power point preentation: Migration in Sri Lanka - CEPA

- International migration and refugees in the Visegrad countries focusing on Hungary - Agnes Hars

Output:

After introductions, we started the first day with a presentation of Jessica Hagen-Zanker from Overseas Development Institute. She presented the main global migration and remittances trends and theories that explain these flows. One of the theories explaining migration is the human capital approach which says people migrate when the benefits of migration are higher than the costs. A question from the audience was what these costs are. These costs include the financial costs of migrating, but also non-financial costs, for example the emotional cost of leaving your children behind.

We then continued with a group exercise in which four different groups looked at positive/ negative effects of migration on different levels of analysis (migrants, community of origin etc). There was a lot of discussion and a wide range of opinions, so the groups came up with interesting conclusions. For example the community group realized that migration and remittances can increase morale/ social cohesion in the community because of lower poverty and shared experiences, but at the same time remittances may increase inequalities within the community and cause resentment. We could also not agree on whether it's a good thing for households if people leave their countries of origin. Is "being patriotic" and staying at home, whenever possible, always the preferred option?

Jessica then continued with a presentation on the effects of development on migration and vice versa. She presented a theoretical model that shows emigration is low at low and high levels of development and high in between. Immigration steadily increases with development. This led to an interesting discussion on what development really is... And what happens to countries that have reached high levels of development with low emigration and high immigration flows. Does this trend continue forever? We think that if EU mobility really increases in some European countries immigration and emigration flows may be similarly important. We also discussed the controversial issue of whether governments should promote migration (like the Filipino government does) or whether governments should tackle development instead and thus prevent migration. Unfortunately it is not that simple, as the majority of migrants do not come from the poorest and most under-developed countries. Another question focused on how we can urge people to invest remittances in more productive sectors. This is not easy, as remittances are by definition private flows. However, matching grants, like the Mexican government employs can stimulate investment of at least a share of these remittances into community projects, like health centres.

Brigitta Jaksa from Demnet, Budapest, presented a different perspective on migration and development issues. The human rights based approach is based on specific UN conventions which binds signatories to certain levels of standards they have to provide. Brigitta explained how the human rights based approach can be used to argue for supporting the well-being of individuals. Especially in the case of Internally Displaced Persons, for whom no-one is responsible, it is used to draw attention to these people and the rights they have (e.g. the right to food). In the extreme case it can even be used to argue that migration is a human right. In many cases the distinction between economic

migration and forced migration is not so clear and again the human rights based approach can be used to lobby for support for all these people.

Thanks to modern technology we then listened to an audio file recorded by Ishara Rathnayake from the Centre for Poverty Analysis in Sri Lanka. She explained to us how important internal and international migration has been to Sri Lanka in the course of its conflict and how positive the effects of migration have been for the country. She also highlighted some of the policy processes in the country.

Agnes Hars from Kopint-Tarki, Budapest presented the trends of international migration flows to Visegrad countries. Basically she showed that immigration flows and refugee flows to these countries are negligible till now, which might also explain in how little attention they have been getting in the policy arena.

Panel discussion

At the end of the first day (25^th March) there was a panel discussion with Martha Pardavi from Hungarian Helsinki Committee, Agnes Hars from Kopint-Tarki, Budapest and Jessica Hagen-Zanker from ODI.  

The first question that was raised to all was how high migration ranks in the list of priorities for these countries. Migration is not considered an important issue for most of the Visegrad NGDO platforms because immigration is so limited in the Visegrad countries until now. Only Slovakia and the Czech Republic are actively working on migration issues. 

The first question the panel discussed concerned policy coherences between immigration policies and other policy areas in the Visegrad countries. Immigration policies have very obvious links to labour market policies, but these are not strengthened or even being considered in these countries. Moreover, immigration policies come from a "police perspective" with even the same people being responsible for immigration policies that were responsible for policing/ security policies before transition. Consequently labour market considerations rank low.

The primary internal question what we should clarify in all cases is that who do we let in, what we should do to make them want to live here. In internal policies we have an external dimension where the normative principle comes from EU’s migration development policy.

Martha Pardavi also mentioned human rights as how they appear either in international policy or in internal policy issues. The basic issue - what all platforms should keep in mind - is that all migrants have the basic human rights (they are unalienable). This partly means that they cannot be sent back to their country, where their basic human rights would be denied or they would be punished in a cruel way.

Looking at the human rights internal approaches it is not as big part of the international law as international migration. In this case we should continue the amounting forproper human treatment throughout NGOs. NGOs cannot force people to be removed from these countries, because they have the right to dignify the safety.

All to this Agnes Hars added that it is very important to see that now the overall EU policy has been impacted by a security regime. The big question is that how the new position of e.g. the Visegrad countries has to collaborate with EU’s restrictive policy.

Above all we can establish that as long as the labour market lead is not strong enough there are and there will be very strict migration restrictions, but nowadays the whole issue is being widely negotiated.

Unconventionally the question comes that what direction should the change take. On EU level migration has now becoming a common EU topic, a common agenda. It is a new phenomenon and the EU has just started to work on the questions of migration. The legal framework has to be worked out on EU level in legal and illegal migration issues. The main questions are: who should be let in, who are those who shouldn’t be here and what kind of permits do we give.

In the future we must work on change. That means that we should work out a very strong lobby to ask for the increase of the amount of money that is poured into international development policies by the EU. On EU level there are no standard principles or guidelines what requires big attention in the future.  

26^th March

Media engagement – dissemination of information in various types of the media

At the beginning of the second day there was a presentation by Ajoy Datta (ODI) about how to identify audiences as an introduction. Perhaps the most memorable thing was the following one. If someone would like to take its policy objectives, firstly it should take the audience, and then identify the tools to reach them, then one can decide to make a research on them or start to communicate with them. For all these it is indispensable to list the key actors, identify the most influential of them and last but definitely not least identify the ones you can influence.

After introduction Leah Kreitzman from ODI spoke about developing messages. After that she facilitated an exercise: “the elevator pitch tool”.  Then Leah gave a presentation about Working with the Media from a US, UK - a Northern European perspective.

The next topic was effective media relations in Visegrad countries presented by Dániel Izsák, a Hungarian freelance journalist. The afternoon session was conducted by Leah Kreitzman. The audience could get to know how to write a good press release which was followed by an exercise about writing a press release. After that there was a challenging exercise for the participants: telling a story to a journalist. As the conclusion of the day participants got knowledge and best practices about the act of influencing the media and how to get closer to it. 

...............................................................

See also:
Events: RT VII - Budapest
News: Outcome and presentations Round Table VII - International migration and its social and economic development impact and refugees
Publications: Round Table 7 outcome - International migration and its social and economic development impact and refugees