UNITED NATIONS: International migration is a mixed blessing because it has both positive economic benefits and negative social consequences, says a new UN report, suggesting that temporary relocation of workers might offset some of the problems.
Rising migrant earnings and the transfer of technology and investments - mostly from rich to poorer nations - have been offset by social disruptions, broken families and exploitation and abuse of migrant workers, according to social activists.
"This is only to be expected," says UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a preface to an exhaustive 217-page study released by the department of economic and social affairs (DESA).
"After all," says Annan, "migration brings with it many complex challenges - including issues of human rights and economic opportunity, of labour shortages and unemployment, of brain drain and brain gain, of multi culturalism and integration, of refugee flows and asylum seekers, of law enforcement and human trafficking, of human security and national security."
The good news is that migrant remittances have grown parallel with the number of international migrants and are estimated to have reached 130 billion dollars in 2000, compared with about 55 billion dollars in official development assistance (ODA).
In October both the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) predicted that migrant earnings transferred to home countries will soon rise to more than 150 billion dollars annually.
The bad news is that the country of origin of a skilled migrant loses both its earlier investment in the education and training of the person who emigrates and the future contributions that person would have made to the economic development of his or her home country.
"The adverse effects of the 'brain drain' are the most common concern regarding migration for countries of origin," says the report, titled 'World Economic and Social Survey 2004: International Migration.'
"Countries of destination have to take into account the effects of the brain drain on countries of origin," Ian Kinniburgh, director of DESA's development policy and planning office, told IPS at the launch of the report on Monday.
"We cannot make policy recommendations that would limit the free movement of people," he continued, but destination countries can "reduce incentives" for immigration. For example, the United Kingdom and France have created policies that reduce incentives to immigration for professionals who are in short supply in origin countries.
"Health systems of small countries can be decimated by outflow of qualified professionals," Kinniburgh stressed. The significance of the brain drain for development is underscored by the 'new growth theory,' which argues that a person's knowledge not only provides a direct benefit in terms of available skills but also has positive effects on the productivity of others.
"Emigration of those skills eliminates this indirect benefit to the economy at large," the study notes. As a solution it suggests, "for destination countries, temporary migration might present fewer difficulties for social integration."
"For countries of origin, temporary work could reduce domestic unemployment and be a source for remittances; it might also reduce the brain drain if temporary migrants returned to their country of origin and used their newly acquired skills there."
The number of international migrants has risen from 76 million in 1960 to 82 million in 1970, reaching 100 million in 1980 and increasing to 154 million in 1990. A sharp increase in the 1980s was largely due to the fact that internal migrants in the former Soviet Union had become international migrants when the country disintegrated.
By 2000, an estimated 175 million persons were living outside their country of birth, of which 158 million were deemed international migrants. Of these about 16 million were recognised refugees fleeing out of a well-founded fear of prosecution; and 900,000 were asylum seekers, according to the latest figures cited in the report.
The study points out that the experience of some migrants today is reminiscent of the hostility that Huguenots once faced in England, that Germans, Italians or Irish experienced in the United States, or that Chinese confronted in the United States and Australia.
"Recently, however, disenchantment with multi-cultural principles has arisen in some destination countries, where there is increasing debate about ways of making migrants conform to national norms," the study said.
In a report released last month, Doudou Diene, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, said that racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are on the "upswing" in Europe.
"New targets of discrimination - immigrants, refugees and non-nationals - have now been added to the traditional victims of these scourges: Jews, Arabs, Asians and Africans," he said.
In Western Europe, Diene added, the resurgence of extremist right wing politics has been explained as a phenomenon caused by economic crisis or rapid influx of non-occidental immigrants into hitherto "homogenous" societies.
The migration study notes, "The number of governments adopting measures to restrict migration has increased significantly in recent decades: in 2003, one-third of all countries had policies to lower immigration, compared with only seven per cent in 1976."
But it argues that, ironically, without the inflow of migrants, Europe would have experienced a population decline between 1995 and 2000. Even with about five million immigrants in this period, the continent's population grew by only 600,000.
"Migrants move today predominantly from developing to developed countries, but the need for migrant labour is also present in some developing countries, including the newly industrialising economies of South-East Asia and the oil-rich countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates)," adds the report. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.
