Migration and international relations. The pitfalls of managing
international migration multilaterally
Today, one of the biggest issues facing global
governance is international migration. It is nevertheless dominated by national
policy and bilateral agreements, and lacks a multilateral management system.
Indeed, migration is one of the stumbling blocks of multilateralism, because
most countries consider migration management is key to national sovereignty (in
economic and territorial terms). Multilateral institutions attempt to suggest
multilateral migration governance mechanisms as a global social phenomenon. At
the UN, the High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) was created to deal with
refugee issues, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) for migrant
workers. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are very
active in issues affecting migrants and remittances, while UNICEF focuses on
the social consequences of this mobility on families in home and host countries.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) works on the fringes of the
UN. The UN was unable to impose the Convention on the Rights of Migrants in
1990, and has had difficulty in developing a joint program of action for the
multilateral management of migration. Nevertheless, on the UN level and above,
international organizations are negotiating the creation of an agency specializing
in migration. Using the HCR’s past multilateral strategy and a recent legal
innovation – the concept of mixed migration – we describe a legal attempt to
manage forced and voluntary mobility. “Mixed migration” first appeared in 2006
to describe Sub-Saharan migration through the Mediterranean region. We examine
how it is applied to migrant flows from the Horn of Africa to Yemen. The concept
of mixed migration can be used to observe the ways in which the difference
between refugees and economic migrants are being broken down. This highlights
the pitfalls in the legal and statutory conditions affecting mobility, and the
practical solutions put forward to overcome this situation. With its experience
in dealing with refugee populations and recent organizational innovations, the
UNHCR seems better placed than the ILO or the IOM to manage international
mobility in the global political context. The UN global Commission on
migration claimed, in 2005, that State possibilities and limitations in the field
of migration gained increasingly clear insights, however the text remained in
vague terms and more circumspect when dealing with actual resources of pressure
and action from international and regional organizations on States policies. The
partnerships created between the countries of the North and South on matters
related to the movement of people only add to the issue that migration policies
development process is in fact bilateral and indeed unequal.
La Commission globale sur les migrations
de l’Onu affirmait en 2005 que les possibilités
et les limites de l’intervention de l’État en matière migratoire devenaient de
plus en plus claires, mais le texte restait très flou et précautionneux quant
aux moyens réels de pression et d’action des organisations internationales ou
régionales sur la politique des États. Les partenariats noués entre les pays du
Nord et du Sud sur les questions de circulation des personnes ne font que
confirmer la nature bilatérale et assurément inégale du processus d’élaboration
des politiques migratoires.
http://transcontinentales.revues.org/787
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