Importance of Family in Migration

Forced Migration

THE ‘GLOBAL MIGRATION CRISIS’

EU, NA, or AUS blame asylum seekers for rocketing crime rates, fundamentalist terrorism,

collapsing welfare systems, and mass unemployment. They call for strict border control, detention of asylum seekers, and deportation of illegals. The number of international migrants has only grown slightly faster than the overall world population since 1965. Britain experienced growing numbers of asylum seekers and undocumented workers. Germany adopted measures to turn the descendants of the ‘guest workers of the 1960s and 1970s into citizens.

Population movements are taking on increased significance in the context of current global social transformations.

1. First, forced migration is growing in volume and importance, as a result of endemic violence and human rights violations.
2. Second, policymakers are attempting to implement differentiated policies for various categories of migrants. There is a global competition to attract highly skilled migrants, but refugees, unskilled migrants, and their families are unwelcome.  
3. Third, there is a growing understanding that migration – both economic
4. and forced – is an integral part of processes of global and regional economic integration.
5. Fourth, it has become clear that immigrants do not simply assimilate into receiving societies, but rather tend to form communities and retain their own languages, religions, and cultures.
6. Finally, migration has become highly politicized and is now a pivotal issue in both national and international politics.

MANY FACES OF FORCED MIGRATION

Forced (or involuntary) migration includes people who have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere.

Refugees

a refugee is a person residing outside his or her country of nationality, who is unable or unwilling to return because of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Pakistan and Iran have by far the largest refugee populations – mainly from Afghanistan. Refugees are overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorest countries.

Asylum Seekers

These are people who move across international borders in search of protection, but whose claims for refugee status have not yet been decided. Asylum seekers live in a drawn-out limbo situation, since determination procedures and appeals may take many years. In some countries, asylum seekers are not allowed to work and have to rely on meager welfare handouts. Up to 90 percent of asylum applications are rejected – yet the majority of asylum seekers stay on.

Internally displaced persons (IDPs)

IDPs are generally defined as ‘persons who, as a result of persecution, armed conflict or violence, have been forced to abandon their homes and leave their usual place of residence, and who remain within the borders of their own country

The increase is due to new types of wars that deliberately target civilian populations.

IDPs are more numerous than refugees, yet are often without any effective protection or assistance. There is no international legal instrument specifically designed to protect them, although they are covered by general human rights conventions.

Development displacements

These are people compelled to move by large-scale development projects like dams, airports, roads, and urban housing. Millions of development displaced experience permanent impoverishment, Dams are often built in remote areas, inhabited by indigenous people or ethnic minorities. Such groups often practice extensive forms of agriculture and have deep bonds with their ancestral land.

Displacement means losing these ties and being forced to adopt a completely new way of life.

Environmental and disaster displacements

While environmental factors do play a part in forced migration, displacements due to environmental factors are always closely linked to social and ethnic conflict, weak states, and abuse of human rights. The emphasis on environmental factors is a distraction from central issues of development, inequality, and conflict resolution.

it is impossible to distinguish clearly between natural and man-made disasters on closer examination it may be seen to be a result of land speculation, unplanned urban growth, and lack of government accountability.

People-trafficking and smuggling

A final form of forced migration is the trafficking of people across international boundaries. It is important to distinguish between people trafficking and People-smuggling. Most smuggled migrants are men. Most trafficked persons are women and children.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE REFUGEE REGIME

Forced migration has become a major factor in global politics and in the relationship between the rich countries of the North and underdeveloped countries of the South and East. The international refugee regime as it has evolved since 1945 into a much wider system of humanitarian action.

The refugee regime in the Cold War

The core of the regime is the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The regime defines who is officially a refugee – a definition that can make the difference between life and death – and what rights such persons should have. the presence of over 40 million displaced persons in Europe at the end of World War II. The preferred solution was to repatriate them to their countries of origin, but since many were unable or unwilling to return, large-scale resettlement programs were introduced. The second major formative influence was the Cold War. Offering asylum to those who ‘voted with their feet against communism was a powerful source of propaganda for the West.

The refugee regime in the era of decolonization

The colonial legacy led to weak, undemocratic states, underdeveloped

economies, and widespread poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Northern

countries sought to maintain their dominance by influencing new elites, while

the Soviet Bloc encouraged revolutionary movements. situations of generalized violence,

leading to mass flight.

The escalation of struggles against white colonial or settler regimes in Africa from the 1960s, resistance against US-supported military regimes in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and long-drawn-out political and ethnic struggles in the Middle East and Asia – all led to vast flows

of refugees.

The ‘asylum crisis of the 1980s and 1990s

By the 1980s, increasing flows of asylum seekers were coming directly to Europe from conflict zones in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Politicians and the media began to claim that they were really economic migrants in disguise.

Following the 1973 ‘Oil Crisis’, most Western European countries introduced zero-immigration policies. Asylum was seen as a way of circumventing these. Asylum seekers' numbers increased dramatically with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.

The situation was further complicated by ethnic minorities returning to ancestral homelands as well as undocumented workers from Poland, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states.

The early 1990s were thus a period of panic about migration. Extreme-right mobilization, arson attacks on asylum-seeker hostels, and assaults on foreigners were threatening public order.

European states reacted with a series of restrictions, which seemed to herald the construction of a ‘Fortress Europe’:

• Temporary protection regimes for people fleeing the wars in former Yugoslavia.
• Non-arrival policies are designed to prevent people without adequate documentation from entering Western Europe.
• Diversion policies are designed to shift responsibility for processing claims and providing protection to other countries.
• Restrictive interpretations of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention,
• European cooperation on asylum and immigration rules

in 1996, Congress passed a law designed to prevent illegal migration and abuse of the asylum process. Persons who had been convicted of a crime in their home country were excluded from the asylum.

Such restrictive measures – rather than real improvements in human rights – are the main reason why the number of officially recognized refugees worldwide has fallen since 1995. The refugee regime of the rich countries of the North has been fundamentally transformed over the last twenty years. It has shifted from a system designed to welcome Cold War refugees from the East and to resettle them as permanent exiles in new homes, to a ‘non-entrée regime’, designed to exclude and control asylum seekers from the South.

Conflict prevention as social transformation

By the end of the 1990s it was evident that the capacity of international humanitarian action to prevent mass exoduses was severely limited:

• The ‘international community’ lacked the political will, and the economic and military resources, to intervene effectively in most conflict situations causing mass displacement.
• The selectivity of intervention undermined the moral and political legitimacy of such action.
• Where intervention took place, it often failed to achieve its objectives, and sometimes exacerbated conflicts and precipitated mass displacement.
• The principle of neutral humanitarianism required aid organizations to help both sides in a conflict, thus often providing resources to sustain hostilities.
• Neutrality and limited mandates could mean looking on while atrocities were committed.

The number of wars at any one time has increased, from an average of about nine in the 1950s to fifty in the late 1990s. Ninety per cent of those killed are civilians. Both government forces and insurgents use exemplary violence including torture and sexual assault as means of control. Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not, or not just, the ‘re-surfacing of age-old hatreds’ as the media sometimes claim, but systemic elements of the new form of warfare.

Humanitarianism and development policy now have a new joint task: the transformation of whole societies in order to prevent conflict and to achieve social and economic change.

Conclusion:

The migration does not present an economic or social crisis for the North. According to UN statistics, international migrants made up 4.5 percent of the population of developed countries in 1990, compared with 1.6 percent of the population of developing countries. The immigrant share was 8.6 percent in North America, 3.2 percent in Europe and the former USSR, and 17.8 percent in Oceania.

There is a growing realization that both demographic and economic factors make immigrant labour a necessity for countries of the North. Nor do refugees and asylum seekers present major economic and social problems for Northern countries.

If there is a migration crisis in the North, it is an ideological and political one. Migration is symbolic of the erosion of nation-state sovereignty in the era of Globalization.

As for the crisis in the South, it has two main aspects. One is the massive increase in forced migration, due to the ‘new wars’ and the widespread abuse of human rights. The other aspect is the blocking of free mobility to the North, which forces would-be migrants to rely on informal networks or people-smugglers in their search for a better life.