Research Handbook on the Institutions of Global Migration Governance (Elgar Handbooks in Migration) 178990806X, 9781789908060, 9781789908077

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© Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet 2023

Cover image: Fariba Adelkhah, ‘“Souviens toi du vol, l’oiseau est mortel 2” (“Remember the flight, the bird is mortal 2”). In homage to Farough Farrokhzad, Evin prison, Iran, Summer 2020’. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937060

This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781789908077

ISBN 978 1 78990 806 0 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78990 807 7 (eBook)

Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 36:38AM

Contents

List of contributorsviii Acknowledgementsxiii List of abbreviationsxiv 1 PART I

Introduction: the institutions of global migration governance Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet

1

INTERGOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS: THE AMBIGUITIES OF MULTILATERAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE

2

Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance? A history of the International Organization for Migration Elaine Lebon-McGregor

19

3

Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state: the IOM and the Migration Governance Framework Younes Ahouga

34

4

UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance: the case of refugee resettlement Adèle Garnier

50

5

The global governance of labour mobility: the role of the International Labour Organization Nicola Piper

63

6

The migration and development nexus and international migration management: the role of the United Nations Development Programme Giulia Breda

76

7

A humanitarian agency in global migration governance: the International Committee of the Red Cross’s migration policy and practice Miriam Bradley

89

8

Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance Ine Lietaert and Antoine Pécoud

102

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vi  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance PART II 9

INTERSECTIONS, CONVERSATIONS AND ARRANGEMENTS IN GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE

The emergence of a global migration policy conversation: a retrospective on two mandates of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2011–2017) François Crépeau and Anna Purkey

119

10

Global encounters: exploring the political foundations of global migration governance Stefan Rother, Hélène Thiollet and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden

132

11

Making a global compact: the objectives and institutions of the Marrakesh Compact Elspeth Guild and Kathryn Allinson

146

12

‘Workers of the world unite’: unions and immigration, a global history Leo Lucassen

13

At the crossroads of climate and migration governance: institutional arrangements to address climate-induced migration François Gemenne

14

The gendered governance of migration Laura Foley

15

The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking: institutions and networks Anna Triandafyllidou and Letizia Palumbo

16

Global migration governance: positionality, agency and impact of civil society227 Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Raúl Delgado Wise and Aleksandra Ålund

170

186 196

214

PART III FIFTY SHADES OF GOVERNANCE: FROM PUBLIC TO PRIVATE, FROM FORMAL TO INFORMAL 17

Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements: two institutions that shaped European migration history (1945–2020) Olivier Clochard

250

18

Economic interests and EU border and migration control: from security hindrances to market opportunities Damien Simonneau

263

19

Migration and religious institutions: (re)arranging itineraries and imaginaries Sophie Bava

279

20

The role of Church organisations in global migration governance Mélodie Beaujeu

297

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Contents  vii 21

The governance of transnational care chains Rianne Mahon

22

Promoting and restricting marriage migrations: when marriages are not such a private matter Hélène Le Bail

327

23

Migration intermediation: revisiting the kafala (sponsorship system) in the Gulf Claire Beaugrand and Hélène Thiollet

341

24

The global ordering of remittance flows: formalisation, facilitation, funnelling and financialisation Anna Lindley

357

25

From a de facto to a de jure role of local authorities in the governance of international migration Thomas Lacroix

377

26

‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’: the role of information in migration decision-making and irregular migration governance Julia Van Dessel

387

27

Is network embeddedness really worth it? Migrant networks as structures of both opportunities and constraints Flore Gubert

406

Index

312

421

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Contributors

Younes Ahouga is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. His current research examines the role of international organisations in the implementation of the Global Compact for Migration. He has (co)authored articles in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Critique Internationale. Kathryn Allinson is Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol, UK. Her research concerns the establishment of state responsibility for breaches of international law, focusing on the interaction of human rights and humanitarian law in relation to displacement, and the protection of socio-economic human rights during conflict. Aleksandra Ålund is Professor Emerita at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society at Linköping University, Sweden. She has published widely in Swedish, English, and other languages on international migration and ethnicity, identity, culture, gender, youth, and urban and global social movements. Sophie Bava is a socio-anthropologist at the French Research Institute for Development, coordinator of the international research centre Movida, editor of the journal Afrique(s) en Mouvement, and in charge of the Africa-Mediterranean mission at the SoMuM Institute. Her research focuses on African migration and Muslim and Christian religious constructions between sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean Africa and Europe. Claire Beaugrand is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences (IRISSO) at the Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, France. She lectures in Sociology of the Gulf at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research deals with the political sociology of migration and mobility in the Gulf states. Mélodie Beaujeu is a Fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations in France and an Associate Researcher at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics. She has worked on migration issues not only as a researcher, but also as a practitioner in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international cooperation agencies and international organisations. Her main research interests are: changes in the governance of migration (international, national, local), the nexus of migration with different areas (climate, education, etc.), and issues of public debate. She co-founded the French NGO Désinfox-Migrations, focusing on and fact-checking issues related to migration. Miriam Bradley is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research examines international responses to conflict, violence and migration. She is the author of The Politics and Everyday Practice of International Humanitarianism (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Protecting Civilians in War: The ICRC, UNHCR, and their Limitations in Internal Armed Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 2016). viii Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 36:38AM

Contributors  ix Giulia Breda has a PhD in sociology. She is a Fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. Her research focuses on the role of knowledge transfer in migration management in the international development field, and more generally on European migration and border policy and seasonal migration. Olivier Clochard is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Research Fellow at Migrinter (University of Poitiers), France and a geographer interested in questions related to the migration policies of the European Union and its Member States. He is co-editor of the Revue Européenne des Migrations internationales and former President of the Migreurop network. François Crépeau is Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Professor of Public International Law at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants from August 2011 to July 2017. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Raúl Delgado Wise is Senior Professor and Emeritus Researcher, and holds the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chair on Migration, Development and Human Rights at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico. He is President and Founder of the International Network on Migration and Development, and a Professor of the Doctoral Program in Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas. Laura Foley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, Ireland. Her PhD in politics (University of Sheffield, UK) was part of the Prospects for International Migration Governance project where she analysed the gendered governance of migration in Malaysia. Laura previously worked at Queen Mary University London (QMUL), researching the role of global processes and institutions in the governance of migration. Adèle Garnier is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Geography, Université Laval, Canada. Her work investigates the interplay of regulatory levels (local to global) in migration and refugee policy in a comparative perspective. François Gemenne works on environmental geopolitics and migration governance at the University of Liège, France, where he is a National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) Senior Research Associate and the Director of the Hugo Observatory. He is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and he also lectures on climate change and migration policies at Sciences Po, France. Flore Gubert is a Researcher at the French Research Institute for Development (IRD). She has been working on migration issues in Western Africa for 20 years, with a focus on the drivers and the impact of migration and remittances. She has also been involved in policy evaluations in different African contexts. Elspeth Guild is Professor at Queen Mary University of London, UK and at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her interests and expertise lie primarily in the area of European Union law, including immigration, asylum, border controls, criminal law, and police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.

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x  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Thomas Lacroix is National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Director of Research in Geography at the Sciences Po Center for International Studies (CERI), France, Associate Researcher at the Maison Française of Oxford, CNRS Research Fellow at Migrinter (University of Poitiers, France), and a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. His most recent book is International Migrations and Local Governance: A Global Perspective (with Amandine Desille, Palgrave, 2017). Hélène Le Bail is a Researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Sciences Po Center for International Studies (CERI), France and a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations. Her research relates to Asian migrations to Japan and France with a special focus on female routes of migration (marriage, sex work) and on collective action. She is the principal investigator for the French National Research Agency (ANR) project ‘Political Participation of Asian Migrants and their Descendants in France’, and co-investigator for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) project ‘Rethinking the Nexus Migration and Sex Work Trafficking’. Elaine Lebon-McGregor is a postdoctoral researcher at United Nations University – Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), United Nations University and Maastricht University, the Netherlands. She conducts research on the evolution of migration governance, with a focus on the role of different actors, the translation of norms across different governance levels, and the role of funding in these processes. Ine Lietaert is Assistant Professor in International Social Work in the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy at Ghent University, Belgium and Professorial Research Fellow in Migration Governance and Regional Integration Studies at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), where she coordinates the Migration and Social Policy Research cluster. Anna Lindley’s research focuses on global migration dynamics, politics, and experiences, particularly transnationalism and remittances, displacement and refugee issues, status precarity, and detention. She is author of The Early Morning Phone Call: Somali Refugees’ Remittances and editor of Crisis and Migration: Critical Perspectives. Leo Lucassen is Director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Professor of Global Labour and Migration History at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and has published widely on global migration history, xenophobia and integration processes. Rianne Mahon has published numerous articles and chapters on industrial policy, labour markets, childcare politics, and social policy redesign at the local, national and global scales, and has also co-edited numerous books. Her current work focuses on the gendering of global governance, with a particular focus on transnational care chains. Letizia Palumbo is a Senior Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy and the coordinator of the work package on trafficking for the H2020 research project ‘Vulner’ (2020–2023). She was previously a Research Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute, where she coordinated a research project on the working conditions of migrant workers in the agricultural sector in Europe. She was also a Post-Doctoral Researcher

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Contributors  xi in Comparative Private Law at the University of Palermo, Italy. Her research focuses on migrant labour, gender migration, exploitation, trafficking, women’s rights and migrant rights. Antoine Pécoud is Professor of Sociology at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord, France and Director of the POLICY department at the Institut Convergences Migrations in Paris. His research focuses on global migration governance and the role of international organisations in migration policy. Nicola Piper is Professor of International Migration and Founding Director of the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is currently on secondment as a British Academy Global Professor Fellow, hosted by Queen Mary University of London’s School of Law (2019‒2022). Anna Purkey is Assistant Professor and Director of the Human Rights Programme at United College at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses primarily on the ways in which legal and political institutions create precarity and reinforce disadvantage for refugees and other migrants, both in Canada and in protracted refugee situations abroad. Stefan Rother is Professor pro tempore for Flight, Migration and Social Mobility at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany and Senior Researcher at the Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His research focuses on international migration, the democratisation of global governance, social movements, regional integration, development, and non-/post-Western theories of international relations. Carl-Ulrik Schierup is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, Sweden. He has published on international migration, ethnic relations, citizenship, labour, and subaltern struggles under conditions of neoliberal globalisation and resurgent nationalism. Damien Simonneau is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Department of International Relations at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO Paris), France. His researches focuses on border security policies at the US‒Mexico border, the Israeli‒Palestinian separation, and European Union borderlands. He is also affiliated to the Institut Convergences Migrations. Hélène Thiollet is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher at the Sciences Po Center for International Studies (CERI), France. She works on migration and asylum in the Global South, particularly in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. She focuses on the international politics of migration and asylum, crises and political transformations. Anna Triandafyllidou holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), Canada. She was previously based at the European University Institute (EUI), where she held a Robert Schuman Chair on Cultural Pluralism in the EUI’s Global Governance Programme. She is editor of the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies. Her recent authored books include What is Europe? (with R. Gropas, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2022) and Rethinking Migration and Return in Southeastern Europe (with E. Gemi, Routledge, 2021). She recently edited a volume on Migration and Pandemics (Springer, 2022).

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xii  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Julia Van Dessel is a PhD candidate in political science at the Group for Research on Ethnic Relations, Migration and Equality (GERME) and the Center for Research and Studies in International Politics (REPI) of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Her research focuses on the externalisation of the European Union’s border and migration policies in West Africa, and the use of ‘awareness-raising campaigns’ to deter irregular migration. Catherine Wihtol de Wenden is a National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) emerita researcher at the Sciences Po Center for International Studies (CERI), France. Her research deals with integration in France and migration politics in Europe.

Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 36:38AM

Acknowledgements

This book benefited from the support of the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the ‘PACE ‒ Politics of Asylum Crises in Europe’ project (project ANR-18-CE41-0013), and of the Center for International Studies (CERI, Sciences Po). We also wish to thank the Migration Collaborative Institute (ICM) for its support to this project. We are immensely grateful to the contributors to this Handbook who bore with us through the global COVID-19 pandemic. We thank Samuel Fergusson and Ludmila Du Bouchet for their careful editing of the manuscript, Ariane Bluteau for the administrative follow-up, and Daniel Mather for his constant editorial support. The cover of this collective book represents a work of art that our colleague Fariba Adelhakh created in the Evin prison in Iran. Fariba was arrested in June 2019 and has been in jail or under house arrest as a scientific prisoner until February 2023, but without ‒ as of March 2023 – having received back her passport and therefore unable to travel outside Iran. The work selected for the cover of this Handbook is entitled ‘“Souviens toi du vol, l’oiseau est mortel 2” (“Remember the flight, the bird is mortal 2”). In homage to Farough Farrokhzad, Evin prison, Iran, Summer 2020’, and we interpret it as a metaphor for migration, its obstacles and possibilities.

xiii Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 36:38AM

Abbreviations

AFL AFL-CIO AFML AMC AMCB AML ANVITA APEC ASEAN BDA BIS BNP2TKI CARAM Asia CARICOM CAT CBTA CCFD CCME CEB CEDAW CEDAW Committee CEI CERD CFDT CFT CGAP

American Federation of Labor American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations ASEAN Forum on Migrant Labour Asian Migrant Centre Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body anti-money laundering National Association of Welcoming Cities and Territories/ Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Association of Southeast Asian Nations Confederation of German Employers’ Associations Bank for International Settlements National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility Caribbean Community Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Centrale Bond van Transportarbeiders Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Développement Churches’ Commission for Migration in Europe United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women Comité d’Entraide International/International Committee for Mutual Aid Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination French Democratic Confederation of Labour/Confédération française démocratique du travail countering the financing of terrorism Consultative Group to Assist the Poor xiv Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 37:02AM

Abbreviations  xv CGTU CIEMI CIO CLIP C-MISE CMW COMESA CONLACTRAHO COP CPA CSD CSI CSO C-TPAT DG DiPS DP DTM EADS EAEU EASO EC ECLAC ECOSOC ECOWAS ECSC EEAM EEC EGTC EIU EMPACT EMSC

United General Confederation of Labour/Confédération générale du travail unitaire Centre d’Information et d’Études sur les Migrations Internationales/ Centre for the Study of International Migration Congress of Industrial Organizations Cities for Local Integration Policies for Migrants City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe Committee on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Confederation of Domestic Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean Conference of the Parties Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese refugees Civil Society Day Container Security Initiative civil society organisation Customs‒Trade Partnership Against Terrorism Director General Diaspora Project Support displaced person Displacement Tracking Matrix European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company Eurasian Economic Union European Asylum Support Office European Commission United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean United Nations Economic and Social Council Economic Community of West African States European Coal and Steel Community Église Évangélique Au Maroc European Economic Community European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation Economist Intelligence Unit European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats European Migrant Smuggling Centre

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xvi  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance EOS ERLAIM ESCWA ESRAB ESRIF EU EUAA eu-LISA EUNAVFOR Med Eurodac Eurojust Europol EUROSUR EVW FATF FFR FNV FOREM FP FRA Frontex G20 G8 GAIN GAMM GATS GATT GCC GCIM GCM GCR GDR GFMD

European Organisation for Security European Regional and Local Authorities for the Integration of Migrants United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia European Security Research and Advisory Board European Security Research and Innovation Forum European Union European Union Agency for Asylum European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice European Union Naval Force Mediterranean European Dactyloscopy European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation European Border Surveillance System European Volunteer Worker Financial Action Task Force Financing Facility for Remittances Federation of Dutch Trade Unions Formation des responsables d’Églises de maison/Training of Leaders of House Churches Focal Point European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights European Border and Coast Guard Agency Group of Twenty Group of Eight Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network Global Approach to Migration and Mobility General Agreement on Trade in Services General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gulf Cooperation Council Global Commission on International Migration Global Compact for Migration (full title: Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration) Global Compact on Refugees German Democratic Republic Global Forum on Migration and Development

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Abbreviations  xvii GIZ GMG GMG GNP GUF HLCP HLD HTA IAMR ICC ICCAR ICCPR ICEM ICGMD ICM ICMC ICPD ICRC ICRMW ICT IDM IDP IDWF IFAD IFI IFRC IGAD IGC IGO IHL ILAB ILO IMA IMRF

German Development Cooperation Global Migration Group global migration governance gross national product global union federation High-Level Committee on Programmes High-Level Dialogue hometown association International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees International Criminal Court International Coalition of Cities Against Racism, later the International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration International Conference on Gender, Migration and Development Intergovernmental Committee for Migration International Catholic Migration Commission International Conference on Population and Development International Committee of the Red Cross International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families information and communication technology International Dialogue on Migration internally displaced person International Domestic Workers Federation International Fund for Agricultural Development international financial institution International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Intergovernmental Authority on Development Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees intergovernmental organisation international humanitarian law International Labor Affairs Bureau International Labour Organization International Migrants Alliance International Migration Review Forum

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xviii  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance INGO Interpol INTI-Cities IO IO IOM IRF IRO ITC-ILO ITUC IUF IWG J4J JMDI KMS M&D MADE MDG MDW MERCOSUR MFA MGI MIC MIDSA MIDWA MiGOF MMC MMP MoU MRLS MSB NAFTA NAPA NGO NHRC NMM

international non-governmental organisation International Criminal Police Organization Benchmarking Integration Governance in European Cities intergovernmental organisation international organisation International Organization for Migration Inter-Regional Forum on Migration International Refugee Organization International Training Centre of the ILO International Trade Union Confederation International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations International Working Group Justice for Janitors Joint Migration and Development Initiative knowledge management strategy migration and development Migration as Development Millennium Development Goal migrant domestic worker Southern Common Market Migrant Forum in Asia Migration Governance Index migration information campaign Migration Dialogue for Southern Africa Migration Dialogue for West Africa Migration Governance Framework Mayors Migration Council Mexican Migration Project Memorandum of Understanding Migration Research Leaders’ Syndicate money services business North American Free Trade Agreement National Adaptation Programme of Action non-governmental organisation National Human Rights Council networked migration management

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Abbreviations  xix NOLA NPM NYD OAS OAU OCHA OECD OFW OHCHR ONI OSCE PDD PfP PGA PICMME PICUM PIF PMU POEA POLO PPT R&D RCP RMG RRF RSMMS SAARC SADC SAR SDC SDG SEIU SG SIGTUR SIS

network of labour activism New Public Management New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants Organization of American States Organization of African Unity United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development overseas Filipino worker Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Office National d’Immigration/National Immigration Office Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Platform on Disaster Displacement Platform for Partnerships People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants Pacific Island Forum Project Management Unit Philippine Overseas Employment Administration Philippine Overseas Labor Office Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal research and development Regional Consultative Process regional migration governance Refugee Response Framework Mediterranean‒Sub-Saharan Migration Trade Union Network South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation Southern African Development Community search and rescue Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation Sustainable Development Goal Service Employees International Union Secretary-General Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights Schengen Information System

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xx  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance SIVE SPV TESDA THAMM TMP-E TSM TUC UAE UCLG UEMOA UK UMA UN UNCT UNCTAD UNDAF UNDESA UNDG UN DOCO UNDP UNESCO UNFPA UNHCR UNHRC INICEF UNIFEM UNODC UNRRA UNRWA UNSG UN Women US USAID USMCA

Integrated System of External Vigilance special purpose vehicle Technical Education and Skills Development Authority Towards a Holistic Approach to Labour Migration Governance and Labour Mobility in North Africa Transnational Migrant Platform ‒ Europe transnational social movement Trades Union Congress United Arab Emirates United Cities and Local Governments West African Economic and Monetary Union United Kingdom Arab Maghreb Union United Nations United Nations Country Team United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Development Assistance Framework United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs United Nations Development Group United Nations Development Operations Coordination Office United Nations Development Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations Population Fund United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Human Rights Council United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Development Fund for Women United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East United Nations Secretary-General United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women United States of America United States Agency for International Development United States‒Mexico‒Canada Agreement

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Abbreviations  xxi VIS WCC WIEGO WSF WSFM WTO

Visa Information System World Council of Churches Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing World Social Forum World Social Forum on Migration World Trade Organization

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Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 37:02AM

1. Introduction: the institutions of global migration governance Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet

INTRODUCTION In December 2018 in Marrakesh, 164 countries adopted the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). The celebration of this achievement, coupled with the heightened political controversies that surrounded it, illustrates the extent to which the global governance of migration is both a highly topical issue in international affairs and a fiercely contested one. While the UN insists that the Compact fully respects states’ sovereignty, governments are less convinced and many of them have long been resisting migration-related interventions on the part of international and intergovernmental organisations, which they perceive as a challenge to their right to govern the admission and treatment of non-nationals on their territory (Pécoud, 2021). Yet, in reality, global migration governance is far more complex that this apparently binary opposition between states and the UN suggests. It is a kaleidoscope of institutions and configurations, a web of complex relations, in which states are connected to other states, migration intermediaries, markets and private business actors, international organisations, migrant networks and civil society groups. This Handbook is concerned with the plurality of institutions that shape and govern migration at the global level, and which are situated outside of, in relation to, or in opposition to states. It goes beyond the usual suspects, such as intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and examines a wide array of institutions, such as social networks, smuggling cartels, religious transnational organisations, cash transfer companies, security firms, trade unions, families, sponsors, and so on. The key questions that run throughout the book include the autonomy and agency of these institutions, their relationship with states, and the manner in which they interact with practices and logics of sovereign control over migration. Contributions describe the variety of migration institutions and governance configurations at work across the world, and the ways in which these affect migration dynamics and are affected by changing migration patterns, with the shared objective of contributing to a renewed and nuanced understanding of migration governance. With that objective in mind, this introduction reviews the core arguments developed in this Handbook, while presenting a comprehensive overview of the institutions involved in global migration governance.

REVISITING GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE Global migration governance has become a key issue over the past decades, both for researchers and from a policy perspective. It often refers to the normative search for mechanisms that should be put in place to better govern migration, on the assumption that migration is currently 1 Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 37:04AM

2  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance not adequately governed. There are different approaches to improving migration governance: especially in the Global North, states have taken measures to tighten migration control, in order to remedy to what they perceive as their current incapacity to control their borders (Hollifield et al., 2022); at the international level, however, the dominant idea is that states should rather engage in multilateral cooperation, which is viewed as the best way forward for improving migration governance. This is not a new situation. As early as 1927, the first director of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Frenchman Albert Thomas, argued that the moment had arrived ‘for considering the possibility of establishing some sort of supreme supranational authority which would regulate the distribution of population on rational and impartial lines, by controlling and directing migration movements and deciding on the opening-up or closing of countries to particular streams of immigration’ (Papadopoulos et al., 2015, p. 13). Today, the Global Compact mentioned above is just one manifestation of a fairly similar quest for mechanisms of global coordination that would go beyond the one-sided and unilateral strategies designed by states. This quest is currently taking place in the context of a ‘global migration crisis’ (Weiner, 1995): in a post-Cold War era, migration is perceived as escaping states’ regulatory capacities, and as being one of the global issues over which sovereign states are ‘losing control’ (Sassen, 2015). There is indeed evidence that migration policy is a case of ‘policy failure’, in the sense that governments tend to fail to achieve their stated objective, which leads to situations in which public demand is increasingly disconnected from policy choices (Ruhs et al., 2019). Even though there are good reasons to question this notion of a ‘control gap’ (Bonjour, 2011; Garcés-Mascareñas, 2019), the fact remains that it makes for a context in which global governance is presented by its advocates as a miracle potion capable of re-establishing states’ control over migration; albeit through interstate cooperation rather than unilateral policymaking. Since the 2000s, states have thus been discussing migration at the multilateral level, often under the auspices of the United Nations, or within intergovernmental settings such as the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). These discussions have taken place in an ongoing climate of crisis, particularly as far as the refugee/migration crisis in the Euro-Mediterranean region is concerned, which has fuelled a growing politicisation of issues relating to migration, integration, and diversity in general. This has in turn contributed to the rise of exclusionary, or even racist, nationalist populist movements in a number of Western countries. Recent outcomes of those discussions include the 2017 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and, in 2018, the Global Compact for Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees. But even though these agreements testify to the formal recognition, by states, of the need for multilateral governance mechanisms, the extent to which these (non-binding) processes can really transform governments’ practices remains unclear. This is also because, in more general terms, both the debates of the early twentieth century and those of today are situated in a particular global context in which ‘peaceful cooperation, expanded human rights, and higher standards of living’ (for both migrants and non-migrants) are concomitant with processes of illiberalisation across the globe and with ‘intensified group conflicts [and] deteriorating social systems’ (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992). Another feature of these discussions is their functionalist roots, corresponding to the practical reality that a global phenomenon such as migration cannot be properly governed by states alone, and requires coordination and cooperation among them. This cooperation also needs to include not only states, but also non-state actors, in hybrid governance configurations involv-

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Introduction  3 ing governments, markets, firms, international organisations (IOs), NGOs and transnational social movements (TSMs), operating at different levels of governance (local, national, international and transnational), and with complex relationships of power and influence between them. As far as their objectives are concerned, multilateral discussions over global migration governance privilege mainstream liberal democratic values; from this perspective, migration should be governed in a way that is both socioeconomically fruitful (in terms of development, remittances, labour market shortages, and so on) and respectful of fundamental human rights. Market-friendly and rights-based principles are viewed as being in the interests of all, and as paving the way for the development of a broad migration regime to complement the existing refugee regime (which applies to only a small proportion of people on the move). Cooperation over migration is also expected to fill a gap, by complementing existing multilateral cooperation frameworks such as those related to other transnational flows (goods or capital) or to other global issues (development, climate change, human rights, and so on). However sensible such general principles may be, this programme is not free from contradictions and dilemmas. The pursuit of economic goals can easily clash with the respect for rights, and there is an obvious and well-known tension between respect for the rights of non-citizens and the principle of sovereign authority. The uncertain fate of migration-related human rights instruments, such as the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW), has made this particularly clear (Pécoud, 2017). In more general terms, migration governance exemplifies the contradictions that lie at the heart of liberal/democratic political values, especially with regard to what Cole calls the ‘incoherence between the liberal polity’s internal and external principles’ (Cole, 2000, p. 202): that is to say, the disjuncture between the liberal, democratic and rights-based values that apply inside national borders, and the lack of respect for these values at the border. Faced with such inextricable political contradictions, the UN tends to depoliticise issues of migration, and to develop a technocratic programme, with the aim of reducing frictions between states (and between states and non-state actors) and maximising cooperation; yet without changing the rule, that is to say without challenging the prevalence of state sovereignty and ‘the national order of things’ (Malkki, 1995). This is the case, for example, with regard to the notion of ‘migration management’, which is predominantly about migration and border control, but includes references to humanitarian imperatives concerning migrant protection and to an economistic agenda connected to the facilitation of labour migration (Pécoud, 2015). Yet, as a concept, ‘global migration governance’ is not only about what should be done. It can also refer to what is actually being done, through empirical descriptions of the complex and multiple ways in which migration and the lives of migrants are governed at the global level, with or without states’ interventions. The assumption here is that, despite the close connection between migration control, citizenship and state sovereignty, governments are far from being the sole actors in the governance of migration, and that non-state actors play a key role both independently from, and in relation to states. If one moves away from a normative definition of global migration governance to an empirical one, the issue is no longer the elaboration of a coherent and overarching framework to ensure cooperation, but rather the fragmentation of this process. The mobility of people, and the outcomes of this mobility, are indeed shaped by many actors of different nature, at different levels of responsibilities, and in different parts of the world. This makes for tensions and potential incoherence, such as when governments, civil society or the private sector pursue

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4  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance different objectives, and therefore confront each other. But fragmentation can also yield coherence, and does not preclude the emergence of patterns of coexistence between actors with different agendas. This results in permanent tensions between opposition and complementarities, and also often leads to unstable governance patterns that contrast with the ideal of order and stability that is envisaged by normative efforts in the field of migration governance. Examples include the role of authorities above and below the state level in shaping migration flows, such as cities, regional organisations and international/intergovernmental entities. Migration flows are also influenced by non-state actors such as NGOs, trade unions and the private sector. And in addition to formal and well-identified organisations, migration is also influenced by other, less tangible dynamics, such as information flows, religious beliefs, gender relations, networks, and so on. Ideas, beliefs and knowledge play a key role in governance mechanisms, because ‘the structures of human association are determined primarily by shared ideas rather than material forces, and … the identities and interests of purposive actors are constructed by these shared ideas rather than given by nature’ (Wendt, 1999). In order to systematise the web of ideas, practices and power relations that shape global migration governance, we propose to build upon broader definitions of governance as a mode of stable regulation of social systems that may or may not include states (Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992), and to draw in particular on the concept of ‘institution’. In what follows, we discuss some of the core implications of this conceptual umbrella, before turning to the ways in which it can be applied to global migration governance.

INSTITUTIONS OF GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE ‘Institution’ is of one the broadest and most debated concepts in social sciences. Institutions are often conceptualised as organising structures that shape everyday lives, and which range from kinship, language, religion or markets, to politics. These institutions have a regulatory function as ‘systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions’ (Hodgson, 2006), or as a set of ‘informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights)’ that ‘create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange’ (North, 1991, p. 97). Furthermore, ‘institutions influence behaviour not simply by specifying what one should do but also by specifying what one can imagine oneself doing in a given context’ (Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 948). Institutions thus shape cognition, and in return cognition shapes social bonds and thus institutions (Douglas, 1986). In more concrete terms, institutions shape the dynamics behind mechanisms of cooperation, solidarity or network formation. This is well documented in migration studies, which has shown the role of family, friendship, kinship and ethnicity in the initiation and continuation of migration flows (through concepts such as chain migration or migration networks). In Chapter 27 of this Handbook, Flore Gubert reviews this literature and emphasises that migrant networks are structures of both constraints and opportunities, according to a dynamic perspective that draws upon a deterministic approach to migration drivers while also recognising migrants’ autonomy and agency. Institutions can be ‘formal bureaucratic structures’, but they exist ‘alongside informal networks’ to produce different ‘social logics and registers of identity’ (Sardan, 2013). Coexisting formal and informal institutions may converge or diverge, leading to social orders that either

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Introduction  5 collide or conflate with one another. For instance, research on migration governance has often opposed formal ‘recruiters’ (in the sense of official intermediaries that operate to bring workers from one country to another) to ‘smugglers’ (who are informal intermediaries offering/selling migration opportunities in contexts where mobility is illegal). Yet, whether formal or informal, both are transnational brokers in the sense of ‘human actors who gain something from the mediation of a valued resource that he or she does not directly control’ (Lindquist, 2015). In practice, brokerage is not marked by a dichotomous split, but rather creates a grey zone serving the interests and benefits of labour markets, states and migrants themselves, despite stark inequalities and relations of domination. This is discussed in Chapter 15 by Anna Triandafyllidou and Letizia Palumbo, which addresses the prohibition of smuggling and trafficking, and in Chapter 23 by Claire Beaugrand and Hélène Thiollet, which focuses on migration brokerage in the Gulf. Certain institutions have a limited scope, as they provide an issue-specific set of rules (such as traffic regulations or exchange rates, for example). But other institutions encompass extremely broad arrays of rules, ranging from the least constraining to the most rigid: language, for example, is an overarching institution that provides people and societies with tools with which to think and communicate. Likewise, religions are broad social institutions grounded in sets of beliefs and practices, and serving as the basis for large communities. The role of religious institutions in governing migration is explored in Chapter 19 by Sophie Bava, who shows how religion is a key institution and resource in migrants’ experiences, and in Chapter 20 by Mélodie Beaujeu, who addresses the history of efforts by churches to organise human mobility. Institutions are generally associated with a number of core characteristics and key debates. Firstly, they introduce order and predictability into social life; without them, interactions between people would be chaotic and unmanageable. Secondly, they feature a combination of rules that are both constraining and enabling: constraining in that they limit peoples’ freedom, and enabling in that they make it possible for people to interact. One of the key debates concerns the complex relationship between institutions and organisations. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and indeed they refer to fairly similar processes of ordering social life, by introducing standardised patterns of behaviour in order to coordinate human interactions. According to one view, organisations constitute a specific category of institutions, corresponding to formal structures, with clear and explicit rules, a physical existence, and staff or members; thereby contrasting with other institutions that are less formal and more widely encompassing (such as language or social conventions, which are institutions, but not organisations). According to an alternative view, institutions and organisations are two distinct realities: in line with the influential argument developed by Douglass North, institutions constitute the rules of the game, whereas organisations are the players; institutions would then correspond to the overarching framework within which people and organisations interact. This distinction is not always operational, however, as organisations are not simply players abiding by external rules: they also shape the rules for the people who interact within them, thereby functioning as institutions themselves. Institutions also need to be conceptualised within broader discussions on social change. Rather than simply imposing fixed rules, institutions are embedded in interactive frameworks in which actors negotiate symbolic and material resources, and construct identities and beliefs. Viewing migration governance through the lens of institutional frameworks necessarily brings about a fluid and pluralistic approach: governance is not just the output of organisational

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6  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance work, nor the simple outcome of cooperation or conflict between actors. While the process of governance is about steering and controlling, it is intrinsically relational, and does not take place in a vacuum: migration governance processes are embedded in broader or related social rules, which shape behaviours and interactions, and determine what is thinkable/doable and what is not. The social rules and ideas that influence migration governance develop both within and outside migration governance processes, such that migration governance is a part of broader processes of social change. It follows from this dynamic approach that institutions are inseparable from processes of institutionalisation: rather than creating an opposition between formal and informal institutions, we are instead led to explore how uncodified/‘soft’ rules may be hardened and transformed into a coercive system (and vice versa). This Handbook thus draws upon the concept of institution to deepen our understanding of global migration governance, the interactions between non-state and state institutions, and the global social transformations that have taken place, and continue to arise in this domain. The discussion is organised around different levels of institutionalisation, which are summarised in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1

Institutions of global migration governance

First, in the inner circle, organisations are understood as institutions. A first group of chapters in this Handbook looks at the place of organisations such as IOs or NGOs in global migration governance; they investigate their nature and discuss their role, whether they act as agents of their member states/donors, or as actors exerting an influence in their own right (see Chapters 2 to 7). The second circle corresponds to international frameworks, or meta-institutions: these are less formal, often multi-actor, international arenas in which states and non-state actors interact and produce norms, narratives or policies. These include intergovernmental forums (Chapters 9 to 11), or groups of different actors that are united by common goals (such as trade unions, see Chapter 12). Finally, the third circle (entitled ‘Fifty shades of migration governance’) relates to institutions in the broad sense, that is to say, the public and private institutions that collide or enter into conflict in the governance of migration and migrants’ lives, and the formal and informal institutions that shape migration outcomes.

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Introduction  7

ORGANISATIONS AS INSTITUTIONS According to this first conception, institutions are organisations, that is to say, well-identified entities, endowed with a clear set of internal rules, an explicit and codified mandate, and a physical existence (for example, with headquarters and staff). When it comes to global migration governance, intergovernmental organisations are widely understood as constituting the building blocks of global governance. In this book, four IOs are examined in particular depth: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the ILO, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In Chapter 4, Adèle Garnier addresses the case of the UNHCR, showing how – from the point of view of global migration governance – this organisation provides a unique example of a single and well-identified organisation working on the basis of a clear political and normative mandate. Yet, even though the UNHCR relies upon a robust refugee regime, the chapter also shows that the work of this agency has gradually become embedded in an increasingly populated context, as it now operates in conjunction with different civil society organisations (CSOs), private actors, and other IOs. This is characteristic of the institutional framework of global migration governance, in which organisational entities navigate in a complex setting, populated by other entities of a different nature working on similar issues. In the case of the UNHCR, this situation challenges the once-dominant position of this organisation: given the growing salience of refugees (and forced migration in general) in world politics, other actors have started to play a significant role in this field. One of these other actors is the International Organization for Migration, which is the object of Chapter 2 by Elaine Lebon-McGregor. In contrast with the UNHCR, the IOM has long been institutionally fragile, with no clear and steady mandate. Yet this fragility is also a strength, as it enables this organisation to work on very different migration-related (and sometimes migration-unrelated) issues. Whereas the UNHCR is institutionally quite strong, with a hard-law mandate and a firm position within the UN, its well-identified mandate has at times prevented it from addressing certain emerging issues, such as environmental migration (Hall, 2015). From that perspective, the IOM’s looser mandate is better suited to addressing the multiple migration-related issues that arise in the domain of global migration governance. By acquiring a permanent status in 1989 and then joining the UN in 2016, the IOM has established itself as a key player in the field, thereby reshaping the institutional landscape and creating certain tensions with other organisations (see also Chapter 3 by Younes Ahouga). The International Labour Organization is one of the IOs that has long been challenged by the changing landscape of global migration governance. In Chapter 5, Nicola Piper provides an overview of this organisation, which is not only the oldest intergovernmental actor in the UN system, but also the one that was from the start mandated to address the rights and protection of foreign workers. The ILO has strived to construct an international labour migration regime through the adoption of hard-law Conventions. This has led to mixed results, however, at least from the perspective of global migration governance: since their beginnings in the 1990s, intergovernmental discussions over migration have systematically avoided the imposition of binding norms about migrant labour; as noted above, this applies to ILO treaties, but also to the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, which enjoys very little support from states. The marginalisation of the issues surrounding migrants’ labour rights illustrates the challenges faced by the ILO in pursuing

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8  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance its mandate, but these challenges have not prevented it from further expanding its normative efforts (as shown by the adoption in 2011 of a Convention on the under-regulated issue of domestic work). This Convention also illustrates the porous boundaries of global migration governance: the regulation of domestic work is not an explicitly migration-related policy issue, but given the over-representation of migrant workers in this sector it is extremely relevant to the governance of migration (see also Chapter 21 by Rianne Mahon). In Chapter 6, Giulia Breda analyses another IO, namely the UN Development Programme. She shows how this organisation was initially not interested in migration, but progressively became involved in global migration governance because of the increasing salience of this issue at the intergovernmental level. It did so by anchoring the issues raised by migration to its core development-centred mandate; a move that was facilitated by transformations in development thinking: with the emergence of the notion of ‘human development’, and the growing recognition of the need for bottom-up development initiatives, migration became more relevant to the development agenda and migrants were reconceived as ‘actors of development’ (through remittances in particular). These changes are not straightforward, however, as migration has still not become a central concern for the UNDP; which illustrates the complexity of internal changes within organisations. As discussed above, these IOs display a dual nature. On the one hand, they establish rules for themselves and for the people they work with (such as refugees in the case of the UNHCR). On the other hand, they operate in a broader context over which they do not have full control, and therefore need to abide by the ‘rules’ of the broad institutional setting in which they are embedded. It follows that IOs have their own internal institutional configuration, worldviews, and strategies (which vary from one IO to another, and can change over time), while at the same time belonging to an overarching institutional context, characterised by yet more sets of rules, and populated not only by different IOs, but also by other actors (such as states and civil society organisations). Moreover, even if they are well-established organisations with a clear mandate, these IOs do not play a univocal role: they rather enact a multiplicity of functions and are therefore fraught with internal tensions and contradictions.

INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORKS The second level of our model of institutions relates to meta-institutions, or institutional frameworks that shape global migration governance. These frameworks are populated by heterogeneous organisations composed of multiple entities, dispersed over time and space, but of a comparable nature. A clear example of an institutional framework is that of civil society. In Chapter 16, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Raúl Delgado Wise and Aleksandra Ålund document the role played by civil society organisations in global migration governance. They show that CSOs are very far from constituting a single coherent group; rather, they are composed of very different organisations, located in different parts of the world, of very different size and scope, and with different mandates, interests and strategies. It follows that, while ‘civil society’ is a core actor in UN-sponsored discussions over migration, it is characterised by a multiplicity of roles, which range from full participation to confrontation. The chapter further emphasises the complex relationship between civil society and other actors, such as states and IOs: the emergence of

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Introduction  9 a composite transnational civil society is to a large extent a reaction ‘from below’ to multilateral discussions over global migration governance. Another example of institutional frameworks is the labour movement. While trade unions now arguably play a less visible role in multilateral discussions over migration, they remain important actors, particularly at the ILO, where they form a constituent part of this organisation. Unions also have a very long history of involvement in migration debates, as from the beginning of the labour movement in the nineteenth century the question of migrant workers has been intensively discussed, in a way that has featured attitudes of both defiance and solidarity. Unions have therefore long played a role in the governance of migration, and particularly in the treatment of foreign workers. Yet unions do not make up a single organisation, and the labour movement is a conglomerate of distinct organisations, present all over the world, which each have their specific history and worldviews. Their attitudes towards labour migration therefore vary and have changed over time. But as Leo Lucassen shows in Chapter 12, despite this internal diversity, the labour movement shares certain core characteristics and concerns. In Chapter 20, Mélodie Beaujeu describes an organisation that has more than 100 years of experience with migration governance, namely the Catholic Church. Since the nineteenth century, Catholicism as an institution has provided a normative backbone to migration and migration policy, and the Catholic Church as an organisation has been involved in migration-related activities. The vulnerability of migrants has long fitted into some of the Church’s core spiritual messages, while the global presence of Catholicism has facilitated transnational activism among migrant communities. Catholic organisations continue to play a key role in global migration governance and are strongly represented among CSOs. But here again, the Catholic Church is an institution composed of a plurality of local actors, which play quite different roles in their respective local contexts, while also being integrated into a broader global institution that plays a key role in world politics and confers power and influence on its local branches. Global migration governance is also characterised by informal institutions that shape international conversations and policies. Particularly relevant to the study of global migration governance are the negotiations or consultative processes in which stakeholders of different natures (governments, CSOs, private sector actors) discuss migration-related issues. In Chapter 9, François Crépeau, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, and Anna Purkey provide an account of what they call a ‘conversation’ among states and non-state actors over global migration governance. They document the loose set of initiatives, peoples and actors that, over the past two to three decades, have contributed to shaping global migration governance (and led to the recent adoption of the Global Compacts in 2018). As they make clear, no single institutional architecture has emerged out of this process; rather, multiple institutions have worked in parallel, and sometimes together, to forge new practices and new ways of perceiving and governing migration. In line with this notion of a ‘conversation’, two chapters explore in greater depth the intergovernmental discussions taking place about global migration governance. In Chapter 10, Stefan Rother, Hélène Thiollet and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden document the spaces in which ‘global encounters’ over migration happen, focusing on the High-Level Dialogues (HLDs) on Migration and Development and the Global Forum on Migration and Development. Rather than constituting organisations in themselves, these forums represent networks of organisations, whose purpose is precisely to craft the rules and norms that should govern

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10  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance global migration governance. All the organisations taking part in the discussion share the objective of establishing a broad institutional framework capable of uniting all stakeholders and establishing the ‘rules of the games’ for global migration governance. The chapter shows the complex power relationships that characterise these spaces: on the one hand, they bring together multiple actors with unequal influence (states, civil society, and so on) and thus contribute to challenging or reinforcing the power asymmetries between them; on the other hand, these spaces also favour the emergence of depoliticised discussions over seemingly consensual issues (such as the migration and development nexus). From an institutional perspective, these spaces are shown to be temporary, and therefore unstable and fluid; yet the authors introduce the notion of ‘temporary institutions’ to explain how these arenas support a deeper institutionalisation of global migration governance, for example through the adoption of standards such as those of the Global Compact for Migration. This Compact is also the object of Chapter 11, by Elspeth Guild and Kathryn Allinson. In an analysis of the institutions and actors that contributed to its drafting and adoption, they highlight the struggles that took place between the different stakeholders (including UN actors, diplomats, regional bodies, researchers and experts, and civil society), their motivations, and the fundamental differences in how they viewed migration and its relationship to human rights and development. The chapter also shows the tension between some states of the Global North (which mainly seek to control their borders) and others, mainly of the Global South, which pursued other objectives (such as development or human rights). The outcome of this conversation between a heterogeneous set of actors, and of the internal dynamics behind the drafting of the Compact, was the decision to opt for a non-binding document.

NON-STATE INSTITUTIONS AND THE STATE While migration policy remains under the close control of state sovereignty, global migration governance is also shaped by non-state actors. Because of this configuration, the direct influence of those non-state actors is limited, but they nonetheless develop strategies to work ‘through’ states by indirectly shaping states’ behaviour. From this perspective, the purpose of crafting an institutional framework, however loose it may be, is precisely to embed states in an environment that, while apparently respectful of their sovereignty, constrains their policy options. Relations between state and non-state institutions vary over time and space, and we bring non-state institutions and actors into the political analysis of migration governance as ‘a constellation of political principles, norms and practices, which fall outside the scope of terms like “state” and “policy”’ (Cvajner et al., 2018). In Chapter 3, Younes Ahouga describes how the IOM recognises the central role of state sovereignty in migration governance, and how this limits its own efforts. The IOM has long emphasised its respect for sovereignty, for instance by maintaining a somewhat distant relationship to international human rights law and by favouring ‘dialogues’ over the establishment of binding agreements. Yet the IOM also pursues the objective of steering states’ behaviours, by shaping an institutional network of migration management in which states coexist with other actors (such as IOs). The chapter analyses in detail the documents in which this strategy is spelt out, showing how the IOM aspires to act upon states, which in turn will act upon migrants.

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Introduction  11 In Chapter 25, Thomas Lacroix analyses the role of cities, as another type of actor that aims to play a role in migration governance despite lacking formal authority to do so. Being strongly exposed to migration flows, and having to address the local/urban consequences of immigration policy, cities and their mayors have sought to increase their influence on governments. While this process is difficult within the national policymaking context, it has been facilitated by intergovernmental discussions over global migration governance: in the context of the negotiations over the Global Compact for Migration, cities institutionalised their informal networks in order to exert a greater influence on the outcome of the discussions. Here again, cities attempt to shape the broad set of institutional rules that, in turn, will shape states’ strategies. Another group of actors that exert influence over states is the private sector, particularly as far as security and borders are concerned. In Chapter 18, Damien Simonneau highlights the contrast between the sovereign nature of migration/border control and the strong presence and influence of private companies therein; a contrast that is characteristic of a neoliberal context in which statehood is deeply interconnected with market logics. He shows how state sovereignty is simultaneously reinforced and challenged by these public‒private partnerships: states manage to ‘thicken’ border control through sophisticated technologies, but also tend to be dispossessed of their sovereign prerogative, while also creating problems of accountability. This makes for complex situations in which the monopoly of the state over the control and treatment of foreigners is maintained, while the state itself is subject to influence from non-state institutions. In other situations, institutions may also work against the state: in Chapter 20, Mélodie Beaujeu recalls how the involvement of Church actors in migration governance was rooted in competition between states and non-state actors; in the late nineteenth century, the expansion of welfare states in increasingly secularised societies challenged the traditional role of the Catholic Church and prompted it to search for new areas of intervention, such as migration. From the perspective of the Catholic Church, migrants constituted a category of people outside the state, who were less protected and were therefore in need of non-state interventions. In Chapter 15, Anna Triandafyllidou and Letizia Palumbo provide a specific illustration of the institutional complexity present in global migration governance, by looking at the governance of smuggling and trafficking. They explore the complex process through which these two realities have been defined and codified, despite the overlaps and the thin line that separates them. They also describe the multiple actors that populate this policy field, from the local to the transnational levels, and from states to intergovernmental actors and civil society. Importantly, an outcome of this institutional complexity is the often contradictory nature of policy responses to smuggling and trafficking (between security and humanitarian strategies, for instance), and the blurring of boundaries between actors and strategies. Chapter 23, by Claire Beaugrand and Hélène Thiollet, explores the relationship between the kafala (or sponsorship system) and states in the Middle East, and particularly in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Although the kafala stems from local commercial regulations in the Arab world, it was codified under British colonial rule in order to manage labour migration in the imperial context. With the oil boom and mass immigration to the Gulf, the kafala became enshrined in migration and labour law, making it compulsory for every foreigner to be ‘sponsored’ by a national (the sponsor or kafîl) in order to reside, work or invest in the destination country. As such, it is often considered to be the main vector of migrants’ exploitation and abuse, since it endows individual nationals with a means of legal domination over foreigners and allows them to extract a rent from immigration. From the perspective of states, weak public bureaucracies

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12  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance have used the kafala to delegate the control of immigration to sponsors, who are often prominent members of royal families or entrepreneurs. The kafala thus privatised the governance of immigration in the Middle East. However, since the 1990s, and to an increased extent after the Arab Spring, Gulf states embarked upon labour market and immigration reforms aimed at dismantling this system. The chapter shows how social institutions embedded in rentier states have progressively evolved, and how Gulf monarchies have increasingly claimed a sovereign grip on migration processes by curtailing the autonomy of intermediaries and migrants.

INSTITUTIONS AND THE MEANING OF MIGRATION As suggested above, one of the key functions of institutions is to elaborate shared frameworks that enable communication between people and organisations, while supporting social life by providing common references, expectations and understandings. When it comes to global migration governance, this is a complex task: while migration takes place everywhere, it is perceived very differently across world regions, and fits into different traditions, sociocultural frameworks and histories. There is, for example, little in common between, say, the central role played by settlement migration in settler-colonial countries of immigration (such as the United States, Canada or Australia), guest worker systems in the Gulf states, and forced migration due to conflicts or disasters in the Global South. From this perspective, a key step in global migration governance is the establishment of shared frameworks that enable these different facets of migration to be apprehended as a whole, with a view to their being governed through a common governance framework. The elaboration of global frameworks is a task that is often associated with IOs, which develop a worldwide perspective on the issues they are concerned with, thereby constructing the worldviews and data necessary for making the world legible. For example, in Chapter 3, Younes Ahouga analyses a document produced by the IOM in which this organisation elaborates a specific narrative about migration and migration governance. Within this narrative, the exact nature of the problems to be solved is outlined, and the role of different actors – including the state – is specified. The narrative also connects migration with other narratives, including those on human rights, development and sovereignty, and is accompanied by data and indicators that provide evidence upon which governance interventions can be grounded. A similar analysis is provided by Giulia Breda in Chapter 6, in which she illustrates the role of IOs in crafting shared worldviews about migration. The chapter documents how the UNDP attempts to connect development with migration, and produces a specific narrative to do so. It highlights the complexity of this process, particularly with regard to the multiple levels of knowledge production that are involved: migration realities on the ground are framed in a way that supports global narratives, while at the same time these global narratives shape the interpretation of local dynamics. Narratives are therefore closely associated with power and influence, since this translation from the local to the global is intended to reinforce the position of the UNDP in global migration governance. It is also a multi-actor process, since on-the-ground actors (such as local researchers or associations) are implicated in the global strategies pursued by the organisation. The chapter illustrates, through its account of interactions between actors in the field and in organisational headquarters, that IOs are themselves heterogeneous and multilevel organisations.

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Introduction  13 IOs are not the only actors to confer meanings on migration realities. In Chapter 20, Mélodie Beaujeu provides an analysis of the ways in which the Catholic Church not only provided services to migrants, but also developed a narrative about peoples’ mobility that corresponds to values of universality and transnational solidarity. This constituted an early attempt at thinking about migration in a transnational/global manner, while leading to the establishment of specific institutions within the Catholic Church (such as the Scalabrini network). The role of religion is also addressed in Chapter 19, in which Sophie Bava documents how religious institutions interact with migration dynamics between West and North Africa. As a set of beliefs and meanings, religion provides migrants with the spiritual resources needed for their journey, while also providing the lens through which their precarious situation can be apprehended. Moreover, as a concrete set of human and social ties, religion also provides the basis for community formation, and for the networks that accompany and support people on the move. In turn, mobility reshapes religions and religious practices, by renewing places, peoples and beliefs.

INSTITUTIONALISING PRIVATE INTERACTIONS The discussion so far has focused on various institutional patterns that are explicitly designed to govern migration, or to influence migration governance. Yet global migration governance is also shaped by a myriad of private actors that, while less visible, play a key role in organising peoples’ mobility. Here too, various patterns of institutional configurations can be identified. A well-known example is the existence of migrant networks. In Chapter 27, Flore Gubert reviews the evidence and shows how networks have long played a key role in migration dynamics. As institutions, migrant networks constrain individuals’ behaviours, for example by influencing the course of migrants’ journeys; but they also provide the social capital that enables people to migrate despite possessing limited resources. As institutions, migrant networks may be more or less formalised. While they often tend to remain informal, they may be institutionalised, for instance in the form of migrant-led organisations or hometown associations (HTAs). Networks also enable the circulation of resources, such as information or money, which in turn shape both the worldviews and the material conditions of future migration flows. With regard to information, Chapter 26 by Julia Van Dessel explores how information circulates among migrant networks, but also how governments attempt to intervene in this process by disseminating their own information. Information is a crucial element in migration strategies and therefore plays a key role within informal migrant networks; in turn, this has incited formal (inter)governmental organisations to participate in this process, and to contribute to the circulation of negative information about migration (on the assumption that the information circulated among migrant networks is too positive, and therefore misleadingly encourages migration). The circulation of information is implicated in both private and public institutional settings that respond to each other, since states and intergovernmental organisations have progressively developed specific tools to try to modify the information shared by migrants. A similar private‒public dynamic can be observed in the case of remittances. In Chapter 24, Anna Lindley analyses how formal institutions (such as IOs or authorities in charge of financial regulation) have established rules to govern the informal circulation of money among

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14  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance migrant communities. Such institutional monitoring of remittances pursues different objectives, ranging from development-friendly attempts to channel them into poverty reduction schemes, to security-inspired attempts to prevent their use by terrorist groups. Here again, institutional interventions ‘from above’ respond to migrant-led institutions acting ‘from below’. The circulation of both information and money is therefore characterised by informal conditions, while at the same time being marked by attempts to regulate and institutionalise them through the elaboration of more formal institutions and explicit rules. Aside from migrant networks, another pattern of social/human interactions that plays a key role in migration governance is marriage. In Chapter 22, Hélène Le Bail shows that, while marriage is a private affair, it has come under increasing scrutiny because of its key role in migration through family reunification. This has placed personal issues, such as love and intimacy, at the centre of migration governance, while raising important issues in terms of women’s vulnerability and consent. The above-mentioned kafala or sponsorship system is another example of a set of codified social interactions that plays a central role in migration governance (Chapter 23, by Claire Beaugrand and Hélène Thiollet). The kafala is an institutional framework that not only institutionalises social and labour market segmentation, but also regulates social relations and interactions between locals and foreigners within host countries and across borders. Although it establishes an administrative domination of nationals over foreigners, it forms connections between locals and immigrants outside the remit of the state, thereby creating room for manoeuvre for both nationals and migrants in the Gulf’s authoritarian context. At a broader level, other institutions that shape social and human interactions also play a role in global migration governance. This is the case with care and the provision of domestic services: in Chapter 21, Rianne Mahon highlights the ways in which this sector of activity is organised, and how reliance on foreign care-givers has become indispensable to large segments of the world population, especially in wealthy countries. This makes for a semi-structured institutional configuration that directly interacts with migration governance and leads to the creation of transnational care chains, that is to say, the structural need for care workers across borders, with far-reaching consequences for family organisations worldwide. In turn, these patterns of social organisation are themselves embedded in even broader social norms, such as gender relations: in Chapter 14, Laura Foley thus draws on field research in Malaysia to document how gender relations pervade the entire process of migration governance. While usually not explicitly codified, gender stereotypes function as an institutional background for most immigration policies, leading to discrimination, gender segregation on the labour market, and biased state interventions.

MIGRATION-SPECIFIC AND MIGRATION-UNSPECIFIC INSTITUTIONS Global migration governance is shaped by both migration-specific and migration-unspecific institutions. This is particularly because the salience of migration issues has attracted the attention of several institutions that lack a clear mandate for addressing global migration governance: cities, for example, as well as IOs whose mandate used to be unrelated to migration. This is also because, as shown by the cases of marriage or domestic work, many aspects of social

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Introduction  15 life have a migration component, and therefore the way in which they are institutionalised is relevant to migration governance. This process is illustrated by the case of the governance of environmental change, and the strong connection that has progressively emerged between climate change and migration. This is the object of Chapter 13 by François Gemenne, in which he provides a historical account of how these two areas of governance have interacted since the 1990s. Climate change governance was initially unconcerned with migration, but soon attempted to include migration in its remit, mainly owing to a recognition of the severe consequences of inaction in the face of growing environmental pressures. In parallel, migration-specific institutions were slow, and often reluctant, to address climate-related movements of people. The result is an awkward governance patchwork in which migration-unspecific institutions, at times, have seemed more advanced on the issue than migration-specific institutions. Another example is that of regional bodies. In Chapter 8, Ine Lietaert and Antoine Pécoud explore the role of regional organisations in migration governance, showing how they have been progressively led to play a role in migration governance despite having an initial mandate that was unrelated to this field. In most regions of the world, free trade and the establishment of a common market are the initial and primary objectives of regional integration processes; yet this has often involved addressing the mobility of people, even if progress has been much more uneven in this domain compared with the mobility of goods or capital. In the European Union, this has proved a hugely complex process, in which the region has been struggling to govern not only the internal mobility of Europeans, but also the entry and stay of non-Europeans. Likewise, in Chapter 7, Miriam Bradley documents how the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an organisation that initially had very little to do with migration, progressively became involved in migration-related policy issues, particularly as some of its core activities (detention, family tracing) became increasingly closely connected to those issues. However, it does not plan to turn into a fully migration-focused organisation, and exemplifies a situation in which migration-unspecific institutions play a role in migration governance. To make sense of these complex institutional configurations, Mélodie Beaujeu relies in Chapter 20 on the concept of a ‘weak field’, derived from Bourdieu’s sociology. The concept is used here to refer to institutional spaces in which migration-related issues are discussed, but by migration-unspecific actors whose main field of activities lies elsewhere. These weak fields thus make for intermediary and interinstitutional spaces, in which migration is addressed as a sub-topic, at the intersection of several other issues.

INSTITUTIONS AND TIME Institutions have a complex relationship with history. One the one hand, they display inertia: once established, institutional patterns shape future developments, and current governance is therefore constrained by past institutional configurations. On the other hand, organisations and institutional frameworks also change over time, for reasons that have to do with internal dynamics, structural changes and external shocks. This is clear in the case of IOs, which are well-established organisations that display continuity over time, while working in a changing geopolitical environment that compels them to adapt. This is illustrated with reference to the ILO in Chapter 5, in which Nicola Piper recalls the century-long history of this organisation; she documents the continuities and ruptures in its

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16  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance mandate and activities pertaining to migration, and highlights how this organisation became somewhat marginalised at one point, largely because it became increasingly difficult for it to advance its agenda of protecting migrants’ labour rights in a post-Fordist context of labour market deregulation, with many migrants occupying underprotected jobs. Yet institutional continuity has enabled the ILO to pursue its activities throughout changes in the socioeconomic and political context, and to keep playing a role in today’s global migration governance. In Chapter 10, Stefan Rother, Hélène Thiollet and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden provide an account of the evolution of power configurations within multilateral arenas that seek to advance cooperation in global migration governance. They examine the two High-Level Dialogues (HLDs) on International Migration and Development held in 2006 and 2013 at the UN headquarters, and the successive annual GFMD meetings across the globe and online. They dissect the evolution of discourses, perceptions, and positions of organisations and actors in these specific arenas since the early 2000s, in order to explain the dynamics and political outcomes of global migration governance. In a very different way, Chapter 17 by Olivier Clochard explores the physical/material nature of institutions, and the ways in which this is rooted in history and has shaped migration governance throughout history. This is done through the study of camps, viewed as institutions that characterise migration governance across different contexts. The camps that are discussed were established in a specific setting, for example in the context of the Second World War or of decolonisation, but have subsequently been used in quite different historical conditions, such as contributing to the securitisation of migration and the control of peoples’ mobility. From this perspective, camps constitute institutional infrastructures that, while rooted in specific contexts, inspire and constrain today’s governance of migration.

REFERENCES Bonjour, S. (2011). The power and morals of policy makers: Reassessing the control gap debate. International Migration Review, 45(1), 89–122. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1747​-7379​.2010​.00840​.x. Cole, Phillip (2000). Philosophies of exclusion: Liberal political theory and immigration. Edinburgh University Press. Cvajner, M., Echeverría, G., and Sciortino, G. (2018). What do we talk when we talk about migration regimes? The diverse theoretical roots of an increasingly popular concept. In A. Pott, C. Rass and F. Wolff (eds), Was ist ein Migrationsregime? What is a migration regime? (pp. 65–80). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​978​-3​-658​-20532​-4​_3. Douglas, M. (1986). How institutions think. Syracuse University Press. Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2019). Beyond methodological Western-centrism: The ‘control gap’ debate reconsidered from a global perspective. In A. Weinar, S. Bonjour and L. Zhyznomirska (eds), The Routledge handbook of the politics of migration in Europe (pp. 50–59). Routledge. Hall, N. (2015). Money or mandate? Why international organizations engage with the climate change regime. Global Environmental Politics, 15(2), 79–97. Hall, P.A., and Taylor, R.C.R. (1996). Political science and the three new institutionalisms. Political Studies, 44(5), 936–957. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1467​-9248​.1996​.tb00343​.x. Hodgson, G.M. (2006). What are institutions? Journal of Economic Issues, 40(1), 1–25. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1080/​00213624​.2006​.11506879. Hollifield, J.F., Martin, P.L., Orrenius, P.M., and Héran, F. (eds) (2022). Controlling immigration: A comparative perspective. Stanford University Press. Lindquist, J. (2015). Brokers and brokerage, anthropology of. In International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp.  870–874). Elsevier. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​B978​-0​-08​-097086​-8​.12178​ -6.

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Introduction  17 Malkki, L.H. (1995). Refugees and exile: From ‘refugee studies’ to the national order of things. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 495–523. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1146/​annurev​.an​.24​.100195​.002431. North, D.C. (1991). Institutions. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1), 97–112. Papadopoulos, Y., Venturas, L., Damilakou, M., Franghiadis, A., Tsitselikis, K., Parsanoglou, D., et al. (2015). International ‘migration management’ in the early Cold War: The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. University of the Peloponnese. Pécoud, A. (2015). Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives. Palgrave Macmillan. Pécoud, A. (2017). The politics of the UN Convention on Migrant Workers’ Rights. Groningen Journal of International Law, 5(1), 57‒72. Pécoud, Antoine (2021). Narrating an ideal migration world? An analysis of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Third World Quarterly, 42(1), 16‒33. Rosenau, J.N., and Czempiel, E.O. (eds) (1992). Governance without government: Order and change in world politics. Cambridge University Press. Ruhs, M., Tamas, K., and Palme, J. (eds) (2019). Bridging the gaps: Linking research to public debates and policy making on migration and integration. Oxford University Press. Sardan, J.-P.O. de (2013). Embeddedness and informal norms: Institutionalisms and anthropology. Critique of Anthropology, 33(3), 280–299. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0308275X13490307. Sassen, S. (2015). Losing control: Sovereignty in an age of globalization. Columbia University Press. Weiner, M. (1995). The global migration crisis: Challenge to states and to human rights. HarperCollins College Publishers. Wendt, A. (ed.) (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge University Press. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1017/​CBO9780511612183​.002.

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2. Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance? A history of the International Organization for Migration1 Elaine Lebon-McGregor

INTRODUCTION On 19 September 2016, Ban Ki-moon, then Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), and William Lacy Swing, then Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), signed an agreement that for the first time in its history brought IOM into the UN system as a ‘related agency’. IOM’s entry into the UN was a milestone in the development of global migration governance and, for many, it signified acceptance of migration as a policy area of relevance to the UN mandate, which as recently as the early 2000s had still been subject to much contention. When, in the early 2000s, the UN had looked for ways to better address migration-related issues, IOM had considered the option of becoming a related agency of the UN. However, the option was taken off the table by the UN, the latter instead offering IOM the status of ‘specialised agency’,2 which IOM member states opposed for fear that IOM would become more bureaucratic and expensive. This chapter uses archival records and key informant interviews to trace the history of IOM from its origins as a small, temporary, intergovernmental organisation in 1951 to its entry into the UN as a related agency in September 2016. Specific attention is paid to the history of UN–IOM relations in order to understand the genealogy of IOM’s role in global migration governance as well as the factors that recently tipped the scales in favour of UN membership.

FROM THE PROVISIONAL INTERGOVERNMENTAL COMMITTEE TO THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MIGRATION IOM began its life as the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME), which was created at the International Migration Conference held in Brussels (Belgium) from 26 November to 5 December 1951. The original purpose of the organisation was to provide operational support to the newly established United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) by facilitating ‘the orderly migration of large numbers of displaced, unemployed or underemployed persons in Western Europe’ (Carlin, 1989, p. 35). The International Labour Organization (ILO) was poised to assume this role, as it had previously done in the 1920s for Fridtjof Nansen, the first High Commissioner for Refugees under the League of Nations. However, its proposal was rejected, mainly due to opposition from the United States of America (US), which decided to fund PICMME instead of the ILO or any other UN agency (Long, 2013).

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20  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance PICMME had an initial lifespan of 12 months; however, the ongoing need for PICMME’s services quickly became evident. At the fourth session of PICMME (13–21 October 1952), 20 member governments met in Geneva (Switzerland) to discuss ‘whether the experimental plan of attack on Europe’s chronic surplus population problem during the previous year should be broadened or abandoned’ (ICEM, 1953, p. 169). UNHCR had already requested PICMME to expand its transport services beyond Europe to support European refugees, mainly White Russians who had fled to China during the First World War. Its member governments were also discussing PICMME’s involvement in land resettlement programmes in Latin America. PICMME’s member governments thus concluded that the organisation remained relevant, and PICMME became the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM, 1953). The Constitution of ICEM authorised it to organise the transport of migrants from European countries, to promote migration from Europe and, moreover, to assist states with the processing, placement and settlement of migrants upon request (Ducasse-Rogier, 2001). Over the next decade, ICEM facilitated the movement of over 1 million people, the majority of whom were European. While transport continued to be its primary function, ICEM also provided a range of services to various countries, such as the establishment of a vocational training centre for prospective migrants in Italy, and the development of a training course for government officials in countries of destination (ICEM, 1959). However, in the early 1960s, the fledgling organisation faced new challenges. Compounding pre-existing budgetary problems (ICEM, 1956), the cost of transport increased, whereas the availability of vessels for transport decreased (ICEM, 1958). Demand for ICEM’s services in Europe fell (ICEM, 1964). The US was of the view that ICEM should evolve in light of the changing international situation, and that ‘the new task for the Committee should be to supply manpower to underdeveloped countries’ (ICEM, 1961, p. 532). Not all states, however, shared the enthusiasm of the US. Between 1962 and 1980, several countries left the organisation, including Canada (1962), France (1962), Sweden (1962), New Zealand (1967), the United Kingdom (1968), Australia (1973), Spain (1977) and Brazil (1980), mainly because they felt that the organisation had served its purpose and was no longer required (Ducasse-Rogier, 2001; ICEM, 1961, 1963). The 1980s saw the consolidation and expansion of ICEM, from an organisation on the brink of extinction to what was to become IOM. In 1979, James L. Carlin was appointed Director General and tasked with turning the organisation around. One of his early achievements was to remove the geographical restriction from the organisation’s name in order to reflect the expansion of ICEM’s work into other parts of the world (Carlin, 1989). Accordingly, ICEM became the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM) in 1980. Beyond the elimination of the European geographical limitation, changes were introduced in the type of work that the organisation performed: ‘in the early years, transportation was the priority, but increasingly, more complex and sophisticated migration services (for example, recruitment, selection, labour reinsertion, and integration) took precedence’ (Perruchoud, 1989, p. 507). In 1985, when Australia, having left in 1973, rejoined the organisation, ICM had representation from all continents (except Antarctica) within its membership for the first time in its existence (Ducasse-Rogier, 2001). Accordingly, the ICM Constitution was amended in 1987 and, two years later, the organisation was renamed the International Organization for Migration (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2011; Carlin, 1989). The early history of the organisation had a lasting impact on IOM. Even as it evolved, it continued to be dismissed as either ‘a Reisebüro, a service de voyages [travel agency] for

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Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance?  21 migrants’ (International organisation (IO) representative, personal communication, March 2017) or an ‘American front organisation’ (IO representative, personal communication, September 2018). The fact that until the election of António Vitorino (Portugal) in 2018, and with the exception of Bastiaan Wouter Haveman (Netherlands) between 1961 and 1969, the Director General of IOM had always been an American, further reinforced IOM’s reputation as a US-driven organisation.

THE 1990S: IOM MOVES CLOSER TO THE UN The end of the Cold War was significant for the evolution of the multilateral system. The early 1990s saw revived interest in multilateralism (Hulme, 2009). The Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1994 resulted in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. In this context, the notion of having a similar global body dedicated to migration gained traction (Bhagwati, 1998; Ghosh, 2000; Straubhaar, 1993), and at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo (Egypt) in 1994, UN member states started to consider the idea of holding a conference on international migration. However, it would take another nine years for states to agree to organise the first High-Level Dialogue (HLD) on Migration and Development, which was ultimately held in 2006 (Chamie and Mirkin, 2013). Tainted by its legacy of Cold War politics, the newly renamed IOM was struggling to find its place in the international system. Equipped with a broader mandate, but confronted with a reduced need for resettlement services following the collapse of the Soviet Union and, moreover, facing the closure of the Vietnam programme, James N. Purcell Jr, who had become Director General of IOM in 1988, recognised that the organisation needed to prove its relevance to member states, or else it would very quickly run out of steam. The first Gulf War was arguably what IOM needed to demonstrate that it was an organisation capable of acting swiftly in an emergency. IOM’s involvement in the repatriation of migrant workers from Kuwait showcased the organisation’s capabilities not only to the UN, but also to a new set of potential member states. From 1991, indeed, IOM’s growth accelerated, and the number of member states doubled from 43 to 86 between 1991 and 2001. IOM’s intervention in Kuwait led to several developments that gradually brought IOM closer to the UN. Firstly, on 19 December 1991, IOM received a standing invitation to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (UN General Assembly, 1992b), which would later become the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The following year, on 16 October 1992, IOM was officially invited to become an observer in the UN General Assembly (UN General Assembly, 1992a). Three years later, following the resolution adopted by the IOM Council at its 71st session (407th meeting) on 29 November 1995, IOM intensified its cooperation with the UN. Purcell was thus invited ‘to strengthen and, as appropriate, formalize cooperation with the United Nations system and other relevant organizations, having regard to the need to improve complementarity and avoid duplication, while ensuring mutual respect of the individual competences of the organizations concerned’ (IOM, 1995, p. 2, para. 6). As a result of Purcell’s efforts, a Cooperation Agreement between the UN and IOM was signed by then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Purcell on 25 June 1996. While the Gulf War had provided a lifeline to the organisation, there was also a growing recognition within its administration that, without a clear strategy, IOM would continue to

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22  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance face challenges to its existence. Having brought the organisation closer to the UN, Purcell then implemented another significant reform: decentralisation. In accordance with his Management Review, which was conducted between 1996 and 1997, the ‘primary responsibility for initiating and executing IOM service delivery to its Member States’ (IOM, 2009, p. 2, para. 4) was transferred from the organisation’s headquarters to its field offices. In addition to this process of decentralisation, IOM initiated a policy of ‘projectization’, defined as ‘the practice of allocating staff and office costs to the operational activities/projects to which they relate’ (IOM, 2002a, p. vi). The resulting change in the financial structure marked an important turning point for the organisation, and this is arguably what allowed it to evolve from a small organisation into one that has seen exponential growth in both its budget and its membership.

IOM–UN RELATIONS AS MIGRATION RECEIVES MORE ATTENTION In the early 2000s, IOM’s lack of UN status was again discussed. Director General Brunson McKinley attributed the renewed debate about IOM–UN relations to heightened awareness within the UN that migration was an issue that deserved greater international attention, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Report of the Secretary-General to the UN General Assembly on 9 September 2002 (UN Secretary-General, 2002, p. 10, para. 39).3 In his address to the IOM Council on 2 December 2002, McKinley stated: the UN is conscious of a gap in coverage and is looking for ways to fill the gap. What are the options? Creating a new UN agency for migration is problematic and would doubtless be strongly resisted by existing agencies and many governments. UN coordination mechanisms have serious limitations as well. That leads back to IOM. (IOM, 2002b, p. 4, para. 27)

After an inconclusive debate, McKinley announced that a Working Group on Institutional Arrangements would be established under the chairmanship of Ambassador Amina Mohamed to further examine the advantages and disadvantages of IOM formally joining the UN system (IOM, 2002b). Mindful of the fact that the UN was preparing to launch the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), the Working Group on Institutional Arrangements issued its first report on 7 April 2003. The report outlined the advantages and disadvantages of two main options: either keeping IOM outside the UN system (the ‘status quo’) or bringing it into the UN as a ‘specialised’ or ‘related’ agency (Table 2.1). When the Working Group met with IOM member states on 15 May 2003 to discuss the preliminary report, the main conclusion, as communicated by letter to then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 28 May 2003 (IOM, 2003), was that ‘the majority of the members who spoke said that they were not convinced that the advantages of a move to seek specialized agency status outweighed the disadvantages, and were thus in favour of retaining IOM’s current status outside the UN system’ (p. 35). Despite resistance on the part of several member states, the Working Group continued its work and investigated the cost implications of specialised agency status as well as the possibilities of improving the existing arrangements through amendments to the 1996 Cooperation Agreement. When the IOM Council met on 17 October 2003, ‘a very small number’ of member states were in favour of specialised agency status, while ‘a very small number’ were strongly opposed to changing the status quo and called for an end to the debate (IOM, 2003, p. 2, para. 9). The majority of member states, however, did not dismiss the

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Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance?  23 Table 2.1

Pros and cons of IOM joining the UN

 

Status quo

  Specialised agency

Pros

● Under the present configuration, IOM has already

  ● De jure status preferable to de facto status (e.g. IOM

been able to contribute to global debates. ● Current UN coordination costs are a fraction of the cost for existing specialised agencies.

would participate in UN Country Teams as of right rather than by invitation). ● Access to the UN Chief Executive Board and its subsidiary bodies. ● Ability to call on the Residence Coordinator in countries where IOM is not represented. ● Higher profile for IOM. ● Possible additional funding sources. ● Greater clarity about IOM for its interlocutors.

Cons

● Lack of an authoritative UN voice on migration. ● Risk that the UN may create its own migration organisation, leading to duplication or competition. ● IOM has no access to the decision-making process. ● UN status could make it easier for IOM to secure

● Legal status for IOM staff members.   ● The timing is not right (economic, social and political circumstances). ● IOM’s membership is not large enough. ● Apprehension among IOM staff members about changes.

funding, rather than having to constantly justify its

● Additional costs and staff time.

role.

● Potential loss of independence, efficiency, flexibility, and responsiveness.

Note: Data summarised from United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (2003).

idea of specialised agency status entirely, either reserving judgement on the issue or stating that the time was not right. In a letter dated 28 January 2004, Brunson McKinley (UNA, 2004) wrote the following to Kofi Annan: ‘IOM Member States were largely not in favour of IOM moving towards specialized agency status at this time. Nevertheless, they recognized both that current practical arrangements could be improved and that the broader issue should remain under advisement’ (p. 1). As later recorded in a note on IOM–UN relations submitted at the IOM Council’s 92nd session in November 2006, an informal decision was made to postpone the discussion until after the GCIM had concluded its deliberations (IOM, 2006, p. 1, para. 2). Subsequent correspondence between Brunson McKinley and Kofi Annan about IOM–UN relations, as recorded in the archives, took place some two years later and came in response to the Secretary-General’s report issued on 18 May 2006 in the lead-up to the first HLD on International Migration and Development. In his letter to Kofi Annan dated 30 June 2006, Brunson McKinley (UNA, 2006b) expressed concern about the ‘omission of any serious reference in it [the report] to IOM’ and, moreover, called for ‘a new, objective look at UN– IOM relations’ (p. 4). This letter suggests that news of the creation of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), which at that stage was envisioned as a venue for intergovernmental discussion within the UN, was the impetus for this renewed focus on IOM–UN relations. Accordingly, McKinley proposed that IOM–UN relations be further strengthened in one of two ways: either by devising a new agreement, whereby IOM would remain a non-UN entity but would be better integrated into the various interagency management systems, including UN Country Teams (UNCTs); or by adopting a relationship agreement in line with the arrangement that the UN already had in place with the WTO (related agency). Following this exchange of letters, a round of technical discussions, coordinated by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), took place in September 2006 (IOM, 2006). The

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24  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance broad conclusion was that, without UN membership, IOM could not regularly participate in the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) and, moreover, that related agency status was not an option. If the IOM wanted to join the UN, it would therefore have to do so as a specialised agency, which, based on existing cost-sharing arrangements to support coordination mechanisms such as the CEB, would cost the organisation an estimated $210 000 per year (IOM, 2006, p. 3, para. 10). At the 92nd session of the IOM Council in 2006, UNDESA’s report was opened to discussion. Even though the UN had taken related agency status off the table, McKinley argued that IOM membership numbers were approaching those of the World Tourism Organization when it had used this aspect to negotiate its status (IOM, 2007b, p. 45, para. 222). However, the ensuing discussion echoed the debate that had taken place three years earlier. The majority, indeed, felt that the time was not right to join the UN, with one unnamed delegate vehemently opposed to UN membership: ‘One delegate did not support the Administration’s action in reopening the issue in 2006, and considered that a clear position had been established in 2003 which it was inappropriate to change without putting forward very good reasons’ (IOM, 2007b, p. 45, para. 225). IOM member states nevertheless called for further review of the issue, in particular to make a cost‒benefit analysis of joining the UN. However, there was obviously a general preference for maintaining the status quo. As a close observer of the process noted: I went to some member states and said: ‘Look, this issue is just swirling around, and I do not think you are particularly wise to leave so much uncertainty around it.’ The answer I got was very clear. They said: ‘Look, that was a very deliberate stance. We said no because we did not think that it would be appropriate for IOM to get into the UN now, but we did not say no, because we do not know how things are going to evolve and we would like to leave that option open.’ (IO representative, personal communication, September 2018)

On 10 July 2007, Brunson McKinley, seemingly undeterred by previous discussions, wrote to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon requesting that IOM be formally invited to the UN Development Group (UNDG) and the CEB. A letter dated 8 October 2007 stated that both requests had to be denied unless IOM became a specialised agency. However, a concession was made allowing IOM to be invited to the High-Level Committee on Programmes (HLCP), a subsidiary body of the CEB, when issues of relevance to IOM would be discussed. On 9 November 2007, an updated document on IOM–UN relations (IOM, 2007a) was released in preparation for discussion at the 94th session of the IOM Council. This document explored four possible ways forward, although one was dismissed outright: (1) full implementation of the existing cooperation agreement; (2) related agency status; (3) transformation of IOM into a UN programme or fund (rejected); and (4) specialised agency status. At the 94th session of the Council, member states decided to deepen the IOM–UN relationship without introducing any changes to its legal status (IOM, 2008). A close examination of the debates about IOM–UN relations between 2002 and 2007 shows that the IOM administration reacted to developments concerning the UN position on migration. It is also arguably the case that McKinley’s efforts to expand the organisation were part of a strategy to ensure that in the long term IOM would become a, if not the, key actor on migration at the global level. Indeed, while McKinley was Director General of IOM, its membership doubled from 43 to 86. Thus, while the discussions that took place between 2002 and 2007 did not lead to the transformation of IOM into a UN agency, they did plant a seed in

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Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance?  25 the minds of its member states that becoming part of the UN might be something that would be necessary in the future.

THE ROAD TO 2016: THE FEAR OF BEING LEFT BEHIND IOM–UN relations were again formally discussed at the IOM Council in 2012. Director General William Lacy Swing suggested in his report to the 101st session of the IOM Council that ‘Member States may find it in their interest once again to consider conducting a formal review of IOMʼs relationship with the United Nations’ (IOM, 2012, p. 27, para. 99). While IOM had grown as an organisation in the decade since the start of the last round of discussions on IOM–UN relations, the global landscape related to migration had also changed considerably, and the UN had made great strides in its efforts to bring migration under its mandate. Following the conclusion of the GCIM, Kofi Annan called for the existing Geneva Migration Group to open its doors to New York entities, which therefore became the Global Migration Group (GMG) in 2006. The UN, moreover, held its first HLD on International Migration and Development that same year, and in the lead-up, Kofi Annan appointed a Special Representative for Migration, Peter Sutherland, to ensure that the event would run smoothly. Sutherland then spearheaded the idea of a GFMD, which he proposed as a way of gradually building trust between states in international deliberations on migration (UNA, 2006a). By 2012, the GFMD had already met five times, and preparations were underway for its sixth meeting in Mauritius. Early discussions on the place of migration in the post-2015 development agenda had also begun. The GMG had grown substantially, from ten members in 2006 to 20 in 2012. However, as new actors joined the field, IOM’s place in the global governance landscape became less secure: ‘As more actors appear on the migration stage – many of them with a somewhat limited interest in migration and often lacking a global footprint – IOM is increasingly challenged to ensure that its own universal mandate and global reach are recognized’ (IOM, 2012, p. 20, para. 69). A review of the archival records of this period uncovers two specific occurrences that hint at the possibility that IOM may have faced exclusion as the UN formalised its role in the area of migration. These occurrences may have prompted IOM member states to reopen the discussion on IOM–UN relations. The first was the omission of IOM from an initial draft of the UN Secretary-General’s (2013) report on International migration and development. As noted by Director General William Lacy Swing in his letter addressed to Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson on 24 July 2013 (UNA, 2013a), ‘the draft report of the Secretary-General, prepared by UNDESA, [did] not adequately reflect IOM’s leadership on migration globally or in HLD preparations’ (p. 1). Swing asked that the GMG, which IOM was chairing, be given a speaking role at the second HLD and, moreover, that a sentence acknowledging ‘the expansion of IOM’s membership, activities and reach since the first HLD in 2006 and its ever-closer partnership with the UN across the board’ be added to the Secretary-General’s report, ‘as an indication of improved attention to global migration governance’ (UNA, 2013a, p. 2). There was a swift response to this letter, as the very next day the Executive Office of the Secretary-General sent a revised copy of the report to Eliasson, which included two additional references to IOM in the introductory and concluding paragraphs (UNA, 2013b, p. 1).4 The second occurrence, in August 2013, came in the form of the report that François Crépeau, then UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, submitted to the

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26  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 68th session of the General Assembly. In his report, Crépeau (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2013) highlighted some concerns regarding IOM: The fact that the mandate of IOM is not supportive of human rights is of concern for the whole United Nations system, as IOM is part of the Global Migration Group and the United Nations country teams in many countries and is often mistakenly believed, including by migrants themselves, to be a United Nations agency. (p. 12, para. 61)

Many civil society organisations and UN agencies believed that, if it were to join the UN, IOM would have to amend its Constitution and receive a normative mandate. As had already been the case in 2002, when Kofi Annan had expressed a wish that the UN should address the issue of migration more comprehensively, the possibility that the UN would create its own normative migration agency resurfaced in 2013. IOM began to review its position vis-à-vis the UN and established a new Working Group on IOM–UN relations and IOM Strategy: The documents entitled IOM–UN relations (SCPF/106) and Review of the IOM Strategy (SCPF/105) highlighted that, although IOM had worked as closely as possible with the United Nations within the current framework and had succeeded in making significant progress, it continued to be excluded from important processes because of its status as a non-United Nations organization. The Standing Committee had therefore agreed to establish a working group to consider IOM–UN relations and the IOM Strategy. (IOM, 2014, p. 9, para. 54)

After the first meeting of this Working Group (13 February 2014), William Lacy Swing wrote to Ban Ki-Moon to request information ‘on the different modalities of association that currently [existed] in the common system for agencies, specialized organizations and other inter-governmental organizations to have any form of association with the UN’ (UNA, 2014a, p. 7). IOM was concerned that it was being excluded from UN activities on migration, and such fears were further compounded in 2014. With discussions already under way, ‘the issue was brought into sharper and more urgent focus because of the discussions of the Second Committee draft resolution on migration and development, and the potential implications of that for both the relationship and for IOM’s role and work on the global stage in general’ (UNA, 2014b, p. 1). The Second Committee draft resolution on migration and development (UN General Assembly, 2014), indeed, lent credence to the idea that the possibility of a UN body dedicated to migration might be put on the table again. In his response to the Chairperson’s Report on the Working Group on IOM–UN Relations and the IOM Strategy, Swing noted that ‘the resolution, as currently drafted, [risked] the marginalization of IOM and the creation of new, additional and duplicative arrangements within the UN’ (UNA, 2014b, p. 4, para. 6). He added that IOM might, ‘as a matter of self-defence, [have] to consider the possibility of a more formal association with the UN system’ (UNA, 2014b, pp. 3–4, para. 5). In late 2014, the UN Development Operations Coordination Office (UN DOCO) sent out documents that reinforced these fears. On 11 December 2014, UN DOCO issued a document outlining new ‘functioning and working arrangements’ effective as of 1 January 2015 (UNA, 2015, pp. 5–14). On 2 March 2015, a second document, entitled Briefing note: New UNDG functioning and working arrangements and IOM, was released, offering further clarification on the earlier document (UNA, 2015, pp. 3–4). In a nutshell, these documents provided that, as a non-UN entity, IOM would no longer be allowed to sign UN Development Assistance

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Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance?  27 Frameworks (UNDAFs), to take part in UNCTs other than on an ad hoc basis, or to benefit from specific funding opportunities. These UN DOCO documents arguably led IOM member states to conclude that, unless IOM joined the UN, it would risk becoming irrelevant and, critically, being cut off from various UN mechanisms and resources. By then, IOM was well integrated into almost all UNCTs around the world and, moreover, was a signatory to UNDAFs in 66 countries (UNA, 2015, p. 1). On 5 March 2015, Director General Swing (UNA, 2015) wrote to Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson to express his concerns about the implications of the UN DOCO documents for IOM–UN relations: As you are aware, IOM has, on a practical basis, for some time enjoyed inclusion in and access to various UN processes and mechanisms such as UNCTs and UNDAFs. I believed that the UN, as much as IOM, had been benefitting from this. We have, however, been taken by surprise that suddenly, and without any prior discussion or consultation, this practical approach is no longer to be followed as of 1 January 2015 … I am now obliged to bring to the attention of IOM Member States the likely impact this will have on IOM’s work, as it significantly changes the facts about the IOM–UN relationship that we have presently shared with them. (pp. 1–2)

Following the release of the aforementioned UN DOCO documents, the matter of IOM–UN relations became a priority, and by October 2015 the Working Group on IOM–UN Relations and the IOM Strategy had concluded that it was time for IOM to formalise its relationship with the UN (IOM, 2015a, p. 18, para. 109). On 24 November 2015, the IOM Council passed Resolution No. 1309 (IOM, 2015b) authorising the Director General to formally seek an improved legal relationship between IOM and the UN. From that point onwards, IOM’s transition to a UN related agency was a swift process: On 25 July 2016, following the endorsement of the draft Agreement concerning the Relationship between the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration by the IOM Council on 30 June 2016, the General Assembly passed a resolution approving the draft Agreement. This Agreement, which came into force on 19 September, not only brought IOM into the United Nations system, it also resulted in IOM becoming the ‘UN Migration Agency.’ (IOM, 2017, p. 4, para. 8)

IOM JOINS THE UN: THE PERFECT STORM? Previous attempts to bring IOM into the UN system had demonstrated that it was ultimately the member states of the organisation that determined its fate. Without the member states’ endorsement, the IOM administration could not have pursued a relationship agreement with the UN. The question then becomes: what had changed by 2016 to make IOM member states agree to the organisation joining the UN, having resisted this course of action for more than 20 years? And, in turn, what led the UN to accept IOM’s entry as a related agency, an option that had been categorically taken off the table just 15 years earlier? Perhaps the single most compelling argument relates to the fear of exclusion and to the negative implications that such exclusion could have for the organisation’s access to resources and its long-term survival. On each occasion, sensing that the organisation’s existence was somehow threatened, the management of IOM responded by seeking counsel on the matter of IOM–UN relations from its member states. In the early 1990s, this threat was an existential one, as the organisation was facing the genuine possibility that its lifespan was coming to an end. In 2002, the UN Secretary-General’s report made it clear that the UN intended to engage more thoroughly with

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28  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance the issue of migration. From 2012 onwards, the likelihood that migration would become more formally institutionalised within the UN increased, while the fear that IOM might be excluded as a result was compounded by the release of the aforementioned UN DOCO documents. While an external threat to IOM’s existence may have triggered the organisation to re-evaluate its relationship with the UN, it does not provide sufficient explanation for why IOM became part of the UN system in 2016. Indeed, one of the reasons cited for the fact that IOM member states decided not to join the UN in the early 2000s was the fear that should the organisation accede to the UN, it would become more expensive and bureaucratic. Some member states were afraid of losing ownership of the organisation. But at that stage, the idea of migration being institutionalised within the UN did not seem plausible. Hence, there was not enough pressure to convince IOM member states that UN membership was required. By 2012, however, when the matter was reopened for discussion, the migration governance landscape had evolved considerably, and it looked increasingly likely that migration would be included in the post-2015 development agenda and, as such, institutionalised into the UN system. The likelihood that migration would be more clearly established within the UN significantly increased in 2015. The inclusion of migration in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 was an important milestone, cementing consensus among UN member states that migration was relevant to the UN mandate. Furthermore, a series of ‘migration crises’ around the world in 2015 demonstrated the limitations of the existing international architecture, thus leading states to reconsider the international response to migration. Accordingly, at the UN General Assembly in December 2015, member states called on Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to convene the High-Level Summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants, which eventually took place on 19 September 2016. The summit culminated in the adoption of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (NYD) by consensus (UN General Assembly, 2016), which laid out a roadmap for the creation of two Global Compacts, one on refugees and the other on migrants, both of which were endorsed by the UN General Assembly in December 2018. Faced with a choice between the creation of a new UN agency for migration (or the appointment of an existing UN agency with a migration mandate) or the entry of IOM into the UN system, its member states opted for the latter, with the provision that IOM would become a related agency and join the UN with minimal changes to the organisation’s modus operandi. The 2015 ‘migration crises’ created the window of opportunity that was needed to pursue institutional change. However, this also required the actions of a small group of individuals who had long wanted to see migration more comprehensively addressed within the UN system: You had an alignment of factors, which like an alignment of planets, happens every 200 years. The planets that were aligned were Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, Peter Sutherland, the Special Representative, Bill Swing, the Director General of IOM, and Jan Eliasson, who was the Deputy Secretary-General. And might I add that there was a fifth person who was not directly involved, but whose presence was extremely important, and that was Barack Obama. Because, had Trump been there, this would never have happened. (IO representative, personal communication, September 2018)

One could therefore argue that a convergence of factors, including the ‘migration crises’ of 2015, the inclusion of migration in the SDGs, the increased likelihood that the UN would create a new agency for migration, and the right people being in the right place at the right time, led to IOM becoming part of the UN system in 2016.

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Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance?  29

CONCLUSION Bringing IOM into the UN at a time when its member states were about to embark on two years of negotiations to develop two Global Compacts, one on refugees and the other on migrants, was an opportune move, in particular for countries in the Global North, which had long favoured informal approaches to migration governance – or perhaps more accurately, ‘migration management’ – over formal norms and rules. While UN member states had legitimised IOM’s role as ‘the global lead agency on migration’ as per the NYD,5 the concern, particularly among the normative organisations of the UN, namely the ILO and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, was that IOM’s non-normative mandate, as well as its continued autonomy from the UN owing to the terms of its accession, would pave the way for the furtherance of a version of global migration governance promoting the interests of countries in the Global North at the expense of the rights-based approach that had been emphasised in the NYD. However, IOM’s entry into the UN system also came at a time of tremendous change in the international system. On 9 November 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the US, marking the beginning of an era of American isolationism. While he was in office, Trump pulled the US out of several multilateral agreements. One such withdrawal was his decision, in December 2017, to remove the US from the negotiations over the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (Global Compact for Migration or GCM), citing incompatibility between the provisions of the NYD and US sovereignty (US Mission to the United Nations, 2017). Trump’s withdrawal from the Compact negotiations was arguably also the reason that, having been a US-led organisation for the better part of its history, IOM elected António Vitorino from Portugal, instead of the American candidate Ken Isaacs, as its new Director General on 29 June 2018. Likewise, it is not insignificant that China became the 165th member state of IOM in 2016 (Geiger, 2020). While much remains to be seen in terms of implementation, the fact that 152 member states voted in favour of the GCM in December 2018 was a watershed moment in the journey of migration as a global policy issue (UN General Assembly, 2019). In particular, given the context in which states negotiated the GCM, with rising nationalism and growing disdain for multilateralism as the backdrop, the very fact that it exists is an achievement in itself (Ferris and Donato, 2019). Although non-binding, the GCM builds on existing human rights and other international instruments, and therefore holds the potential to have legal effects (Costello, 2018; Guild et al., 2019). Since the GCM was adopted, several initiatives have been launched to support its implementation, with IOM at the helm. Secretary-General António Guterres announced the creation of the UN Network on Migration, which replaces the GMG and is permanently chaired by IOM, at the 2018 Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakesh (Morocco). The UN Network on Migration has been active in developing guidance and toolkits of relevance to GCM implementation and, at the time of writing in November 2021, it was involved in the first round of voluntary reviews. It is not yet clear what the future holds for IOM as a UN related agency. Perhaps some of its member states will seek alternative venues for intergovernmental cooperation on migration outside the UN. Equally, it may well be that IOM’s entry into the UN signals lasting change in the way that the UN operates.

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30  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance

NOTES 1. This chapter is based on a section of my PhD dissertation, International Organizations and Global Migration Governance (Lebon-McGregor, 2020). I am grateful for comments on previous drafts provided by Michal Natorski, Antoine Pécoud, Nora Ragab, Melissa Siegel, Ronald Skeldon and Hélène Thiollet. Any errors remain my own. 2. The main difference between a specialised agency and a related agency is that the latter is excluded from Articles 57 and 63 of the UN Charter (UNA, 2014a). The UN, therefore, ‘may coordinate the activities of the specialized agencies through consultation with and recommendations to such agencies and through recommendations to the General Assembly and to the Members of the United Nations’ (UN, 1945, p. 13, art. 63, para. 2), while a related agency, although ill-defined, retains more autonomy from the UN. 3. For a more detailed discussion of this period, see Chapter 9 in this Handbook. 4. Paragraph 9 of the introduction of the revised draft report states that ‘since the first High-Level Dialogue (IOM) has seen an expansion of its membership, activities and reach and an ever closer partnership with the United Nations entities dealing with migration’ (UNA, 2013b, p. 29). The last paragraph suggests that ‘cooperation and dialogue on migration within the United Nations, IOM and regional economic communities should be strengthened’ (UNA, 2013b, p. 52). 5. Paragraph 49 of the New York Declaration (UN General Assembly, 2016) states: We commit to strengthening global governance of migration. We therefore warmly support and welcome the agreement to bring the International Organization for Migration, an organization regarded by its Member States as the global lead agency on migration, into a closer legal and working relationship with the United Nations as a related organization.

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32  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2015b). Resolution No. 1309: IOM–UN relations (C/106/RES/1309). International Organization for Migration. https://​www​.iom​.int/​resources/​council​ -resolution​-no​-1309​-iom​-un​-relations. International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2017). Annual report for 2016 (C/108/4). International Organization for Migration. https://​www​.iom​.int/​resources/​c/​108/​4​-annual​-report​-2016​-3. Lebon-McGregor, E. (2020). International organizations and global migration governance. Boekenplan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.26481/​dis​.20201005elm. Long, K. (2013). When refugees stopped being migrants: Movement, labour and humanitarian protection. Migration Studies, 1(1), 4–26. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​migration/​mns001. Perruchoud, R. (1989). From the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration to the International Organization for Migration. International Journal of Refugee Law, 1(4), 501–517. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​ijrl/​1​.4​.501. Straubhaar, T. (1993). Migration pressure. International Migration, 31(1), 5–41. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​ j​.1468​-2435​.1993​.tb00717​.x. United Nations (UN) (1945). Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice. United Nations. https://​treaties​.un​.org/​doc/​publication/​ctc/​uncharter​.pdf. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2003, 7 April). Letter exchange between Brunson McKinley and Louise Fréchette regarding the preliminary report of the IOM Working Group on Institutional Arrangements (WG/IOM-UN/1) between 7 April 2003 and 10 June 2003 (S-1093-0048-11-00015). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​specialized​-agencies​ -2002​-iom​-7. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2004, 28 January). Letter from Janis Karklins to Kofi Annan regarding informal consultations on the IOM–UN relationship (S-1093-0035-11-00001). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​specialized​-agencies​-2004​ -iom. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2006a, 3 April). Letter from Peter D. Sutherland to Kofi Annan regarding the Global Migration Forum (S-1100-0003-13-00013). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​vip​-2006​-s​-5. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2006b, 30 June). Letters exchanged between Brunson McKinley and Kofi Annan (reply by Mark Malloch Brown) between 30 June 2006 and 17 July 2006 (S-1093-0010-01-00002). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​specialized​ -agencies​-2006​-iom. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2013a, 24 July). Letter from William Lacy Swing to Jan Eliasson regarding preparations for the UNGA’s Second High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, including remarks on the draft report of the Secretary-General (S-1959-0106-0006-00025). United Nations Archives. https://​search​.archives​.un​ .org/​development​-reports​-100. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2013b, 25 July). Note to the Deputy Secretary-General from Lenni Montiel: Report of the Secretary-General on International Migration and Development (S-1959-0099-0003-00006). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​ administration​-of​-the​-executive​-office​-of​-the​-secretary​-general​-secretary​-generals​-annual​-reports​-5. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2014a, 14 April). Note from the Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) regarding the letter to the Secretary-General from the Director General of IOM, requesting information on different modalities of association that currently exist between the United Nations and other international organizations in the UN system (S-1959-0166-0010-00006). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​development​-initiatives​-migration​-8. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2014b, 8 December). Letter from William Lacy Swing to Jan Eliasson regarding the IOM–UN relationship, with an enclosed copy of the Director General’s response to the Chairperson’s report on the Working Group on IOM–UN Relations and the IOM Strategy (C/105/CRP/48) (S-1959-0223-0006-00007). United Nations. https://​ search​.archives​.un​.org/​scheduling​-requests​-for​-meetings​-with​-the​-deputy​-secretary​-general​-158. United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UNA) (2015, 5 March). Letter from William Lacy Swing to Jan Eliasson regarding a briefing note issued by the United Nations Development Group (2 March 2015) on New UNDG functioning and working arrangements and IOM

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Bringing about the ‘perfect storm’ in migration governance?  33 (S-1959-0256-0008-00027). United Nations. https://​search​.archives​.un​.org/​internal​-relations​-united​ -nations​-funds​-programmes​-agencies​-and​-regional​-commissions​-304. United Nations General Assembly (1992a). Observer status for the International Organization for Migration in the General Assembly: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly (A/RES/47/4). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​154787. United Nations General Assembly (1992b). Strengthening of the coordination of humanitarian emergency assistance of the United Nations: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly (A/RES/46/182). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​135197. United Nations General Assembly (2014). International migration and development: Draft resolution (A/C.2/69/L.32). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​782222. United Nations General Assembly (2016). New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (A/ RES/71/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​844669​?ln​=​en. United Nations General Assembly (2019). Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration (A/ RES/73/195). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1660537​?ln​=​en. United Nations Secretary-General (2002). Strengthening of the United Nations: An agenda for further change. Report of the Secretary-General (A/57/387). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​ record/​474330. United Nations Secretary-General (2006). International migration and development: Report of the Secretary-General (A/60/871). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​576390. United Nations Secretary-General (2013). International migration and development: Report of the Secretary-General (A/68/190). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​755933. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Human rights of migrants (A/68/283). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​756197. United States Mission to the United Nations (2017, 2 December). United States ends participation in Global Compact on Migration. https://​usun​.usmission​.gov/​united​-states​-ends​-participation​-in​-global​ -compact​-on​-migration/​.

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3. Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state: the IOM and the Migration Governance Framework Younes Ahouga

Since the 1990s, the complex and unstable process of the ‘globalisation of migration’ (Czaika and de Haas, 2014) has raised the question of its ‘manageability’ through international cooperation (UN, 1995, p. 67). Yet attempts to establish a binding international regime that could consistently regulate states’ interactions have not succeeded. States have been reluctant to relinquish their sovereignty in order to build strong international institutions and norms with which to coordinate their migration policies. Instead, contemporary international migration is governed by fragmented and conflicting discourses, practices and institutions (Kunz et al., 2011). Against this backdrop, and based on the principle in migration management of ‘regulated openness to migration’ (Ghosh, 2000, p. 221), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has carried out, since the early 2000s, the task of harmonising (inter)national responses in order to ‘facilitate’ human mobility.1 As the self-proclaimed global lead agency on migration, the IOM has sought to establish the paradigm of migration management as a collection of discourses, ways of interacting, and ways of being that would be capable of making migration intelligible, while also prescribing the appropriate actions with which to govern it. In this regard, the year 2015 proved crucial to the IOM’s advocacy for migration management. This year saw the unprecedented crossing of the Mediterranean by more than 1 million refugees, asylum seekers and migrants fleeing political violence and economic hardship, for security and a better life in Europe. It was amidst this migration and asylum crisis that the IOM convinced its 162 member states to adopt the Migration Governance Framework (hereafter MiGOF) in November 2015. The MiGOF offers a blueprint for governing migration according to a series of non-binding principles and objectives, thereby providing a comprehensive means to manage the protracted challenges related to migration, instead of the usual ‘piecemeal responses’ (IOM, 2015a, p. 9). It is intended to allow states to identify ‘the weaknesses or gaps in policies having an impact on migrants and the governance of migration’ (IOM, 2016c), and to involve states in the reform of their discourses and practices, as it provides ‘a basis for measuring the progress of states in terms of migration management’ (IOM, 2016c). In the view of the IOM, ‘the more states can see they are making progress against the elements of the MiGOF, the more they would want to do the right things on migration and migrants’ (IOM, 2016c). This chapter examines the IOM’s document C/106/40, the text that established the MiGOF in 2015, in order to understand what the IOM means by ‘the right things’ and how it intends to act on its member states. I argue that, rather than achieving a seemingly innocuous ‘good migration governance’, the MiGOF entails the implementation of an institutional network that encompasses the role of states. It pursues the replacement of the current, fragmented situation of migration governance by a model of ‘networked migration management’ (hereafter 34 Younes Ahouga - 9781789908077 37:06AM

Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  35 NMM), in order to confront not only the complexity and instability of migration, but also its politicisation, which strengthens the role of the state, its political actors and its bureaucrats (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018, p. 4). The chapter first examines how the MiGOF implicitly construes states as preventing the implementation of global migration governance, and how it seeks to transform their migration policy, disseminate and dilute their authority, and align their interactions through informal institutions. The next section discusses how the MiGOF’s principles were intended to reform and adapt the exercise of states’ sovereignty by assigning them depoliticised ways of interacting and of being in the framework of NMM. The chapter then demonstrates that the MiGOF’s encompassing ambitions did not overcome the obstacle posed by the sovereignty of IOM member states, which undermined its consistent implementation. The following section suggests that the MiGOF nonetheless constituted a vehicle for several of the IOM’s attempts to transform its internal organisation, to monitor states’ migration policies, and to engage stakeholders in multilateral settings. The chapter concludes by discussing the significance of the MiGOF for the IOM’s role in global migration governance.

FROM A REMEDY FOR BAD MIGRATION GOVERNANCE TO A NEW NETWORKED MIGRATION MANAGEMENT What, according to the MiGOF, is problematic concerning migration and its governance? The IOM’s document C/106/40 justified the creation of the MiGOF by the necessity to harness the ‘benefits and full potential’ of human mobility (IOM, 2015c, p. 1). This was crucial, as the IOM expected migration to increase exponentially with no foreseeable abatement. Yet the MiGOF condemned the fragmentation of migration governance, since at that time, ‘no single international convention or framework’ conformed with the obligation to govern migration well (IOM, 2015c, p. 1). This was partly because the ‘stakeholders’ of existing international texts were not acting in a ‘consistent, comprehensive, and balanced manner’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 1). Against such flawed international cooperation, the MiGOF asserted the need for a ‘good migration governance’, underpinned by the concept of a ‘migration system’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 2). Although document C/106/40 does not define such a system, it sets out three principles by which it should be governed (IOM, 2015c, p. 2): 1. Good migration governance would require adherence to international standards and the fulfilment of migrants’ rights. 2. Migration and related policies are best formulated using evidence and ‘whole-of-government’ approaches. 3. Good migration governance relies on strong partnerships. These principles should be followed in ‘policy, law, and practice’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 2) in order for the migration system to attain three objectives, which are legitimised by the ethical need to ensure the ‘well-being’ of migrants and that of so-called countries of origin, transit and destination (IOM, 2015c, p. 2): 1. Good migration governance and related policy should seek to advance the socioeconomic well-being of migrants and society. 2. Good migration governance is based on effective responses to the mobility dimensions of crises.

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36  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 3. Migration should take place in a safe, orderly and dignified manner. By devising a clear set of essential principles and objectives, document C/106/40 inaugurated a unique textual structure within the institutional context of the IOM; the drafting of this document therefore constitutes a noteworthy event. After a first, thwarted bid, between 2002 and 2007, to convince its member states to ratify a comprehensive approach to migration management,2 the IOM was finally able to lead them to support a document that it drew up in order to fulfil a ‘strategic’ function (Fairclough, 2003, pp. 71–72): in effect, the MiGOF offers and requires the use of appropriate discourses, ways of interacting, and ways of being, with a view to achieving good governance. However, it formulates each principle and objective in the passive voice, which leaves doubt as to who is responsible for implementing and accomplishing them. One needs to read the entirety of document C/106/40 to grasp that the ‘bad’ governance problem in question, which the MiGOF seeks to address, solely involves the state. It is misconduct on the part of states that prevents global migration governance by denying the rights of migrants, and by acting in a piecemeal, selfish and uninformed way. The MiGOF’s definition of the term ‘governance’ stresses the centrality of the state: [It is] the traditions and institutions by which authority on migration, mobility and nationality in a country is exercised … As the primary actor in migration … a state retains the sovereign right to determine who enters and stays in its territory and under what conditions, within the framework of international law. Other actors – citizens, migrants, international organizations, the private sector, unions, non-governmental organizations, community organizations, religious organizations and academia – contribute to migration governance through their interaction with states and each other. (IOM, 2015c, p. 1)

This definition, emphasising the primacy of the sovereign functions of the state, carries out a remarkable restriction of the scope of governance. Yet the second sentence invokes international law as a limit to the full exercise of state authority. Moreover, the definition offers a seemingly comprehensive list of non-state actors that participate in the governance of migration alongside states. This paradoxical depiction of governance is informed by the MiGOF’s desire to regulate states’ conduct by dovetailing them with a broader set of actors. The MiGOF’s principles and objectives are not consistent with an undefined and neutral migration system. Drawing on insights from Castells’s (2010, p. 367) analysis of the network state, I argue that they are rather intended to establish an institutional network that would manage migration by encompassing the role of states. The MiGOF sets out forms of governance that are designed to address the crisis of the international order emerging from the twentieth century (Richmond and Tellidis, 2020, p. 936). Since the 9/11 attacks in the United States (US), sovereign states, territorial citizenship and multilateral bureaucratic institutions have seemed to be unable to cope with the political and spatiotemporal effects of globalisation and the reactive ‘affirmation of [national and ethnic] identity as the source of meaning’ (Castells, 2010, p. 343). Despite the complexity, instability and politicisation of migration and the fragmentation of its governance, the MiGOF aims to link, harmonise and make predictable the collective conduct, not only of states, but of all relevant non-governmental actors. To do so, it envisages a three-dimensional NMM that would encompass the state sovereign functions that are typically geared towards border control, by: (1) relying on a principle-based regulation that pursues substantive compliance by assigning flexible yet clear ways of interacting and of being in order to face complex and uncertain risks (Black, 2008, pp. 426–427);

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  37 (2) disseminating and diluting authority between multilevel but still interdependent ‘nodes’, so that no single stakeholder can ignore the others, no matter its power (Castells, 2010, pp. 367–368); and (3) focusing on achieving outcomes through informal institutions of coordination (Jensen and Richardson, 2003, p. 26). As I highlight in the following sections, the issue of encompassing the role of the state through the establishment of NMM pervades the principles of the MiGOF, states’ mistrust towards this framework, and the IOM’s efforts to implement it.

THE MIGOF’S PRINCIPLES FOR A NETWORKED MIGRATION MANAGEMENT How does the MiGOF’s conception of good migration governance translate into specific ways of interacting and ways of being that would reform state sovereign functions within the framework of NMM? To answer this question, it is necessary to closely examine its three principles and how they serve a ‘normative argumentation’ (Fairclough, 2006, p. 35) about what ought (or ought not) to happen and to be done to govern migration. As we will see, they mainly strive to ‘depoliticise’ (Pécoud, 2015, p. 96) migration policymaking and to avert the risk of state sovereign functions monopolising NMM. The Use of Human Rights to Monitor State Sovereignty The MiGOF’s first principle underlines the fundamental necessity for states to adopt a way of interacting that respects the rights of all migrants: The obligation to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of individuals is paramount and applies to all individuals within a state’s territory, regardless of nationality or migration status and without discrimination, in order to preserve their safety, physical integrity, well-being and dignity. (IOM, 2015c, p. 2)

To grapple with the politicisation of migration and its weakening effect on individual agency (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018, p. 5), states ought to: combat xenophobia, racism and discrimination; identify and help vulnerable migrants; and criminalise irregular migration and the smuggling and trafficking of human beings, provided that the migrants themselves are not criminalised (IOM, 2015c, pp. 2–3). Respecting the rights of migrants also requires states to adopt a way of being that follows international law as embodied by the following texts (some of which are binding, some non-binding): the nine core human rights treaties, the International Labour Organization conventions and recommendations, the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols, as well as relevant regional instruments, in particular those with specific references to migrants and discrimination. (IOM, 2015c, pp. 7–8)

Although this ‘architecture of rights’ (Sokhi-Bulley, 2016, p. 50) may be empowering and inclusive towards vulnerable migrants, it encompasses the role of states in order to transform their national sovereignty practices. States’ compliance with the first principle of the MiGOF, and the ways of interacting and being that this entails, can be measured, compared and evaluated, so as to determine whether they can be expected to receive the supposed benefits of

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38  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance good migration governance. The MiGOF’s conception of human rights constructs the category of the vulnerable individual, such as the irregular or forced migrant, in such a way that this issue can be kept under constant observation (Sokhi-Bulley, 2016, pp. 4–5). This would then allow for a network of international organisations (IOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – which the IOM could train and fund – to devote their expertise to monitoring states’ substantive conformity with the need to manage migration without raising disruptive obstacles against legal channels for migration. If a state disregards the MiGOF’s first principle and succumbs to the politicisation of migration, it then risks being named and shamed accordingly (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, pp. 23–24). Through the dilution and monitoring of the states’ ability to act on migrants within their territory, the MiGOF would thus guarantee, not so much the liberalisation of migration, but rather the overhaul of ‘narrow-minded’ state border control practices. Pragmatic Use of Data to Bind States and Empower Epistemic Communities States must also embrace the MiGOF’s second principle, which requires them to conduct migration policy using ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’ regarding demographic trends, transnational mobility, internal displacement, diasporas, labour markets, education and health, and the effects of climate change (IOM, 2015c, p. 9). States should adopt a pragmatic way of being, in order to analyse the ‘benefits and risks the movement of people poses to the state’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 3). This would lead them to approach reality by seeking validation not in a general moral system or legal process, but rather in their own ‘grounded experience’ about what works well in practice (Schein, 2016, p. 74). This is crucial, since migration policy is ‘often the subject of intense political debate and can often be based on populist sentiments’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 3). Thus, to reduce the agonistic ‘ideologization’ of migration (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018, p. 5), states should turn to scientific and technical knowledge in the form of objective data. However, by focusing on these seemingly undeniable ‘empirical traces’ of reality (Galloway, 2011, p. 87), the MiGOF seeks to harmonise and determine states’ interactions through their use of data (Supiot, 2017, p. 10). The dissemination of data that the MiGOF additionally requires (IOM, 2015c, p. 3) would establish unbiased and measurable facts as a ‘common language’ that would seamlessly and consistently bind the various nodes of NMM. As the IOM has stressed since the 2000s, states should not simply collect data in any way they see fit. In order to share credible information, they should compile data using comparable periods and standardised definitions about migration and its multiple dimensions (IOM, 2002, pp. 4–5). This pragmatic production, analysis and circulation of data would then provide states, IOs and NGOs with self-evident reference points that they could all agree on, and with which they could all align their conduct, despite their distance in space and time. The fine-tuning of this alignment would rely on and empower ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas, 1992, p. 2) of statistical experts, which the IOM itself would actively gather and assist (IOM, 2017a, 2018a), in order to produce and interpret data on behalf of national policymakers. Confronted with a set of expertly quantifiable and sharable facts, no single node could then politicise NMM by construing migration risks as a zero-sum game that is unfavourable to international cooperation.

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  39 A Whole-of-Government Approach as a Way of Distancing States from Security Concerns In order to eschew the possibility of such ‘skewed’ analysis, the pragmatic and data-centric way of interacting prescribed by the MiGOF should be adopted by states with regard to all areas of their activity pertaining to migrants: The law and policy affecting the movement of people are not restricted to any single issue, but include travel and temporary mobility, immigration, emigration, nationality, labour markets, economic and social development, industry, commerce, social cohesion, social services, health, education, law enforcement, foreign policy, trade, and humanitarian policy … Good migration governance therefore relies on whole-of-government approaches, whereby all ministries with responsibilities touching on the movement of people are implicated. In this way, a state can ensure that migration and mobility policy advances its broader interests. (IOM, 2015c, p. 3)

By widening the scope of its conception of well-governed migration, the MiGOF contradicts its previous definition of governance. The second principle’s whole-of-government way of interacting distances states from ‘narrow’ security concerns regarding the control of entry and exit from their territory. Instead of focusing on a zero-sum conception, where one state’s relative gain in preventing or allowing entry is seen as a loss by another, the MiGOF stresses the various non-security issues at stake, from which perspective states can focus on the absolute gains that can be made (Powell, 1991, p. 1303). This is the reason why the second principle of the MiGOF entails the internal dilution of states’ national security apparatuses within their ‘broader’ socioeconomic functions. In order to fulfil their role in NMM, states should act comprehensively by mobilising all their parts in one coordinated movement. This way of interacting is rooted in the concept of New Public Management, which rose to prominence in the 1970s among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This label refers to a way of reforming state bureaucracies by: disaggregating them into units operating with one another on an arm’s-length basis; assigning them measurable tasks and goals that rely on a clear distribution of responsibilities; and steering them towards achieving results rather than obeying bureaucratic procedures (Hood, 1991, pp. 4–5). Combined with the pragmatic use of data, this whole-of-government approach is expected to reform state bureaucracies to prevent them from enforcing rigid rules or political (that is, zero-sum) understandings of public interest. Removed from any substantive policy issues, those bureaucracies should then establish the most seemingly neutral technocratic coordination and instrumental implementation of migration policy (Box, 1999, p. 19). Partnership as a Way of Enlisting States in Competitive Political Markets While the MiGOF involves the horizontal disaggregation of the state in the framework of NMM, it also requires its vertical disaggregation. Its third principle highlights the need for a partnership-based way of interacting that establishes informal coalitions of the ‘willing and able’ (McKeon, 2017, p. 488). This ‘multistakeholderism’ (Massit-Folléa, 2014) encompasses four types of actors operating at various levels of governance: subnational governments; non-governmental actors; other countries of origin, transit and destination; and international and regional organisations (IOM, 2015c, p. 4). A partnership-based way of interacting would

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40  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance ‘broaden’ stakeholders’ understanding of migration and allow them to develop ‘comprehensive and effective’ approaches to migration (IOM, 2015c, p. 3). In other words, partnerships depoliticise the interactions of the multilevel nodes of NMM. They downplay the long-term divergent interests between them, and prevent states from adopting exclusive stances that might be concerned with their immediate national security benefits. How can the establishment of partnerships contribute to the broader project of encompassing the role of states? They create a number of ‘political markets’ (Craig and Porter, 2006, p. 91) that function as sites of coordination with the framework of NMM. If a state partners with other states and with non-state actors to attain migration management goals, then this partnership will become a vessel for external financial and capacity-building resources. Indeed, the IOM can competitively funnel and allocate such resources, according to stakeholders’ compliance with the MiGOF. Thus, partnerships are not only instruments allowing for mundane dialogue and cooperation. Although partnerships are apparently non-binding, informal and voluntary-based, they rely on a ‘new contractualism’ to achieve appropriate outcomes (Yeatman, 1998, pp. 231–232). Rather than adopting legal and precise monitoring and control, they highlight best practices for states to emulate. The establishment of partnerships involves the inclusion of the actors deemed to be most deserving and responsible, on the basis of their efforts in depoliticising the issues at hand (Abrahamsen, 2004, p. 1464). Through this inclusion/exclusion mechanism, and since partnerships are vessels for external resources, they can lead the nodes of NMM to discipline each other’s conduct according to the MiGOF’s principles and objectives. It is unsurprising, then, that document C/106/40 only explicitly mentions institutions that are partnership-based. The MiGOF encourages states to participate in the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), in the IOM’s International Dialogue on Migration (IDM), and more importantly in the many Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs) on migration around the world. These non-binding forums, in which the IOM has entrenched its policy and technical expertise (Köhler, 2011, p. 69), foster global and regional partnerships between countries of origin, transit and destination in order to achieve appropriate migration management outcomes.

THE MIGOF AND THE HURDLE OF STATE SOVEREIGNTY Now that we have examined how the MiGOF’s three principles steer states’ conduct in NMM, we might ask: why did the IOM’s member states agree to such a framework? And, insofar as they endorsed it at the 106th session of the Council of the IOM in Geneva,3 is it capable of mitigating state sovereignty? Unfortunately for the MiGOF, this issue overshadowed the process leading to its adoption, in a way that hindered its ability to be consistently implemented. Member States’ Distrust towards the MiGOF Although states greeted the IOM’s decision to elaborate a governance framework in November 2014, the year-long adoption process of the MiGOF was marred by states’ distrust regarding its suggested limitations to their sovereignty. The resolution drafted by diplomats of member states, providing a commentary on their endorsement of document C/106/40, stressed at the outset that the MiGOF should not exceed the mandate of the IOM (IOM, 2015e, p. 1). In other

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  41 words, they asserted that it is not the IOM’s role to govern migration by establishing NMM. Its function is limited to advising and assisting states, and providing them with a ‘forum to facilitate their cooperation efforts concerning migration issues’ (IOM, 2015e, p. 1). The member states’ resolution adds that this cooperation rests on ‘the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states’ (IOM, 2015e, p. 1). States therefore had reservations about acknowledging a framework that would further the topic of global migration governance. During the discussions surrounding the MiGOF, many diplomats were surprised by the use of the term ‘governance’ instead of ‘management’. The term ‘governance’ had not previously been used in the texts of the IOM, and it was perceived that its adoption could imply the use of guidelines that are far from optional. The IOM responded that both words were synonymous, but that ‘governance’ was not limited to the issue of border control, as it conveyed the need to grasp the socioeconomic aspects of migration.4 Nevertheless, the IOM subsequently added the concept of ‘management’ to the MiGOF’s lengthy subtitle, which takes up the language of goal 10.7 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which had been sanctioned by member states: to ‘facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’. Furthermore, one diplomat successfully requested to alter the text of the resolution drafted by member states, changing the expression ‘international migration law’ to ‘principles of international law which are related to migration’ (IOM, 2017c, p. 8). This seemingly innocuous amendment draws the MiGOF away from anything that could elicit the idea of an international migration regime with power over states’ interactions. To alleviate states’ distrust, the Director General (DG) of the IOM proposed during the discussions to modify the MiGOF’s statement ‘confirming the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states’ to that of ‘recognizing the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states’ (IOM, 2017c, p. 8). He justified this change, which was ultimately approved, by remarking that the organisation ‘had no authority to confirm states’ sovereignty’ (IOM, 2017c, p. 8). The MiGOF as a Context-Dependent Ideal of Migration Governance The DG’s gesture of goodwill towards state sovereignty is replicated in document C/106/40 in three ways. Firstly, the MiGOF frequently employs the conditional mood, and avoids imperatives or sentences with an active verb. This therefore avoids explicitly subordinating states to seemingly compulsory ways of interacting and being. The MiGOF’s principles and objectives are instead depicted as rules that are not assigned to states per se, but rather to the more abstract and undefined migration system. Secondly, the MiGOF avoids presenting itself as a collection of ‘new standards or norms’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 2). It only echoes past international texts that states have already drafted and recognised. This is why the MiGOF explicitly affirms that it does not address the issue of global migration governance, as it concurs with the view that the state is ‘the primary actor’ of migration governance (IOM, 2015c, p. 2). Thirdly, the MiGOF admits that it ‘does not propose a unique model of governance for every state’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 2). It rather puts forward ‘an ideal version of migration governance to which every state could aspire’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 2). The way to achieve such an ideal depends ‘on the historical, economic, social and geographic context of each state’ (IOM, 2015c, p. 2). Although this may have been necessary to secure the MiGOF’s adoption, the IOM nonetheless granted an unusual amount of leeway to its member states. The authority and expertise of IOs lie in their capacity to make a shared problem legible, before prescribing standardised

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42  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance solutions that states should apply uniformly (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012, p. 7). How, then, can we assess the latitude allowed to the IOM’s member states? With regard to its attempt to establish global migration governance, the MiGOF was confronted with the hurdle of state sovereignty. However, by recognising the ability of states to pursue its ideal of governance in any way they see fit, the MiGOF aligns itself with what Peck (2011) calls ‘neoliberal global projects’. These projects do not attempt to control interactions, but rather to establish ‘fast political integration’ (Peck, 2011, p. 166) in order to create near instant, loose and effortless alliances around a set of assumptions, values and objectives. This is why, instead of mentioning specific governmental technologies with which to steer states’ conduct (Dean, 1999, pp. 269–270) – such as data exchange platforms, detailed action plans and budgets, or performance indicators  –  the MiGOF simply insists that states join partnership-related forums. The GFMD, the IDM and RCPs should then foster flexible, yet consistent alliances conducive to NMM. Through these dialogue- and consensus-based forums, the IOM hopes to convince member states about the merits of migration management.

ESTABLISHING THE MIGOF’S NETWORKED MIGRATION MANAGEMENT DESPITE STATE SOVEREIGNTY The MiGOF’s flexibility may be its greatest weakness, as its principles and objectives risk being turned into a series of vague ‘buzzwords’ (Cornwall, 2007, p. 471) which every state can construe creatively. To ward off the threat of an inconsistent NMM, the IOM tried to compensate for the leeway that it had granted to states’ sovereignty by using its own framework in several different ways: as a tool for the organisation’s own internal transformation; as a basis for the monitoring of states’ performance; and as a ‘unique selling proposition’ to engage stakeholders in multilateral settings. A Tool for the IOM’s Internal Organisational Change The IOM sought to guarantee the coherent and effective implementation of the MiGOF by autonomously incorporating its principles and objectives in its own bureaucratic routines and ways of interacting with states: IOM will use the [MiGOF] to guide its work in capacity-building, providing policy advice and developing specific programmes. This could include training tools and assessment models. The Organization will also use the framework to facilitate planning and reporting on how IOM contributes to migration governance, with a focus on results that are measurable and concrete. (IOM, 2015c, p. 6)

The transformation of the IOM’s ‘Report of the Director General on the Work of the Organisation’ in 2016 testifies to its willingness to restructure its practices according to the MiGOF. This flagship annual report submitted by the office of the DG to the IOM Council used to summarise the organisation’s activities over the previous year (IOM, 2015d). In contrast, the newly and plainly titled ‘Annual Report’ was no longer explicitly tied to a single part of the IOM. It now relied on a presumably considerable amount of information collected by questionnaires sent to the IOM’s regional and (sub)national offices throughout the world (IOM, 2016a, p. 3). Henceforth, the report would organise information on the IOM’s activities around the MiGOF’s principles and objectives, in order to demonstrate their consistency with

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  43 the framework ‘even before it was put in place’ (IOM, 2016a, p. 1). By rallying all parts of the IOM around the MiGOF, this new form of the report elevated the MiGOF’s importance in the day-to-day work of the organisation in order to achieve internal transformation (Hall, 2016, p. 97). The report raised awareness among the IOM’s decentralised parts about the need to brandish the MiGOF in all their interactions with states. According to the IOM’s DG, these interactions should henceforth fulfil two ambitions: ‘to respond to frequent requests for advice to states on the principles necessary for well-run migration systems, and to help them measure improvements in migration governance’ (IOM, 2015b, p. 2). Although the first objective may meet the approval of states, provided that the ‘advice’ does not limit their sovereignty, the second one implies an implementation process of the MiGOF that would result in measuring their performance. Before its adoption, the IOM was hoping that the MiGOF would include ‘indicators of success’ (IOM, 2015b, p. 2), but it ended up dropping this element, despite the importance of such indicators for a consistent and effective implementation of the MiGOF. Their presence would have meant that states had yielded to mechanisms that could dictate their conduct by making their (non-)compliance with the MiGOF legible. A Framework for Monitoring States’ Migration Policy However, the IOM did not relinquish its intention to monitor states’ migration policy. As the MiGOF itself lacked performance indicators, the IOM instead commissioned a Migration Governance Index (MGI) from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), which was delivered in 2016 as a 70-page report (IOM, 2016b). Although both the IOM (2015f) and the EIU (2016, pp. 6–7) presented the MGI as a data-based tool for measuring the good governance of migration and assisting states in the implementation of goal 10.7 of the 2030 Agenda, in effect the MGI provided a means of monitoring the application of the MiGOF. This index, legitimised by the expertise of a corporation specialised in the design of governance indicators, is informed by an ‘analytical framework’ that identifies five ‘building blocks of effective migration governance’: ‘1) institutional capacity, 2) migrant rights, 3) safe and orderly migration, 4) labour migration management, and 5) regional and international co-operation and other partnerships’ (EIU, 2016, p. 15). These five domains, ‘directly inspired by the MiGOF’ (IOM, 2016b), are broken down into 23 indicators measured by 73 subindicators to give ‘policymakers a 360-degree overview of important areas where national policies can be improved’ (EIU, 2016, p. 11). The MGI is then applied to 15 countries of origin, transit and destination as a governmental technology comparing and evaluating for each domain their ‘institutional development level, ranging from nascent to emerging, developed and mature’ (EIU, 2016, p. 16). Despite the states’ dissimilarities, the index aggregates its (sub)indicators with neutral weights to establish a standardised benchmark that renders their level of compliance with the MiGOF legible, comparable and classifiable (Sum, 2009, p. 194). By revealing their strengths and weaknesses, the MGI places states in a competitive game that is expected to lead them to discipline each other’s conduct in pursuit of the evidently sought-after stage of ‘maturity’ (Fougner, 2008, p. 306). This is why the index presents certain states as role models for each of the five domains, so that other states can emulate their best practices in order to improve their level of institutional development (EIU, 2016, p. 19). Yet the MGI’s ability to set up a continuous and effective competitive game is limited. In contrast to other mainstream indexes,

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44  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance such as the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business Report’, it lacks a numerical ranking – which was deemed to be ‘controversial and ultimately counterproductive’ (EIU, 2016, p. 7) – and an annual update and extension. Despite hoping that more countries would become part of the index (EIU, 2016, p. 7), neither the EIU nor the IOM repeated or extended the MGI in the following years. In 2016 the IOM reverted to a voluntary and bilateral process entitled ‘Migration Governance Indicators’, whereby states agreed to subject their policy to a one-time assessment informed by the MiGOF. This scheme, involving 67 countries up until March 2020, aimed more modestly to convince states to discuss their strengths and weaknesses and to develop their baseline assessment and evaluation routines according to their circumstances (IOM, 2020). A Unique Selling Proposition to Engage Stakeholders in Multilateral Settings Although the IOM was thwarted in its attempt to circumvent the leeway of states through a sustained top-down monitoring, comparison and ranking of their performance, it nonetheless continued to use the MiGOF as a way of engaging stakeholders in its envisaged NMM in multilateral settings. By codifying the appropriate conduct to follow in varied situations, in the form of ready-to-use and easy-to-communicate principles, the ‘framework thinking’ behind the MiGOF indicated that the IOM was a ‘voice of reason’ that could consistently navigate complexity (Johnson, 2014). An effective framework can act as a ‘unique selling proposition’, steering processes of policy dialogue in order to attract different stakeholders with the prospect of beneficial quick fixes, and in order to bolster the leadership, originality and relevance of the framework’s owner (Steinhardt, 2010, pp. 235–236). The MiGOF demonstrated its usefulness to the IOM’s policy advocacy during the 2017–2018 intergovernmental negotiations for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). The IOM launched a campaign to shape the outcomes of these negotiations by convening two IDM workshops in April and July 2017, wherein a wide array of states, IOs, NGOs and experts identified ‘models’ for the GCM, such as the ‘lauded’ MiGOF (IOM, 2017d, p. 71). Moreover, the IOM co-organised, together with UN-Habitat and United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), a Global Conference on Cities and Migrants in November 2017. This event gathered delegates of 50 cities from around the world to draft a declaration, submitted to the GCM negotiations, which noted the ‘importance’ of the MiGOF’s good migration governance (UCLG, 2017). To lay out its ‘vision’, the IOM also drafted a series of issue briefs, thematic papers and inputs to the UN Secretary-General (UNSG), which recommended that the GCM emulate the MiGOF’s principles (IOM, 2017b). This flurry of efforts was not only intended to establish the MiGOF as the source of a self-evident set of solutions, but also sought to reinforce the IOM’s ability to steer the conduct of states. During the GCM negotiations, the IOM claimed that, if states wished to achieve a coherent migration governance, they should allow it to have access to more stable funding, reinforced ‘strategic and knowledge generation capacity’, and new technologies for its ‘assessment processes’ (Camacho and Lauber, 2017, p. 17). Furthermore, the IOM hoped to shore up its position as ‘first among equals’ within the UN system, which it joined in 2016, by taking on the management of the GCM’s monitoring, evaluation and capacity-building architecture (IOM, 2017e, p. 3).

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  45

CONCLUSION This chapter has highlighted the IOM’s many endeavours to establish NMM through the MiGOF. This blueprint for states’ conduct in relation to migration attempted to build non-binding but nonetheless consistent and recurring ties between all stakeholders in order to structure and stabilise migration governance. Through principle-based regulation, the dissemination and dilution of states’ authority, and reliance on informal institutions, the MiGOF aimed to reshape states’ conduct around the goal of facilitating mobility, despite the complexity, uncertainty and politicisation of migration. Although it convinced its member states to endorse the MiGOF, the IOM’s ability to steer, monitor and assist in the construction of NMM was still faced with the challenge of state sovereignty. The long-term success of the MiGOF depends on the level of autonomy and agency of the IOM. However, the adoption of the GCM in December 2018 did not result in a strengthening of the IOM’s capacity to establish its NMM. Its member states rejected the organisational reform that it requested, and the UNSG watered down its role in the implementation of the GCM by including it alongside 37 other UN agencies in the UN Network on Migration. In light of the MiGOF’s inability to consistently encompass the role of states, it might appear to be insignificant. Furthermore, its conceptual underpinning is far from innovative, as it mirrors the 2004 International Agenda for Migration Management. This document, produced by the informal Berne Initiative, which gathered around 100 states with the IOM acting as its secretariat, laid out 20 non-binding principles for ‘migration management systems’ (Berne Initiative, 2005, p. 24). The IOM similarly outlined most of the MiGOF’s ways of functioning in 2002 during its first failed bid to convince its member states to endorse a comprehensive migration management approach (IOM, 2002). Thus, the MiGOF might seem to be another unsuccessful attempt to repackage an old plea to manage migration globally. Nevertheless, the MiGOF belongs to the latest wave of multilateral attempts to tackle the crisis of the international order emerging from the twentieth century, by addressing the ‘wicked problems’ of globalisation (Rittel and Webber, 1973, pp. 160–161), such as migration, poverty and climate change. Along with the GCM, the UN Network on Migration, the International Migration Review Forum, the 2030 Agenda, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction, the MiGOF attempts to fill gaps in global governance by encompassing the role of states. Moreover, the state-sanctioned MiGOF has considerable importance for the IOM, as it offers the organisation a means for its ‘self-legitimation’ towards states and other IOs (Korneev, 2018, p. 1674). The MiGOF’s emphasis on pragmatism, objective data and the expert monitoring of state conduct conceivably aims to consolidate the IOM’s expert authority in global migration governance (Robinson, 2020, p. 139). Yet its role in establishing its moral authority should also not be overlooked. As demonstrated by the IOM’s uses of its ‘principled’ framework, the MiGOF serves a broader undertaking, in which the IOM would become less of a functional IO and more of a normative one, like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or the ILO (Hall, 2013, pp. 92–93). Instead of carrying out projects paid for by its (wealthiest) member states, the IOM is attempting to extend its autonomy and agency by safeguarding, implementing and requiring states’ compliance with a growing network of multilateral documents. In times of migration crises and politicisation, the MiGOF allows the IOM to appear as a proponent of universal societal welfare and human rights, rather than of the interests of some of its member states (Hall, 2013, p. 93). This not only shields it against

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46  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance the frequent concerns of NGOs and scholars regarding its respect for migrant rights and alignment with the priorities of the Global North (Pécoud, 2020, p. 13), but also enables the IOM to respond to potential challenges, from other IOs within the UN system, to its claim to lead on migration and safeguard migrant rights without a legal protection mandate (Geiger, 2020, p. 294).

NOTES 1.

The IOM carries out projects for its member states in the areas of refugee resettlement, peacebuilding and crisis stabilisation, the ‘voluntary’ return of migrants, and migration mainstreaming in regional and national policies. Its nine regional offices and hundreds of national (sub)offices design, implement and review them through unstable, voluntary and project-specific contributions from its (wealthiest) member states; amounting to US$1 billion in 2019 (IOM, 2018b, p. 23). The IOM’s headquarters in Geneva supervises these projects and formulates policy and strategy guidelines with the use of fixed state contributions; amounting to 52 million Swiss francs in 2019. In 2016 the IOM became a ‘related organization’ to the UN, whereby it kept its budgetary and policy autonomy, without recognising the UN human rights protection mandate, and while formally accessing various UN bodies. For an overview of the IOM, see Geiger and Pécoud (2020). 2. In 2002, the IOM drafted an unofficial ‘information document’ that laid out a ‘comprehensive migration management approach’ criticising the securitisation of migration following the 9/11 attacks in the US (IOM, 2002). It posited the need to manage mobility rather than preventing it, by outlining appropriate ‘methods’ (for example, international cooperation, the inclusion of all stakeholders, statistical standards) and by requiring the overhaul of the IOM’s role in migration governance. While the IOM succeeded in pushing its member states to debate its role, the member states did not ultimately choose to endorse its proposed elements. Instead, they sidelined the IOM by drafting and officially adopting their own approach in the form of the ‘IOM Strategy’ document (IOM, 2007). This reaffirmed that the IOM must abide by the priorities of member states, as some of them disapproved of its claim to leadership in migration governance (IOM, 2004, p. 1). Undeterred, the IOM took advantage of its member states’ request in 2014 to enhance its reporting processes to convince them of the need for a single document that would define good migration governance and provide a solid foundation for its planning and reporting (IOM, 2016d, p. 1). Finally, the IOM announced that the adoption of the MiGOF ‘implicitly’ replaced the states’ ‘IOM Strategy’ (IOM, 2016d, p. 2). 3. The Council of the IOM is its highest authority, gathering representatives of the member states once a year to determine and review the policies and activities of the organisation. 4. Participant observation conducted at the IOM, 2–3 July 2015.

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  47 Castells, M. (2010). End of millennium: The information age: Economy, society, and culture. Wiley-Blackwell. Cornwall, A. (2007). Buzzwords and fuzzwords: Deconstructing development discourse. Development in Practice, 17(4/5), 471–484. Craig, D., and Porter, D. (2006). Development beyond neoliberalism? Governance, poverty reduction and political economy. Routledge. Czaika, M., and de Haas, H. (2014). The globalization of migration: Has the world become more migratory? International Migration Review, 48(2), 283–323. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. SAGE. EIU (2016). Measuring well-governed migration: The 2016 migration governance index. Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2006). Language and globalization. Routledge. Fougner, T. (2008). Neoliberal governance of states: The role of competitiveness indexing and country benchmarking. Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 37(2), 303–326. Galloway, A. (2011). Are some things unrepresentable? Theory, Culture and Society, 28(7–8), 85–102. Geiger, M. (2020). Possible futures? The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ and the shifting global order. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ in critical perspective (pp. 293–306). Palgrave Macmillan. Geiger, M., and Pécoud, A. (eds) (2020). The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ in critical perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. Ghosh, B. (2000). New international regime for orderly movements of people: What will it look like? In B. Ghosh (ed.), Managing migration: Time for a new international regime? (pp. 220–247). Oxford University Press. Haas, P.M. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination. International Organization, 46(1), 1–35. Hall, N. (2013). Moving beyond its mandate? UNHCR and climate change displacement. Journal for International Organizations Studies, 4(1), 91–108. Hall, N. (2016). IOM and climate change. In Displacement, development, and climate change: International organizations moving beyond their mandates (pp. 87–114). Routledge. Hood, C. (1991). A public management for all seasons? Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19. IOM (2002, 1 November). Elements of a comprehensive migration management approach. Information document MC/INF/255. IOM (2004, 30 November). IOM strategy: Current and future migration realities and IOM’s role – Additional information. Conference room paper CRP/15. IOM (2007, 9 November). IOM strategy. MC/INF/287. IOM (2015a, 22 November). Director General’s report to the 106th session of the Council. C/106/48. IOM (2015b, 4 February). GFMD thematic meeting on the post-2015 development agenda – Session 2: ‘Facilitating well-managed migration’. Discussion brief, Geneva: Global Forum on Migration and Development. IOM (2015c, 4 November). Migration governance framework: The essential elements for facilitating orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people through planned and well-managed migration policies. C/106/40. IOM (2015d, 12 June). Report of the Director General on the work of the organisation for the year 2014. C/106/3. IOM (2015e, 4 December). Resolution no. 1310. C/106/RES/1310. IOM (2015f, 27 September). Statement at the UN summit to adopt the post-2015 development. https://​ www​.iom​.int/​speeches​-and​-talks/​statement​-un​-summit​-adopt​-post​-2015​-development​-agenda. IOM (2016a, 13 June). Annual report for 2015. C/107/4. IOM (2016b). IOM, Economist Intelligence Unit launch ‘migration governance index’. https://​www​.iom​ .int/​news/​iom​-economist​-intelligence​-unit​-launch​-migration​-governance​-index. IOM (2016c, 23 August). MiGOF: The migration governance framework. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​ watch​?v​=​DkQlTUlQA7A. IOM (2016d, 11 October). The IOM strategy and the migration governance framework. WG/ REL/2016/15. Working group on IOM-UN relations and the IOM Strategy, Geneva.

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48  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance IOM (2017a). Free movement of persons and migration project in West Africa builds capacity in migration data collection and management. https://​www​.iom​.int/​news/​free​-movement​-persons​-and​ -migration​-project​-west​-africa​-builds​-capacity​-migration​-data​-collection​-and​-management. IOM (2017b, 18 August). IOM activities in support of the Global Compact for Safe Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) Phase I. IOM (2017c, 9 January). Report on the 106th session of the Council. C/106/54/Rev.1. IOM (2017d). Strengthening international cooperation on and governance of migration: Towards the adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in 2018. IOM (2017e, 28 November). Supplemental input to the UN Secretary General’s report on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Detailed proposed approach for follow-up and review. IOM (2018a). First international forum on migration statistics begins today. https://​www​.iom​.int/​news/​ first​-international​-forum​-migration​-statistics​-begins​-today. IOM (2018b, 14 November). Programme and budget for the year 2019. C/109/6/Rev.1. IOM (2020). Migration policies and governance. https://​ migrationdataportal​ .org/​ themes/​ migration​ -policies​-and​-governance. Jensen, O.B., and Richardson, T. (2003). Making European space: Mobility, power and territorial identity. Routledge. Johnson, S. (2014). The power of framework thinking. http://​ www​ .sean​ -johnson​ .com/​ framework​ -thinking/​. Keck, M.E., and Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Cornell University Press. Köhler, J. (2011). What government networks do in the field of migration: An analysis of selected regional consultative processes. In R. Kunz, S. Lavenex and M. Panizzon (eds), Multilayered migration governance: The promise of partnership (pp. 67–94). Taylor & Francis. Korneev, O. (2018). Self-legitimation through knowledge production partnerships: International Organization for Migration in Central Asia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(10), 1673–1690. Krzyżanowski, M., Triandafyllidou, A., and Wodak, R. (2018). The mediatization and the politicization of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 16(1–2), 1–14. Kunz, R., Lavenex, S., and Panizzon, M. (eds) (2011). Multilayered migration governance: The promise of partnership. Taylor & Francis. Massit-Folléa, F. (2014). Internet et les errances du multistakeholderism. Politique étrangère, (4), 29–41. McKeon, N. (2017). Transforming global governance in the post-2015 era: Towards an equitable and sustainable world. Globalizations, 14(4), 487–503. Peck, J. (2011). Global policy models, globalizing poverty management: International convergence or fast-policy integration? Geography Compass, 5(4), 165–181. Pécoud, A. (2015). Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives. Palgrave Pivot. Pécoud, A. (2020). Introduction: The International Organization for Migration as the NEW ‘UN Migration Agency’. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ in critical perspective (pp. 1–27). Palgrave Macmillan. Powell, R. (1991). Absolute and relative gains in international relations theory. American Political Science Review, 85(4), 1303–1320. Richmond, O.P., and Tellidis, I. (2020). Analogue crisis, digital renewal? Current dilemmas of peacebuilding. Globalizations, 17(6), 935–952. Rittel, H.W.J., and Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. Robinson, C. (2020). Measuring ‘well-governed’ migration: The IOM’s migration governance indicators. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ in critical perspective (pp. 123–143). Palgrave Macmillan. Schein, E.H. (2016). Organizational culture and leadership. John Wiley & Sons. Sokhi-Bulley, B. (2016). Governing (through) rights. Hart Publishing. Steinhardt, G. (2010). The product manager’s toolkit: Methodologies, processes and tasks in high-tech product management. Springer.

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Managing migration by encompassing the role of the state  49 Sum, N.-L. (2009). The production of hegemonic policy discourses: ‘Competitiveness’ as a knowledge brand and its (re-)contextualizations. Critical Policy Studies, 3(2), 184–203. Supiot, A. (2017). Governance by numbers: The making of a legal model of allegiance. Hart Publishing. UCLG (2017, 17 November). The Mechelen declaration on cities and migration. Global Conference on Cities and Migrants. UN (1995). Report of the international conference on population and development. A/CONF.171/13. Yeatman, A. (1998). Interpreting contemporary contractualism. In M. Dean and B. Hindess (eds), Governing Australia: Studies in contemporary rationalities of government (pp. 227–241). Cambridge University Press.

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4. UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance: the case of refugee resettlement Adèle Garnier

INTRODUCTION In contrast to other categories of migrants, refugees are the object of a global regime (Barnett, 2002; Pécoud, 2020a). This regime is organised by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter the Refugee Convention). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the international organisation in charge of monitoring the implementation of the Refugee Convention. UNHCR is thus at the centre of the global refugee regime (Betts et al., 2012). The Refugee Convention codifies who can be classified as a refugee, and this definition has found wide acceptance in the international community. According to UNHCR, there are three ‘durable solutions’ for refugees: voluntary return to the refugee’s country of origin, local integration in the country of first asylum, and refugee resettlement, that is, the voluntary admission by states of refugees from countries in which it is not sustainable for them to stay (Garnier et al., 2018a). This chapter focuses on the role of UNHCR in refugee resettlement. Quantitatively, refugee resettlement reached a peak during the Cold War, whereas in 2022 less than 1 per cent of the world’s refugees were resettled. Most refugees live in countries of first asylum, and more than 74 per cent of refugees are hosted in low- and middle-income countries (UNHCR, 2023). While refugee resettlement is a marginal response to forced displacement, it raises important questions, concerning: the international politics of asylum governance and power relations between international organisations, host (Southern) states, and resettlement (Western/Northern) states; the role of states and other actors in the institutional proliferation of refugee governance; and refugee agency and power relations between UNHCR and refugees. In response to these questions, this chapter makes the following argument: even though refugee resettlement is scarcely codified in ‘hard’ international law, UNHCR has played a key role in the production and global dissemination of expertise on refugee resettlement. Nonetheless, this has not fundamentally challenged state sovereignty, and refugee resettlement has become a marginal instrument of international protection. In a context of increasing regime complexity (Betts, 2009), UNHCR fears the loss of its own leadership role, yet it increasingly recognises the role that other actors play in refugee resettlement. This process has yet to affect the ongoing marginalisation of refugees themselves in policy-making. The argument is developed as follows. The chapter first focuses on the establishment of UNHCR and the expansion of its mandate ahead of the creation of international refugee law during the Cold War, as Western states selectively supported large-scale refugee resettlement. From the late 1980s, states turned away from refugee resettlement, yet, as the next section shows, UNHCR continued to promote resettlement through norm entrepreneurship, opera50 Adèle Garnier - 9781789908077 37:07AM

UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance  51 tional capacity-building, and the creation of new alliances. This did not lead to a substantial increase in refugee resettlement, but it did expand the field of resettlement stakeholders, a development that UNHCR approached with ambivalence in a context of institutional proliferation and mandate competition, as is highlighted next. In the following section we contend that UNHCR’s power over resettled refugees and resettlement candidates remains considerable.

REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT AND UNHCR’S MANDATE EXPANSION DURING THE COLD WAR According to Loescher (2001, p. 35), ‘UNHCR was created by Western governments in such a way that it would neither pose a threat to their sovereignty nor impose new financial obligations on them.’ UNHCR was established in 1950 at a time when refugee resettlement was reaching a peak. Since 1947, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) had coordinated the resettlement of 1 million European displaced persons (DPs). European refugees were seen not only as geopolitical assets but also as contributors to the economics and demographics of settler states in the ‘New World’ and Western European states looking to expand their depleted workforce (Neumann, 2004; Miles and Kay, 1992; Wyman, 1998). The IRO had been largely funded by the United States (US), which was opposed to the establishment of a strong, well-resourced UNited Nations (UN) organisation dealing with refugees (UNHCR, 2000). Resource scarcity and limited operational capacity led UNHCR to partner, early on, with the US-backed Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM)1 and voluntary agencies, and to rely on private funding (Loescher, 2001; Elie, 2010). According to Elie (2010), relationships between ICEM and UNHCR were both cooperative and competitive; UNHCR welcomed ICEM’s operational involvement in the logistics of refugee travel, yet was wary of its attachment to US resources in particular, and of its perceived efforts to coordinate refugee operations. UNHCR’s ambivalence towards inter-organisational partnerships has thus characterised its situation in the field of asylum and migration governance since the UN agency was established. The Refugee Convention provided definitions of both a refugee and refugee rights, while also being limited to the geographical and temporal scope of events that had occurred in Europe before 1951. Article 35 of the Convention stipulated that UNHCR would monitor the implementation of the Convention by states. However, the UN General Assembly had conferred on UNHCR the authority both to ‘provide international protection’ and to ‘seek permanent solutions for refugees’ (UNHCR, 2013). Reichel (2019) argues that UNHCR’s double mandate allowed it to incrementally expand its activities ahead of developments in international refugee law. Such mandate expansion by stealth occurred in the case of Hungarians fleeing the Soviet repression of the Budapest uprising in 1956. UNHCR assisted with the resettlement of Hungarian refugees to 35 countries and coordinated assistance with ICEM and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Austria and Hungary (UNHCR, 2000; Elie, 2010). In 1957, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognising the refugee problem as a global one, established an emergency fund and UNHCR’s Executive Committee, and asked UNHCR to use its ‘good offices’ to assist refugees outside Europe (UNHCR, 2000).2 UNHCR

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52  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance subsequently became heavily involved in postcolonial displacement crises in Africa (Elie and Hanhimaeki, 2008; Sandvik, 2010). The expansion of UNHCR’s operations was a key driver of the adoption of the 1967 Protocol, which removed the geographic and temporal limits previously imposed by the Refugee Convention. Refugee resettlement, however, was not a preferred solution to forced displacement in Africa, apart from the resettlement of Ugandan Asians to Western countries in 1971 (UNHCR, 2000). In contrast to UNHCR’s involvement in Africa, which mostly focused on repatriation and local integration, refugee resettlement was central to the expansion of UNHCR’s activities in Asia, a continent where most countries had then – as still today – ratified neither the Refugee Convention nor the 1967 Protocol. As the Cold War intensified, UNHCR was the lead agency in the coordination of the resettlement of Indo-Chinese refugees fleeing Vietnam from 1975 onwards. Between 1975 and 1979, 200 000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled from first countries of asylum in South-East Asia. This figure more than doubled to 450 000 in 1979–1980 following a 1979 UNHCR-organised Geneva Conference, at which first countries of asylum agreed to continue hosting refugees as long as resettlement was eventually provided (Robinson, 1998). During this period, UNHCR’s budget grew considerably, from $80 million in 1975 to more than $500 million in 1980 (UNHCR, 2000). Although it had started as a small and weak UN organisation, by the mid-1980s UNHCR was the leading UN body on refugee issues. UNHCR’s double mandate had helped it to expand in a way that did not appear to threaten the sovereignty of its major donors. The Cold War context also meant that Western states perceived many (though not all) refugees as geopolitical assets, and this was essential in their support for large-scale refugee resettlement. As the next section will show, the end of the Cold War led UNHCR to increase its role in the increasingly crowded areas of humanitarian governance and migration governance. It was in this context that UNHCR reframed its involvement in refugee resettlement.

UNHCR’S REFRAMING OF REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT AS A STRATEGIC AND HUMANITARIAN SOLUTION FOR THE FEW From the mid-1980s, in the context of economic downturns that saw abrupt interruptions of labour migration programmes and an increase in asylum migration, Western states became increasingly reluctant to admit refugees. Whereas resettlement, as a durable solution to forced displacement, had so far been on an equal footing or preferred to either voluntary repatriation of refugees to their countries of origin or local integration in refugees’ first countries of asylum, it then became the least-preferred durable solution. In 1990, UNHCR counted 15 million refugees worldwide, yet only requested resettlement for 1 per cent of them (Troeller, 1991). In the context of this politics of containment (Shacknove, 1993), UNHCR expanded its humanitarian activities to include refugee populations in camps (Hammerstad, 2000), and engaged in multilateral agreements aimed at achieving an array of durable solutions for specific refugee populations in Africa and Central America, primarily with a focus on local integration and repatriation (Betts, 2008). However, many countries of the Global South facing debt crises and structural adjustment programmes were increasingly reluctant to support the local integration of refugees (UNHCR, 2000). Barnett and Finnemore (2004) contend

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UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance  53 that repatriation became entrenched in UNHCR’s organisational culture, and that boundaries between voluntary and forced repatriation were increasingly blurred. Nonetheless, one multilateral agreement did combine both repatriation and refugee resettlement. The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese refugees (CPA) was adopted in 1989 following a surge in the number of refugees arriving from Vietnam, but also Cambodia and Laos, in neighbouring countries in South-East Asia. Countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia were still reluctant to provide long-term protection, but also considered – as Western states increasingly did too – that the provision of large-scale resettlement was a ‘pull factor’ for refugees. In response, the CPA combined a commitment to resettle refugees who had arrived in countries of first asylum by a specific cut-off date, following an individual assessment of their need for resettlement, and a commitment by Vietnam to readmit those who had not been found to be in need of resettlement (Robinson, 2004). Between 1989 and 1995, 530 000 refugees, mostly from Vietnam and Laos, were resettled (UNHCR, 2000). In 1994, an internal review of UNHCR’s resettlement policy made recommendations to restore its leadership in the domain of refugee resettlement (Fredericksson and Mougne, 1994). The review promoted a redefinition of refugee resettlement as the strategic and humanitarian durable solution of choice: a solution only for refugees for which neither repatriation nor local integration were possible (the humanitarian framing), and a solution to be used in combination with other forms of protection (the strategic framing). This reframing was to be supported by increased internal capacity-building regarding the definition of resettlement criteria and the identification of resettlement candidates who would meet these criteria, as well as outward capacity-building aimed at fostering policy coordination (Fredericksson and Mougne, 1994). These recommendations were largely followed over the course of the next decade. Refugee resettlement was promoted as a humanitarian and strategic solution in key documents outlining UNHCR’s priorities, such as the 2001 Agenda for Protection; regular multilateral forums aimed at fostering exchange and coordination, such as the Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement, in which UNHCR, states and NGOs participate, were established; and the Resettlement Handbook, providing detailed guidelines, refugee selection criteria and resettlement procedures was published for the first time in 2004, and has been regularly updated since then. Operational capacity was also expanded, which also included partnerships with NGOs (Garnier, 2014). UNHCR’s efforts had a global impact on refugee resettlement. The number of countries involved in resettlement increased over time from ten countries with an annual resettlement quota in 1991, to 24 such countries in 2018 (Cellini, 2018). UNHCR was closely involved in the elaboration of the European Union Joint Resettlement Programme (Garnier, 2014) and has been the architect of several multilateral resettlement initiatives, the most successful being the resettlement of over 100 000 Bhutanese refugees from Nepalese refugee camps to resettling states including Canada, the US and Australia (van Selm, 2018). UNHCR has also promoted the local exchange of best practice regarding the integration of resettled refugees in Europe (European Resettlement Network, n.d.). The proportion of UNHCR-assisted resettlement increased from less than half of all resettled refugees in the early 1990s to almost 80 per cent of all resettled refugees in 2012 (UNHCR, 2014, p. 21), and resettlement expanded from 93 300 refugees in 1985 (UNHCR, 1994, table 15) to a peak of 189 300 in 2016 (UNHCR, 2017).3 While UNHCR’s resettlement expertise and its operational role in refugee resettlement expanded, the significance of resettlement in international protection governance diminished. Firstly, the number of refugees under the UNHCR mandate has increased considerably over

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54  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance time, reaching 20.4 million in 2019, and so this growth has far outweighed resettlement growth (UNHCR, 2020a, p. 2). Furthermore, since the end of the Cold War, UNHCR has considerably expanded its activities towards other ‘populations of concern’. In the 1990s, UNHCR was mandated by the UN General Assembly to formally identify stateless people in order to prevent and reduce statelessness, and to protect the rights of the stateless (UNHCR, n.d.). In 2005, in the context of the UN humanitarian governance, UNHCR agreed to take a greater role in the protection of internally displaced persons (IDPs), including the coordination of emergency housing and IDP camp management (Crisp, 2009, 2020). Activities towards asylum seekers and people forcibly displaced by natural disasters or climate change have also expanded, especially since a UNHCR policy statement made in 2009 which labelled climate change as a ‘humanitarian problem’ (Crisp, 2020). As a consequence of the expansion of UNHCR’s mandate and activities, refugees are now largely outnumbered by other ‘populations of concern’. For instance, UNHCR counted 45.7 million IDPs in 2019 (UNHCR, 2020a, p. 2). In addition, the language used by UNHCR has shifted away from a primary emphasis on refugees, to an emphasis on forced displacement and ‘those who flee for their lives’ (Crisp, 2020; UNHCR, 2020b).4 This has further marginalised the significance of refugee resettlement. At the end of the 2010s, resettlement became a salient political issue in several traditional and newer resettling states, and this led to a sharp decline in resettlement numbers. The US, Denmark and Belgium reduced or suspended refugee resettlement as part of broader trends in anti-refugee or anti-immigration politics. The disengagement of the US from resettlement activities was of considerable significance given that the US had been the global resettlement leader since 1980 (Beers, 2020). In contrast, pro-resettlement politics have characterised the Canadian government of Justin Trudeau, to the extent that Canada, between 2018 and 2021, replaced the US as the country resettling the most refugees (IRCC, 2022; MPI, 2023). Canada’s resettlement policies have for decades strongly emphasised private refugee sponsorship alongside government sponsorship. Private refugee sponsorship allows for the resettlement of refugees who are not assisted by UNHCR (Labman, 2020). To an extent, Canada’s resettlement engagement, as well as the increase in the total number of resettling countries, mitigated the US’s retreat from resettlement, and, following the end of COVID-related mobility restrictions, resettlement has increased again under the US Presidency of Joe Biden. Nonetheless, resettlement declined from its peak of 189 300 in 2016 to 107 800 resettled refugees in 2019, then 57 500 in 2021, a year still impacted by COVID-related travel restrictions (UNHCR, 2020a, p. 2; UNHCR, 2022a, p. 3). The proportion of UNHCR-assisted resettled refugees also declined from its peak of 80 per cent of all resettled refugees in 2016 to less than 60 per cent in 2019. In the context of COVID-related travel restrictions, this proportion increased again to more than 68 per cent in 2021.5 Since the end of the Cold War, the global refugee regime has been dominated by the politics of containment of the Global North. In this context, UNHCR has transformed itself into a humanitarian organisation mandated to address the needs of an increasing diversity of displaced populations, mostly within the borders of their own state, many of whom have been in a precarious situation of displacement for several decades. Refugee resettlement has thus become an increasingly marginal instrument of durable protection. In the 1990s and 2000s, UNHCR invested significant resources to reframe resettlement as a durable solution for the most vulnerable, and engaged in partnership with a widening array of resettlement partners, ranging from the local to the global level. The next section focuses on the ambivalence of

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UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance  55 UNHCR towards such partnerships, with a strong emphasis on the 2016 UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants.

INTER-ORGANISATIONAL POLITICS AND THE FRAMING OF RESETTLEMENT In the last decade, scholarship has explored the intersections of the global refugee regime with other fields of international politics, most notably in relation to humanitarianism and international migration, as well as the increasing role of private actors in global refugee governance. Gottwald (2010) and Glasman (2019) have explored UNHCR competition within the ‘humanitarian marketplace’, while Machacek (2018) has looked specifically at relationships between UNHCR and private businesses in this field. Koch (2014), Bradley (2017) and Moretti (2020) have investigated competition and complementariness between UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The lead-up, unfolding, and aftermath of the first ever UN New York Summit for Refugees and Migrants in 2016 provides a useful vantage point for considering UNHCR’s ambivalence towards partnerships in relation to refugee resettlement. The lead-up to this summit illustrates UNHCR’s misgivings about the increasing competition over international refugee affairs. Betts (2017) has argued that the summit’s planning shifted from an original focus on the Syrian crisis to a general summit on refugees and migration because UNHCR refused to be just one co-organiser, alongside other UN organisations and the IOM, of a summit specifically focusing on forced displacement. In the end, the Obama administration organised a specific summit focusing on pledges to offer durable solutions for Syrian refugees, which took place a day after the New York Summit (Garnier, 2016a). Ahead of the Summit, the UN General Assembly unanimously endorsed a resolution making the IOM a ‘related organisation’ to the UN (IOM, 2016). The resolution demonstrated the growing legitimacy and significance of the IOM in international migration governance (Pécoud, 2020b). At the end of the summit, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the New York Declaration. The Declaration reiterated principles at the core of the global refugee regime and the global human rights regime, and also anticipated the adoption of the more specific, but equally non-binding Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) and Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). Both were adopted in December 2018. Shortly after the New York Summit, UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Volker Türk (2016), hailed the elaboration of the GCR as a ‘minor miracle’ in a global context of rising hostility to refugees. By contrast, several scholars, such as Hathaway (2018) and Hyndman and Reynolds (2020), consider that the Compact endorsed the status quo, including the containment by rich states of refugees and ‘unwanted migrants’ in the Global South. Hyndman and Reynolds (2020) also stress the ‘top-down’ labelling of the Global Compact on Refugees compared to the more participatory name of the Global Compact for Migration.6 As for refugee resettlement, UNHCR pursued partnerships to expand these activities in a context in which states were opposed to hard global resettlement targets. In 2016, a draft of the summit report to the UN Secretary-General set out a goal to resettle 10 per cent of refugees, but this target was abandoned in the final document (Garnier, 2016a). Instead, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants endorsed the concept of ‘complementary pathways’, as it recommended to expand the range of legal pathways for refugee admissions

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56  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance so as to be able to meet UNHCR’s annual resettlement needs, including the use of private sponsorship and labour mobility schemes for refugees (sections 77–79). At the New York Summit, UNHCR supported ‘complementary pathways’ mechanisms, most notably the Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, which aims to strengthen community sponsorship across the world, and is a joint initiative of UNHCR, the Government of Canada, two private foundations and a Canadian university.7 The Obama summit included pledges by 52 states to expand the protection space, including resettlement pledges, and showcased a joint UNHCR‒IOM initiative aimed at supporting emerging resettlement countries, which the US ‘helped establish’ (White House, 2016).8 ‘Expanding access to third-country solutions’ is one of the four key objectives of the GCR, alongside easing the pressure on host countries, promoting conditions of safe return to countries of origin, and promoting refugee self-reliance. The GCR’s language on refugee resettlement is also less vague than that found in the New York Declaration (Garnier et al., 2018b). It suggests the use of numerical targets to speed up the processing of the UNHCR resettlement caseload, and recommends that states set aside 10 per cent of their resettlement caseload for cases deemed urgent by UNHCR. The GCR laid out a three-year strategy on resettlement and complementary pathways, which was based on the use of partnerships, as it was jointly coordinated by the UNHCR Assistant Commissioner for Protection and representatives from the United Kingdom government and the British Refugee Council, which were co-chairs of the Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement in 2018. This three-year strategy was again firmer than the GCR, as it specified numerical objectives for resettlement growth for the next decade. The attainment of these objectives was set to result in 150 000 UNHCR-assisted resettlement departures and 300 000 admissions following complementary pathways by 2028, and a doubling of countries involved in such third-country refugee admissions (UNHCR, 2019). To achieve these objectives, numerous pledges by countries and the private sector were made at the first Global Refugee Forum in December 2019.9 Global Refugee Forums were set to occur regularly in order to monitor progress in achieving the objectives of the GCR (Sewell, 2019), and the first forum since 2019 is set to occur in December 2023. The final report of the three-year strategy noted that due to COVID but also limited multi-stakeholder engagements, resettlement targets for 2019–2021 had not been met. Achieving the 2028 target was seen as not impossible but challenging (UNHCR 2022b). In a context of continuing politics of containment by states of the Global North, UNHCR has embraced the expansion of the definition of refugee resettlement, or at least its co-existence with other modes of admission of refugees. In this context, UNHCR strongly promotes collaboration with other partners, including the IOM and the private sector. Yet it seems that UNHCR has fewer qualms about embracing operational collaboration, or even the delegation of tasks to other actors, than it has about embracing joint policy design. UNHCR appears especially wary of competition with the IOM. It can be argued that UNHCR’s ambivalence is not unlike what Elie (2010) observed in relations between UNHCR and ICEM during the Cold War, although both organisations have considerably grown since that time, while global migration governance has become considerably more complex. As the next section will show, this growing complexity has not significantly strengthened the agency of resettlement candidates and resettled refugees, even though UNHCR increasingly emphasises refugee resilience and self-reliance.

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UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance  57

THE CONTINUING MARGINALISATION OF REFUGEE AGENCY Resettlement candidates and resettled refugees have sought individual and collective negotiations with UNHCR, in order to discuss their individual resettlement cases and to assert their collective voice in the management of affairs in refugee camps, but also to promote greater refugee participation in global refugee policy. However, ideological as well as institutional factors continue to considerably impede refugee agency. Refugee resettlement is organised around the selection of resettlement candidates, many of whom are identified by UNHCR. Refugees have never had a formal say in the establishment of classification criteria, which since the 1990s have emphasised vulnerability, as discussed in section 2. As such, resettlement is partly an exercise in ‘needology’, in which experts aim to render suffering objectively commensurable (Glasman, 2019) and claim to know ‘what’s best’ for beneficiaries. With an emphasis on objectified individual suffering, the role of the individual is prioritised over the differentiated needs of social and political collectives, yet at the same time the individual agency of the sufferer is denied. Top-down humanitarian categorisation ignores self-determination and creates artificial separations between the deserving and the undeserving (Hyndman and Reynolds, 2020). By contrast, the organisations deploying this ideology have considerable power. A significant body of scholarship has emphasised the marginalisation of individual and collective refugee agency in UNHCR-managed refugee camps (Hyndman, 2000; Moulin and Nyers, 2007; Holzer, 2012). Such imbalances are also stark within the resettlement process. UNHCR has a considerable impact on resettlement outcomes, as it is responsible for refugee status determination as well as identification for referral to resettling countries. At the same time, UNHCR participates in the ‘patchwork governance’ of refugee resettlement: many operational tasks are devolved to others, while other organisations, such as national ministries delivering identification documents, play a considerable procedural role. Refugees can be caught in a bureaucratic labyrinth, particularly in contexts where refugee protection is seen to challenge national security imperatives (Balakian, 2020). Sandvik (2011) and Thomson (2018) address such power imbalances while also focusing on the resources that resettlement candidates mobilise to strengthen their own agency, including carefully preserving legal documents, but also recourse to spiritual resources. The scarcity of opportunities for resettlement has also led to several cases of corruption within UNHCR in local resettlement offices, which have led to investigations being conducted by the agency’s headquarters. One response to corruption has been to emphasise the need to prevent refugee fraud in order to ensure that only ‘real refugees’ would be resettled. Documents produced by the agency’s headquarters have also increasingly emphasised accountability. However, accountability is defined in relation to donor and host states rather than to resettlement candidates. The latter have no means of legal recourse if they wish to contest a UNHCR decision on their resettlement case (Garnier, 2016b). Bureaucratic complexity also reduces the accountability of individual organisations (Balakian, 2020). Scholarship is critical of the impact on refugee agency of UNHCR’s increased emphasis on refugee self-reliance, which is one of the core objectives of the GCR. Krause and Schmitt (2020) argue that UNHCR’s definitions of self-reliance and resilience in its global policy documents, which are similar to the criteria of vulnerability that had been at the core of resettlement activities since the 1990s, have not been made in consultation with refugees, who thus remain voiceless in the formulation of this policy. Pinock et al. (2020) also note that the

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58  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance concept of self-reliance which has been promoted by UNHCR mostly focuses on economic self-reliance, while neglecting social and political dimensions. The promotion in the GCR of complementary pathways, with an emphasis on labour mobility, also raises problems in terms of refugee agency. Labour migration channels are increasingly temporary, and generally do not allow for family reunion, whereas refugee resettlement has traditionally been framed as a ‘durable solution’ and often prioritises families (Martin and Ruhs, 2019). Finally, scholars question whether the emphasis on partnerships, discussed above, has made any substantive difference to collective refugee agency. Nominally, refugee-led organisations, in which resettled refugees are strongly represented, are increasingly visible in global humanitarian and refugee policy forums. Several refugee-led organisations were invited to contribute to some consultations during the production of the GCR, and the Global Refugee-Led Network had a strong presence at the Global Refugee Forum in December 2019 (Pinock et al., 2020). The global border closure triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic also led UNHCR to recognise the strategic role of refugee-led organisations, which were essential in the field at a time when UNHCR and other international organisations temporarily suspended their activities (Alberghini, 2020; Garnier et al., 2020). However, Alberghini (2020) and Alio et al. (2020) note that strategic recognition has not been accompanied by expanded funding. UNHCR’s COVID-19 funding plan envisaged funding transfers to more ‘formal’ national and international organisations (Alio et al., 2020). In practice, UNHCR does not appear to materially support policy co-design by refugee-led organisations, but rather to embrace traditional top-down delegation of tasks to established agencies. In sum, in spite of an increased emphasis on refugee agency in UNHCR policies, the agency of resettlement candidates and resettled refugees remains marginalised by the very ideology at the core of modern humanitarianism: its top-down institutional practices, as well as institutional inertia, and UNHCR’s focus on formal partnerships in policy deployment. It remains to be seen what the implications for refugee agency will be from the current tension at the core of the GCR between, on the one hand, an emphasis on vulnerability in UNHCR-sponsored refugee resettlement, and on the other hand, an emphasis on self-reliance in complementary pathways. Policy diversity (or policy incoherence) might strengthen the agency of specific types of refugees, such as the highly skilled. However, it is doubtful that this would apply to refugee agency more broadly.

CONCLUSION This chapter has focused on the role of UNHCR in the global governance of refugee resettlement, a form of international protection that is based on the voluntary commitment of states to offer resettlement places, and it has situated UNHCR’s involvement in refugee resettlement more broadly in the domains of humanitarian governance and the governance of forced displacement. I have argued that UNHCR’s role in refugee resettlement has considerably increased since the end of the Second World War: firstly, through mandate expansion to include refugees beyond the original limits of the Refugee Convention, in an international context auspicious to refugee resettlement; then later through the production and dissemination of expertise, as international politics turned away from refugee resettlement as a large-scale form of humanitarian protection. However, UNHCR’s expansion of its role in humanitarian governance, and to encompass displaced persons who are not (yet) classed as

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UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance  59 refugees, has contributed to the marginalisation of refugee resettlement as a ‘durable solution’ to forced displacement. I have also shown that UNHCR has embraced the concept of partnerships with states, but also with inter-governmental and non-governmental actors. In practice, UNHCR has been open to partnerships at the operational level, yet has been wary of perceived strategic competition, particularly with the IOM and its predecessors. Such ambivalence has had problematic consequences for the promotion of international protection, and thus for the very achievement of UNHCR’s mandate. Refugees themselves, in spite of the recent evolution of resettlement policies away from a primary focus on vulnerability, and towards a double emphasis on vulnerability and self-reliance, remain marginal voices in global policy-making. Nonetheless, their presence is increasingly visible in global policy forums, and the operational role of grassroots, refugee-led organisations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has also become more visible, at a time when UNHCR and other international agencies retreated from the field. However, it remains to be seen whether this increased visibility will lead to more equal partnerships.

NOTES 1. ICEM later became the International Organization for Migration (IOM). 2. UNHCR activities still exclude Palestinian refugees, as the mandate for this group lies with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). 3. There was a significant decline in refugee resettlement following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. However, resettlement recovered and increased over the following decade (UNHCR, 2013, p. 21). 4. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​gRcThRFDvAs. 5. This is calculated using the global resettlement figure available in the annual UNHCR Global Trends report and data from the UNHCR Resettlement Data Finder database, available at https://​ www​.unhcr​.org/​resettlement​-data​.html. 6. The GCR also envisaged the establishment of a global academic network on refugees (the Global Academic Interdisciplinary Network, GAIN) in order to foster the development of academic knowledge supporting the objectives of the GCR, to disseminate this knowledge, and to promote solidarity with the forcibly displaced. Crisp (2018), a former head of the UNHCR Research and Evaluation section, notes that GAIN has noble objectives but that ‘academic research plays a very modest role in the formulation of UNHCR policies and the design of its programmes’ compared to other factors such as funding and the shifting priorities of executive management. 7. https://​refugeesponsorship​.org/​who​-we​-are. 8. At the time of the summits, the White House had developed a specific website focusing on welcoming refugees (see Garnier, 2016a). The site disappeared with the advent of the Trump presidency. 9. The Digital Platform of the Global Refugee Forum allows for pledge tracking. As of April 2023, it included 86 pledges with the keyboard ‘resettlement’. A quarter of the pledges were fulfilled and about 70 per cent were in progress. See https://​g​lobalcompa​ctrefugees​.org/​pledges​-contributions.

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UNHCR and the transformation of global refugee governance  61 Gottwald, M. (2010). Competing in the humanitarian marketplace: UNHCR’s organizational culture and decision-making processes. New Issues in Refugee Research series, 190. UNHCR. Hammerstad, A. (2000). Whose security? UNHCR, refugee protection and state security after the Cold War. Security Dialogue, 31(4), 391–403. Hathaway, J. (2018). The global cop-out on refugees. International Journal of Refugee Law, 30(4), 591–604. Holzer, E. (2012). A case study of political failure in a refugee camp. Journal of Refugee Studies, 25(2), 257–281. Hyndman, J. (2000). Managing displacement: Refugees and the politics of humanitarianism. University of Minnesota Press. Hyndman, J., and Reynolds, J. (2020). Introduction: Beyond the global compacts: Reimagining protection. Refuge, 36(1), 66–74. IOM (2016). IOM becomes ‘related organization’ of United Nations. https://​www​.iom​.int/​news/​iom​ -becomes​-related​-organization​-united​-nations. IRCC. (2022). 2022 annual report to parliament on immigration. Government of Canada. https://​ www​.canada​.ca/​en/​immigration​-refugees​-citizenship/​corporate/​publications​-manuals/​annual​-report​ -parliament​-immigration​-2022​.html. Koch, A. (2014). The politics and discourse of migrant return: The role of UNHCR and IOM in the governance of return. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(6), 905–923. Krause, U., and Schmitt, H. (2020). Refugees as actors? Critical reflections on global refugee policies on self-reliance and resilience. Journal of Refugee Studies, 33(1), 22–41. Labman, S. (2020). Crossing law’s border: Canada’s refugee resettlement program. UBC Press. Loescher, G. (2001). The UNHCR and world politics: State interest vs institutional autonomy. International Migration Review, 35(1), 33–56. Machacek, M. (2018). Global public‒private partnerships and the new constitutionalism of the refugee regime. Global Constitutionalism, 7(2), 204–235. Martin, P., and Ruhs, M. (2019). Labour market realism and the global compacts on migration and refugees. International Migration, 57(6), 80–90. Miles, R., and Kay, D. (1992). Refugees or migrant workers? European volunteer workers in Britain, 1946–1951. Routledge. Moretti, S. (2020). Between refugee protection and migration management: The quest for coordination between UNHCR and IOM in the Asia-Pacific region. Third World Quarterly. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​01436597​.2020​.1780910. Moulin, C., and Nyers, P. (2007). ‘We live in a country of UNHCR’: Refugee protests and global political society. International Political Sociology, 1(4), 356–372. MPI. (2023). U.S. annual refugee resettlement ceilings and number of refugees admitted, 1980–present. Migration Policy Institute. https://​www​.migrationpolicy​.org/​programs/​data​-hub/​charts/​us​-refugee​ -resettlement. Neumann, K. (2004). Refuge Australia. UNSW Press. Pécoud, A. (2020a). Philosophies of migration governance in a globalizing world. Globalizations, 18(1), 103–119. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14747731​.2020​.1774316. Pécoud, A. (2020b). Introduction: The international organization for migration as the new ‘UN Migration Agency.’ In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN Migration Agency’ in critical perspective (pp. 1–27). Palgrave Macmillan. Pinock, K., Betts, A., and Easton-Calabria, E. (2020). The global governed? Refugees as providers of protection and assistance. Cambridge University Press. Reichel, E. (2019). Navigating between refugee protection and state sovereignty: Legitimating the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In K. Dingwerth, A. Witt, I. Lehmann, E. Reichel and T. Weise (eds), International organisations under pressure: Legitimating global governance in challenging times (pp. 195–231). Oxford University Press. Robinson, W.C. (1998). Terms of refuge: The Indo-Chinese exodus and the international response. Zed Books. Robinson, W.C. (2004). The comprehensive plan of action for Indochinese refugees, 1989–1997: Sharing the burden and passing the buck. Journal of Refugee Studies, 17(3), 319–333.

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62  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Sandvik, K.B. (2010). A legal history: The emergence of the African resettlement candidate in international refugee management. International Journal of Refugee Law, 22(1), 20–47. Sandvik, K.B. (2011). Blurring boundaries: Refugee resettlement in Kampala: Between the formal, the informal, and the illegal. PoLAR, 34(1), 11–32. Sewell, A. (2019). Key takeaways from the first Global Refugee Forum. New Humanitarian. https://​ www​.thenewhumanitarian​.org/​news/​2019/​12/​20/​Global​-refugee​-forum​-takeaways. Shacknove, A. (1993). From asylum to containment. International Journal of Refugee Law, 5(4), 516–533. Thomson, M.J. (2018). ‘Giving cases weight’: Congolese refugees’ tactics for resettlement selection. In A. Garnier, L.L. Jubilut, and K.B. Sandvik (eds), Refugee resettlement: Power, politics and humanitarian governance (pp. 203–222). Berghahn. Troeller, G. (1991). UNHCR resettlement as an instrument of international protection: Constraints and obstacles in the arena of competition for scarce humanitarian resources. International Journal of Refugee Law, 3(3), 564–578. Türk, V. (2016). A minor miracle: A new global compact on refugees. Address at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney. https://​www​ .unhcr​.org/​admin/​dipstatements/​583404887/​minor​-miracle​-new​-global​-compact​-refugees​.html. UNHCR. (1994). Populations of concern: A statistical overview. UNHCR. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​ 3bfa33154. UNHCR (2000). The state of the world’s refugees 2000. UNHCR. UNHCR (2013). Note on the mandate of the High Commissioner for Refugees and his Office. UNHCR, Division of International Protection. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​protection/​basic/​526a22cb6/​mandate​ -high​-commissioner​-refugees​-office​.html. UNHCR (2014). Global trends 2013. UNHCR. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​statistics/​country/​5399a14f9/​ unhcr​-global​-trends​-2013​.html. UNHCR (2017). Global trends. Forced displacement in 2016. UNHCR. UNHCR (2019). The thee-year strategy on resettlement and complementary pathways. UNHCR. https://​ www​.unhcr​.org/​protection/​resettlement/​5d15db254/​three​-year​-strategy​-resettlement​-complementary​ -pathways​.html. UNHCR (2020a). Global trends in forced displacement 2019. UNHCR. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​statistics/​ unhcrstats/​5ee200e37/​unhcr​-global​-trends​-2019​.html. UNHCR (2020b). Who we are: 70 years of the UN Refugee Agency. UNHCR. https://​www​.youtube​.com/​ watch​?v​=​gRcThRFDvAs. UNHCR (2022a). Global trends in forced displacement 2021. UNHCR. https://​data​.unhcr​.org/​en/​ documents/​details/​93791. UNHCR (2022b). Final report. The three-year strategy on resettlement and complementary pathways. UNHCR. https://​g​lobalcompa​ctrefugees​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​2022​-03/​Three​%20Year​%20Strategy​ %20​%282019​-2021​%29​%20End​%20Report​_Final​%20for​%20copy​%20edit​_final​-compressed​.pdf. UNHCR (2023). Refugee data finder: key indicators. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​refugee​-statistics/​. UNHCR (n.d.). How UNHCR helps stateless people. UNHCR. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​how​-unhcr​-helps​ -stateless​-people​.html. van Selm, J. (2018). Strategic use of resettlement: Enhancing solutions for greater protection? In A. Garnier, L.L. Jubilut and K.B. Sandvik (eds), Refugee resettlement: Power, politics, and humanitarian governance (pp. 31–45). Berghahn. White House (2016). Fact sheet on the leaders’ summit on refugees. https://​obamawhitehouse​.archives​ .gov/​the​-press​-office/​2016/​09/​20/​fact​-sheet​-leaders​-summit​-refugees. Wyman, M. (1998). DPs: Europe’s displaced persons, 1945–51. Cornell University Press.

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5. The global governance of labour mobility: the role of the International Labour Organization Nicola Piper

As the oldest specialised agency in the history of the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organization (ILO) has spearheaded the multilateral rights-based governance of migration in relation to the world of work and employment. Since its inception in 1919,1 ‘non-citizen’ workers have been part of its mandate, and migration is explicitly mentioned in its founding constitution. Being a normative institution, the ILO was also the first standard-setting international organisation in the field of labour rights to be tasked with the coordination, development and promotion of international labour standards across countries. In line with its founding principles and remit, based on the core principles of non-discrimination and equality, the ILO, ever since its foundation, has engaged in promulgating new labour standards and programming aimed at the protection and empowerment of migrant workers. It has done so in two major ways: via group-specific instruments aimed at migrant workers (such as ILO Conventions 97 and 143), and via sectoral conventions (such as ILO C189 on domestic work; see also Chapter 21 by Mahon in this Handbook) or other thematic conventions (such as those on private recruitment, labour inspection, equal pay, and so on) that affect migrants as workers channelled into under- or unregulated niches of labour markets. Most migration is related to work in some form – approximately two-thirds of the world’s 258 million migrants are in the labour force2 – and the lack of job opportunities in countries of origin is among the key drivers of migration. Issues such as fair recruitment, non-discriminatory employment practices and labour protections, therefore, are historically not new issues. What is new, however, is the revival and intensification of efforts made over the last two decades at the global level to address what is referred to as ‘unsafe’ migration. The ILO has engaged with these global efforts and its framework been drawn upon to support their design and execution. After decades of constant, often increasing flows of international migration for the purpose of work, global institutions have indeed come to recognise that a better understanding of the transnational character of labour hiring and employment practices is essential for effective migration governance in terms of addressing the drivers of migration (often referred to as its root causes), alongside the negative consequences of migration (that is, discrimination, rights violations and exploitation). This recognition is evident from the latest commitments made by the global community in the form of the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda 2030 – particularly Goal 8 on ‘Decent Work’, but also the explicit references to migration in relation to a number of other goals3 – as well as through the inclusion of the issue of decent work for migrants in the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (Objective 6), adopted in 2018. These developments suggest that a certain level of consensus at the global level has emerged about the need for concrete action to regulate the work and employment-related issues involved in migration according to commonly agreed principles, 63 Nicola Piper - 9781789908077 37:09AM

64  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance with the aim of countering the proliferation of various forms of exploitation and discrimination, which lead to the deepening of inequality. What has emerged over the last decades in the realm of global migration governance, however, is an incipient imbalance between, on the one hand, policies aimed at controlling the exit and entry of people across borders – the so-called ‘management of migration’ paradigm – and, on the other hand, policies designed to uphold labour protections for migrants, who are over-represented among the low-wage, highly precarious workforce labouring in under- or unregulated sectors of the labour market.4 These approaches are designed or promoted by different actors who have joined the migration policy arena over time. The question that this observation raises is why an international organisation such as the ILO has been unable to close the gap between the dominant management approach, with its economically instrumentalist objectives, and the rights-based approach to hiring and employment practices in migration. After providing a short historical background to the ILO’s loss of its monopoly on migration policy, the main purpose of this chapter is to trace the ILO’s positioning in relation to the outcome of recent global efforts made in response to the challenges of migration, starting in the early 2000s, when the UN decided to put international migration back on its agenda. Those who participate in shaping migration policy, which include states, corporations, employers, and the array of labour market intermediaries that facilitate labour mobility, have focused their efforts on capturing the material benefits generated through labour migration, minimising the costs they can incur, and frequently endeavouring to externalise the responsibility that arises in the course of managing migrants and/or migration. This has left an increasingly narrow space for affected migrants to make their voices heard via advocacy organisations (including unions). This chapter discusses these institutional and political challenges through the lens of the ILO, in order to analyse the reasons for the imbalance between the migration and labour dimensions involved in the global governance of worker mobility. Since the ILO is situated at the intersection of capital, labour and state interests, as evident from its unique tripartite make-up, its standard-setting and promotional activities are influenced by the need to be attentive to business sensitivities. An assessment of the ILO’s position in promoting its labour standards applied to migrant workers must therefore include more than the sketching of its political structure and processes. Attention must also be given to shifts within the global economy and migrant labour’s role in relation to supply chain capitalism. It is for this reason that this chapter is based on a regulatory analysis complemented by an apolitical economic perspective.

INSTITUTIONALISING GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE THROUGH THE LENS OF THE ILO The ILO was established in 1919, at the time of the Treaty of Versailles and alongside the creation of the League of Nations, with the aim of developing and regulating international agreements on labour protection (Hughes and Haworth, 2011). Its broad political goals were the direct result of the experience of the First World War: to build world harmony and world peace through social justice and worldwide improvement in working and living conditions by harnessing economic interest in fair international exchanges on a level playing field. ILO policy is still guided by the principle of connecting social values with the concept of inter-

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The global governance of labour mobility  65 national regulation, in the context of an increasingly interdependent world in political and economic terms (Senghaas-Knobloch, 2004). Since its inception in 1919, the well-being of migrant workers has been part of the ILO’s overall mandate as the specialised UN agency governing the world of work (Cholewinski, 2018), as evident from its founding constitution, which refers to the ‘protection of the interests of workers when employed in countries other than their own’.5 The ILO’s work on orderly migration and population distribution dislocation was seen as a contribution to the realisation of peace and social justice. The ILO’s conception of migration as a fundamental component of basic development has been part of its work on advancing socioeconomic standards right from the start. Freedom of movement was embraced by post-war socialism, with a particular emphasis on the economic value of Europe’s surplus population, while the refugee issue was of secondary importance. The first General Director, Albert Thomas, was keenly interested in developing the ILO into a supranational authority that would regulate migration movements in fairly impartial terms (Thomas, 1983). The ILO’s work on migration grew after the Second World War, and several migration conferences in the 1940s endorsed its institutional expansion in this policy field. It was the intention of its leaders to see the ILO cover all activities connected with migration and, in so doing, become a mammoth organisation, extending over all labour-related aspects in the fight for worldwide economic and social betterment. The ILO took an increasingly prominent role in leading the discussion on the international coordination of migration policy and activities during the 1950s. For example, it invited other international organisations to its Preliminary Migration Conference, where it was recommended that the ILO should ‘intensify its present activities in the field of migration’. However, some governments, notably those of France, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US), were concerned that too much international coordination would interfere with their national migration policies, especially their right to select immigration according to their own standards and criteria. The US in particular became cautious of being drawn into the ILO’s expansionism in the name of internationalism, let alone humanitarianism (Karatani, 2005). In 1951, the ILO held an inter-governmental conference in Naples at which it advanced its plan for becoming a comprehensive agency that would incorporate refugees within a wider migration framework (Karatani, 2005). The ILO‒UN combined plan recommended international cooperation under the leadership of a single international organisation, the ILO. The idea was that the ILO would be responsible for migrants, including refugees, in their role as workers. However, the Naples conference was a total failure for the ILO, with the US essentially quashing the ILO‒UN quest to build a single comprehensive regime for people on the move. This was primarily because the US Congress was not prepared to release major funding to an organisation whose members included the Soviet Bloc states. Instead of supporting the ILO, the US decided to create an alternative organisation, the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME). This group later became the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), known today as the International Organization for Migration (IOM). In this manner, the US was able to display a political commitment to protect refugees, especially those fleeing from communist regimes. As a result of the creation of the PICMME (now the IOM), the distinction between migrants and refugees emerged as a way of restructuring and dissolving the pre-war refugee protection organisations.

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66  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance After that point, the debate about whether migrants (as opposed to refugees) need some sort of international protection did not reoccur at the UN level until the early 1970s. From then onwards, the UN began to involve itself (as a separate entity from its specialised agencies) more proactively in the protection of migrants, and in 1990 – after a full decade of drafting and negotiating – it even adopted its own convention: the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. The UN also revived the debate on the link between migration and development, leading to the first High-Level Dialogue on this topic in 2006, followed by the decision to hold the Global Forum on Migration and Development annually as an extra-UN space for states to share information and engage in dialogue, facilitated by the IOM. This forum played an important role in paving the way to the Global Compact for Migration, which was adopted in 2018 (Bingham, 2019). The IOM serves as the secretariat for the UN Migration Network, devoted to supporting and surveying the implementation process. The ILO is involved in all of these initiatives, but is not at their forefront. This has given rise to concerns about the ILO’s ability to promote and advance a rights-based approach to labour migration in this multi-actor field of global migration governance (Hall, 2018). Broader economic and political developments have impacted upon the obstacles that the ILO has been facing.

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SHIFTS SHAPING THE GLOBAL REGULATION OF LABOUR MIGRATION In the years following the Second World War, international migration manifested both the economic interdependencies and restrictionist tendencies that had started to emerge during the decades before the War. The speed and extent of post-war economic expansion was fuelled by a steady stream of migrants into the labour-deprived sectors of the industrialised world. At the same time, governments continued to put in place processes and institutions to foster the control and regulation of population movements, and thus assert control over access to their own labour markets. In addition, Cold War sensitivities motivated the adoption of stringent border controls in late colonial and post-colonial territories (Simeone and Piper, 2018). Shaped by the unprecedented productivity of Fordist production and the influence of the US in the global arena (Hoogvelt, 2001), migration practices and policies in the post-war era demonstrated both continuities and a sharp divergence from the past. Following the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 and the oil crisis of 1973, a series of economic, political and ideological adjustments converged over the next two decades to dramatically reconfigure social relations throughout the world. A vast body of literature in the social sciences and humanities has accumulated since the 1980s to make sense of the implications of these transformations. A summary of this work would be beyond the scope of the present chapter, but suffice to say that, whether the contemporary world is described in terms of globalisation, neoliberalism, postmodernism or postcolonialism, it may be characterised with respect to certain prevalent features: (1) a reconceptualisation of the social contract to prioritise freedom of individual choice over equality and collective well-being; (2) the deregulation of economic activities to maximise profitability through the exchange of capital, goods and services in globally integrated markets; (3) a dismantling of the welfare state accompanied by a shift from legislative to executive forums as the strategic site for policymaking; (4) rapid technological innovation and high-speed transportation, which distort spatio-temporal scales of proximity

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The global governance of labour mobility  67 and influence; and (5) the proliferation of social networks and the diversification of migration flows (Jessop, 1982; Hoogvelt, 2001). As far as migration is concerned, these transformations have led to the consolidation of restrictive migration policies, alongside the revival and expansion of the use of temporary and circular migration schemes by major destination countries. Furthermore, economic globalisation has led to heightened competition internationally, with businesses having to streamline operations and outsource supply chains in a continual scramble to keep costs low. In industrialised countries, trade unions have had varying degrees of success in preventing this ‘race to the bottom’ and ‘social dumping’ by reaching out to migrant workers (Banks, 2006). Yet a shrinking percentage of the world’s workforce is unionised, and most international migrants find work in sectors that are notoriously under-regulated or considered un-organisable, such as the service industries, construction, agriculture and informal sectors. This often results in substandard working conditions relative to those experienced by the local, or native, workforce (ILO, 2011). Although globalisation has accelerated economic growth in much of the developing world, structural adjustment policies and stiff competition among economic actors have also had destabilising effects. Burgeoning industries in smuggling, trafficking and the unethical recruitment of migrant workers must be understood in this light. They are not only an expansion of illegality and entrepreneurial opportunism, but also the effect of a policy environment that approaches poverty and immigration as an inevitable security threat, rather than a problem to be ameliorated through social supports. The ill-conceived development project of the Fordist era has been eclipsed by an equally incoherent optimism that equates economic well-being with growth rates, the privatisation of state functions, international investment, and the stimulation of consumer spending through diaspora remittances. This has therefore supported the promises of the migration‒development nexus debate, which has instrumentalised migration as a tool for furthering ‘development’, understood here in economic rather than human-centred terms (Piper and Rother, 2014). The international institutions that were assembled to support self-sufficient welfare states, along the lines advocated by John Maynard Keynes and T.H. Marshall, have been gradually reorientated towards the project of building interdependent global systems from within their borders. Such an interpretive approach helps to explain why, despite the predictions of early globalisation theorists, the national emphasis on sovereignty has neither withered away nor lost its political valence. Although certain institutional features of liberal governance have been universalised since the fall of the Soviet Bloc, states remain differentially situated within a historically and geographically fractured terrain. The legacy of colonialism makes itself felt through unequal trade relations, diplomatic paternalism, and particular configurations of wealth and power that influence policy outcomes. It was naive to expect that these complex and specific constellations of forces past and present could be evenly addressed through the project of democratisation or the universal application of human rights standards (Merry, 2003; Branco, 2009). At the same time, human rights can also be understood as ‘work in progress’, and therefore as a practice, not only a principle (VeneKlasen et al., 2004). Although formulated through a highly legalistic ritual performance of compromise, international norms can only be realised through the participation of a wide range of social actors. In particular, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), activists and community leaders serve as critical knowledge brokers, translating transnational ideals into local strategies, whilst also pushing for the (re-)interpretation of the meaning of rights in order to ensure greater inclusion (Merry, 2006). Indeed, the current prevalence of a human rights discourse within domestic and international politics can

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68  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance be attributed to the proliferation of transnational advocacy networks following the end of the Cold War. This phenomenon has been termed ‘globalisation from the bottom up’. For the migrant rights movement in particular, global civil society has provided the vantage point from which to expose the structural vulnerability of non-citizens (Piper, 2015). In order to influence global regulation and the functioning of institutions, however, the cooperation of small players such as civil society organisations (CSOs) with bigger players is a necessary requirement. It is in this context that the ILO has an important role to play. In line with scholarship on global governance and the role of international organisations (e.g., Jakovleski et al., 2019; Drahos, 2017), scholars researching the ILO in particular view its mandate as revolving primarily around the fulfilment of activities in relation to three core roles: (1) norm-setting via the establishment of international labour standards; (2) knowledge provision through research and educational activities; and (3) acting as a development agency on the basis of technical assistance programmes and partnerships with other international organisations.6 In addition, international organisations can take on a forum role or function as a platform for dialogue. The ILO is particularly well equipped to do so, as a result of its unique tripartite system. This tripartite structure means that each member state is represented by delegates from the national government, employer organisations and worker organisations (that is, labour unions), who all have speaking and voting rights at its annually held conference (‘Labour Parliament’). The principle of tripartism runs through all operations of the ILO, including the composition of its governing body. Because of this set-up, the ILO has been described as among the most forward-thinking, inclusive and representative of all international institutions (Hughes and Haworth, 2011). Although the ILO was created as a compromise between capital and labour, and was therefore never meant to be an institution advocating for radical change, it is nonetheless the most inclusive institution of its kind, on the basis of its social dialogue principle and its tripartite decision-making. This has allowed the ILO to be consistently at the forefront in championing social issues with a view to alleviating the negative outcomes of capitalism; an endeavour for which the ILO received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969. However, the ILO has also been embroiled in and frustrated by superpower politics and the effects of neoliberal economic globalisation and supply chain capitalism (Hughes and Haworth, 2011). Through the leadership and vision of its director generals, the ILO has been able to weather the storms and demonstrate its continuing relevance by managing to have its broad mandate for a fairer globalisation reaffirmed. In order to do so, however, it has had to embark upon a reform process, involving alliances and partnerships with various actors and stakeholders, internal restructuring, and the emulation of so-called new forms of global governance based on, for example, the principle of soft law (Baccaro and Mele, 2012). These developments have had profound implications for the ILO’s work on labour migration. As noted early in the ILO’s history by Albert Thomas, its first Director General (1919–1932), a shift from a laissez-faire approach to the use of policy as a form of protection from migration started to take shape back then, resulting in a sorting and selection of immigrants, who were thus subject to severe restrictions (Thomas, 1983). Throughout the history of the ILO, classic destination (settlement) countries have pushed for policies aimed at ‘population movement control’ at the international level, while emigration countries were left ‘standing cap in hand’ (Boehning, 2010, p. 9). This is an early indication of what has come to be termed the ‘migration management’ paradigm, which lies at the intersection of the

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The global governance of labour mobility  69 securitisation and economic approaches to migration, while eclipsing a rights-based approach (Crépeau and Atak, 2016; Piper, 2015). As far as a rights-based approach is concerned, human rights have generally been described as having an increasingly precarious status within international institutions (Charlesworth, 2017), manifested in the lack of turning ‘rights on paper’ into ‘rights in practice’. This is particularly the case in the arena of international human rights law applied to migrant rights protection, since there is continuous, widespread resistance against the universal concept of the rights of migrants (even more so when they are undocumented) (Basok, 2009). The real or perceived failures of international law on migrants have been amply demonstrated (Darrow and Arbour, 2009), and some scholars have highlighted the strategies that governments have used to flout their international obligations (e.g., Piper and Iredale, 2003). As far as the ILO is concerned, a strong rights-based approach has fallen victim to the broad compromise between employers, worker organisations and governments, in an era in which neoliberal thought and policy frameworks have come to dominate the global approach to labour protection in general, while simultaneously increasing the necessity for migration in countries that lack employment opportunities and are generally unable to expand publically funded social services. The large, unprotected migrant workforce is wedged between these ‘pull’ and ‘push’ dynamics. Another key challenge that the ILO has had to grapple with has to do with its trajectory from being a primarily European or Western organisation to becoming a truly global one, serving a rising number of heterogeneous member states, such as the newly independent former colonies, and a largely informal workforce in the Global South. These challenges are addressed under the heading of the main policy direction that the ILO has embarked upon since the late 1990s: its Decent Work Agenda. This Agenda was developed by the ILO around four pillars: employment creation, rights at work, social protection and social dialogue. Its broad aim is to streamline the concept that productive work occurs only under conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity, in which rights are protected, adequate remuneration ensured and social coverage provided. It is the outcome of developments in the 1980s, when the ILO found itself in a marginal position, while countries around the world adopted neoliberal economic policies that undermined workers’ rights. The 1990s opened up political opportunities for the ILO to re-emerge as the champion of a fairer globalisation aimed at reducing poverty and achieving inclusive and sustainable development.7 A further innovation on the operational side has been the increased involvement in the ILO of civil society actors outside the framework of conventional worker representation through formal trade unions. This development reflects the size of the informal economy in many of the ILO’s member states. A particularly well-documented example relevant to foreign workers is the case of domestic work and the advocacy efforts that were made leading to the ILO Convention no. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (Fish, 2017; Piper, 2013). A further development that the ILO has had to adjust to as a result of increasing economic globalisation is the appearance of a new diversity of actors operating in the field of standard setting, such as the rising number of campaigns by NGOs against multinational corporations and the shift towards corporate social responsibility or voluntary codes of conduct. This has led to concerns regarding a lack of formal representativeness, and a push towards a model termed ‘Tripartite Plus’. It is also important to note that advocacy for migrants’ labour rights has historically been largely driven by CSOs, and only to a lesser extent by trade unions. This fact was recognised by the 2006 Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration in its Principle 7, which states that governments and social partners should consult with CSOs and migrant

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70  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance associations on labour migration policy, and encourages the forming of networks between them (Wickramasekara, 2015). As a result of these challenges and developments, the ILO’s new policy approach has come to be based on a strong cooperation model, working together with other international actors operating in the field of economic governance (such as the international financial institutions), and forming new partnerships with NGO actors, business actors and governments (Senghaas-Knobloch, 2004; Hughes and Haworth, 2011). The ILO has also adopted this model of forging partnerships in the policy field of international migration, where cooperation with the IOM and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has deepened (Fanning and Piper, 2021). The ILO’s progress along this road, however, has been bumpy and intermittent.

PUSHED TO THE SIDELINES: THE NEAR-ECLIPSING OF THE ILO Over the last two decades, the global governance of migration has become premised upon normative interpretations as well as practices linked to a specific understanding of migration. This understanding equates human mobility with the need to maintain, on the one hand, tight control and a selective approach to immigration; and on the other hand, an increasingly aggressive ‘labour export’ policy that views migration in terms of its potential for economic development in more resource-poor countries of origin. States hold on to their right to manage labour relations and poverty, not by liberalising the free flow of populations across borders, but rather by implementing increasingly restrictive policies that allow for high levels of flexibility in the recruitment of temporary contract workers, hyper-exploited ‘illegal’ migrants, and the maintaining of strong ties to countries of origin that are conducive to producing a steady flow of remittances. In the current scenario, the movement of persons is a function of market forces, restrictive regulation and macro-level politics rather than an aspect of personal choice. A considerable proportion of migrants today are low-wage temporary contract workers (Kuptsch and Martin, 2011) who find themselves in a highly vulnerable situation on several accounts: firstly, due to the severe limitation of their rights, and the exploitation and discrimination that they are exposed to in destination countries; and secondly, because temporary migrants may not only receive limited or no support from their sending countries, but may also face extortion (for instance, by recruitment agencies) before and after their return, as well as in the transit process. It is because of the structural vulnerability and experiential marginalisation of many migrant workers that migrant rights’ organisations from around the world have come together to voice a common critique of the dominant discourse at the global level. This critique is based on the disregard for, or sidelining of, human rights issues by the dominant discourse. It proposes instead the use of a human rights framework, which it considers essential for successful migration management and human development. This critique therefore constitutes a counter-discourse, centred on a rights-based approach to migration, combined with a demand for the ILO to be at the centre of global migration governance. In the normative realm, despite its early standard-setting efforts on labour migration and its two ILO Conventions (no. 97 and 143), the first major signifier of the ILO losing its dominance in this area was the genesis of the UN Migrant Worker Convention and its adoption in 1990. This Convention is rooted in migratory problems and policies of the 1960s and 1970s (Simeone and Piper, 2018; Pécoud, 2018), and concerned with the effects of South‒North

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The global governance of labour mobility  71 migratory movements, particularly issues related to migrant workers in Central and Northern Europe, and undocumented migrants who have crossed borders into North America. Its focus on the traditional mobility of industrial workers is attributable to the ‘mass movement’ phase of migration in the 1950s‒1960s, when migration was directed towards the assembly lines of mass production in the industrialised countries that had experienced significant workforce reductions because of the Second World War. This phase ended in the early 1970s, when oil shocks saw drastic cuts to the inflow of workers accepted on labour market grounds. This period saw enhanced efforts to integrate the established stock of migrants, alongside active incentives for them to return to their country of origin. Tensions increased between migrant destination and source countries: the discrimination that had affected the migrants who stayed, becoming second-class citizens, continued to affect the second generation. The prolonged stay of foreign industrial workers also increased the need for family reunions. Increasingly restrictionist approaches to migration policy saw the transformation of mass movements of – until then – documented workers into irregular migration and unauthorised labour. From the 1970s onwards, certain continuities but also discontinuities can be observed. The realities of contemporary mobility have changed. Examples include: polarisation, which has seen highly skilled workers distinguished from low-skilled workers, with the former typically having access to a more extensive bundle of rights than the latter; diversification with regard to source and destination countries; a rise in intra-regional movement, sometimes referred to as South‒South migration; and increasingly complex policy frameworks. Recent economic and/ or financial crises have led to countries that had recently become major receiving countries, such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, turning into significant sending countries once again. Furthermore, the internationalisation of education and training has led to rising numbers of students and trainees moving to overseas institutions, and also often taking up jobs outside of their birth countries. It has been seen that an individual’s first migration often leads to prolonged periods away from their country of birth due to further migration on to a third destination, and so forth. The facilitation of these trends involves an expanding network of recruitment agencies and labour hiring services. These groups serve an important purpose in terms of matching labour demand and supply, but have also played a part in problems of corruption and exploitation. One of the most prominent examples of this is the experience of migrant workers in Qatar involved in building the physical infrastructure for the FIFA football World Cup 2022, as well as those involved in domestic and service work.8 The existence of expansive labour hiring networks points to the increasing privatisation of the ‘business of migration’, which also entails migrants shouldering the costs of financing their own movement. This does not only affect those labouring in low-wage sectors. There are signs of intra-company transfers being increasingly replaced by hiring practices of ‘self-initiated expatriates’.9 One major result of such trends is a heightened precarity – legally, socially and economically – which affects an ever widening range of categories of migrants. These structural changes help to explain why it was particularly countries of origin of migrant labour in the Global South that were behind the push for the UN to adopt a migrant worker convention. Despite the fact that its comprehensive character surpasses the two migrant worker ILO Conventions, it is regarded as a serious encroachment on the ILO’s field of competence (Boehning, 2010). The ILO was not, however, the preferred platform for countries located in the Global South, for a number of reasons. Among these were the fact that, unlike at the UN, they did not have an automatic majority vote at the ILO. They regarded the ILO Conventions as aiming at preventing unauthorised migration in times of rising restric-

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72  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance tions, thus depriving them of deploying ‘surplus labour’ abroad. Furthermore, many countries in the Global South did not approve of the principle of independent trade union representation. The UN, by contrast, constitutes a state-centric venue where no other actors have voting rights (Boehning, 2010). In parallel to the UN, the other serious rival to the ILO has been the IOM. This became evident at the ILO Congress in 2004, when labour migration was on the agenda with a view to reviving a rights-based approach. The fierce debate about what form this revival should take resulted in a non-binding multilateral framework. Many influential governments in the Global North explicitly expressed preference for the IOM on migration-related issues (source: author fieldnotes), thereby weakening the ILO’s standard-setting mandate in relation to migrant workers.

THE END OF THE ROAD FOR THE ILO’S WORK ON LABOUR MIGRATION? CONCLUDING REMARKS There is a considerable body of literature on the ILO’s role in contemporary global governance in general, assessing and questioning its relevance and effectiveness in relation to three core dimensions of global governance: actors, rules and mechanisms. There is broad consensus that the ILO has successfully carried out internal reform in order to adjust to the contemporary context of heightened economic globalisation and a changing world of work, especially by forming institutional networks and engaging in cooperation with other influential players. With regard to acting in the field of international worker migration, the key challenge for the ILO since its very inception has been to find ways to counter-balance the increasingly restrictive and selective approach to migration policy favoured by certain influential states (referred to as ‘migration management’ since the 1990s) with a comprehensive rights-based approach to labour migration that draws on the ILO’s comprehensive body of universal principles and rights at work. Since it aspires to the status of being (or remaining) ‘the centre for normative action in the world of work; a platform for international debate and negotiation on social policy; and a source of services for advocacy’ (ILO, 1999, p. 2), the ILO has in theory been ideally placed to develop such a rights-based approach to the governance of labour migration. Yet, as demonstrated here, the increasingly complex sphere of global migration governance and its diffuse institutional architecture have severely compromised the ILO’s capacity to do so. At the core of this balancing act lies the tension between global labour market liberalisation and the exercise of national sovereignty to restrict labour mobility, which has exposed a fundamental anomaly in the globalisation project. Internally, the ILO’s tripartite structure has prevented the emergence of a more radical position on equality and social justice for migrant workers. Externally, the evolution of global migration governance into a multi-actor field has resulted in competition and turf wars. Due to the combination of these factors, adjustments had to be made, and the overall results of this process have led, I would argue, to some forms of convergence and collaboration among key international organisations, social partners and civil society organisations. On the issue of rules-making, the ILO’s limited success and occasional failure in promoting a rights-based approach to migration clearly indicates that the ‘rights of states’ continue to prevail over the ‘rights of people’ in relation to border crossings and border controls. The principle of national sovereignty and economic nationalism plays into the hands of smugglers

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The global governance of labour mobility  73 and recruiters, as well as unscrupulous employers, as is evident from the continuation or revival of ‘unfree labour’ and labour exploitation, since migrant workers are typically not free to circulate in the labour markets of foreign countries under temporary visa arrangements tied to specific employers (Piper et al., 2017). As a result of the combined forces hampering the creation of a rights-based approach to migration, the ILO has undoubtedly lost influence in the multi-actor space of global migration governance. Does this mean that the ILO should be written off? Far from it. In fact, all of its standards are intended to be applied to all workers, without distinction. Migrants benefit indirectly from sector-specific instruments, such as ILO C189, since domestic work attracts many foreign workers, and in many instances they are even the majority. Moreover, there is more to the role of the ILO than its work in standard-setting, as outlined above. It is also a knowledge provider and has a vast research capacity. It provides technical cooperation and runs programmes, such as those gathered under its Decent Work Agenda, which aim to broaden choices for prospective migrants (that is, by reducing the drivers of migration) and to assist returning migrants in finding alternative income-generating opportunities. Finally, in its role as a forum or platform, the ILO is an enabling organisation, a facilitator of action involving an array of other organisations. More research is required in all these areas in order to assess the ILO’s impact on labour migration more broadly, and in relation to the full cycle of migration, including pre- and post-migration.

NOTES 1. It should be noted that the ILO’s mandate has never been to promote absolute freedom of movement, that is, a ‘right to migrate’. In international human rights instruments, there is a right to leave one’s country of nationality/birth, and the right to return to one’s country of citizenship, but no commensurate right to enter and remain in a country which one is not a national of. The closest to the latter is the non-refoulement principle set out in the 1951 Refugee Convention, which is also not a right to settlement. 2. The ILO estimates that, in 2017, migrant workers accounted for 164 million of the world’s approximately 258 million international migrants (ILO, 2018). 3. This stands in stark contrast to the SDGs’ predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), from which both decent work and migrants were absent. 4. On migration management, see Geiger and Pécoud (2010, pp. 1–20); and on the lack of ‘labour governance’, see Piper et al. (2017). 5. Use of the term ‘migrant’ was avoided, as it was strongly opposed by certain states, including the US and UK, at that time (Boehning, 2010). 6. Wickramasekara (2015) adds to this list a fourth role, that of advocacy. Opinion is divided on this. Especially in relation to the labour and human rights of migrants, it appears that the role of advocacy rests mostly with labour unions and CSOs. For a more detailed discussion, see Piper (2015). 7. For a detailed discussion of the ILO’s broad institutional shifts, see Hughes and Haworth (2011). 8. See Amnesty International (2019) and Human Rights Watch (2020). 9. Nana Oishi, conference paper delivered at City University of Hong Kong, 30 March 2016.

REFERENCES Amnesty International (2019). Reality check: Migrant workers rights with four years to Qatar 2022 World Cup. https://​www​.amnesty​.org/​en/​latest/​campaigns/​2019/​02/​reality​-check​-migrant​-workers​rights-with-four-years-to-qatar-2022-world-cup/.

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74  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Baccaro, L., and Mele, V. (2012). Pathology of path dependency? The ILO and the challenge of new governance. ILR Review, 65(2), 195–224. Banks, K. (2006). The impact of globalization on labour standards. In J. Craig and M. Lynk (eds), Globalization and the future of labour law (pp. 77–107). Cambridge University Press. Basok, T. (2009). Counter-hegemonic human rights discourses and migrant rights activism in the US and Canada. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 50(2), 179–201. Bingham, J. (Ed). (2019). Engine. Exchange and action: The Global Forum on Migration and Development. ICMPD. Boehning, R. (2010). A brief account of the ILO and policies on international migration. ILO Century Project. ILO and International Institute for Labour Studies. Branco, M.C. (2009). Economics versus human rights. Routledge. Charlesworth, H. (2017). A regulatory perspective on the international human rights system. In P. Drahos (ed.), Regulatory theory (pp. 357–374). ANU Press. Cholewinski, R. (2018). Working together to protect migrant workers: ILO, the UN Convention and its committee. In A. Desmond (ed.), Shining new light on the UN Migrant Worker Convention. Pretoria University Law Press. Crépeau, F., and Atak, I. (2016). Global migration governance: Avoiding commitments on human rights, yet tracing a course for cooperation. Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 34(2), 113–146. Darrow, M., and Arbour, L. (2009). The pillar of glass: Human rights in the development operations of the United Nations. American Journal of International Law, 103, 446–501. Drahos, P. (ed.) (2017). Regulatory theory: Foundations and applications. ANU Press. Fanning, C., and Piper, N. (2021). Global labor migration: Shifting governance regimes, rights deficits, and the search for order. Labor, 18(1), 67–86. Fish, J. (2017). Domestic workers of the world unite! A global movement for dignity and human rights. New York University Press. Geiger, M., and Pécoud, A. (2010). The politics of international migration management. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The politics of international migration management (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, A. (2018). The role of the trade union movement in the Global Forum on Migration and Development and the Global Compact on Migration. Report for the Mondiaal FNV, Netherlands. www​.mondiaalfnv​.nl. Hoogvelt, A. (2001). Globalization and the postcolonial world: The new political economy of development. Johns Hopkins University Press. Hughes, S., and Haworth, N. (2011). The International Labour Organization: Coming in from the cold. Routledge. Human Rights Watch (2020). ‘How can we work without wages?’ Salary abuses facing migrant workers ahead of Qatar’s FIFA World Cup 2022. https://​www​.hrw​.org/​report/​2020/​08/​24/​how​-can​-we​-work​ -without​-wages/​salary​-abuses​-facing​-migrant​-workers​-ahead​-qatars. ILO (1999). ‘Decent work,’ Report of the Director-General of the ILO to the 87th session of International Labour Conference. ILO. ILO (2011). Global wage report: Wage policies in times of crisis. ILO. ILO (2018). ILO global estimates on international migrant workers: Results and methodology: Executive summary. ILO. https://​www​.ilo​.org/​global/​publications/​books/​WCMS​_652001/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. Jakovleski, V., Jerbi, S., and Biersteker, T. (2019). The ILO’s role in global governance: Limits and potential. International Development Policy, (11), 82–108. Jessop, B. (1982). The capitalist state. New York University Press. Karatani, R. (2005). How history separated refugee and migrant regimes: In search of their institutional origins. International Journal of Refugee Law, 17(3), 517–541. Kuptsch, C., and Martin, P. (2011). Low-skilled labour migration. In A. Betts (ed.), Global migration governance (pp. 34–59). Oxford University Press. Merry, S.E. (2003). Human rights law and the demonization of culture. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 26(1), 55–76. Merry, S.E. (2006). Transnational human rights and local activism: Mapping the middle. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 38–51. Pécoud, A. (2018). The politics of the UN Migrant Worker Convention. In A. Desmond (ed.), Shining new light on the UN Migrant Worker Convention (pp. 24‒44). Pretoria University Law Press.

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The global governance of labour mobility  75 Piper, N. (2013). Resisting inequality: Global migrant rights activism. In T. Bastia (ed.), Migration and inequality (pp. 45–64). Routledge. Piper, N. (2015). Democratising migration from the bottom up: The rise of the global migrant rights movement. Globalizations, 12(5), 788–802. Piper, N., and Iredale, R. (2003). Identification of the obstacles to the signing and ratification of the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers: The Asia Pacific Perspective. Prepared for UNESCO, APMRN Working Paper no. 14, University of Wollongong. Piper, N., Rosewarne, S., and Withers, M. (2017). Migrant precarity: ‘Networks of labour’ for a rights-based governance of migration. Development and Change, 48(5), 1089–1110. Piper, N., and Rother, S. (2014). More than remittances: Resisting the global governance of migration. Journal fuer Entwicklungspolitik/Austrian Journal for Development Studies, 30(1), 30–45. Senghaas-Knobloch, E. (2004). The scope for the International Labour Organization under globalisation. Arbeit, 13(3), 236–247. Simeone, L., and Piper, N. (2018). Making rights in times of crisis: Civil society and the Migrant Workers’ Convention. In A. Desmond (ed.), Shining new light on the UN Migrant Workers Convention (pp. 45–71). Pretoria University Law Press. Thomas, A. (1983). Albert Thomas on the international control of migration. Population and Development Review, 9(4) 703–711. VeneKlasen, L., Miller, V., Clark, C., and Reilly, M. (2004). Rights-based approaches and beyond: Challenges of linking rights and participation. IDS Working Paper no. 235. Institute of Development Studies. Wickramasekara, P. (2015). International Labour Organization (ILO) and broader civil society: An uneven relationship? Presentation slides. https://​ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​2689000.

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6. The migration and development nexus and international migration management: the role of the United Nations Development Programme Giulia Breda

INTRODUCTION This chapter, which is based on empirical research,1 discusses the role played by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in international migration management. It addresses how the UNDP’s interest in migration rose during the 1990s in a context of crisis in development aid funding and theorisation. At the same time, the internationalisation of the migration management debate paved the way for international organisations to work on a new set of actions that had previously been strictly limited to the domain of national sovereignty. The UNDP’s strategy for positioning itself in this new field has been centred on its global normative power, its widespread network of actors, and its expertise in local development (Breda, 2019). With a particular focus on the impact that migration has on development and vice versa, the UNDP has endeavoured to contribute to the debate on international migration management. This has been achieved by participating in international forums and by disseminating reports and training tools within its network of actors (development practitioners, local and national officials, civil society associations, researchers, and so on). The UNDP also has more holistic normative instruments, such as the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which contain advice on the good governance of the international migration and development nexus. In this chapter I argue that the UNDP, through its normative power, defines relevant interests and a shared interpretation of migration and development (M&D) issues, while building a system of interested actors at the international level. These actions can be analysed in light of what Bruno Jobert and Robert Muller describe as the ‘mediation’ phase between relevant actors in the co-construction of national public policies (Jobert and Muller, 1986). UNDP mediation on M&D issues in international migration management takes place between local and global actors and interests. By analysing in particular the actions taken under the UNDP’s Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI), which funded several M&D projects in emigration countries, this chapter will assess the strategies adopted by the relevant actors in this mediation phase, paying particular attention to dynamics of power relations. Studying the production and transfer of knowledge involves the identification of bias and power relations that produce and reproduce social reality (Ziemilski, 1980; Gherardi, 2000). Indeed, highlighting the effects of knowledge hierarchies in the interactions within the JMDI involves showing how these hierarchies frame and limit the possible range of what can be known and done. 76 Giulia Breda - 9781789908077 37:10AM

The migration and development nexus and international migration management  77 The Joint Migration and Development Initiative (2008–2016) was one of the UNDP’s tools for creating and disseminating its expertise on M&D. This expertise is supposed to be built on evidence from work on the ground, and co-constructed with project implementation partners at the local level through a bottom-up approach. This chapter analyses how knowledge transfer between local and global actors was influenced by power relations and how this impacted the content of the resulting ‘knowledge products’.

THE UNDP’S POSITIONING IN THE INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION MANAGEMENT FIELD Scientific debates on the link between migration and development have led to diverse outcomes. Economic research has observed positive effects, such as the role of remittances in improving the living conditions of migrants’ families in the country of origin, or the contribution that migrants make to the local economy in the host country, along with negative effects such as brain drain in the country of origin, and the creation of dynamics of dependency (de Haas, 2012). The positive and negative impacts of migration depend on a variety of factors, some of which are related to the socioeconomic and political context of host countries, countries of origin, and regions, while others are related to the position of migrants in terms of social stratification. These factors influence migrants’ social capital and the choices that are open to them, and therefore their strategies and investment opportunities (de Haas, 2010; Lacroix, 2014; Breda and Mangane, 2018). To add to the complexity of this research field, the definition of ‘development’ is normative, and the results of scientific research on this subject have been co-opted in the service of ideological struggles and political agendas (Rist, 1996). The aim of this chapter is not so much to discuss the debate on the M&D nexus, but rather to show how the UNDP – the United Nations (UN) agency devoted to poverty reduction and sustainable development – has entered this debate and claimed a role for itself in the international migration management field. The UNDP’s interest in M&D should be viewed in relation to the context of the changing nature of international development over the decades. The global economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, the failure of previous international development aid programmes, together with the end of the Cold War and associated struggles to gain ideological and economic influence over developing countries, all caused major transformations in the field of international development aid. Development macroeconomic policies (structural adjustment programmes) became the responsibility of the Bretton Woods financial institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), while the idea of state-led progress was strongly discredited by the so-called ‘neoliberal counterrevolution’ (Simon, 2008). In the 1990s, the UNDP had to rethink its approach, abandoning its former discourse centred around reducing the development gap between the North and the South (Brant Report, 1980), and instead introducing the new human development paradigm, which focuses on enhancing individual capacities to improve one’s own environment (Sen, 2001). Such a definition implies that development aid should not be imposed from above, and that development activities achieve their aims more successfully through bottom-up approaches, with an emphasis on ownership by local stakeholders, decentralised cooperation and good governance, which has become a condition for the allocation of development aid (Chavagneux, 2003). As a consequence, the number of development actors increased substantially, and the UNDP sought other

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78  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance sources of funds through the creation of partnerships with private actors, local institutions and civil society organisations, including migrants’ associations. In this context, international organisations started to promote the merits of migrants as a source of development. This stemmed primarily from the discovery of the value of remittances being sent by migrants to their country of origin, but also from the recognition being demanded by migrants’ organisations in host countries (Bréant, 2012; Vincent, 2018). A discourse centred on the positive contributions that migrants make both to host countries and to their countries of origin has also been instrumental in counteracting the rise in xenophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric. In the past decades, both these discourses have been growing in parallel with the successive tightening of migration and border control policies and the criminalisation of irregular migration following each new economic crisis. Migration has since become a central issue in both national political debates and international negotiations. The internationalisation of discussions on migration management has been accompanied by the proliferation of international institutions and discussion forums that have enabled international organisations to deal with an issue that had previously been strongly connected to national sovereignty (Geiger and Pécoud, 2010). Since the Tampere Summit in 1999, the European Union (EU) has addressed M&D issues through its Global Approach to Migration and Mobility (GAMM).2 The resulting ‘mobility agreements’ with countries of origin have seen development aid being granted according to these countries’ commitment to the fight against irregular migration. Support for migrants as development actors has therefore been part of a global policy aimed at fostering a culture of migration control in third countries. Civil society organisations and researchers have criticised this EU approach to M&D, as it is often tied to the utilitarian and security-orientated concerns of host countries (Daum, 2007; Bakewell, 2008). Nevertheless, the M&D discourse continues to be prevalent in international political arenas. It was the subject of two UN High-Level Dialogues3 (in 2006 and 2013) and gave rise to the creation of the Global Forum for Migration and Development in 2007, which each year brings together a variety of actors: international organisations, state representatives, civil society associations, development practitioners and academics. International organisations also started producing a series of reports aiming to define how and why the good governance of international migration could help to enhance the benefits of migration.4 These reports became fundamental points of reference in the international debate on M&D. In this context, the UNDP (2009) also positioned itself in the field of migration management by focusing on M&D in its Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development), by incorporating migration in the Sustainable Development Goals, and by developing its technical expertise and leading M&D projects within the JMDI. The Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development report presents the UNDP’s conception of the M&D nexus. It presents migration as ‘natural’, and migrants as development actors. Migrants can thus be considered as potential partners and entrepreneurs who invest in their territories of origin. The conclusions of the report are consistent with those of international migration management narratives that stress the importance of ‘orderly and humane migration’ in a globalised labour market (Pécoud, 2015). They also highlight the central role of diasporas and their transfers back to countries of origin, the positive potential of liberalising labour mobility and circular or temporary migration, and the need for coordinated global policies between host countries and countries of origin to ensure the proper management of the opportunities and challenges arising from international migration. Such coordination

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The migration and development nexus and international migration management  79 processes would require the support of UN agencies and their experts, which validates their intervention on migration issues within the framework of their mandates. A more comprehensive way in which the UNDP can influence state policy is by establishing global development goals that identify criteria for assessing development outcomes. After being institutionalised within the UN, these goals become the criteria used by funding development projects at a global level: any organisation or association wishing to respond to an institutional call for tenders aimed at allocating funds for development projects is encouraged to take these global development goals into account and clarify how their action will contribute to achieving such goals. Lengthy international consultations led to the approval by the UN General Assembly in September 2015 of the 2030 Development Agenda and the new Sustainable Development Goals.5 Migration issues were integrated as cross-cutting issues in some of the SDG targets. Migrants appear, on the one hand, as vulnerable people to be protected; and on the other hand, as development actors. The stated aims of these targets are: to expand the number of scholarships available to enable students from developing countries to study in developed countries (goal 4.B); to facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies (10.7); to reduce transaction costs for migrant remittances (10.C); to tackle human trafficking (5.2, 8.7, 16.2); to protect migrants’ labour rights (8.8); and to enhance capacity-building for better data collection in developing countries (17.18). This soft law instrument enables the UNDP to influence national policy: with the acceptance of the SDGs, UN member countries also agree to follow UN framework guidelines in their national development policy.6 The SDGs play a role in merging the development agenda with the migration management agenda. Although they address the social protection of migrants in host countries, they are much less binding with respect to migrants’ human rights than the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990), which was adopted by the General Assembly but was not ratified by most host countries (de Guchteneire and Pécoud, 2010).7 Finally, the UNDP’s Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI) dealt with M&D issues at a more local level. It was created during a long period of internal reflection that preceded the negotiations of the post-2015 agenda. The opportunity arose when the European Commission and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation solicited the UNDP to create a global migration and development programme. The JMDI ‘sought to provide policy-makers and practitioners with evidence-based recommendations in the field of M&D. These recommendations were based on the practical experiences drawn from small scale actors having received financial and technical support through the JMDI.’8 In its first phase (2008–2012), the JMDI established around 51 M&D projects in 16 countries, and published a report asserting that the most successful and sustainable projects were those in which civil society organisations collaborated with local authorities (JMDI, 2013). In the second phase (2012–2016), 16 projects in eight countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, Nepal and the Philippines) were selected.9 These brought together a wide variety of activities (improving health, preventing violence against migrant women, reintegrating seasonal workers, investing remittances, creating jobs upon return, and so on) and partners (local, regional and national authorities; migrant associations; local and international non-governmental organisations, and so on) that benefited from ‘support for maximizing the link between migration and development’.10 These local projects served as

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80  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance pilot projects and as examples of best practices to be implemented subsequently at a national and global level. The JMDI’s focus on the local level can be explained in different ways: it was consistent with the UNDP’s human development and bottom-up approach; it was presented as being more effective as a result of its ownership by local stakeholders, which also favoured the sustainability of the projects; and it allowed funds to reach local entities directly, thus circumventing national governments. Furthermore, this focus on the local level was fundamental for the UNDP, as it constituted its added value in relation to other international organisation and agencies working on the same issues.

THE UNDP’S MEDIATION ROLE The UNDP’s need to highlight the added value of its actions was the result of the reforms to the UN system made in the 1990s. Agencies were subsequently asked to ‘deliver as one’, that is, by coordinating their work more effectively and collaborating on cross-cutting themes and projects, since competition between agencies had, in the past, had a negative impact on project outcomes (Browne, 2016). This is why the JMDI was created as an inter-agency initiative and received contributions from several UN entities.11 Its director was temporarily relocated from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to work at the UNDP. Although the UNDP was the hosting agency for the JMDI, it had to consult regularly with other agencies and share out some of the tasks that had to be accomplished under the programme. This mainly involved the IOM, which actively contributed to project implementation, and the International Labour Organization, especially its International Training Centre (ITC-ILO). These agencies were selected for their expertise in areas overlapping those of the JMDI, and also because they had offices in countries where M&D projects were being conducted. They therefore coordinated their efforts to support the JMDI’s work; for example, by making use of existing partnerships, knowledge and infrastructure. In practice, this collaboration took the form of a biannual technical meeting, during which the JMDI informed partner agencies of the progress made and possible partnerships. The strong collaboration between the UNDP and the IOM in their joint management of the JMDI was particularly justified by the need for their complementary expertise on M&D. In fact, the IOM was the first international organisation to act specifically on the M&D nexus at the national level (Geiger, 2010). The local approach of the UNDP was therefore fundamental for its selection by the European Commission (EC) as its main partner in the implementation of the JMDI. The relationship between the two was intended to be a partnership, and therefore an exchange of services over the long term. This represents a constraint that has increasingly bound the UNDP in its relations with its donors. The increasing decision-making power of funders in relation to the UNDP results from the increase in the number of projects financed on an ad hoc basis, instead of the promotion of more coherent and long-term planning for development assistance (Devin and Placidi-Frot, 2011). According to a management representative of the JMDI, the EC needed a partner to implement its M&D policies and projects involving diaspora groups. The rigidity of the mechanism and rules in the EU system made it impossible for the European Commission to bring together a number of actors from a migrant background. The UNDP was therefore the perfect partner: an organisation with a widespread presence in countries of origin, where it had been building

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The migration and development nexus and international migration management  81 partnerships with different types of actors since the start of the post-war period. Moreover, delegating the implementation of M&D projects to an institution considered as being both technical and neutral facilitates negotiations with actors in countries of origin on such a politicised matter. The UNDP’s specific positioning in the M&D field through its work in the JMDI allowed it to play the role of mediator between local actors (local authorities, civil society, migrants’ associations) and global actors (the UN, EU, and national authorities in host countries and countries of origin). This was achieved through the co-construction of technical expertise with local partners, through which the UNDP produced a set of standards and models, as well as establishing both the ‘right way’ and the ‘right actors’ for creating a positive nexus between migration and development at the local level. On this basis, the UNDP aimed to implement and disseminate these standards and harmonise practices globally. This intention was specified in the JMDI second-phase goals: ● to reinforce M&D management capacities locally and push for the development of local M&D policy (creating tools to assess needs, institutionalising information and data collection on migration, organising training on M&D project management, and so on); ● to develop strategies for generalising such local policies regionally and nationally (upscaling); and ● to develop tools for disseminating these practices and policies at a global level (mainstreaming). After achieving results with M&D projects at the local level, it was then necessary for the UNDP to upscale political action at the meso level (regions, governorates, provinces, and so on) so as to institutionalise best practices in M&D. Finally, training and advocacy work was carried out at the national and international level to ensure that state policies would be favourable to the ongoing processes. Such behaviour resembles what Bruno Jobert and Pierre Muller describe as ‘mediation’. According to their theories in the sociology of public policy, political action at the national level comprises four stages: politicising social issues, training actors, making decisions and implementing policies. The ‘politicising social issues’ stage requires a phase of mediation to define the relevant interests and a shared interpretation of the issues, and to build a system of interested actors (Jobert and Muller, 1986). The growing empowerment of social subsystems and the heterogeneity of constraints make it difficult to find a solution that can satisfy all the relevant actors (Lascoumes, 1996). This leads to heterogeneous decisions being taken, and exacerbates the uncertainties of public action. To reduce uncertainty, governments must act on actors’ representations. Training actors while involving them in policy construction limits their autonomy by providing standards for action and reference models that are consistent with public policy codes. If we apply this theoretical framework at the international level, the UNDP can be considered as a mediator between, on the one hand, international elites and their understanding of the overall interests of global society on M&D issues; and on the other hand, local interests. Through its technical expertise, the UNDP establishes standards and criteria for policy interventions. This mediation role is based on the normative power of international organisations and stems from several factors: their prestige, their presumed position of neutrality on the world stage, their networks extending to both the North and the South, and their means for producing

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82  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance knowledge and expertise (Devin, 2002). This expertise is manifested in the production of reports, reference documents containing recommendations based on statistics that serve as national policy guidelines, and compilations of best practices and success stories from local case studies (Klein et al., 2015; Parizet, 2015).

POWER RELATIONS AND KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER WITHIN THE JMDI Through its work on the JMDI, the UNDP developed evidence-based expertise and a network of interested actors. The aim of this chapter is not so much to discuss the content of this expertise, but to show how it was built and how the collection of information from local actors was organised. This was carried out following the JMDI’s knowledge management strategy, which consisted of several different steps: after the selection of M&D projects at the local level, partners were trained in the use of the JMDI’s own terminology, then asked to transfer information from the field trough monitoring reports. Information was then codified into ‘knowledge products’, and disseminated. The Project Management Unit (PMU), which consisted of four UNDP officials based at the JMDI headquarters in Brussels, selected the local M&D projects and partners together with representatives of the EC and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). An important selection criterion, after verifying that the projects were consistent with the JMDI’s goals, was that the local actors responsible for the project should already have some experience in international cooperation or be capable of handling the international cooperation procedures. Once the local partners had been selected, JMDI coordinators asked them to respond to a questionnaire on the UNDP approach to M&D issues. The themes of the questionnaire were mainly centred on international cooperation standards. In fact, after the first set of general questions on the link between migration and local development, the focus was on project management, resource mobilisation and partnership creation. Training was then organised by the PMU to fill any knowledge gaps. This shows how JMDI knowledge on M&D was seen as a starting point for local actors. The Brussels-based PMU, through the creation of these self-assessment forms, regulated local actors’ skills and knowledge acquisition by defining and circumscribing them. Once trained, local actors would participate more efficiently in the JMDI’s co-construction of evidence-based expertise on how to manage the M&D nexus, as well as joining the global network across which the JMDI spread this expertise and promoted the implementation of M&D projects. This bottom-up expertise was informed by the concepts and vocabulary inherent to knowledge produced from above. The JMDI’s objective was to create a network capable of sharing practical knowledge from which common actions could emerge. These actions would then be carried out by a range of different stakeholders, and would therefore be easier to institutionalise. This knowledge management strategy (KMS) played an important role in the organisation of the JMDI in terms of human resources, budgeting and activities. It was negotiated by UNDP representatives with the EC and SDC at the founding of the initiative, and was justified by the need to address the scarcity of data pertaining to the M&D nexus. Indeed, according to a management representative from the initiative, even though the connection

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The migration and development nexus and international migration management  83 between migration and develop is a fact, information on how this nexus operates in different territories is still not fully understood. The main goal of the KMS was therefore to act in coordination with JMDI local partners in the collection of evidence, best practices and lessons learned from experience on the ground. Those responsible for collecting these data were known as the Focal Points (FPs): the consultants hired by the JMDI and based in the UNDP/IOM headquarters in the capitals of the countries where projects were being implemented. The role of these FPs was to monitor the projects and write regular reports alongside the local actors. These follow-up, monitoring and reporting activities were central to their work as intermediaries conducting information upwards to the PMU in Brussels from the local actors. For the production of these reports, local actors were asked to complete forms, prepared by the PMU, that asked two types of questions. The first type focused on the progress made and the activities carried out, and the answers provided by local actors to these questions were used by the initiative coordinators to ensure that everything was going as planned. The second type focused on lessons that had been learned, mistakes made and difficulties encountered. Local actors have acknowledged, during interviews conducted in the field, that they preferred to stay silent about the difficulties and mistakes, and to report the progress of the project in the best possible light. This represents a bias in the collection of the data. Moreover, the questions were formulated in such a way that they left little room for actors on the ground to report what they thought was important to report. They were targeted questions, designed to collect information showing how local governance is central to achieving a positive M&D nexus, how to include migration in local development planning, and how local actors should manage M&D projects through private‒public partnerships and within international cooperation frameworks. When the reports were sent to the PMU, they were selected and progressively added to the JMDI’s ‘knowledge products’. Knowledge products took different forms: publications related to the general outcomes of the JMDI, blog posts, white papers on a specific issue, collections of best practices, training tools, and so on. To fit the JMDI’s discourse on M&D, information from the ground was selected, but it also needed to be ‘translated’ so that it could be used in general analyses. This was achieved by transcribing the information using JMDI terminology, and through a modelling process that focused on certain aspects and ignored others. One example of this process is a testimony from a refugee that was transcribed by an FP and sent to the PMU. This testimony mainly indicated the vulnerability of the author, who concluded his story by thanking the institutions in the host country for helping and protecting him. The PMU asked the FP to rewrite part of this ‘field story’ so that it placed a greater emphasis on the development impact at a local level. Here we see the translation process in action: when information from the ground was requested, it had to be formulated in such a way as to be consistent with the JMDI discourse on M&D. Testimonies had to fit into a pre-existing discursive scheme. This framework structured M&D discourse and had been designed with a view to becoming an international reference system: a general discourse whose principles are intended to facilitate the good governance of migration. The JMDI gathered evidence relating to M&D actions and trends that could be applied at the global level. According to a management representative from the initiative, it was essential to identify standard elements, which then became a model for the institutionalisation of M&D local planning that would be replicable at the global level.

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84  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance All published written text was subject to review by the PMU. The purpose of this editing work was mainly to verify that the contents were consistent with the JMDI strategy. If the local dimension and/or the impact of migration on development were not sufficiently emphasised, the author was asked to revise their text. In order to deliver a unified account of migration management, all the relevant actors needed to master the same language. This language is general and flexible enough to cover all conflicting positions and interests, while also serving as a tool for consensus, and fitting in with international migration management narratives (Pécoud, 2015). The production of good practices within the codification phase involved the promotion of success factors and exclusion of information about failures. This process of information selection and translation also served to justify JMDI analyses and policy recommendations. The process of selecting good practices and success stories has a political dimension: it identifies priorities and partners among different social groups with different needs and objectives. The production and transfer of knowledge was not only bottom-up, from the local to the global, but also circular. The actions that were identified as ‘good practices’ were those that were implemented by partners who showed a successful approach to the M&D nexus and whose experiences were a close fit with JMDI’s overall analyses on M&D. The ultimate aim of the initiative was in fact to disseminate M&D local policies at a global level. To achieve the upscaling and mainstreaming of local M&D policies, it was necessary to disseminate knowledge products to different actors in the M&D international network in the form of reports12 and training tools.13 The JMDI’s knowledge management strategy also included the creation of the M4D Net, an online network where JMDI partners could find information or exchange experiences and questions. The JMDI’s dissemination, outreach and awareness-raising activities were listed in a document entitled ‘Policy’. Its purpose was to plan actions to more directly promote local development policy reforms aimed at mainstreaming, and hence to institutionalise the good practices codified by the KMS. These activities were deployed at three levels: local, national and global. At local and national levels, the JMDI prepared a policy plan advocating for the adoption of its approach to M&D, and providing advice for relevant institutional actors, local authorities and civil society. This action also extended to universities and schools for civil servants, which were offered the opportunity to use the reports and online courses developed by the JMDI. At a global level, the aim was to foster peer-to-peer exchange and raise awareness among local authorities through the dissemination of good practices and lessons learned from M&D projects in order to reform policy approaches and actions. To achieve this aim, the JMDI relied partly on online tools, but also on more proactive work through the organisation of and participation in international meetings, forums and conferences. During these meetings, local JMDI project partners were sometimes invited to present their success stories. However, the reception of the JMDI discourse was not homogeneous. While actors at national and local institutional levels in implementing countries tended to repeat JMDI rhetoric, several interviews conducted in more informal contexts with members of partner civil society associations revealed a more critical discourse. Indeed, interviews highlighted that many of these actors did not completely share the JMDI discourse on M&D. On the contrary, they criticised it for its distance from realities on the ground and local problems. It was interesting to observe how these actors participated in M&D projects while at the same time holding dissenting views, without necessarily displaying them officially. This dual discourse allowed them to continue to pursue their local goals, while benefiting from international

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The migration and development nexus and international migration management  85 cooperation funding in the short term and contributing to the development aid agenda in the long term. Such resistance strategies also exist within the UNDP among the several hundred officials, often from different backgrounds, who engage in internal debates and criticism. When criticisms were expressed explicitly by local actors, they were left aside because they were considered by JMDI management to be contextual, localised, and characterised by a ‘lack of understanding of the broader issues at stake’. This brings to mind the social genesis of public policy when sectoral interests are considered not to be in step with society’s overall interests, or with the representations of them devised by government elites (Jobert and Muller, 1986). There is almost no mention of failure in the knowledge products, such as cases where the projects’ actions aimed at the economic integration of migrants were unsuccessful due to the migrants’ lack of trust in the institutions, or where the political participation of migrants in decision-making at the local level had been impossible due to a centralised political context, or where the social integration of returning migrants had been hindered by competition mechanisms within the society of origin. The causes of recurring problems are omitted, as the aim was to produce a logical and consistent presentation of a series of positive actions to be undertaken. The analysis of experiences on the ground was not conducted in order to understand why some projects do not succeed, or why in some cases they are not considered a priority by local actors. Explicit demands and criticisms from local actors, especially when the problems encountered did not fall within the competence of local authorities, were also ignored: the facilitation of visas by immigration countries, the implementation of work exchange schemes that have been signed off but are not effective, and the protection of migrants in host countries, are all central issues for migrants that can only be resolved by their governments taking up a strong position in international negotiations. This is not a matter that the JMDI discourse addresses explicitly. The default hypothesis is that, if M&D projects do not succeed, the cause lies in the lack of knowledge and skills of local actors, who should therefore be trained and inspired by examples of success. This conception does not consider the influence of the structural context, and flattens social stratification by ignoring power struggles. The proposed solutions are therefore limited to very concrete advice on how to set up an M&D project in order to meet the criteria of international cooperation, or on how to insert the issue of migration into local development planning. The JMDI neither investigated nor identified the causes of social inequalities, but rather focused on the process of political change.

CONCLUSION This chapter argues that the UNDP plays a role in the internationalisation of migration management through its normative power and expertise on M&D at a local level. This role is as a mediator between local and global interests regarding M&D issues. The UNDP mediation strategy, whose aim is to ‘make (an issue) governable’, corresponds to the ‘transcoding’ dimensions in the co-construction of public policies as conceptualised by Pierre Lascoumes (1996). The participation of local actors in the formulation of policies helps to establish reference models for these policies, along with their cognitive, normative and instrumental codes (Jobert and Muller, 1986). Action by the JMDI served, on the one hand, to disseminate the interpretation of the ‘migration problem’ as a lack of good governance (the cognitive

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86  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance dimension); and on the other hand, to establish the principles of good governance that should be put into practice to solve such problems (the instrumental dimension). Finally, it served to disseminate ‘apolitical’ values, such as freedom of movement for people who are considered as being equal and able/willing to invest. Local actors living at the margins of globalisation have worldviews and needs that are not always consistent with international development aid goals and practices. If we look at the interactions between the different actors involved in implementing the JMDI, we can see a hierarchy of knowledge being established across the initiative. Global knowledge was not regarded as being equal to local knowledge: it was hierarchically superior and incapable of recognising potentially competing ‘knowledge systems’ (Marglin, 1990). Global actors, who form part of the same network as many other representatives from national and international institutions, and who are based in global cities such as Brussels, were considered to be in possession of the right blend of technical and universal knowledge. At the lower end of the hierarchy, we find local actors living in peripheral territories and maintaining relations with other peripheral actors. These local actors benefited from being connected to the global actors only through international aid programmes, and their involvement was limited to tactical (local) problems. They were asked about information related only to specific local issues, because they were considered to have a partial vision of reality and global strategy. These actors are nevertheless fundamental to the legitimisation of the UNDP’s expertise and activities.

NOTES 1. A six-month participant observation was conducted at the UNDP’s office in Brussels within the JMDI’s Programme Management Unit as part of an internship (February–August 2015). 2. Since 2005, the GAMM has been the framework for EU external migration and asylum policy, defining the priorities of its policy dialogues and cooperation with third countries. 3. A High-Level Dialogue is one of the forms of debate within the United Nations. Convened by the General Assembly, these dialogues usually take place during General Assembly sessions for the purpose of consulting and seeking consensus on a specific topic among heads of state. Private sector actors, civil society organisations and interested international agencies are thus invited to present their positions on the topic under discussion. 4. The main examples are the World Migration Report 2005: Costs and Benefits of International Migration published by the International Organization for Migration (IOM, 2005), and Global Economic Prospects 2006 published by the World Bank (2006) and dedicated to the macroeconomic implications and repercussions of migrants’ remittances. 5. Unlike the earlier Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015), the SDGs were not formulated by specialists, but negotiated by all UN member states. They include 17 goals (with 169 associated targets and 232 indicators for tracking them), and they no longer concern only countries from the South in reducing poverty and slowing climate change. See the United Nations website: https://​ www​.un​.org/​sus​tainablede​velopment/​en/​sustainable​-development​-goals/​. 6. Since the 2000s, an instrument known as the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF), which is the framework agreement negotiated between the UNDP and the governments of the countries in which it operates, has become the standard for ensuring that UNDP actions and national development priorities coincide. 7. A working group was established in 1979, and the drafting process lasted ten years because of the difficulty in getting host countries and countries of origin to agree on the necessary protection of migrants’ rights. The Convention was not adopted by the UN General Assembly until 1990, and the threshold of 20 ratifications for its entry into force was reached only in 2003. During these 13 years, following the risk of failure of the entire project, a strong awareness campaign by international asso-

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The migration and development nexus and international migration management  87

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

ciations and non-governmental organisations ensured the survival of this Convention. However, the low number of ratifications makes it completely ineffective. http://​www​.m​igration4d​evelopment​.org/​en. In 2016, the JMDI’s second phase was completed, but it did not obtain funding to pursue further work on the ground. The initiative has now been transferred to the IOM, which became the UN Migration Agency that same year. The website continues to be updated with new publications. http://​www​.m​igration4d​evelopment​.org/​en. The International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the UN Women and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). They can be found on the JMDI website: http://​www​.m​igration4d​evelopment​.org/​en/​resources/​ home. For example, the two online courses developed by the JMDI: Running your M&D project successfully and My JMDI Toolbox: http://​www​.m​igration4d​evelopment​.org/​en/​resources/​toolbox/​training.

REFERENCES Bakewell, O. (2008). ‘Keeping them in their place’: The ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa. Third World Quarterly, 29(7), 1341–1358. Bréant, H. (2012). Démontrer le rôle positif des migrations internationales par les chiffres: Une analyse de la rhétorique institutionnelle du système des Nations unies. Mots: Les langages du politique, (100), 153–171. Breda, G. (2019). (Co) Développement et gestion internationale des migrations: Contrôler le savoir pour savoir contrôler. Doctoral thesis, Université Côte d’Azur. Breda, G., and Mangane, A. (2018). Different investment strategies versus a unique co-development discourse: A case study of Tunisian and Senegalese migrants in France. In M. Caselli and G. Gilardoni (eds), Globalization, supranational dynamics and local experiences (pp. 251–268). Palgrave Macmillan. Browne, S. (2016). Why the UN cannot deliver as one (and how it could). FUNDS Briefing, 43. Chavagneux, C. (2003). FMI, Banque mondiale: Le tournant politique. Revue d’économie financière, (70), 209–218. Daum, C. (2007). Le codéveloppement, grandeur et décadence d’une aspiration généreuse. Revue internationale et stratégique, 68(4), 49–59. de Guchteneire, P., and Pécoud, A. (2010). Les obstacles à la ratification de la Convention des Nations Unies sur la protection des droits des travailleurs migrants. Droit et société, 75(2), 431–451. de Haas, H. (2010). Migration and development: A theoretical perspective. International Migration Review, 44(1), 227–264. de Haas, H. (2012). The migration and development pendulum: A critical view on research and policy. International Migration, 50(3), 8–25. Devin, G. (2002). Sociologie des relations internationales. La Découverte. Devin, G., and Placidi-Frot, D. (2011). Les évolutions de l’ONU: Concurrences et intégration/The evolution of the UN: Competition and integration. Critique internationale, (53), 21–41. Geiger, M. (2010). Mobility, development, protection, EU-integration! The IOM’s national migration strategy for Albania. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The politics of international migration management (pp. 141–159). Palgrave Macmillan. Geiger, M., and Pécoud, A. (eds). (2010). The politics of international migration management. Palgrave Macmillan. Gherardi, S. (2000). Practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing in organizations. SAGE. International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2005). World Migration Report 2005: Costs and benefits of international migration. Geneva: IOM. JMDI (2013). Mapping local authorities’ practices in the area of migration and development. http://​www .m​igration4d​evelopment​.org/​en/​resources/​library/​mapping​-local​-authorities​%E2​%80​%99​-practices​area-migration-and-development-new-jmdi-0. Jobert, B., and Muller, P. (1986). L’Etat en action. Presses universitaires de France.

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88  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Klein, A., Laporte, C., and Saiget, M. (2015). Les bonnes pratiques des organisations internationales. Les Presses de Sciences Po. Lacroix, T. (2014). Conceptualizing transnational engagements: A structure and agency perspective on (hometown) transnationalism. International Migration Review, 48(3), 643–679. Lascoumes, P. (1996). Rendre gouvernable: De la ‘traduction’ au ‘transcodage’: L’analyse des processus de changement dans les réseaux d’action publique. In CURAPP (ed.), La gouvernabilité (pp. 325–338). Presses universitaires de France. Marglin, S.A. (1990). Towards the decolonization of the mind. In F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (eds), Dominating knowledge: Development, culture, and resistance. Oxford University Press. Parizet, R. (2015). Le PNUD et la fabrique des indicateurs de développement. In A. Klein, C. Laporte and M. Saiget (eds), Les bonnes pratiques des organisations internationals (pp. 79–94). Presses de Sciences Po. Pécoud, A. (2015). Depoliticising migration. In Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives (pp. 95–123). Palgrave Pivot. Rist, G. (1996). Le développement: Histoire d’une croyance occidentale. Presses de Sciences Po. Sen, A. (2001). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press. Simon, D. (2008). Neoliberalism, structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategies. In V. Desai and R. Potter (eds), The companion to development studies (pp. 86–92). Hodder Education. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2009). Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development. UNDP. Vincent, C. (2018). Le petit monde du développement porté par les migrants: Une sociologie de la reconnaissance des ‘associations de migrants’ dans les arènes françaises de la coopération au développement (1981–2014). Doctoral thesis, Université Paris Nanterre. World Bank (2006). Global Economic Prospects 2006: Economic implications of remittances and migration. Ziemilski, A. (1980). Les formes sociales du transfert des connaissances. In B. Ribes (ed.), Domination ou partage? Développement endogène et transfert des connaissances (pp. 19–30). UNESCO.

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7. A humanitarian agency in global migration governance: the International Committee of the Red Cross’s migration policy and practice Miriam Bradley

This chapter examines the migration policy and practice of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).1 The ICRC is not a migration agency, but an international humanitarian agency with a core mandate to respond to victims of armed conflicts. Like other major international humanitarian agencies, the ICRC provides material assistance and basic services to the victims of conflicts, in accordance with the Red Cross principle of impartiality, which stipulates that such aid must be provided to individuals in proportion to the degree of their suffering and to the level of their needs.2 Moreover, the ICRC has a special role in the development and implementation of international humanitarian law (IHL), the body of international law that regulates the conduct of hostilities in international and internal armed conflicts, for example through the prohibition of targeting civilians and other protected persons. Since its creation in the mid-nineteenth century, the ICRC has played an important part in the development of IHL, providing initial drafts of the core IHL treaties (the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols), participating in campaigns to ban particular weapons (for example, the 1997 Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel landmines), and documenting as well as interpreting state practice to shape understandings of the state of customary law (Bradley, 2016, pp. 78, 175–177). Underpinning this work is a strong conviction that states and armed groups, both of which are bound by IHL, are more likely to comply with a norm enshrined in international law than with a purely moral principle. When it comes to implementation, the institutional approach of the ICRC focuses on training combatants in the principles and rules of IHL, and persuading them to observe those principles and rules. Delegates – the name given to ICRC expatriate staff – collect and present allegations of IHL violations to the armed forces or the armed group in question, with the aim that such violations will be investigated by the relevant authorities and individual violators punished, and in the hope that, in turn, this will deter future violations (Bradley, 2016, pp. 162–163). In seeking to convince different actors to comply with their obligations under IHL, the ICRC has a strong institutional preference for confidential bilateral dialogue centred on legal arguments, although delegates also make pragmatic use of non-legal arguments when this is deemed more effective for increasing compliance with the letter or the spirit of IHL (Bradley, 2013; 2016, pp. 94–97). In implementing IHL, the ICRC has thus always sought to influence the conduct of states (and other authorities), but almost never by using adversarial techniques. It seeks to maintain good relations with all parties to a conflict – and therefore to retain access to the victims, combatants, prisons, and so forth, on all sides of a conflict – in part through its commitment to the principle of neutrality. Neutrality prohibits ‘[taking] sides in hostilities or [engaging] at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature’ (Pictet, 1979, 89 Miriam Bradley - 9781789908077 37:11AM

90  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance p. 4; see also Forsythe, 2005, pp. 157–160). Within the ICRC, it is often understood to imply a (conditional) commitment to confidentiality and discretion (Bradley, 2016, pp. 57–58). Whereas human rights organisations frequently pursue the same kind of goal by publicly ‘naming and shaming’ those states that violate international law, the ICRC believes that it can have a greater impact by exercising discretion and building trust with its interlocutors. For the same reasons, ICRC staff members do not participate or testify in judicial proceedings against those accused of breaching IHL, such as cases brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC), arguing that to do so would compromise the agency’s neutrality and confidentiality, and could endanger those who provided the ICRC with information about such violations (Forsythe, 2005, p. 275; La Rosa, 2009). Impartiality and neutrality are facilitated, at least in theory, by independence. The principle of independence entails operating with no influence from other actors, including states and international organisations (IOs). The ICRC has a unique relationship with states, which distinguishes it from both intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs). It was set up by private individuals, does not have member states, and is formally independent of any external actors. However, it is not a ‘normal’ INGO, in that: (1) states play an important role in the broader Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and in IHL, both of which contribute to defining the ICRC mandate; and (2) it is recognised in international public law as if it were a public international organisation. Like most of the other major international humanitarian agencies, both IGOs and INGOs, the ICRC is funded by voluntary financial contributions, the majority of which come from a small number of donor states. In addition to this general approach – being an impartial, neutral and independent agency, with a preference for confidential dialogue based on legal argumentation – two aspects of the ICRC’s work within its core mandate are especially pertinent to its activities on migration: family tracing and detention work. The ICRC first established an agency for family tracing – now known since 1960 as the Central Tracing Agency – at the outset of the First World War to restore contact between people separated by war, including prisoners of war, civilian internees, and civilians in occupied territories. This was the central focus of the ICRC’s work during the war, and it involved negotiating with the belligerent states for information on prisoners, and cross-referencing this information with requests from families to generate files that ultimately contained 6 million index cards (ICRC, 2007). The same basic approach – using a centralised database to match up information from family members searching for one another, often across different countries – continues to this day, albeit with significant input from National Societies (ICRC, 2010). For around 150 years, the ICRC has also been visiting people deprived of their liberty, monitoring the conditions under which they are detained, and working to improve these conditions, either through the direct provision of assistance or through confidential bilateral dialogue with the detaining authority (ICRC, 2015b).

MIGRATION IN THE HISTORICAL WORK OF THE ICRC For the better part of its history, the ICRC worked on migration-related issues on an ad hoc basis, primarily in response to people fleeing armed conflict or political instability, and hence linked to its core mandate, and played an important part in developing the institutions of global refugee governance. The general pattern was that the ICRC would respond to events on the

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A humanitarian agency in global migration governance  91 ground, then call for intergovernmental cooperation, and finally wind up its own activities once such cooperation had been established. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the ICRC took on a central role when it responded to the million or more Russian refugees in the 1920s, providing material assistance and arguing for an intergovernmental response (Skran, 2018). The ICRC pushed the League of Nations to coordinate intergovernmental cooperation for refugees, and the latter created the High Commission for Refugees in 1921, appointing the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen as High Commissioner (Krill, 2001, p. 607). Following Nansen’s death in 1930, the League of Nations abolished the High Commission and established the Nansen International Office for Refugees, whose statutes were drawn up by the ICRC President (Forsythe, 2003, p. 4). After the end of the Second World War, the ICRC again played a practical role, taking charge of 320 000 people displaced by the war until the International Refugee Organization, whose creation the ICRC had supported, was set up in 1947 and gradually assumed responsibility (Forsythe, 2003, p. 5; Krill, 2001, p. 608). In 1948, the ICRC began a major operation on behalf of Palestinian refugees, in cooperation with the League of Red Cross Societies (now the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, IFRC) and the American Friends Service Committee, which lasted until the newly created United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) took over in 1950 (Forsythe, 2003, pp. 4–6; Krill, 2001, pp. 608–609). From the creation of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1950, the ICRC mostly left refugee issues to UNHCR (or, where applicable, to UNRWA), but continued to provide protection and assistance on an ad hoc basis, and in situations where ICRC and UNHCR mandates overlapped. At the 1981 International Conference of the Red Cross Movement, Resolution XXI entitled ‘International Red Cross aid to refugees’ was adopted, together with an accompanying Statement of Policy, which stressed that states had primary responsibility for refugee protection and assistance; that UNHCR had a role enshrined in international law for the provision of international protection and material assistance; and that the role of the Red Cross Movement was subsidiary and complementary (Krill, 2001, p. 611). The exact nature and extent of the ICRC’s responsibility and response to refugees has thus historically depended on a number of factors, including whether or not those refugees were in a country characterised by armed conflict (in which case the ICRC had a mandate for their protection as civilian victims of conflict under IHL); they also came under the mandate of UNHCR; UNHCR was able to discharge its mandate; and the refugees in question had particular needs, such as for family tracing, which the ICRC was especially well placed to meet (Krill, 2001, pp. 614–618). Within the Movement itself, the Seville Agreement (1997) designated the ICRC as the lead agency for large-scale refugee movements into countries marked by armed conflict or domestic tensions, and the IFRC in other refugee situations (International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, 1997; Forsythe, 2003, p. 9). Migrants in countries affected by armed conflict are generally part of the civilian population and, as such, they fall within the ICRC’s core mandate. Yet, historically, the ICRC did not seek to protect and assist them qua migrants, but rather as civilian victims of conflict and violence. Singling out a subset of conflict victims, such as refugees or the internally displaced, was seen to contradict the principle of impartiality because it could result in the displaced being prioritised over non-displaced civilians with greater needs (Aeschlimann, 2005, p. 26; ICRC, 2011, p. 49; Krill, 2001, p. 620). Historically, then, the work of the ICRC on migration was

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92  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance limited to those areas where such activities overlapped with its core mandate in armed conflict contexts – that is, where migrants were treated as part of the broader civilian population without distinction – and, when necessary, to filling the gaps left by other actors, notably in terms of protection and assistance to refugees. In recent years, however, the ICRC has made migration a more central dimension of its work, incorporating migrants qua migrants into its institutional mandate.

MAKING MIGRATION AN INSTITUTIONAL PRIORITY In 2007, the ICRC undertook to ‘support the work of the Movement to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable migrants, irrespective of their legal status, in a more consistent way’ (Wigger, 2012, p. 1). Migration was identified as one of the institutional priorities in the ICRC Strategy 2015–2018, adopted in mid-2014 (ICRC, 2014a, p. 14). This expansion of the agency’s mandate has been justified through reference to humanitarian needs linked to migration and to relevant ICRC expertise and experience. The ICRC is seen to have a particular advantage over other actors due to its protection expertise and to the fact that, with a National Society present in nearly every country around the world, it is part of a network of responders along migratory routes (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 103). The ICRC is concerned with all vulnerable migrants, regardless of their reasons for migrating, their legal status or the stage of their journey (ICRC, 2015a, pp. 1–2). The institutional position is that it is the vulnerability of migrants that prompts ICRC engagement, and their needs that define the ICRC response (ICRC, 2017b, p. 359). All of this is in keeping with the ICRC commitment to the principle of impartiality, according to which humanitarian action is provided on the basis of need and need alone. Yet the principle of impartiality always operates within certain implicit parameters, and the development of specific ICRC policies and programmes for migrants involves a shift in those parameters, such that the ICRC no longer views impartiality solely through a conflict and violence lens (Bradley, 2016, p. 44). If the vulnerability and needs of migrants are what determines the ICRC response, then it follows that impartiality is seen through a migration lens. In practice, however, responding to migrants according to need and need alone creates tensions for an organisation whose primary focus is armed conflict. While such a response should not give priority to migrants affected by conflict and violence unless they are also those migrants with the greatest needs, the mandate of the ICRC compels it to prioritise the victims of conflict. The core mandate of the ICRC is delineated by IHL, and work on non-IHL contexts and issues is considered peripheral to that mandate (Bradley, 2020, pp. 5–7). In armed conflict contexts, the ICRC has a greater obligation to act and it ‘is always keen and determined to do so’ (ICRC, 2014b, p. 276), whereas the decision to respond to the needs of any given group of migrants outside armed conflict is at the ICRC’s discretion. It is therefore not surprising that as recently as 2015, most of the work of the ICRC on behalf of vulnerable migrants and their families took place in areas marked by armed conflict or other situations of violence (ICRC, 2015a). The ICRC is more likely to be present among migrants in conflict contexts than in non-conflict contexts, and this arguably determines whose needs it responds to. The fact that some categories of migrants are entitled to greater legal protection than others generates a further tension in ICRC priorities, particularly given the agency’s institutional preference for legal argumentation. Migrants who live in or are travelling through countries

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A humanitarian agency in global migration governance  93 affected by armed conflict are protected by IHL, and some rules of IHL also have a bearing on migrants who have fled for reasons related to armed conflict, even if they are now in a transit or destination country at peace (Obregón Gieseken, 2017, p. 122). Refugees, asylum seekers and stateless persons are also entitled to various forms of protection under different bodies of international law. Where migrants have a legal status that affords them particular rights or protection in international or domestic law, the ICRC seeks to ensure that they receive the protection to which they are entitled (see, e.g., ICRC, 2015a, p. 4; ICRC, 2017b, p. 360). In short, while the ICRC is concerned with all migrants irrespective of their legal status, it has more tools at its disposal when responding to those whose status entitles them to particular legal protections. As such, while it may respond to migrants according to their vulnerability and needs, it is able to provide a more effective response to those with a particular legal status, even if they are not the most vulnerable or needy. In the ICRC, migration policy and practice focus on three main areas – missing migrants and their families, immigration detention, and non-refoulement, each of which is examined in detail below – but the organisation’s institutional response to migration also includes other activities. Drawing on its experience on the use of force in law enforcement situations, for example, the ICRC advocates against the use of excessive or unnecessary force in response to irregular migration (Le Bihan, 2017, pp. 114–115; see also ICRC, 2017a, p. 4). The ICRC, moreover, seeks to ensure that the basic needs of migrants are met along migration routes and in countries of destination. While always emphasising that the state has primary responsibility to assist migrants, the ICRC will sometimes deliver services – for instance, supplying drinking water or providing primary healthcare or physical rehabilitation – often in cooperation with National Societies, or it may help migrants to access services offered by National Societies, governments or other actors (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 114). The following sections of this chapter explain the ICRC’s institutional position, goals, activities and limitations in each of the three aforementioned policy areas. These three issue areas are not completely independent of one another. For example, efforts to circumvent restrictive migration policies, including refoulement or detention, often increase the likelihood of migrants going missing. The work of the ICRC also shows the interaction between these three issues, as delegates visit detained migrants, try to ensure that they can contact their family members and consular authorities if they wish to, and remind detaining authorities of their obligations under the principle of non-refoulement. Nonetheless, they are examined here separately for the sake of clarity and, moreover, to reflect the way in which the ICRC itself treats them as discrete policy areas.

MISSING MIGRANTS AND THEIR FAMILIES Migrants can go missing in a variety of circumstances. They may lose contact with their families and loved ones because they are detained without access to means of communication, or because they or their families choose to avoid contact for fear that such communication, or the assistance they would need to keep in touch, could lead to deportation, detention or other problems with the authorities (ICRC, 2017c, p. 4). Migrants also go missing when they die during their (often very dangerous) journey or in their destination country and cannot be identified, as sometimes they are buried in mass graves in transit or receiving countries, and in some cases their remains are never found (ICRC, 2017c, p. 4; Le Bihan, 2017, p. 110). Since

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94  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance migrants often lack identification documents (either because they have lost their documents en route or because they have deliberately destroyed them in an effort to make migration easier or safer), they are more likely to die with no way of easily identifying them, compared with the rest of the population. The Missing Migrants Project led by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) records the deaths of migrants who have gone missing along migration routes worldwide, and estimates that as of April 2022, over 48 000 people have lost their lives en route since 2014.3 When migrants go missing, both they and their families suffer. As well as emotional turmoil, the families of missing migrants may face practical challenges as a direct consequence of not knowing or being able to document the fate and whereabouts of their missing relative. For example, they may ‘struggle to access social benefits, sell or manage property or inheritance, remarry, or exercise parental rights’ (ICRC, 2017c, p. 4). For migrants themselves, losing contact with their families, loved ones and communities can cause stress and anguish and, moreover, may undermine self-protection mechanisms and increase vulnerability. With more than 100 years of experience tracing missing persons, elucidating the fate of those reported missing, and restoring family links, mainly in contexts of armed conflict, the ICRC is well placed to add value to the work of existing institutions of migration governance. Indeed, the ICRC draws an explicit analogy between its ‘long-lasting experience ... in clarifying the fate and whereabouts of persons who went missing in situations of armed conflict’ and its more recent work on behalf of missing migrants and their families (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 112). The organisation’s extensive institutional experience is further enhanced by its institutional infrastructure, with the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency and the Agency’s relationship with the network of National Societies considered central to its activities on missing migrants. In its work related to missing migrants and their families, the ICRC pursues three main goals. Firstly, it seeks to minimise the risk of migrants going missing, to prevent separation during migration, and to help migrants stay in touch with their families (ICRC, 2017c, p. 4; Le Bihan, 2017, p. 110). Secondly, the ICRC strives to restore contact between family members, to reunite those who have been separated, and to clarify the fate and whereabouts of those reported missing (ICRC, 2017c, p. 4; Le Bihan, 2017, p. 110). These first two objectives are seen as ends in and of themselves, but they are also deemed to be a means of reducing migrants’ vulnerability and exposure to risks (Le Bihan, 2017, pp. 103–104). Thirdly, the ICRC is committed to ensure that dead migrants and their families are identified, as well as treated with dignity and respect (ICRC, 2017c, p. 4; Le Bihan, 2017, p. 112). To enable migrants to maintain contact with their families, ICRC interventions can be as straightforward as supplying telephone services, connectivity and power along migration routes. In the 2011 conflict in Libya, for example, the ICRC, together with National Societies, facilitated more than 120 000 phone calls at the borders with neighbouring countries (Wigger, 2012, pp. 2–3). In cases where migrants have lost contact with their families, traditional tracing methods are also used. The website of the ICRC programme Restoring Family Links allows people to register information about missing family members, whether as a result of conflict, disaster or migration,4 and the ICRC then works with National Societies to try to locate the missing, put families back in touch, and help them to maintain contact through phone calls and messages (ICRC, 2019). Family tracing work is often necessary to identify those who have died during their journey, and the ICRC additionally supports national authorities ‘from a humanitarian forensic perspective, to ensure that human remains of dead migrants are handled in a dignified manner and

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A humanitarian agency in global migration governance  95 that the chances of identification are safeguarded and enhanced’ (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 112). The ICRC has coined the term ‘humanitarian forensic action’ and promotes a particular approach to handling the dead, be they migrants or victims of conflict or disaster, which prioritises the identification and respectful treatment of individuals over the determination of the factors that led to their death or the pursuit of justice (Cordner and Tidball-Binz, 2017; Rosenblatt, 2019). Since the factors behind migrant deaths very often include structural violence and state policies aimed at preventing migration, an approach in which the identification and treatment of the dead take precedence arguably serves to avoid criticising states and other actors. As such, it is consistent with the wider ICRC philosophy, which explicitly seeks to distinguish between humanitarian response and justice or accountability. As well as providing assistance and services directly to migrants, and working bilaterally with states, the ICRC engages in policy advocacy for missing migrants and their families at the global level, calling on states to adopt particular policies and practices, and taking an active part in the development of international norms. In 2017, a policy paper set out recommendations for states (ICRC, 2017c), and that same year, the ICRC also contributed two written comments to the intergovernmental negotiations tasked with drafting the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (the Global Compact for Migration), the first of which included some discussion of missing migrants (ICRC, 2017a, p. 5). Many of the most direct recommendations are relatively uncontroversial in theory, even if they are often not observed in practice. For example, some of the recommendations address issues such as trans-regional coordination to communicate information about the missing to their families and to identify migrants who have died during their journey, and concern technical tasks such as data protection and standardisation (ICRC, 2017a, p. 5; ICRC, 2017c, p. 16). Other recommendations touch on more controversial issues and state practices, but in a non-confrontational and often only indirect manner. For example, the ICRC acknowledges the fact that migrant disappearances and the separation of families are sometimes the consequence of restrictive migration policies that criminalise movement and seek to contain would-be migrants, thus compelling them to take more dangerous routes and to expose themselves to greater risks (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 109). Accordingly, the ICRC calls on states to ‘take all feasible measures, including adopting adequate policies, to prevent family separation’ (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 112). To the extent that relaxing restrictive migration policies is feasible, then, the ICRC is indirectly asking states to do so. Nonetheless, the ICRC is not openly criticising specific policies or states.

IMMIGRATION DETENTION Many countries detain migrants awaiting deportation, a category which may include failed asylum seekers, other migrants who are in the country illegally, and migrants who are in the country legally but have committed certain types of crime; and sometimes also those awaiting status determination, that is, asylum seekers. There is no single body of international law dedicated to the issue of immigration detention, but several international instruments contain provisions that have a bearing on the detention of migrants (for a helpful summary of relevant provisions, see Global Detention Project, 2016). The most relevant rules concern the grounds on which migrants can be detained, the period of time for which they can be held, the rights of detainees to access consular representatives from their country of citizenship, and the

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96  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance conditions of detention. The applicability of different provisions varies depending on the international treaties to which any given state is party. One of the most recent normative developments is the 2018 Global Compact for Migration, which sets out as one of its 23 objectives to ‘use migration detention only as a measure of last resort and work towards alternatives’ (UN General Assembly, 2019, pp. 7, 21–22). Immigration detention is of concern to a humanitarian organisation such as the ICRC because of the suffering that migrants endure as a result of being detained. Detention has been shown to have adverse effects on migrants’ mental health, with longer periods of detention causing more severe mental health problems, and migrant children being particularly badly affected (von Werthern et al., 2018). Furthermore, the ICRC stresses that systematically resorting to the detention of migrants contradicts the right to liberty and security of persons (ICRC, 2017b, p. 360). Having worked on behalf of detained migrants for many years as part of its activities for detained populations in general, the ICRC recently began implementing specific programmes for migrants detained in countries of transit and destination, operating on its own or in collaboration with National Societies. In line with the ICRC’s long-standing practice of visiting people detained in relation to armed conflicts and violence, delegates visit migrants who are held in either criminal or dedicated immigration detention facilities in order to assess whether they ‘are afforded due process of law, treated humanely and held in conditions that preserve their dignity’ (ICRC, 2015a, p. 5). Moreover, they evaluate the ability of migrants to maintain contact with the outside world, including with their families and consular authorities (ICRC, 2017b, p. 359). They then raise any issues that they have identified with the detaining authorities, seeking to persuade the states in question to fulfil their obligations under international law (ICRC, 2017e, p. 1). While the ICRC’s work on immigration detention mirrors its activities on behalf of prisoners of war and political prisoners, there are some important differences. On the one hand, the ICRC mandate and the obligation for detaining authorities to agree to ICRC visits are both clearer and stronger in the case of those held in connection with an armed conflict, especially prisoners of war in an international armed conflict (ICRC, 2015b). On the other hand, in its efforts on behalf of detained migrants, the ICRC has gone beyond its usual detention work, which focuses on improving the conditions of detention, to challenge the use of detention itself. At the global level, the scope of the ICRC’s advocacy work on detention issues has extended beyond the conditions of detention, including calls to limit the detention of migrants in the first place. In 2017, the ICRC released a policy paper outlining ‘key considerations for states’ in relation to immigration detention (ICRC, 2017b, p. 360). Moreover, it issued two written comments on the proposed Global Compact for Migration, published in March and October 2017, respectively; the first of which called for the Compact to set specific commitments on a range of issues, including migrant detention (ICRC, 2017a), and the second of which was devoted to the issue of immigration detention (ICRC, 2017e). In these documents, the ICRC urged states to treat irregular migration as an administrative infraction rather than a criminal offence; to use detention only in exceptional cases, as a measure of last resort; to take detention decisions on an individual basis; to use detention only for limited periods of time, and only when it served a legitimate purpose, and therefore not as a means to deter or punish irregular entry or stay (ICRC, 2017a, pp. 5–6; ICRC, 2017b, 2017e). When it advocates the adoption of particular detention policies and measures, the ICRC usually does not specify the legal basis for each demand, emphasising instead the needs and

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A humanitarian agency in global migration governance  97 vulnerabilities of migrants, based on the organisation’s extensive experience and relevant research. With respect to the legal basis for its recommendations, the aforementioned policy paper argues that most of the ‘fundamental points’ it asks states to respect ‘reflect existing international law and are compatible with international standards and/or safeguards’ (ICRC, 2017b, p. 361). Nevertheless, much of what the ICRC is requesting of states goes beyond their international legal obligations. Indeed, in its comments on the Global Compact for Migration, it explicitly calls on states to further develop the normative framework in such a way as to expand their soft law obligations. Rather than providing legal justifications for each demand, then, the ICRC points to its own experience as ‘a daily witness to the negative, lasting and potentially irreversible damage caused by detention to the mental health and well-being of migrants’, as well as to ‘a large body of research’ on the harmful effects of detention on migrants (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 108). With respect to immigration detention, the ICRC is thus asking states to comply with their legal obligations and to go just beyond them, without always making clear where the line lies between an obligation and what extends beyond it. While some of the demands may be unpopular with states, they are always made in a non-confrontational way, either in the course of a confidential dialogue with individual states about their specific detention policies, or as part of a public conversation and policy position statements that are framed in general terms and do not call states out on their practices.

THE PRINCIPLE OF NON-REFOULEMENT The principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the transfer of a person to a country in which they will be in danger, is a core principle of international refugee law as well as a key feature of international human rights law more broadly and of IHL. Formal recognition of refugee status or entitlement to any other form of protection is not required for the principle to be applicable, and it applies not only to refugees sensu stricto, but also to other migrants. It is widely agreed that non-refoulement is a principle of customary international law, which means that it applies not only to states that are parties to the relevant conventions, but also to all states except those that have persistently and consistently opposed it. It has also been argued that the principle has attained the status of jus cogens: namely that it is binding on all states, with no derogation permitted (Allain, 2001). In practice, states return migrants from their territory to places where those migrants are in danger, but this is a rare occurrence relative to the widespread practice of preventing migrants from reaching their territory in the first place through such measures as migrant interdiction, or of leaving those migrants who have arrived in legal limbo, whereby they are neither granted legal status nor removed to another country. Rejection at the border violates the principle of non-refoulement if it involves returning people to a country in which they could be at risk. However, preventing people from reaching the border is a legal grey area, which states, including European Union member states, the United States and Australia, have taken advantage of by, for example, intercepting boats at sea and denying them entry to any port in the state in question (Goodwin-Gill and McAdam, 2007, pp. 270–277). Where a person reaches the territory of a state and the principle of non-refoulement is upheld, the principle itself only obligates the state not to deport or return that individual to a place where they would be in danger of fundamental rights violations. It does not entail a positive obligation to give that person legal status or access to employment, social services, and so forth. It should be noted, indeed, that

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98  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance not all individuals protected by the principle of non-refoulement are entitled to refugee status or other forms of protection. In a 2018 note on the principle, the ICRC (2017d) laid out its perspective on non-refoulement in general terms. It offered its interpretation of existing law and the attendant obligations of states, in places noting where there was disagreement over the legal status of the principle or over the exact nature of the obligations it implied, but by and large it provided a perspective that was broadly consistent with conventional wisdom and supported by references to other authorities on the subject, including UNHCR. For example, the ICRC considered that the core of the principle had become customary international law, but observed that some states had challenged that view (p. 346). The ICRC also gave its analysis of the conditions under which interception at sea constituted a breach of the principle of non-refoulement, drawing on several UNHCR Executive Committee Conclusions (pp. 352–354). Furthermore, in 2017, the ICRC’s (2017a) first comment on the proposed Global Compact for Migration called for specific commitments on non-refoulement, while explicitly recognising the right of states to regulate migration to their respective territories (pp. 3–4). Emphasising that the principle of non-refoulement was well enshrined in international law, here too the ICRC offered an interpretation of the obligations that international law placed on states in this respect, and asked that those obligations be specified in the Compact, but it refrained from demanding that states do anything beyond their legal obligations (pp. 3–4). Although this represented a cautious approach to advocacy, it was more assertive than the position taken by UNHCR, whose initial draft of the Global Compact on Refugees made no mention of the principle of non-refoulement, even in abstract terms (Gammeltoft-Hansen, 2018, pp. 608–609). Since most of its dialogue with states is confidential, it is difficult to assess whether and to what extent the ICRC engages in discussions with states about specific (potential) incidents of refoulement. We know, however, that as part of its dialogue with the authorities in the context of immigration detention, the ICRC seeks to make sure that those authorities abide by the principle of non-refoulement (Le Bihan, 2017, p. 108). Opportunities to provide practical support to migrants to ensure that the principle of non-refoulement is respected are limited compared with those available in the case of detained and missing migrants. Noteworthy is the fact that, in an article setting out the ICRC’s approach to migration, the section on non-refoulement merely discusses the legal responsibilities of states and has nothing to say about the role of the ICRC in this matter, in marked contrast to the sections devoted to missing migrants and immigration detention, which describe ICRC activities in these areas (Le Bihan, 2017, pp. 115–117). That said, for those migrants who find themselves in legal limbo, being as they are without legal status or without the right to work or access to basic services, the ICRC is likely to offer material assistance in keeping with its commitment to help the most vulnerable migrants, irrespective of their legal status, provided that it works with migrants in that country. Some INGOs take part in search and rescue missions, for example in the Mediterranean Sea, which amounts to a form of practical assistance intended to prevent migrant interdiction and forced returns, but the ICRC is not involved in such operations. Indeed, since such missions are usually understood to imply criticism of the practices of European states (for example, see del Valle, 2016, p. 31), this kind of intervention would probably be too adversarial for the ICRC. In sum, the ICRC has gone further than UNHCR in its discourse on the principle of non-refoulement, that is, in abstract terms, but it has stopped short of undertaking the type

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A humanitarian agency in global migration governance  99 of activities and advocacy work carried out by some INGOs that would suggest criticism of particular states.

CONCLUSION Across these three issue areas, then, the ICRC does seek to contest state practices, albeit in a non-confrontational way. As well as providing material assistance and services directly to migrants, the ICRC engages in bilateral confidential dialogue with the relevant authorities and, moreover, contributes to migration policy debates in a range of multilateral forums. In both cases, the ICRC advocates migration policies and practices that are in line with, and potentially extend beyond, what is required of states by law. The ICRC does not publicly name and shame individual states that fail to meet their international legal obligations, and for the most part neither does it call them out on practices that are harmful yet legal. State policies and strategies may well be a primary cause of migrant vulnerability, and the ICRC, indeed, acknowledges this fact (for example, see Le Bihan, 2017, p. 113). However, aside from a limited range of policy areas, notably those discussed in this chapter, the ICRC neither criticises nor seeks to challenge or alter these state-led policies and strategies.

NOTES 1. The ICRC is the oldest component of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (hereafter ‘the Movement’). Best understood as a network rather than a single organisation, the Movement also includes the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and 192 National Societies, such as the American Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. The Movement’s component units are not wholly independent of one another, but each unit has its own legal identity, and the intention is that there is a division of responsibility between them. This division of responsibility was clarified in the 1997 Seville Agreement, which designates the ICRC as the agency taking a lead role in situations of armed conflict, and the IFRC in natural disaster contexts (International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, 1997). 2. There are seven ‘fundamental principles of the Red Cross’: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntarism, unity and universality (see Pictet, 1979). 3. See the website of the Missing Migrants Project (https://​missingmigrants​.iom​.int/​). 4. See the website of Restoring Family Links (https://​familylinks​.icrc​.org/​).

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100  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Bradley, M. (2020). From armed conflict to urban violence: Transformations in the International Committee of the Red Cross, international humanitarianism, and the laws of war. European Journal of International Relations, 26(4), 1061–1083. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​1354066120908637. Cordner, S., and Tidball-Binz, M. (2017). Humanitarian forensic action – its origins and future. Forensic Science International, (279), 65–71. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.forsciint​.2017​.08​.011. del Valle, H. (2016). Search and rescue in the Mediterranean Sea: Negotiating political differences. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 35(2), 22–40. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​rsq/​hdw002. Forsythe, D.P. (2003). Refugees and the Red Cross: An underdeveloped dimension of protection. New Issues in Refugee Research Working Paper no. 76. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​research/​working/​3e422b564/​refugees​-red​-cross​-underdeveloped​-dimension​protection-david-p-forsythe.html. Forsythe, D.P. (2005). The humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross. Cambridge University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​CBO9780511755958. Gammeltoft-Hansen, T. (2018). The normative impact of the Global Compact on Refugees. International Journal of Refugee Law, 30(4), 605–610. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​ijrl/​eey061. Global Detention Project (2016, 28 June). Migration-related detention and international law: Treaties and protocols. https://​www​.gl​obaldetent​ionproject​.org/​international​-law/​treaties​-and​-protocols. Goodwin-Gill, G.S., and McAdam, J. (2007). The refugee in international law. Oxford University Press. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2007). The international prisoners-of-war agency: The ICRC in World War One. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​doc/​ assets/​files/​other/​icrc​_002​_0937​.pdf. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2010, 7 April). ICRC Central Tracing Agency: Half a century of restoring family links. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​doc/​resources/​documents/​interview/​centra​ -tracing​-agency​-interview​-070410​.htm. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2011). Annual report 2010. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​doc/​resources/​documents/​annual​-report/​icrc​-annual​-report​ -2010​.htm. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2014a). ICRC strategy 2015–2018. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​publication/​4203​-icrc​-strategy​-2015​-2018​ -adopted​-icrc​-assembly​-18​-june​-2014. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2014b). The International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC’s) role in situations of violence below the threshold of armed conflict: Policy document, February 2014. International Review of the Red Cross, 96(893), 275–304. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1017/​S1816383114000113. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2015a). Activities for migrants. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​doc/​assets/​files/​publications/​icrc​-002​-4246​.pdf. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2015b, 14 October). ICRC detention work: Why, where, who? https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​document/​icrc​-detention​-work​-why​-where​-who. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2017a). ICRC comment on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​ .org/​en/​download/​file/​48768/​icrc​_comment​_on​_the​_compact​_on​_migration​.pdf. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2017b). ICRC policy paper on immigration detention. International Review of the Red Cross, 99(904), 359–363. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​ S1816383117000546. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2017c). Missing migrants and their families: The ICRC’s recommendations to policy-makers. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​ .icrc​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​document/​file​_list/​missing​-migrants​-families​.pdf. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2017d). Note on migration and the principle of non-refoulement: ICRC, 2018. International Review of the Red Cross, 99(904), 345–357. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1017/​S1816383118000152. International Committee of the Red Cross (2017e). Second ICRC comment on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Focus on immigration detention. International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​download/​file/​59882/​icrc​_second​_comment​_on​_the​_gcm​ .pdf.

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A humanitarian agency in global migration governance  101 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2019). Are you looking for a family member? International Committee of the Red Cross. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​publication/​4102​-are​-you​-looking​ -family​-member​-familylinksicrcorg​-can​-help​-you. International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (1997). Agreement on the organization of the international activities of the components of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement: The Seville Agreement. https://​www​.icrc​.org/​en/​doc/​resources/​documents/​article/​other/​57jp4y​.htm. Krill, F. (2001). The ICRC’s policy on refugees and internally displaced civilians. International Review of the Red Cross, 83(843), 607–628. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S1560775500119224. La Rosa, A.-M. (2009, 3 March). ICRC and ICC: Two separate but complementary approaches to ensuring respect for international humanitarian law. International Committee of the Red Cross. http://​www​ .icrc​.org/​eng/​resources/​documents/​interview/​international​-criminal​-court​-interview​-101008​.htm. Le Bihan, S. (2017). Addressing the protection and assistance needs of migrants: The ICRC approach to migration. International Review of the Red Cross, 99(904), 99–119. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​ S1816383118000036. Obregón Gieseken, H. (2017). The protection of migrants under international humanitarian law. International Review of the Red Cross, 99(904), 121–152. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S1816383118000103. Pictet, J. (1979). The fundamental principles of the Red Cross proclaimed by the twentieth International Conference of the Red Cross, Vienna, 1965: Commentary. Henry Dunant Institute. https://​www​.icrc​ .org/​en/​doc/​resources/​documents/​misc/​fundamental​-principles​-commentary​-010179​.htm. Rosenblatt, A. (2019). The danger of a single story about forensic humanitarianism. Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, (61), 75–77. https://​doi​.org/​https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.jflm​.2018​.11​.007. Skran, C.M. (2018, 30 January). Gustave Ador, the ICRC, and leadership on refugee and migration policy. Humanitarian Law and Policy. https://​blogs​.icrc​.org/​law​-and​-policy/​2018/​01/​30/​gustave​-ador​ -the​-icrc​-and​-leadership​-on​-refugee​-and​-migration​-policy/​. United Nations General Assembly (2019). Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration. A/ RES/73/195. United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1660537​?ln​=​en. von Werthern, M., Robjant, K., Chui, Z., Schon, R., Ottisova, L., Mason, C., and Katona, C. (2018). The impact of immigration detention on mental health: A systematic review. BMC Psychiatry, 18, Article 382. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1186/​s12888​-018​-1945​-y. Wigger, A. (2012, 13–14 September). Statement. Conference statement, International Dialogue on Migration (IDM), Geneva, Switzerland.

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8. Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance Ine Lietaert and Antoine Pécoud

INTRODUCTION Throughout the world, states have engaged in regional cooperation over a vast array of issues. Despite the importance of regional actors in the governance of human mobility, the interest of migration scholars in the institutionalisation of policies at the regional level remains relatively limited (Lavenex and Piper, 2021). Over recent years, however, processes of regional cooperation and integration have been receiving renewed attention in the light of evolving patterns of migration governance. As in other policy areas (Farrell et al., 2005), the absence of a consistent, legitimate and appropriate global governance system has prompted the search for alternative pathways, and the regional governance of migration has therefore attracted increasing interest. In broader terms, regional organisations and initiatives are gradually becoming recognised political players in global politics and global governance at large (Dick and Schraven, 2018). This chapter provides an overview of how, and why, regional migration governance (RMG) has become an important research and policy issue. A first key question is RMG’s relationship with both national migration policy and global migration governance (GMG). Somehow, RMG lies in the middle of these two, half-way between the global level and that of states. A second question regards the exact nature of RMG, and the diversity of experiences across the planet in terms of objectives and practices. Finally, a third issue pertains to interregional dynamics, since regions are not isolated entities, and since some of the most pressing issues in terms of migration governance concern people who move from one region to another. The core argument of the chapter is that, while regions may embody an alternative level at which people’s mobility can be governed, they also reproduce some of the characteristics – and sometimes the shortcomings – of both national and global migration policy. It is therefore difficult to place the different levels in opposition to one another on the basis of normative or functionalist assumptions, in terms of which level would ‘work better’. Rather, each level displays particularities and raises specific challenges. To explore these issues, the chapter starts by providing an analytical framework for RMG. It then discusses the obstacles faced by efforts to govern migration at the global level, which are often put forward to make the case for RMG. The following section attempts to map the various domains where RMG has already been implemented. In order to assess the diverse experiences of RMG and advance the discussion on its objectives and practices, the chapter then unpacks the nature of RMG by examining which aspects of mobility and migration are governed, and what sort of interregional dynamics are involved, particularly as far as Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs) and bordering processes are concerned.

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  103

REGIONAL INTEGRATION AND HUMAN MOBILITY: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Regional integration is a multifaceted and complex process. In order to better understand the relationship between the different models of regionalism and migration governance, this section identifies different patterns of regional integration and their implications for RMG. Regionalism is often conceptualised as a chronological (or evolutionary) process, in the sense of passing through different successive steps according to a fairly linear dynamic (Van Langenhove and Costea, 2005). According to this view, the main driving force for this evolutionary change is of an economic nature: regional integration is mainly about the merging of separate (typically national) economies into a larger integrated regional economy. Consequently, RMG is likely to be apprehended differently depending upon the particular stage of economic integration in which regions find themselves. Initially, regions will engage in free trade agreements, which involve only very limited cooperation over human mobility. At a later stage, they may establish a common market, with provisions pertaining to all factors of production, including workers. In turn, this may evolve into patterns of even closer integration, in which people are no longer considered as workers only, but as de facto citizens, and in which the provisions for mobility extend to all people and encompass many more rights than that of mere access to the labour market. In such a model, the development of RMG relates to a late stage in the regional integration process, since states are expected to discuss human mobility only after economic integration has been initiated through the establishment of free trade. Moreover, according to such an economistic approach, RMG is predominantly concerned with the intra-regional mobility of labour. While this conceptualisation is meaningful for understanding certain patterns of regional integration, such as the initial economic integration of Western Europe after the Second World War or the many regional free trade agreements that exist across the world, it fails to properly address the non-economic issues that are inevitably correlated to people’s mobility. For example, the mobility of workers for narrowly defined labour market purposes will often raise the issue of their possible discrimination in other countries of the region in question. More broadly, regional integration is likely to raise far-reaching questions about migrants’ legal, social and political status in the state in which they live and work. This model also fails to recognise the diversity of forms of regionalism: in reality, economic integration is not necessarily the starting point of regional collaboration, and such an approach risks bringing to bear a teleological prejudice based on the assumption that ‘progress’ in regional integration is defined in terms of European Union-style institutionalising (De Lombaerde et al., 2010, p. 743). These shortcomings are to some extent addressed by more recent conceptualisations, often referred to as ‘new regionalism’, in which regionalism is understood as a multidimensional process that encompasses not only economic, but also cultural, political, legal and social dynamics (Farrell et al., 2005), and is not limited to intergovernmental or supra-national institution-building. This breaks away from linear/chronological models, by assuming that economic integration necessarily raises non-economic matters (such as security, justice, education, and so on) and that it cannot therefore be separated from political, social or cultural integration. New regionalism, apart from offering a new methodological approach, helps to make sense of the heterogeneity of regional integration dynamics since the 1990s, characterised by a multidimensional political agenda and different trajectories (De Lombaerde, 2011; Farrell et al., 2005).

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104  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance As far as RMG is concerned, new regionalism often includes ‘social’ issues such as non-discrimination, but also the development of complementary policies across the regional space, such as the mutual recognition of skills and qualifications between different states, and the portability of social security rights. New regionalism is also in line with core developments in the European Union (EU), where the scope of RMG has been substantially broadened to extend beyond economically active people, thus providing for the free mobility of all categories of people. Finally, the approach of new regionalism highlights that RMG is not only about removing formal barriers to economic integration and mobility, but also about adopting positive measures that foster mobility, and foster integration in different domains. An example of this is the support that is provided for student mobility in Europe through the well-known Erasmus programme. Another implication of new regionalism is the focus on the role of non-state actors in regional integration. Such actors include in particular multinational corporations, unions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society at large. Because the region is also a socio-cultural and political unit, these actors are likely to become organised and coordinate at the regional level. Moreover, states and regional authorities need the help of non-governmental actors in order to develop region-wide strategies; this is the case with universities, for instance, which need to ‘regionalise’ in order to take part in regional integration dynamics. This focus on the role played by non-state actors (including supra- and intergovernmental organisations, as well as actors from the private sector and civil society) echoes approaches to understanding GMG, where an increasing number of non-state actors populate the field and contribute to shaping norms and models of governance. Beyond the opposition between economic and non-economic integration, there exists another issue, which concerns the extent of the global dimension of regional integration, since regions are embedded in global (or interregional) developments and do not therefore integrate in isolation from the rest of the world. This is clear in the case of free trade, for example, as trade within regions is obviously affected by trade dynamics in other regions or at the global level. This points to the need for an assessment of internal regional dynamics that takes into account the role played by other regions, in the context of global politics (De Lombaerde et al., 2010; Farrell et al., 2005). To play a role in world politics and global governance, regions must usually have achieved a fairly advanced level of regional integration, such that they can speak with one voice in the international arena. Arguably, very few regions display such ‘global actorness’, and most regions lack the functioning institutional architecture to craft regional consensus on global issues. The main and almost unique example is the EU, which plays a key role in world politics, for example, by working with the United Nations (UN) and other global bodies (Van Langenhove and Macovei, 2010). The external dimension of regional integration is very relevant for RMG. Regions that adopt a common approach to internal migration (or ‘mobility’) are likely to be confronted with the issue of how to treat the nationals of countries outside the region, whether in terms of the internal mobility of this category of people, or of their arrival into the region from the outside. In the EU, this issue has long proven difficult: while internal migration/mobility is fairly well established, most efforts over recent years have concerned the external dimension of regional migration policy (Lavenex and Piper, 2021). So far, however, the elaboration of common external asylum and immigration strategies have led mainly to efforts to control migration, through the creation of new institutional actors (such as Frontex) and through so-called ‘externalisation’ strategies, whereby activities related to migration and border management are

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  105 ‘outsourced’ or ‘off-shored’ to third counties outside the regional territory in order to prevent unwanted arrivals at their borders (Cuttitta, 2020). As discussed below, such outsourcing has obvious implications for other regions and highlights the need to incorporate interregional dynamics in an understanding of RMG.

WHY IS REGIONAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE NEEDED? The Pitfalls of Global Migration Governance Global migration governance is a much-debated and elusive concept that refers to the ways in which migration is governed beyond the level of the state. Even though the admission and treatment of non-nationals remain closely associated with state sovereignty, it has become clear that sovereign states are not the only actors involved in the governance of migration. At the international level, states work with each other, often with support from intergovernmental organisations. Below the state level, actors such as cities have become important players in shaping the place of migrants in destination societies. In addition, states also cooperate with non-state actors, including those from civil society and the private sector. Global governance is thus understood as a multilevel and multistakeholder decision-making process, which is of particular relevance to the governance of transnational issues that exceed the boundaries of the state and cannot therefore be handled by governments alone (Panizzon and van Riemsdijk, 2019). Following Betts (2010), one can distinguish three patterns of GMG. Firstly, there are formal multilateral mechanisms that govern certain segments of migration flows: this is the case for the governance of refugees, which is conducted within the framework of the regime provided by the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). A regime is here defined as a set of ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner, 1983). Regimes typically enable states and non-state actors to cooperate over certain issues, thereby lessening the costs stemming from non-cooperation; they usually combine norms with the designation of an institutional actor that is entrusted to implement them. However, other patterns of migration – and especially labour migration – lack such a clear governance framework; the existence of a well-established refugee regime thus contrasts with the absence of a comparable regime for other categories of people on the move. Secondly, some areas of GMG rely on a more diverse set of rules, norms and principles, which do not constitute either a regime or an independent body of international (migration) law, but are rather embedded in other policy areas. For example, international human rights law provides a framework for migrants’ access to fundamental rights. Likewise, international maritime law codifies the ways in which migrants are rescued at sea, while World Trade Organization (WTO)-sponsored trade agreements sometimes provide for the mobility of certain categories of workers. From this perspective, GMG is fragmented and therefore lacks internal coherence. While this may be inevitable given the multifaceted and complex nature of migration flows, it nevertheless jeopardises the implementation of GMG. Thirdly, GMG is also composed of migration-specific informal norms, which are the result of ongoing discussions at the intergovernmental level. Since at least the beginning of the

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106  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 2000s, states have been meeting regularly to discuss such issues and have developed a fairly coherent policy framework, in terms of both key policy orientations and institutional configurations (Betts and Kainz, 2017; Pécoud, 2015). The latest step in this process is the adoption in 2018 of the Global Compact on Migration, which builds upon earlier initiatives such as the Global Forums on Migration and Development, the High-Level Dialogues on International Migration and Development, and the Global Migration Group. In 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the leading international organisation in the field of migration policy, joined the UN system, which has further strengthened the UN’s capacity to address migration-related issues. Unlike the refugee regime, however, this framework is non-binding, and it remains to be seen whether the agreements reached therein will have any substantial impact on actual policymaking. Despite these developments, GMG still faces major obstacles. Not only is it fragmented and sometimes inconsistent, but it also faces political resistance from states. For example, although there are ILO- and UN-sponsored international law instruments pertaining to labour migration, states have proven very reluctant to ratify them, thus illustrating their broader resistance to multilateral interventions in the field of immigration policy. More recently, their resistance also became clear with the implementation of the Global Compact on Migration: although the Compact was eventually approved by 164 states, it became an issue of heightened controversy inside many countries, which demonstrates that multilateral efforts in the field of migration policy do not necessarily enjoy support from national governments (Pécoud, 2009, 2021). Therefore – and as Newland (2010, p. 331) observed more than a decade ago – there is ‘no consensus on whether global governance is really required, what type of global governance would be appropriate, and how it should develop’. There are at least three major factors contributing to this situation. Firstly, in many countries migration is a sensitive issue with major implications for security, linking immigration policy, border control and national sovereignty in such a way that multilateral efforts are readily interpreted as an undesirable interference. Secondly, cooperation is made difficult by the lack of reciprocity: migration flows tend to be asymmetrical, which means that states find it difficult to strike reciprocal migration agreements in which all parties would benefit equally. And thirdly, because of these imbalances, states do not share the same interests, especially along the South‒North divide: even though actual migration patterns are far more complex than simple flows from less-developed to more-developed countries, the fact remains that the opposition between sending and receiving states and regions pervades global discussions over migration; in addition, migration is also a divisive issue within societies, for instance, between governments, the private sector and civil society. The Case for Regional Migration Governance? In light of these obstacles, the regional level is regularly presented as a more appropriate level for interstate cooperation over migration-related issues. The first reason for this is that a significant part of today’s cross-border movements takes place within regional spaces. Even though South‒North migration is the most visible and politicised aspect of migration, South‒South and North‒North flows actually involve just as many people. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA, 2020), nearly half of all international migrants worldwide remain in their own region. This is particularly the case in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, where intra-regional migration accounts for 70 per cent and 63 per cent

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  107 Table 8.1

Intra-regional migration as a percentage of total migration for selected regional organisations, 1980–2020

 

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

EEC/EEU

n/a

n/a

46

47

46

ASEAN

16

21

39

45

42

SADC

35

35

55

56

51

MERCOSUR

n/a

34*

32

33

30

ECOWAS

83

85

83

78

75

NAFTA

n/a

37**

41

42

36***

EU

24

32

31

42

42

Notes: * 1991; ** 1994; *** 2019; n/a = non-applicable. EEC/EEU = Eurasian Economic Commission/Eurasian Economic Union. Source: Regional Integration Knowledge System (https://riks.cris.unu.edu/).

of all migration, respectively. When focusing on the relative size of migration flows within regional organisations, it can be observed that intra-regional migration as a proportion of total migration has particularly gone up in the cases of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the EU, when viewed over a longer period of time (Table 8.1). However, this emphasis on intra-regional migration needs to be nuanced as, in contrast, 78 per cent of migrants from Central and Southern Asia live outside the region, a proportion that reaches 75 per cent in North America, and 74 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean. By contrast, in an analysis of the Euro-Mediterranean region, Deutschmann et al. (2021) show that interregional mobility is currently stagnating, or even declining, whereas intra-regional mobility is increasing. The second reason for favouring the regional level in this regard is that RMG involves a smaller number of states, which is assumed to allow for quicker negotiation processes, better implementation and more ambitious agreements (Biermann et al., 2009). States within the same region are also often characterised by similar levels of socio-economic development, which makes for more balanced situations in which reciprocity is more likely. They also potentially share common geopolitical interests, while being connected by stronger links and mutual trust (Geddes et al., 2019; Lavenex, 2019). This is all the more the case in regions in which borders are of recent creation and sometimes partly artificial, and in which people keep moving from one state to another (sometimes regardless of legal and policy frameworks). Because of this greater cohesiveness, it is argued that regional regimes may bring higher benefits to migration-sending states, which hold a much weaker position within GMG (Dick and Schraven, 2018). While there are sensible arguments for states to focus on RMG, the relationship between GMG and RMG is complex. If one considers, as discussed in the previous section, that GMG is about governing migration beyond the state, then RMG is actually part of GMG rather than distinct from it. RMG would then represent a step in the direction of GMG; a step that is less ambitious and therefore more achievable, but that nevertheless pursues the same objective. This is why global actors call for RMG: as early as 2005, the UN stressed the importance of regions in the governance of migration in the Report of the Global Commission on International Migration; more recently, both the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Migration emphasised the importance of regional approaches, which they view as central to providing ‘neighbouring’ responses to disasters and emergencies, or to collaboration

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108  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance with a view to curbing irregular migration and facilitating labour mobility (United Nations, 2018a, 2018b). The idea here is that the regional level constitutes a kind of third way, whereby the pitfalls of exclusively national strategies can be avoided, without succumbing to the obstacles encountered in GMG. Regions are then considered as laboratories for pursuing global objectives (Lavenex and Piper, 2021). However, this perspective coexists with another one, according to which RMG and GMG represent two fairly distinct realities and processes. It is common, for example, to use different terminologies in these two domains: at the intra-regional level, the movement of people is typically referred to as ‘mobility’, but it becomes ‘migration’ when different regions are concerned (see Geddes et al., 2019). The distinction between the two concepts is far from clear, but seems to entail more fluidity in the case of mobility (back-and-forth movement, short-term stays) and less legal/administrative complexity, since intra-regional movement would be facilitated by free movement schemes or loose patterns of migration control. The distinction might be seen as Eurocentric, as it builds upon the EU experience, where people on the move are EU citizens and therefore no longer considered migrants. If one follows this line of thought, RMG does not constitute a step towards GMG (as an equivalent form of ‘world citizenship’ is, by any standard, an unrealistic prospect), but rather constitutes an enlargement of the state, wherein regional mobility is treated as if it were a special case of internal movement. But upon closer analysis, both views – RMG as a second-best strategy in pursuit of the objectives of GMG, versus RMG as a separate process – prove to be fairly problematic. In order to advance the discussion further, the next sections explore the concept of regional integration, from both an analytical and an empirical perspective, to better understand the relationship between RMG and GMG.

WHERE HAS REGIONAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE BEEN IMPLEMENTED? Empirically, RMG can be seen to take a wide diversity of forms. In line with the diversity of patterns of regional integration outlined above, this section identifies a number of empirical trends in RMG. In certain regional integration processes, the issues raised by human mobility tend to be ignored. In line with the economistic approach outlined above, states in these regions concentrate on economic integration (and particularly on free trade) and thereby exclude non-economic issues. The core political principle here is that the admission of non-nationals is an issue of state sovereignty over which states should not cooperate. A telling example is that of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), where internal mobility is a long-standing and structural reality, but in which socio-economic divides are strong and governments of the more developed states (such as South Africa, but also Namibia and Botswana) are reluctant to engage in regional cooperation on this topic. They prefer to make use of bilateral agreements with their key labour-supplying partners, without leaving much space for a genuine regional approach (Segatti, 2017). Another well-known example is that of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which developed into the United States‒Mexico‒Canada Agreement (USMCA) in July 2020. The main objective of this regional integration process is to boost economic development by enhancing intra-regional trade in goods and services. Trade and migration are

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  109 therefore conceived as mutually exclusive policy options, as free trade and foreign investment would act as development catalysts (thereby representing substitutes for migration, especially from Mexico to the United States). NAFTA therefore provides a framework for cooperation only over the mobility of businesspeople, expatriates, service providers and investors (Studer, 2017). This results in the creation of a free trade area with highly securitised borders. By contrast, in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), intra-regional mobility constituted a central objective from the very beginning of the regional integration process (Dick and Schraven, 2018). This led to measures aimed at establishing a borderless West Africa, especially through the adoption of the 1979 free movement protocol, in which three phases (right of entry, residence and establishment) were identified for achieving free movement within the region. This aspiration is rooted in history, as recent, post-independence borders never really hindered long-standing patterns of mobility across the region. Yet, despite having made some concrete achievements (such as visa-free travel for up to 90 days), the protocol is far from being fully implemented (Kabbanji, 2017; Zanker et al., 2020). This implementation gap is due not only to the contradicting interests of West African states, but also to the influence of external parties: in particular, the EU’s strategy of restricting irregular migration to Europe through various bilateral partnerships with ECOWAS member states has proved detrimental to the realisation of free intra-regional mobility, and even risks undermining the very spirit of the ECOWAS protocols on free movement. The case of the EU, which has achieved free movement of its citizens on an unprecedented scale, provides another model. What is now considered as a fundamental right for EU citizens developed as part of a gradual and long-term process: the founders of the European Economic Community (EEC) did not aim to establish a general right to free movement, but rather targeted the working population alone, with the objective of integrating European labour markets and allowing for labour surpluses from southern Europe to move to the centre of the EEC (Kunz and Leinonen, 2007). Since then, however, the right to free movement has been incrementally extended to all categories of people, notably through the introduction of European citizenship in 1993, and the implementation of the Schengen Area in 1999. In other regions, cooperation over human mobility is included in regional integration dynamics, but only in part. For example, in the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) in South America the free movement of people is an aspiration, but does not exist in regional legislation (Gallinati and Gavazzo, 2017). Another example is that of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which has succeeded in abolishing major legal and organisational obstacles to migration, but where implementation has run up against a number of difficulties and conflicts between migration and labour market governance (Korneev and Leonov, 2022). There is therefore no global consensus over the forms of regional cooperation regarding intra-regional mobility. There is consequently a broad spectrum ranging from the almost complete absence of cooperation to achievement of full freedom of movement. And even when free movement is implemented (or at least envisaged), this can result from different (and sometimes conflicting) logics: as illustrated by the history of the EU, free movement may initially be rooted in matters of economic policy, before becoming a right and a symbol of a regional identity. The diversity is even greater if one recognises that RMG is not limited to the question of intra-regional mobility, but includes at least two other core political issues. As made clear by the ‘new regionalism’ approach, the first issue is that of the non-economic status of intra-regional movers: people’s right to free mobility across a region does not in itself tell us anything about how these people will be treated once in another country of the region,

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110  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance whether in terms of the length of their authorised stay, of their access to the labour market, or of many other rights- and citizenship-related issues. Here too, regions display a great heterogeneity (for a cross-regional comparison, see Weinrich, 2021). The second issue regards the admission and treatment of third-country nationals: as noted above, intra-regional mobility is only one aspect of mobility dynamics, as it coexists with interregional mobility. If RMG concentrates on intra-regional mobility, it may well fail to address the mobility of people between regions. Moreover, in terms of policy, intra- and interregional mobility tend to be interconnected: once mobility inside a region is made easier, then people arriving from outside the region may also find it easier to circulate from one country of the region to another. Given the complexity of this issue, and the close connection between sovereignty and the admission of foreigners, it is not surprising that this is an underdeveloped policy area. In virtually all regions, states remain largely free to select their immigrants, without constraint from processes of regional integration. As noted above, the EU is the main exception to this. This brief empirical overview illustrates that, even if RMG may at first sight be more feasible than GMG, it is actually just as fragmented and non-consensual. States in different regions do not have the same views as to what RMG should look like, even when it comes to what may appear to be the simplest issue, namely the mobility of labour within a process of economic integration. This calls for further disentangling of the nature of RMG.

UNPACKING THE NATURE OF REGIONAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE Relying on the analytical and empirical observations made in the two previous sections, it is possible to unpack RMG and to identify its key components, or, in other words, the exact nature of what is actually governed through RMG. Following Lavenex et al. (2016), at least three issues can be the object of RMG: (1) the internal mobility of labour (and therefore of people understood as workers); (2) the legal status of these workers and their access to both labour and non-labour rights; and (3) the control/management of the external borders of the region, and thus of the admission of third-country nationals. The first issue is the one that is most commonly addressed by RMG. Labour mobility fits directly into economic integration and, as noted above, its liberalisation at the regional level is one of the building blocks of several regional integration processes (Lavenex, 2019). The types of labour that are allowed to circulate freely vary a lot, ranging from specific (usually highly skilled) workers in certain regions (as in the case of the USMCA) to all people/workers in others. In terms of its driving logic, such liberalisation is motivated by largely domestic concerns over economic growth. The picture is different when it comes to the second issue. Rights are a matter not only of economic strategy, but also of values and political belonging. They assume that individuals have a kind of supra-national identity: without going into the global dimension that makes them citizens of the world (and grounds the logic of human rights), processes of regional integration recognise that the identity of the residents of a certain region is based not only on their connection to the state, but also on a collective identity, which forms the basis for regional citizenship. Such regional citizenship can be either legally defined or practice-based through informal institutional norms and citizenship-related policies, and different connections exist between regional citizenship and national citizenship (Weinrich, 2021).

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  111 Finally, the third issue is tied to practical and security aspects. This is primarily the case because the facilitation of internal mobility makes it more difficult for states to control the mobility of third-country nationals, hence the need for greater coordination between states within the region. This issue is also connected to the securitisation of migration, as states’ concerns regarding the control of irregular migration move higher up the political agenda of the region. Taken together, these three components illustrate the complexity and diversity of what is covered by RMG. RMG is connected to economic policy, security and patterns of belonging and citizenship; it is inspired by different paradigmatic approaches, or philosophies, that sometimes compete, conflict or overlap with each other (Lavenex, 2019; Pécoud, 2021). Just like immigration policy at the national level, RMG must contend with contradictory imperatives, logics and actors. It must reconcile principles of both openness and closure, applying them to different people/groups on the basis of different criteria. RMG is thus also about identity formation: by including some people and excluding others, it contributes to shaping processes of regional integration, since regions are not merely pre-existing (or ‘natural’) entities, but rather the outcome of political projects, in which RMG plays a key role (Farrell et al., 2005). As noted above, not all components receive the same amount of attention across regions, which reflects differences in national/regional migration trends and realities (Dick and Schragen, 2018). Korneev and Leonov (2022) add that the nature of RMG also depends on the actors that are involved: ‘home-grown’ RMG pushed by local/regional actors tends to build upon economic rationality, whereas externally driven, or imported, RMG is often wrapped in security considerations. It follows that, rather than constituting a ‘solution’ to the shortcomings and pitfalls of national migration governance, RMG tends to reproduce some of the conundrums and dilemmas that characterise traditional country-level immigration policy. Whether at the national or the regional levels, the governance of migration is a complex policy field that relates to a wide set of economic, political, social, demographic and environmental conditions, and consists of a mixed bag of measures and laws that target various groups of migrants in varied and often contradictory ways (De Haas et al., 2016; Geddes et al., 2019; Paul, 2012). This makes for sometimes incoherent policy strategies, while also contributing to the gap between rhetoric and practice that often characterises immigration policy; that is to say, the difference between: (1) what states claim they want to achieve; (2) the actual objectives of migration policy; and (3) the actual outcomes of policies (Czaika and De Haas, 2013). In Europe, for instance, this gap manifests itself in at least two ways. Firstly, European integration was premised from the start on the facilitation of internal mobility for the sake of economic growth, yet mobility remains low and limited to mostly upper-class workers. Moreover, it tends to remain associated with situations of relative poverty or economic crises, as the strong tendency towards outward mobility from countries such as Romania or Greece indicates. While this has long been regretted (notably by economists, who tend to see such sedentariness as one of the reasons behind the Continent’s slow economic growth), it illustrates the numerous obstacles to mobility and the limits of an abstract (or top-down) approach to RMG. Secondly, the EU finds it difficult to control migration from outside the continent, to the extent that the migration/refugee crisis has become one of the major political issues in European politics. As indicated above, concerns about such migration flows are due both to internal preoccupations within countries (and states’ strategies for putting these issues on the

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112  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance regional agenda), and to the inevitable difficulty of controlling national borders in a context of free movement inside the continent. Governments in the region tend to acknowledge that they cannot control migration on their own, and need a regional approach; yet this regional approach has not so far proven successful: rather, it has reproduced at the regional level the difficulties experiences at the national level. Regional Consultative Processes It is in this context that Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs) have emerged. RCPs have developed over the past three decades as intergovernmental forums for addressing migration-related issues that are pertinent for a particular region. Despite considerable differences in history, purpose, organisational structure and composition, RCPs share some essential characteristics, which distinguish them from other regional, national or international institutions. Firstly, they are informal and non-binding. Informality refers to a characteristic of depoliticised space in which participants can openly discuss issues of common interest without primarily defending national positions. They are non-binding because states do not negotiate binding (legal) rules and are not obliged to follow the conclusions adopted during a meeting. Secondly, RCPs are processes, in that they are neither one-time events nor comparable to formal regional institutions. They are repeated, regional meetings of government officials, technical experts, and representatives of different international and regional organisations. Finally, RCPs are characterised by a minimal administrative structure, as their secretariat is often hosted by an international organisation (such as the IOM). Their aim is to create networks of information exchange between governments and to build trust between all actors involved, thereby facilitating a common understanding of migration issues, which can ultimately lead to convergence in migration policies and practices (Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2001). RCPs usually build on pre-existing regional (or sub-regional) processes of economic integration, at least during their creation. They are thus not created ex nihilo and the boundaries of the region are already partially fixed by previous experiences of cooperation (Thouez and Channac, 2006). In Africa, for example, the Conference on Western Mediterranean Cooperation (5+5) gathers all the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA) member states, while also assembling some southern EU states. Meanwhile, the Migration Dialogue for Southern Africa (MIDSA) follows the borders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA); while the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) are closely associated with the development of the Migration Dialogue for West Africa (MIDWA). In Latin America, RCPs are bound to regional economic groupings, such as the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), the Organization of American States (OAS), or the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). For Asia and the Pacific, the majority of RCPs are supported by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Pacific Island Forum (PIF), and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). At first sight, RCPs could be interpreted as being complementary to formal processes of RMG. Given the sensitivity of migration-related issues, states would benefit from a specific and separate framework which would enable them to ‘isolate’ human mobility from other areas of regional cooperation and to have a freer exchange of views; possibly leading towards

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  113 more formal cooperation in the future. There are indications that RCPs may indeed constitute a step towards more binding patterns of RMG: in Europe, for instance, the so-called Budapest Process, launched immediately after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, enabled Western European states to discuss migration with their Eastern European counterparts, before the latter joined the EU in the 2000s. In this respect, RCPs function as a kind of pre-RMG process. However, this example also indicates another function of RCPs, namely their interregional nature. As indicated above, RMG cannot focus exclusively on intra-regional mobility, but must also address the issues raised by migration flows coming from outside the region. In the case of Europe, the EU was concerned with what it perceived as potentially uncontrollable migration flows from the East after the lifting of all restrictions in former communist countries; yet, as these states were not part of the EU, RMG could not fully address them. This is why an RCP was set up, in order to liaise with those states who were outside the EU, but whose cooperation was necessary for managing migration into Western Europe. To put it differently, RCPs enable interregional consultations to take place, thereby addressing one of the key shortcomings of RMG. RCPs help to channel ideas, practices and policies from one region to another, leading to a transfer or learning process that connects regions. To some extent, they may also serve to connect RMG with GMG: as mentioned above, the secretariats for RCPs are hosted by international organisations such as the IOM, which are key actors in GMG and are therefore in a position to steer regions in specific policy directions. This also fits into a broader trend that sees UN organisations collaborating with regional organisations. This is particularly the case in the domain of peace and security, but also in that of migrants and refugees: the UNHCR, for example, has long worked with regional institutions (as some of these have developed their own specific instruments for the protection of refugees). Regional Migration Governance, Regional Consultative Processes and Regional Bordering In practice, the issues discussed most extensively within RCPs are irregular migration and border control. Throughout the world, RCPs are used to support regional discussions on such policy matters, and on other related issues (such as human trafficking or smuggling). This points to the complex relationship between RMG and RCPs. On the one hand, when RMG entails a liberalisation of mobility within the region, this makes for a clearer divide between people inside and outside the region, and is thus likely to reinforce the region’s external borders. As discussed above, the EU is the clearest example of this dynamic. In the long run, this would be expected to lead to a world in which the most significant borders are those between regions (or blocs), rather than those between states (Blake, 2000; Walters, 2004). This further means that, as far as migration control is concerned, border management will increasingly focus on those interregional borders. This is clear in the case of the Europe‒ Africa situation: given that the control of mobility inside these two blocs is not strict, tensions arise at the places where these two regions meet each other, namely on certain islands (such as the Canary islands, Lampedusa, Malta, and so on) and in certain specific places (such as the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla at the Spanish‒Moroccan border). Formal patterns of RMG find it difficult to address these situations, because they extend outside the region and call for a global ‘actorness’ that is difficult to achieve within regional integration processes.

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114  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance In principle, such tensions between regions would call for GMG mechanisms, in order to coordinate world regions at the global level. However, in practice, GMG is too weak to achieve this objective, and this is where RCPs come in: they enable policy transfers from one region to another, not in a formal manner that would be deemed unacceptable from the perspective of the sovereignty of states/regions, but rather through mere non-binding/informal exchanges, and often with the support of supposedly neutral international organisations. In practice, RCPs thus enable dominant regions to subtly interfere with policymaking in less powerful regions (Thouez and Rosengartner, 2007), in cooperation dynamics that are simultaneously regional, interregional and global. This is not specific to Europe, or to the Europe‒Africa context. RCPs exist worldwide and, importantly, even in situations where regions have not implemented free movement. For instance, NAFTA has only very limited provisions for free movement, especially as far as Mexican immigration to the United States is concerned. Logically, this omission might be expected to reduce the need for interregional cooperation to fight unauthorised migration, yet this has not prevented the externalisation of the US‒Mexico border further south, at the border between Mexico and Central America, as well as the emergence of RCPs (such as the Puebla Process) that aim to facilitate interregional coordination. There is therefore a deep and logical connection between RMG, RCPs and externalisation. As argued above, RMG is facilitated by the socio-economic convergence between the member states of the region: where internal imbalances are less extreme, economic migration is likely to be less pronounced, thereby making its governance easier. Yet, if wealthy states gather regionally with other wealthy states, this inevitably increases imbalances between regions, with the result that interregional economic migration will increase. In turn, this will put growing pressure on interregional borders, calling for renewed strategies to control migration, such as externalisation and policy transfer in the form of RCPs.

CONCLUSION This chapter has presented an overview of some of the key issues raised by RMG. Through the examination of empirical examples and a further unpacking of these processes and their relations to GMG, it becomes clear that the contribution of RMG to migration governance is complex and ambivalent. On the one hand, RMG is often apprehended as a positive and much-needed development, providing a welcome source of new ideas and practices in migration policymaking. As Lavenex (2019) writes, ‘the richness of regional initiatives is clearly an asset in current aspirations for more humane and equitable international migration governance’. Underpinning this optimistic view is the argument that, whether at the regional or at the global level, interstate cooperation is a good thing, as it involves a transformation of states’ sovereign power and the transfer of part of their prerogatives from the national to a kind of supra-national level. This would lead to alternative conceptualisations of statehood, thereby challenging the ‘old’ Westphalian concept of the state and calling for some of its core pillars, including the sanctity of international borders, to be rethought. RMG also conveys the need to rethink patterns of belonging and of individual/collective identities in relation to the nation state. In today’s multicultural and globalised societies, nationality and citizenship are overriding features that define who belongs (and who does

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  115 not belong) to a specific country. As a consequence, many aspects of social life are affected by regionalisation and RMG (identity, citizenship, culture, ways of life, and so on). In this respect, RMG is inseparable from a regional identity or ‘regional consciousness’: it entails more than just rethinking the governance of mobility, as it leads to fundamental changes such as measures assuring non-discrimination and, beyond, issues pertaining to economic, social and political rights. From this perspective, it would seem that RMG constitutes an appropriate foundation for pursuing the objectives of GMG. Such optimism should be nuanced, however, as our analysis of RMG shows that, everywhere in the world, states remain reluctant to relinquish their sovereign prerogative to decide upon the admission and treatment of non-nationals. The result is that, with the exception of the EU, regional organisations worldwide have not so far created supra-national institutions with independent powers, but largely apply a classical intergovernmental approach based on consensus. Moreover, even if the EU is the most advanced example of regional integration, it is still faced with policy gaps (between the aims and outcomes of its policies), which shows that RMG does not necessarily remedy the shortcomings of national policymaking. One of the reasons why RMG fails to address the challenges of contemporary migration flows is that it often remains embedded in an economistic approach: regional integration has historically been about growth and development, and RMG has long viewed the mobility of people through an economic lens. Yet the mobility of people raises broader non-economic issues. As such, RMG cannot be solely about workers’ mobility, but must encompass social aspects. In addition, RMG may well lead to the reinforcement of borders between regions. This makes GMG more difficult, such that there is therefore a clear trade-off between the regional and the global level, and these levels cannot then be understood as a series of steps towards cooperation above the national level. Finally, it is worth recalling the somewhat odd status of RMG with respect to global governance. In most cases, regional integration processes pursue objectives that are also on the agenda of global and multilateral institutions. Free trade, for instance, is a core pillar of regional integration dynamics, while also lying at the heart of global trade agreements (such as those negotiated under the auspices of the WTO). Free trade is not apprehended in the same way at regional and national levels, and there are often tensions between the two levels, but the fact remains that, at least in principle, the common goal is that of convergence. This is also the case with other objectives, such as those connected to development or human rights, which are the object of both regional and international/global efforts. Yet, when it comes to migration, the picture is very different. Certain regions explicitly envisage (and implement) the free movement of people, but there is absolutely no initiative of a similar nature at the global level. Because of this discontinuity, this policy field at the regional level cannot be complemented by global efforts; hence the inevitable tensions between RMG and GMG.

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Regions and regional organisations in global migration governance  117 Paul, R. (2013). Strategic contextualisation: Free movement, labour migration policies and the governance of foreign workers in Europe. Policy Studies, 34(2), 122–141. Pécoud, A. (2009). The UN Convention on Migrant Workers’ Rights and International Migration Management. Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations, 23(3), 333‒350. Pécoud, A. (2015). Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives. Palgrave. Pécoud, A. (2021). Philosophies of migration governance in a globalizing world. Globalizations, 18, 103–119. Segatti, A. (2017). The Southern African Development Community: A walk away from the free movement of persons? In S. Nita, A. Pécoud, P. De Lombaerde, K. Neyts and J. Gartland (eds), Migration, free movement and regional integration (pp. 47–94). UNESCO and UNU-CRIS. Studer, I. (2017). North American migration: Labour markets vs. political necessities. In S. Nita, A. Pécoud, P. De Lombaerde, K. Neyts and J. Gartland (eds), Migration, free movement and regional integration (pp. 173–200). UNESCO and UNU-CRIS. Thouez, C., and Channac, F. (2006). Shaping international migration policy: The role of regional consultative processes. West European Politics, 29, 370–387. Thouez, C., and Rosengartner, S. (2007). Who owns and drives capacity building? Forced Migration Review, 28, 28. United Nations (UN) (2018a). Global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration. United Nations. United Nations (UN) (2018b). Global compact on refugees. United Nations. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) (2020). International migration 2020 highlights. https://​www​.un​.org/​development/​desa/​pd/​sites/​www​.un​.orgdevelopment​.desa​.pd/​ files/​international​_migration​_2020​_highlights​_ten​_key​_messages​.pdf. Van Langenhove, L., and Costea, A.-C. (2005). The EU as a global actor and the emergence of ‘third generation’ regionalism. UNU-CRIS Occasional Papers, 0-2005/14. Van Langenhove, L., and Macovei, M.C. (2010). Regional formations and global governance of social policy. Journal of International Relations, 4, 30–50. Van Riemsdijk, M., Marchand, M.H., and Heins, V.M. (2021). New actors and contested architectures in global migration governance: Continuity and change. Third World Quarterly, 42(1), 1–15. Walters, W. (2004). The frontiers of the European Union: A geostrategic perspective. Geopolitics, 9, 674–698. Weinrich, A.R. (2021). Varieties of citizenship in regional organisations: A cross-regional comparison of rights, access, and belonging. International Area Studies Review, 24(4), 255–273. Zanker, F., Arhin-Sam, K., Bisong, A., and Jegen, L. (2020, June). Free movement in West Africa: Juxtapositions and divergent interests. MEDAM Policy Brief, 2020/1. Mercator Dialogue on Asylum and Migration.

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9. The emergence of a global migration policy conversation: a retrospective on two mandates of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2011–2017)1 François Crépeau and Anna Purkey

In the course of our lives, our successes and failures often depend on circumstances beyond our control: unforeseen opportunities presenting themselves, doors closing unexpectedly, events taking us down unanticipated paths. When asked what a politician feared most, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave the following, probably apocryphal, response: ‘Events, dear boy, events!’ Events, however, can also be opportunities. My (that is, the first author’s) two terms as United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants were, indeed, characterised by exceptional circumstances, as a result of which the mandate (this is the name given to the Special Rapporteur and his team) was able to make a significant contribution to the heated social and political debates on migration policy taking place at the time.

MIGRATION POLICY: A LANDSCAPE IN FLUX Refugee protection has been the subject of multilateral cooperation since the 1920s due to the need to provide legal avenues to resolve the situation of de facto statelessness in which millions of refugees have found themselves. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its predecessors have played a key diplomatic and normative role in building a multilateral refugee protection system. This system is currently threatened by a lack of political will by states to agree to large-scale refugee resettlement and local integration, as well as by restrictive migration policies aimed at preventing asylum seekers from reaching a country where they could rebuild their lives and provide a future for their children. In contrast, migration policy has long been considered to be within the exclusive purview of the national state, and thus has come to be understood as a function of territorial sovereignty. Accordingly, states have always carefully avoided discussing their migration policies at the UN. This multilateral cooperation organisation was not seen as an appropriate forum to examine policies related to purely national, sovereign matters: issues concerning development, human rights and international security (that is, the three pillars of the UN Charter) were not to interfere with the objectives of territorial sovereignty and national security. Migration Policy as a Function of National Sovereignty The link binding territorial sovereignty and the admission of foreigners has been further strengthened over the last 30 years, largely as a result of the reframing of the border as an imaginary marker defining the boundaries of the nation, the characterisation of the stranger or 119 François Crépeau and Anna Purkey - 9781789908077 37:14AM

120  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance the foreigner as a threat, the increasing securitisation of migration policies, and the growing prevalence of anti-immigration nationalist-populist discourses rooted in toxic identity politics. However, such a connection is not a given. In the postwar reconstruction era, labour migration was typically a matter for departments of employment, labour or social affairs. While they were subject to discrimination, migrants were rarely considered a threat or the responsibility of security or military agencies. Increasingly, during this period, a visa was no longer required for short stays. Facilitating mobility was held as a hallmark of the modern era. Moreover, this connection between territorial sovereignty and migration was disregarded in numerous instances of free cross-border movement, as exemplified by the European Union (EU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), or the Southern Cone of South America. In such cases, freedom of movement was not viewed as a threat to territorial sovereignty, but rather as the very exercise of such sovereignty. While, according to demographers, the proportion of the global population migrating across borders has risen only slightly in recent decades (from 2.3 per cent in 1980, to 2.8 per cent in 2000, and 3.4 per cent in 2017), in absolute terms, cross-border migration has increased markedly over the last century owing to the exponential growth of the world population (Global Migration Data Analysis Centre and International Organization for Migration, 2018). Technological progress has significantly contributed to the democratisation of cross-border mobility. The advent of the jet plane in the 1960s made intercontinental travel considerably easier. The diffusion of global culture, first through television and film, then via the Internet, has enabled millions of young people to imagine building a life elsewhere. The growth of diaspora communities everywhere has also facilitated the social and economic integration of many migrants into host countries. Communication technologies now allow migrants to remain in contact with their families and friends wherever they may be. During the postwar reconstruction era, a broad social consensus about migration crystallised: foreign labour was needed, but migrant workers were not meant to integrate into local societies and become citizens (except in the ‘New World’ countries of Oceania and the Americas). However, since the 1980s, international migration has been the subject of various controversies stemming from constructed social anxieties and acrimonious, if not toxic, political debates. This situation has given rise to identity-driven political movements, whose sole raison d’être seems to be bigotry or the rejection of ‘the other’, and whose anti-immigration discourses have ended up dominating the political agenda, even in traditionally centrist political parties. The Securitisation of Migration Policy in the Global North The 2015–2016 European migration ‘crisis’ has deep roots in the past. Specifically, it originates in the closure of Europe’s borders to labour migration in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the oil crises of the preceding years. It was at that time, indeed, that the term ‘asylum seeker’ first appeared in the media discourse: as a result of border closures, the status of refugee (and therefore asylum claims), from marginal as it had been until then, became the only legal pathway to enter those states able to provide durable international protection. Accordingly, restrictive policies against labour migration caused a sharp increase in the number of asylum applications in countries across the Global North. Since then, states have constantly sought to limit asylum claims, by reforming administrative procedures to speed up the refugee status

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The emergence of a global migration policy conversation  121 determination process and make it more ‘efficient’, and moreover, by trying to stem migrant arrivals by disrupting migration routes both at their borders and in transit countries. This repressive approach has fuelled an expansive smuggling industry devoted to facilitating irregular migration, against which states have deployed increasingly draconian containment measures. The contemporary fight against illegal migration was first formally embodied in the 1990 Schengen Convention, when member states of the Schengen Area made it an international crime akin to terrorism, organised crime, drug trafficking and arms dealing. At about the same time, the US–Mexico border also became increasingly securitised, even as the flows of capital, goods and services between the two countries increased substantially as a result of the Border Industrialization Program of the 1960s and, later, the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The implementation of policies designed to reduce the pathways for legal migration – despite clear labour needs – has led to the exponential growth of the markets for illegal migration and exploited labour. Notwithstanding their official refusal to cooperate openly on migration issues, states quickly realised that they needed to act collectively. They began creating discreet forums, convened outside existing international cooperation institutions, where they could engage in discussions on migration issues without appearing to establish formal cooperation mechanisms. The first of such forums was the Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees (IGC), which was officially created in 1985 but, in fact, simply served to formalise the cooperation that had been secretly initiated as early as 1982 in order to encourage Turkey to contain the Iranians fleeing the 1979 Iranian Revolution within its territory. Today, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there are 23 Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs) and 18 Inter-Regional Forums on Migration (IRFs), including active, emerging and dormant ones, many of which receive secretariat support from the IOM (IOM, n.d.). These are discreet forums in which senior government officials can exchange best practices and lessons learned about various issues, and in particular about migration control at and beyond state borders. While no official decisions are taken during these meetings (to avoid political accountability or legal liability), these forums facilitate expertise-sharing and technology transfer, thus undoubtedly shaping policy choices regarding law enforcement and military cooperation. The North–South power imbalance being what it is, countries of the Global North have a disproportionate influence over the agenda of most of these meetings, meaning that security-related concerns generally dominate. Nevertheless, these multilateral processes have proved valuable in that they are a means of engaging high-level state officials in discussions, allowing them to share their experience and expertise, establishing a common analytical framework and lexicon, and building relationships of trust between national administrations that previously ignored one another. We can therefore identify a pattern of operation in terms of migration cooperation. Until recently, migration cooperation was the exclusive domain of forums that remained outside the existing formal framework for international cooperation, comprised of organisations such as the UN, the EU, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and so on. The idea was to keep the discussions strictly focused on technical issues related to migration control, and thus to prevent questions of human rights and development from creeping in. A case in point was IOM, which was created in 1951 and known as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration from 1952 to 1988, when it acquired its current name: for 65 years, IOM remained outside the UN system. Such was also the case of the Schengen Agreement, through which European states, without any legal accountability, built elements

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122  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance of a European common migration policy, which was then integrated into the main body of EU law under the name of Schengen acquis in 1999. The aforementioned RCPs and IRFs, as well as the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), operate in a similar fashion. The political debates and technical cooperation on migration flows finally prompted the UN to take an interest in these issues, but it was not until Secretary-General Kofi Annan succeeded in creating an opening for a substantive multilateral conversation about migration that any true progress was made. The United Nations Steps into the Ring The 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families finally entered into force in 2003, having obtained the requisite number of ratifications (20), and more than 30 years since its adoption it still has only 57 state parties, all of them from the Global South (UN, 1990). Although the Convention essentially consists of a restatement of rights that are already contained in other international instruments – UN human rights treaties and International Labour Organization (ILO) instruments – receiving states, whether in the Global South or in the Global North, have largely rejected this document intended to impose legal obligations regarding migrants on them. They have been especially reluctant to officially recognise the rights of undocumented migrants. As a European ambassador, who happened to support the recognition of migrants’ rights, said in a private conversation: ‘This convention is a dead duck!’ For two decades, Chapter X of the Programme of Action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (Egypt) was the only UN document offering a global vision of migration (UN, 2014, art. 10.1–10.29), and no follow-up ensued. The report Our global neighbourhood, which the Commission on Global Governance set up by the UN issued in 1995, merely mentioned migration in passing. Despite these obstacles, Kofi Annan, who had been elected Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1996, persevered and created the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants in 1999. However, the sterling work of the first two mandate holders went largely unheeded due to a lack of interest on the part of receiving states in engaging in any meaningful discussion of the subject. In 2003, Kofi Annan established the Global Commission on International Migration. The Commission’s 2005 report, entitled Migration in an interconnected world: New directions for action, was extremely disappointing. We know from the Commission’s Director of Policy and Research, Jeff Crisp, that the draft report actually contained many innovations, but member states purged it of anything that smacked of novelty before publication. The final report merely reaffirmed the primacy of territorial sovereignty. Faced with this failure, Kofi Annan had a stroke of genius: in 2006, he appointed Peter Sutherland as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Migration and Development. Firstly, international development being one of the pillars of the UN, linking development and migration lent credibility to this newly created mandate. Secondly, Peter Sutherland commanded the respect of member states. Having served as Attorney General of Ireland (and thus having been an elected politician), European Commissioner for Competition, the last Director General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the first Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, and Chair of the London School of Economics Council, he had long been a fixture in the corridors of power and therefore was personally acquainted with all the important political actors. While he

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The emergence of a global migration policy conversation  123 knew almost nothing about migration, he had the ability to bring states to the table and engage them in a conversation. He was supported by a very talented team, in part provided and funded by Georges Soros and the Open Society Foundations. Sutherland began by preparing the first High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, which was held at the UN General Assembly in 2006, and he wrote the keynote address delivered by Secretary-General Annan. The fact that the meeting happened at all was a success in itself, even if it did not end with an agreed-upon declaration. The second High-Level Dialogue (in 2013) concluded with a formal declaration (UN General Assembly, 2014) but without a plan of action; still, it demonstrated progress. In 2006, Sutherland encouraged UN agencies to formalise their interagency cooperation, the core of which would become the Global Migration Group, later replaced by the UN Migration Network in 2018. He also persuaded member states to create the GFMD, a consultative process at the global level. The GFMD defines itself as an ‘informal, non-binding, voluntary and government-led process’ (GFMD, n.d.); one clearly sees that states continue to resist political and legal accountability – a consequence of the toxicity of domestic political debates on migration. Over the course of its first three meetings (in Belgium in 2007, in the Philippines in 2008, and in Greece in 2009), this annual forum, held in turn in the Global North and in the Global South, at the invitation of a state, and behind closed doors (that is, without the presence of civil society representatives), limited itself to a discussion of the ways to maximise the benefits of economic migration. As such, the GFMD was a way of engaging states and keeping them at the table until they could recognise their common interests. A True Multilateral Conversation Is Initiated In December 2010, Mexico hosted the GFMD, put migrants’ human rights on the agenda, and invited civil society organisations to take part in the discussions. In the years that followed, a standard format was established: two days of civil society meetings, one day of joint meetings, and two days of state-level meetings, including one half-day behind closed doors. A public debate, albeit still discreet and without binding commitments, could finally begin. Six months later, in July 2011, I was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. A series of ‘crises’ quickly highlighted the need for global cooperation. Starting in 2012, a totally unprepared Europe found itself overwhelmed by the large-scale movements of people fleeing the Syrian crisis across the Mediterranean, provoking a nationalist-populist backlash. From 2014 onwards, moreover, state implosion in the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America as well as the activities of Mexican cartels increased pressure on the US southern border. In 2016, finally, the Rohingya exodus in South-East Asia raised questions about the role of the UN in protecting minorities, refugees and migrants in countries in turmoil. It became apparent that collective thinking and action on migration issues were sorely needed. It was against this backdrop that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US President Obama convened the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York on 19 September 2016. Member states adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (UN General Assembly, 2016), a declaration that contained a substantial list of guarantees for migrants and refugees and, moreover, set out commitments to develop two Global Compacts, one on refugees and the other on migrants. At this summit, IOM was inducted as a UN ‘related organisation’, while retaining its modus operandi as an operational and non-normative agency,

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124  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance which was very important to its member states. Unlike my predecessors, then, I entered the UN scene at the right moment: that is, at a time when states had become receptive to a multilateral dialogue on migration issues. My mandate began six months after the GFMD had opened itself up to a multilateral public debate on migration policies, and ended during the consultation phase preceding the negotiation of the Global Compact for Migration.

ACCOMPANYING A GLOBAL CONVERSATION We should not delude ourselves about the impact that reports of the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) may have. They have rarely made a difference to anyone’s life; except, perhaps, when the mandate holder receives individual complaints and can appeal to the relevant authorities, which is not the case for the mandate on the human rights of migrants. However, these reports add to the knowledge base concerning situations or states that are problematic in terms of human rights. They convey and amplify the legitimate claims of marginalised groups, thus contributing to their political and legal empowerment. They complexify the analysis and enrich the conceptual framework. They help to debunk stereotypes, myths, fantasies and threats, and thus serve to refine public discourse. They open up avenues of public policy that can lead to far-reaching reforms once members of the political class embrace them. In short, more often than not, a Special Procedure report has influence over the long term, without bringing about radical change in the short term. Every Special Procedure must produce at least two thematic reports and two country visit reports each year. During my mandate, one thematic report was presented in June at the UNHRC in Geneva, and another in October at the UN General Assembly in New York.2 Country visits must be requested by the mandate holder and authorised by the authorities of the host state. Over 100 countries have issued standing invitations to the Special Procedures of the UNHRC. Yet, even with such states, negotiating the timing of the visit can prove difficult. Many of my requests – to countries both with standing invitations and without – received either a negative response or none at all. The choice of topics for thematic reports is left to the discretion of mandate holders, who may design their work plan as they see fit, unless there is a specific request from the UNHRC. In my case, my second report on EU policies and practices (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2015b) was, indeed, in response to such a request. Furthermore, the mandate holder is frequently invited to discuss migration policy issues at conferences, workshops, closed-door meetings and private meetings at the invitation of international organisations, civil society organisations, unions, university research centres, government departments, and so forth. As migration is often a controversial issue, there are also many media requests for interviews. My thematic reports can be grouped according to three main themes: European migration policies, the situation of migrant workers, and global migration governance. European Migration Policy Before my appointment, my research expertise was in European and North American migration and refugee policies. For this reason, my first mission was to Albania (December 2011), whose consent had been obtained by the previous mandate holder. Visiting Albania allowed

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The emergence of a global migration policy conversation  125 me to observe the effects of EU migration policies on its immediate neighbours (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2012c). Long a hub for human trafficking, Albania had succeeded in substantially reducing this trade in human misery. Advised and funded by the EU, the Albanian authorities had built a large migrant detention centre, which stood almost empty at the time of my visit. This centre, located about 25 miles away from Tirana, with no public transport links and on a road accessible only by truck, was largely inaccessible to the public. As I was visiting border posts in the south of the country, it was explained to me that Greece was deporting children of Albanian origin by the busload twice a week. The Greek authorities made no effort to determine whether these children, picked up at random in the streets, had parents in Greece, thus failing to apply the best interests of the child principle. This initial visit led me to design a project on European migration policies, based on country visits that I conducted on both sides of the EU external border. Five visits were devoted to this initiative: the institutions of the EU in Brussels (May 2012), Tunisia (June 2012), Turkey (June 2012), Italy (October 2012) and Greece (December 2012). In each country, I visited several border checkpoints; numerous detention centres, some of which were in an appalling state; command centres such as that of the Italian Navy, with its enormous electronic display indicating the position and direction of every ship in the Mediterranean; police stations; informal camps, and so on. In all these countries, I also met with senior officials of various government departments, including Foreign Affairs, Justice, Home Affairs, and Social Affairs (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d, 2013e, 2013f). Whenever possible, and especially in detention centres, I spoke directly with migrants. Such encounters are always emotionally charged. Some migrants clearly suffered from mental health issues. The most despairing cases were those of migrants who had been separated from their relatives, such as their spouse and children, and did not know their fate. The resilience of detained migrants, however, was striking. In their minds, many had already left the detention centre: they were planning their next steps on the road to a better future for themselves and their children. My thematic report on the ‘management of the external borders of the European Union and its impact on the human rights of migrants’ (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2013f) ruffled some feathers in Brussels. It was, indeed, the first time that a report of a Special Procedure of the UNHRC focused on the EU. At 25 single-spaced pages, the EU’s response was notably thorough, considering that many states all too often reply with a paragraph simply stating that they will carefully study the recommendations of the report. Rather amusingly, it was easy to distinguish in the EU response the sections that had been written by the European Council (very defensive, if not outright hostile) from those authored by the European Commission (much less defensive, and actually engaging in a real conversation). During my courtesy visit to Brussels following the publication of the report, the then EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, demonstrated a true interest in the questions raised in the report. One sensed that the main obstacle to including the protection of fundamental rights in a European common migration policy was the opposition of most member states in the European Council: their electoral agendas did not allow for initiatives that could be construed in support of migration or in favour of migrants. Commissioner Malmström successfully led the revision of all legal texts – EU directives and regulations – adopted following the integration of the Schengen acquis, in particular by adding explicit guarantees for the fundamental rights of migrants. However, under the next Commission, political leadership

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126  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance and legal initiative on migration policy issues were concentrated in the hands of the European Council, with the Commission reduced to playing merely an implementation role. In the autumn of 2014, in the aftermath of Operation Mare Nostrum, during which the Italian Navy was deployed to save lives in the Mediterranean, the UNHRC asked me to revisit the question of European migration policy. In December 2014, I returned for short visits to Greece, Italy and Malta. In May 2015, I produced a new report on each of these countries (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2015c, 2015d) as well as a second thematic report intended as a follow-up ‘study on the management of the external borders of the European Union and its impact on the human rights of migrants’ (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2015b). This report called on states, in even stronger terms than the first one, to recognise the importance of facilitating and governing human mobility, instead of prohibiting and restricting it. This body of work on European migration policies highlighted the need for a global migration governance regime, which would be based on the long-term, planned facilitation of cross-border mobility. The Situation of Migrant Workers The next priority of the mandate was the protection of the millions of migrant workers with precarious status around the world. My first visit was to Qatar (November 2013), a country with a national population of 225 000 citizens that, at the time, hosted some 2 million migrant workers and expatriates. Migrant workers are needed for Qatar’s grandiose construction projects funded by the wealth derived from its enormous gas reserves. Being in the limelight as host of the 2022 FIFA football World Cup, Qatar needed international support. To this day, its treatment of migrant workers is a source of considerable embarrassment, especially the kafala system, which puts a migrant worker at the mercy of a single employer who can have that person deported simply by terminating their work contract. As migrant workers have often incurred debts, in particular to cover illegal recruitment fees, they cannot risk deportation to their home countries and are thus forced to accept the conditions imposed on them by their employers. ‘Contract replacement’ is standard practice, salaries are often lower than initially promised, the hours longer, and working conditions more difficult. Construction workers and domestic workers are those most likely to be mistreated. Every year, countless construction workers die a ‘natural death’ and return home in coffins. Accepting the Special Rapporteur’s request for an invitation was part of the Qatari authorities’ strategy of cooperation with the UN to demonstrate goodwill in the face of criticism, and to avoid having the World Cup withdrawn. The report (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2014c) seems to have struck the right balance between offering a critique of Qatari policies and engaging Qatari officials in a discussion of labour migration policy reforms. Thanks to the efforts of many actors – including the mandate, other UN bodies, labour unions, the ILO, human rights non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and so on – some progress has been made, and reforms, although slow to materialise on the ground, are under way. Moreover, Nepal being the home country of the second-largest community of foreign construction workers in Qatar, a private visit to Nepal, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and arranged by Nepali unions, was organised in February 2014. It was followed by an official visit to Sri Lanka, a major sending country for domestic workers in the Middle East (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2015e).

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The emergence of a global migration policy conversation  127 These country visits resulted in the thematic reports on the exploitation of migrant workers and on abusive foreign labour recruitment practices (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2014b, 2015a). These reports served, among other things, to initiate cooperation between the mandate and the ILO. The ILO had long been concerned about the situation of migrant workers, but due to long-standing resistance by member states, it only made their plight a priority issue in May 2014, when it presented its first ever (in 95 years of existence) Report of the Director-General to the International Labour Conference on the topic of ‘fair migration’ (ILO, 2014). Taken together, these reports on the condition of migrant workers demonstrated the importance of migrants’ legal and political empowerment to enable them to claim and defend their rights. Global Migration Governance My first thematic report (June 2012) focused on the detention of migrants (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2012a). It reaffirmed that undocumented migrants had committed no crime, since their lack of documentation was merely a breach of administrative rules, not a crime against persons, against property or against the security of the host state: apart from immigration offences, the vast majority of migrants are perfectly harmless (Landgrave and Nowrasteh, 2019). The report therefore strongly recommended that detention be used only as a measure of last resort in accordance with the principles of necessity and proportionality, and it stressed the importance of investing in alternatives to detention, especially for migrant children and families. My second thematic report (October 2012) revolved around climate change-induced migration (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2012b) and expressed scepticism that it would be possible to legally identify a ‘climate migrant’ (except in the case of small island nations that will become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels within this century), and thus to create a legal regime for climate migrants. There is no question that climate change will exacerbate the difficulties that people face in accessing resources and will amplify existing migration movements, such as those already occurring in the Sahel. However, our response should be tailored to the specific characteristics of each case, without necessarily trying to define a common regime. The report, moreover, noted the importance of ensuring that facilitating internal and international mobility be part of national climate change adaptation plans, and that such facilitation be negotiated by neighbouring countries experiencing such migration movements. Several subsequent reports also addressed the question of global migration governance. In October 2013, a report dedicated to ‘global migration governance’ (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2013a) was prepared for the second High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, which took place in 2013. In October 2014, a report on ‘the human rights of migrants in the post-2015 development agenda’ (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2014a) was produced in anticipation of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015 (UN General Assembly, 2015). In June 2016, a report on ‘the impact of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements on the human rights of migrants’ was issued (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2016b). In October 2016, a report aimed at developing the Global Compact for Migration (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2016a) was released as a contribution to the Summit for Refugees and Migrants held in New York in September 2016.

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128  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance In June 2017, a report providing ‘a 2035 agenda for facilitating human mobility’ (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2017) was prepared as part of the development of the Global Compact for Migration (UN General Assembly, 2019); this report was taken up by my successor and presented to the UN General Assembly in October 2017. All these reports led me to devise a long-term programme to gradually facilitate human mobility. The June 2017 report followed the format of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, thus setting a series of objectives, targets and indicators for what needed to be done in the coming decades in order to facilitate human mobility (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, 2017). One cannot be certain that the reports produced by the mandate have had any influence on the design of the Global Compact for Migration, but I like to think that the June 2017 report might have contributed to the final version of the Compact (UN General Assembly, 2019), since that text contains no fewer than 62 occurrences of the words ‘to facilitate’ or ‘facilitation’, which cannot be a coincidence. Ultimately, the central message of the Global Compact for Migration dovetails with the conclusion that I have reached in the course of my mandate: facilitating migration leads to better migration governance. More people will be able to obtain the appropriate travel documents, and therefore fewer migrants will need to rely on smuggling networks to cross borders. More migrants will be empowered to denounce exploitation, and fewer will find themselves living on the margins of host societies. Security and border agencies will have better access to the information they need to protect the rights and freedoms of all. Host populations will be reassured, and thus toxic nationalist-populist actors will lose their hold on the public discourse on migration. Politicians will be able to debate migration policies using data, rather than myths and stereotypes.

CONCLUSION The Global Compact for Migration owes a great deal to the exemplary diplomatic leadership of the two co-presidents of the Intergovernmental Conference (10–11 December 2018), Mexican Ambassador Juan José Gómez Camacho and Swiss Ambassador Jürg Lauber, as well as to the groundwork provided by the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for International Migration, Louise Arbour, who supported the co-presidents throughout the consultation and negotiation process. In my capacity as Special Rapporteur, I was able to contribute to the evolution of the debate as an independent voice on these complex issues. Special Rapporteurs, indeed, represent neither the UN, nor their country, nor any NGO, and are therefore entirely independent in their opinions. Thanks to this real and perceived independence, their ideas can carry more intellectual, if not political, weight. During my mandate, the political debate truly soured, and migration became an increasingly toxic issue in electoral politics. Some nationalist-populist politicians were propelled into power. In the United Kingdom, the vote in favour of Brexit was largely driven by migration fears. As a result of this toxicity, states in the Global North implemented aggressive, interventionist ‘cooperation’ policies with countries of origin and transit, with the objective of ‘immobilising’ migrants, that is, ensuring that they cannot cross borders while travelling to Europe, North America or Oceania. But at the same time, this political debate has opened the eyes of many citizens, who until now were indifferent or unconcerned, to the question of migration. It has shed light on the push and pull factors influencing migration movements. It has painted

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The emergence of a global migration policy conversation  129 a complex picture of migrants, thus debunking many of the common myths and stereotypes about them. It has helped to refine the arguments in favour of facilitating human mobility. It has also shown that the toxicity of the debate is often more telling about nationalist-populist politicians in need of a scapegoat, than about migrants themselves or the factual benefits and challenges of migration. As negotiated by diplomats and government experts, the text of the Global Compact for Migration shows that virtually all states now agree on certain basic facts and share a common understanding of the migration phenomenon. It establishes a common diagnosis of the crises of recent years and offers reasonable long-term solutions. The dismay that several politicians expressed when the Global Compact was presented for signature – and the refusal of some states to sign it altogether – exemplifies the gap between the fact-based understanding of efficient migration governance by technocratic policy-makers, and the myth-ridden political discourse on the ‘dangers’ of welcoming migrants. One can only hope that such political opposition to increased mobility is primarily that of a particular generation. Baby boomers are afraid of losing the wealth that they have accumulated over decades, often at the expense of future generations. They are nostalgic for their childhood in neighbourhoods featuring little ethnic, sexual or religious diversity. Ultimately, they deny ‘others’ the right to mobility that they claim for themselves. Subsequent generations have often been raised in an environment marked by increasing diversity, growing urbanisation and financial insecurity, the last of these being a condition that they share with many of those ‘others’. Such generations will hopefully not tolerate discrimination against migrants or minorities as readily, since these will be their friends and family members. Just as the baby boom generation has mainstreamed the legal, political and social inclusion of the LGBTIQ+ community, so one hopes that the next generations will adopt a much more welcoming attitude towards mobility and diversity. It may well be that, as was the case for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the 2018 Global Compact for Migration will not truly begin to inspire political leaders and citizens for another decade or two. However, considering the impact that the 1948 Declaration still has today, one must have faith that the fruits of this labour will be firm and lasting. In short, the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants should contribute to a better framing of the legal, political and social conversations on migration policies. It should raise awareness that immobilising people has more deleterious effects than facilitating their regulated mobility. It should promote a deeper engagement of all stakeholders, including migrants themselves, over the long term. If it does this, it will have served the public good.

NOTES 1. François Crépeau was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants from August 2011 to July 2017. This chapter is a translated and revised version of: Crépeau, F. (2019). L’émergence d’une conversation globale sur les politiques migratoires: retour sur un mandat de Rapporteur Spécial des Nations Unies sur les droits de l’homme des migrants (2011–2017). Droits fondamentaux, (17). http://www.crdh.fr/wp-content/uploads/L%E2%80%99​ %C3%A9mergence-dune-conversation-globale-sur-les-politiques-migratoires.pdf. The authors wish to thank the editors of Droits fondamentaux for allowing them to use the initial publication. 2. All the reports of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants to the UNHRC and the UN General Assembly can be found online at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr​ -migrants/annual-reports.

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REFERENCES Commission on Global Governance (1995). Our global neighbourhood: A report of the Commission on Global Governance. Oxford University Press. Global Commission on International Migration (2005). Migration in an interconnected world: New directions for action. Report of the Global Commission on International Migration. Global Commission on International Migration. https://​www​.refworld​.org/​docid/​435f81814​.html. Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) (n.d.). Background. Retrieved 20 February 2020, from https://​www​.gfmd​.org/​process/​background. Global Migration Data Analysis Centre and International Organization for Migration (2018). Global Migration Indicators 2018. International Organization for Migration. https://​publications​.iom​.int/​ books/​global​-migration​-indicators​-2018. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2014). Fair migration: Setting an ILO agenda (ILC.103/DG/ IB). International Labour Office. https://​www​.ilo​.org/​ilc/​ILCSessions/​previous​-sessions/​103/​reports/​ reports​-to​-the​-conference/​WCMS​_242879/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. International Organization for Migration (IOM) (n.d.). Inter-regional forums on migration. Retrieved 20 February 2022, from https://​www​.iom​.int/​inter​-regional​-forums​-migration. Landgrave, M., and Nowrasteh, A. (2019). Criminal immigrants in 2017: Their numbers, demographics, and countries of origin. Immigration Research and Policy Brief no. 11. Cato Institute. https://​www​ .cato​.org/​sites/​cato​.org/​files/​pubs/​pdf/​irpb​-11​.pdf. United Nations (UN) (1990, 18 December). International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. https://​treaties​.un​.org/​Pages/​ViewDetails​.aspx​ ?src​=​TREATY​&​mtdsg​_no​=​IV​-13​&​chapter​=​4. United Nations (UN) (2014). Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population Development. 20th anniversary edn. United Nations Population Fund. https://​ www​ .unfpa​ .org/​ publications/​international​-conference​-population​-and​-development​-programme​-action. United Nations General Assembly (2014). Declaration of the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (A/RES/68/4). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​ 763758​?ln​=​en. United Nations General Assembly (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​3923923​?ln​=​en. United Nations General Assembly (2016). New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (A/ RES/71/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​844669​?ln​=​en. United Nations General Assembly (2019). Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration (A/ RES/73/195). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1660537​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2012a). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (A/HRC/20/24). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​ .un​.org/​record/​724611​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2012b). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (A/67/299). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​ .org/​record/​733880​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2012c). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Albania (A/HRC/20/24/Add.1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​725349​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013a). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (A/68/283). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​ .org/​record/​756197​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013b). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Greece (A/HRC/23/46/Add.4). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​755598​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013c). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Italy (A/HRC/23/46/Add.3). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​755597​?ln​=​en.

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The emergence of a global migration policy conversation  131 United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013d). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Tunisia (A/HRC/23/46/Add.1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​755593​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013e). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Turkey (A/HRC/23/46/Add.2). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​755596​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2013f). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Regional study: Management of the external borders of the European Union and its impact on the human rights of migrants (A/HRC/23/46). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​755587​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2014a). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (A/69/302). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​ .org/​record/​779029​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2014b). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Labour exploitation of migrants (A/HRC/26/35). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​771920​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2014c). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Qatar (A/HRC/26/35/Add.1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​771921​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2015a). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (A/70/310). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​ .org/​record/​801969​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2015b). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Banking on mobility over a generation: Follow-up to the regional study on the management of the external borders of the European Union and its impact on the human rights of migrants (A/HRC/29/36). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​ 797850​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2015c). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Follow-up mission to Italy (A/HRC/29/36/Add.2). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​797999​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2015d). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Malta (A/HRC/29/36/Add.3). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​798000​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2015e). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants: Mission to Sri Lanka (A/HRC/29/36/Add.1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​797998​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2016a). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (A/71/285). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​ .org/​record/​840550​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2016b). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants on the impact of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements on the human rights of migrants (A/HRC/32/40). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​ record/​842653​?ln​=​en. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants (2017). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants on a 2035 agenda for facilitating human mobility (A/ HRC/35/25). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1299241​?ln​=​en.

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10. Global encounters: exploring the political foundations of global migration governance Stefan Rother, Hélène Thiollet and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores the emergence of global migration governance. Historians and scholars of international relations have offered narratives of how early twentieth-century migration governance was marked, on the one hand, by the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the regulation of labour rights, including the rights of migrant workers (Bohning, 1991), and, on the other, by the activism of individual actors such as Fridtjof Nansen and the League of Nations regarding the governance of refugees (Loescher et al., 2011). Although the distinction between migrants and refugees has been politically constructed across time, actors, and places (Long, 2013), a number of organisations emerged after the Second World War devoted specifically to Palestinian or European refugees. Two of these – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe/ Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (PICMME/ICEM), which would later become the International Organization for Migration (IOM) – started out on the regional level, while one – the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – started out on the international level. However, the politics and interests of national governments, focused on maintaining their own sovereignty, have long overdetermined governance outcomes, as most authors point out in literature on the international politics of migration and asylum (Barnett, 2001; Gamlen and Marsh, 2011; Koser, 2010; Loescher, 2001). For instance, this tendency could be observed at the first United Nations World Population Conference, which took place in Rome in 1954 and discussed only technical issues. Some international initiatives, however, have attracted scholarly attention because of their attempts to indirectly impact upon national political decisions: such is the case of the Global Commission on International Migration (as discussed in François Crépeau and Anna Purkey’s Chapter 9 in this Handbook), which was the first ever global panel on international migration, composed of 19 members and set up in 2003 by the Secretary-General (SG) of the United Nations (UN), Kofi Annan. Its aim was to bring together scholarly evidence about migration and asylum, to foster policy debates between stakeholders, and to advance discussions in global migration politics (Global Commission on International Migration, 2005; Hansen, 2006). In this chapter, we contribute to ongoing debates on the multilateral politics of migration governance. We do so from a historical and empirically situated perspective: we focus on the foundations of global migration governance, paying particular attention to the politics of global encounters around migration. We examine two series of events and processes that have contributed to the foundations of global migration governance in this policy field: the United Nations High-Level Dialogues (HLDs) on Migration and Development in 2006 and 2013, 132 Stefan Rother, Hélène Thiollet, and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden - 9781789908077 37:15AM

Global encounters  133 and the meetings of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) from 2007 onwards. The authors attended both HLDs and all GFMDs. These multilateral gatherings brought together states, international organisations and civil society actors in order to further cooperation between actors and countries. As such, they were expected to create spaces where actors could advance migration governance and promote or consolidate its rules and norms. They were initially conceived as an instrument for advocating for the adoption of legal provisions for the protection of migrants, such as the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW) of 1990. They therefore also constituted policy arenas where a global convergence towards liberal modes of migration policy could take place, through the diffusion of norms and policies. Such expectations align with the hypothesis formulated by Marc Rosenblum and Wayne Cornelius (2012) on the evolving dimensions of immigration policies: along with others, these researchers compare migration policies within states and argue that there is a global convergence of quantitatively restrictionist yet rights-enhancing immigration and asylum policies (Cornelius et al., 1994; Hollifield, 1992; Rosenblum and Cornelius, 2012), while international scholars emphasise the increasing importance and diffusion of norms in migration governance (Guiraudon, 2000; Kunz et al., 2011; Rother, 2019; Triadafilopoulos, 2010). However, these encounters emerged amidst a general defiance on the part of governments – notably governments of migrant destination countries – towards interventions by the United Nations and its agencies in migration policies. This defiance has led to the relative failure of the rights-based, legally binding (‘hard law’) approach to migration governance, which is manifested in the low ratification rate of the ICRMW. We argue that such sovereignty-based reluctance led intergovernmental organisations within the UN and beyond to actively engage in political lobbying by framing migration mainly through the less controversial prism of economic and human development or humanitarianism, thereby moving away from the most controversial and politicised topics (Chamie and Mirkin, 2011). At the same time, one can observe the rise of civil society actors in this field: ‘networks of networks’ and global umbrella organisations for migrants’ rights advocacy have emerged, often organising in response to newly opening global spaces such as the GFMD and the HLDs. We argue that the global encounters taking place at the HLDs and GFMDs reveal the power relations between actors and across organisations of migration governance at the global level. They act as temporary institutions in ‘invited spaces’. They offer venues where conflicts around norms and practices of migration governance become visible, but that also provide opportunity structures for creating new discourses and for socialising actors into cooperative behaviour. By mapping and analysing the main global arenas that have gathered international actors in the 2000s and 2010s, this chapter offers insights into the genesis of migration governance from a situated perspective.

PREMISES As explained by Antoine Pécoud (2015, p. 18), pre-1990s international migration politics were characterised by a piecemeal approach, which combined a relatively institutionalised and consensual refugee regime operated by the UNHCR (Loescher et al., 2011), a powerless ILO suspected of leftist sympathies because of the representation of trade unions in its governance,

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134  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance and the PICMME/ICEM and later IOM, which offered logistical support and practical services to member states. The actual emergence of multilateral migration governance as a central political issue can be traced back to the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. During this conference, migration emerged as a key theme, together with the idea that human migration should be governed internationally. In 2000, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) report on migration highlighted the ageing of certain populations, notably in Europe and Japan, which was increasing demographic imbalances at the global level. At the time, this demographic trend raised an economic challenge for advanced economies, in which the domestic labour force was becoming a scarce resource. Between December 2003 and December 2005, migration experts gathered in the context of the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), the first ever global panel addressing international migration. The GCIM was officially launched in Geneva by the United Nations SG Kofi Annan and representatives from a number of governments. Kofi Annan also stepped in to support the Geneva Migration Group, an interagency group created in April 2003 by several organisations: the ILO, the IOM, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In May 2006, in response to a recommendation of the GCIM for the establishment of a high-level interinstitutional group of agencies involved in migration-related activities, the Geneva Group became the Global Migration Group (GMG). It extended membership to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Bank. This interagency group was created with the goal to ‘bring together heads of agencies which seek to promote the wider application of all relevant international and regional instruments and norms relating to migration, and to encourage the adoption of more coherent, comprehensive and better coordinated approaches to the issue of international migration’ (Global Migration Group, 2021). Despite Annan’s support, the leadership of the SG remained mostly symbolic, and was in practice embodied by the presence of Peter Sutherland, his special representative for migration. States and governments showed little enthusiasm, and meetings were technical and confidential. Feedback from the GMG to the UN General Assembly did not raise much interest. The recommendations drafted by the Group in its report in 2005 remained overly general, yet included scenarios for the creation of a UN migration agency. As Antoine Pécoud argues, for nation states, the first ‘internationalisation of migration politics was above all a strategy to preserve national/sovereign control over human mobility’ (Pécoud, 2015, p. 19) in the midst of a UN-led effort to ‘globalise’ the issue. Indeed, these groups and this first report constitute one of the first international endeavours to treat migration as a global issue after the UN migrant workers’ convention in 1990. They gave rise to several important dimensions of migration politics: labour, development, state security, human security, integration, the protection of migrants, and global governance. They also allowed formal discussions on an issue that had become the ‘new development mantra’ (Kapur, 2004): the potential nexus between migration and development was then being promoted by institutions such as the World Bank, with a major focus on the impact of remittances. At the time, this seemed to be the only issue that was open for constructive discussion, and where at least some consensus could be built across states, intergovernmental actors and non-state actors.

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Global encounters  135 From Rights to Development: Depoliticising Migration Governance to Make Cooperation Possible The global governance of migration was presented as a key objective of Kofi Annan’s mandate. The initial stance of the UN, inheriting a decade of rights-based advocacy, was to further the legal protection and rights of migrants, especially in countries of destination, but also in countries of origin. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 had already granted every person the right to leave any country, including their own. The ILO resolutions Nos 97 and 143 protect the social rights of migrant workers. Refugees are defined and protected by the Geneva Convention of 1951 and its 1967 extension, and some regional agreements offer more comprehensive provisions in some regards (such as the 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, and the Cartagena Declaration in 1984). After almost a decade of lobbying for a legal text on migrants’ rights, the 1990 Convention came as a great disappointment: it took the UN 12 years to implement the Convention,1 and the text was neither signed nor ratified by powerful countries of destination. The granting of universal rights to people on the move and their families, regardless of their status (regular or otherwise), thus remained an elusive goal. By 2023, still only 58 countries, primarily countries of origin in the Global South, had signed and ratified the Convention, and migration governance continues to lack a universal legal framework. In the 1990s, the migration‒development nexus was a rising topic in scholarly and policy publications, with the publication of the Ascencio report in 1990, a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1992, the Cairo Conference report in 1994, and an IOM report in 1996. Even though the relationship between migration and development remained contested (Castles and Delgado Wise, 2008; Delgado-Wise, 2014; Faist, 2008; Papademetriou and Martin, 1991), development became the raison d’être of migration-related multilateral encounters and the main policy mantra of UN-led diplomacy, where legal activism had failed. The role of development, development policies, remittances, social networks, human capital, and humanitarian or development aid featured in increasingly complex scholarly models and intergovernmental discussions, while policy discussions at the level of nation states often remained overly simplistic (Nyberg-Sorensen et al., 2002). Intergovernmental discussions progressively shifted the substance of discourses from rights to development. While the interest in economic development was genuine, notably in poorer countries, the overall ambition was to depoliticise migration governance and to create the discursive and political conditions for the emergence of a global infrastructure for cooperative migration governance, which would be led by the UN and its affiliated international organisations (IOs). As Pécoud notes in his analysis of international migration narratives based on a corpus of IOs’ reports, public discourses on migration governance in the 2000s overwhelmingly feature governance, cooperation, dialogue or partnerships as their main topic. Development comes third as a topic, and asylum or human rights feature in only a third of the reports he analyses (Pécoud, 2015, p. 35). An emphasis on the link between migration and development, together with the socio-economic dimension of migration governance, notably in the Global South, thus became a central element of discourses and policy development from 2005 onwards. This was a response to the relative failure of the ICRMW, and offered a new policy framework with which to push for global cooperation by depoliticising the issue of migration.

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136  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The UN General Assembly, in its resolution 58/208 of 23 December 2003, voted in favour of holding a High-Level Dialogue on international migration and development during its 61st session in 2006. The following sections of this chapter focus on these two series of events, whose successive manifestations constitute interconnected political processes: the HLDs of the General Assembly of 2006 and 2013, and the GFMDs, the first of which took place in 2007 in Brussels as one of the outcomes of the first HLD. The subsequent GFMDs took place in Manila in 2008, Athens in 2009, Puerto Vallarta in 2010, Geneva in 2011, and Mauritius in 2012. After the 2013 HLD in New York, further GFMDs were organised in Stockholm in 2014, Istanbul in 2015, Dhaka in 2016, Berlin in 2017, Marrakesh in 2018, Quito in 2020, and online in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2021.

UN-LED MULTILATERAL ENCOUNTERS: THE HLDS OF 2006 AND 2013 Overall, the initial emphasis placed on rights by the SG and UN agencies in the 1990s, notably at the UN migrant workers’ convention, proved counterproductive to the advancement of international cooperation. A multilateral political willingness to engage in deliberations on migration remained elusive or marginal before the 2006 HLD. Migration and migrants’ lives continued to be largely ruled by the laws of countries of destination, which defined the rights of entrance, work and settlement at the national level. As SG Kofi Annan put it in his inaugural address in 2006: ‘Clearly, there is no consensus on making international migration the subject of formal, norm-setting negotiations. There is little appetite for any norm-setting intergovernmental commission on migration’ (Annan and United Nations, 2006). The first HLD took place in 2006 in the UN General Assembly. In his address, Annan underlined that this meeting was indeed a milestone on a difficult journey: ‘Just a few years ago, many people did not think it possible to discuss migration at the United Nations. Governments, they said, would not dare to bring into the international arena a topic on which their citizens are so sensitive’ (Annan and United Nations, 2006). Confronted with resistance from advanced economies, Annan brought migration governance onto the UN agenda by framing it within the migration‒development nexus. The HLD was intended to jump on the consensual bandwagon of internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Whereas discourses on rights and protection had failed, the rhetoric adopted by the SG and all UN stakeholders of the HLD built upon the mantra of ‘triple wins – for migrants, for their countries of origin, and for the societies that receive them’ (Annan and United Nations, 2006). The Dialogue took place between 14 and 15 September 2006 in the UN headquarters in New York. It consisted of four plenary meetings and four interactive roundtables on various themes, including migrants’ rights, human trafficking and migrant smuggling, remittances, and partnerships at the bilateral and regional levels. One of the main achievements of the Dialogue was to bring about the coexistence of government and IO representatives, alongside representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) accredited by ECOSOC, in discussions of migration policies. Yet participant observation during some of the regional and bilateral level sessions revealed that discussions mostly involved the presentation of information by UN representatives. Government officials remained

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Global encounters  137 taciturn, if not altogether silent, during the meetings. During one session devoted to the Middle East and North Africa, for instance, discussions were mainly conducted by representatives of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), and the Lebanese government representative was the only one that spoke. Generally, representatives from countries of emigration from the Global South voiced their concerns and priorities, while destination countries in the Global North or the Gulf Cooperation Council remained cautiously silent. Off-the-record discussions were mostly between partners who were already engaged in bilateral politics related to migration management. Collective discussion occurred only in the formal and theatricalised manner typical of large assemblies, and no actual policy commitment was made in these discussions. As expected, people participating in the smaller meetings were mostly technical staff from IOs and second-tier diplomats or their assistants. Yet, for most UN and governmental staff, the main achievement was to bring about interaction at a higher policy level than had occurred before the HLD, and to connect personnel dealing with migration across organisations. Interorganisational connections were consolidated, thus providing organisations with a pathway towards integrating migration into their various fields and sectors of activity. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), for instance, reinforced its position as a ‘cause’ leader around the issue of children’s mobility and children ‘left behind’ in migration households.2 Interactions between IOs and diplomatic staff remained largely limited to junior levels of representation, and mostly involved the discussion of technical issues among partners who were already collaborating. Overall, the HLD was pervaded by a general impression of a lack of interest on the part of governmental representatives, manifested in empty seats and deserted meeting rooms. During the first HLD, no consensus could be reached about whether the issue of migration should be discussed within or outside the UN; or indeed in no kind of forum at all, as the United States and Australia argued (Martin et al., 2007). A key result of the first HLD was thus an acknowledgement of the resistance of governments in relation to any form of legally and politically binding commitment regarding labour migration and irregular flows, and the UN therefore challenged nation states to engage in meaningful cooperation. The result of such reorientation of the negotiation was the GFMD, conceived as a mere platform for informal dialogue, with an advisory role for IOs and NGOs. The GFMD, whose first meeting took place the following year in Brussels, was thus initiated as a compromise, and framed as a ‘State-led and non-binding platform for informal dialogue and cooperation.’3 The Second HLD (2013): Side-Lining UN Organisations, Consolidating Intergovernmental Negotiations, and the Rise of the IOM In 2008, the General Assembly, in its resolution 63/225, decided to hold a second High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2013, which would follow on from a one-day informal thematic debate at its 65th Session, on 19 May 2011.4 This preliminary meeting unveiled the pre-eminent role that the IOM was to take on as an institutional leader of multilateral cooperation around migration, as the IOM’s Director General, William Swing, chaired the first panel, following interventions by SG Ban Ki Moon and Joseph Dreiss, President of the General Assembly. The IOM also co-organised the Informal Interactive Hearings with NGOs, Civil Society and the Private Sector (15 July 2013, New York) and the Panel Discussion on International Migration and Development (25 June 2013, New York), and took the lead regarding the

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138  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance multilateral coordination of Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs), most notably with regard to the Fourth Global Meeting of Chairs and Secretariats of RCPs in Lima (2013). As state-led instruments of cooperation, RCPs corresponded closely to governments’ agenda of finding informal cooperation platforms that would not infringe their sovereign autonomy, while remaining ‘issue-orientated’ and sector-specific, as well as entirely non-constraining. In a report commissioned by the IOM, Randall Hansen concludes that the work of RCPs mostly amounts to ‘incentivizing cooperation and, therefore, finding a middle way between ad-hoc discussions and supranational migration governance’ (Hansen, 2010). However, this ‘supranational migration governance’ never quite emerged as a concrete set of binding mechanisms, and cooperation remained limited to participation in the informal IOM-organised and state-led processes. As the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development took place as part of the 68th Session of the General Assembly on 3–4 October 2013, with the subtitle ‘Making Migration Work’, a UN official observed that ‘Western countries [were] trying to keep migration out of the UN political strategy … as the UNHCR and other UN agencies are far too constraining for destination states.’5 This initial reluctance was partly redeemed by the bilateral and multilateral cooperation that was organised at many administrative levels by UN organisations. However, it mostly led to states favouring the IOM as a central organisation in the institutionalisation of global migration governance. Contrary to UN organisations such as the ILO or UNHCR, the IOM was clearly perceived by governments as their preferred channel for collaboration. The second HLD was characterised by an increasing integration of migration initiatives across UN organisations. Additionally, and contrary to the first HLD, it also served as an arena for intense negotiations at the bilateral level between states. In this context, a new trend was the increased participation of small states in the negotiations. Some of these smaller players were given a voice and a space in the HLD arena, as a response to new migration crises such as the one connected to environmentally induced internal displacement in Bangladesh. Nepal voiced concerns about the migration of low-skilled workers, in view of its increasing emigration, notably to India and the Gulf monarchies. Small states developed a strategy of using experts to give visibility to their arguments, and forming coalitions backed by UN organisations such as the ILO or the UNHCR. In so doing, they developed a form of soft diplomacy on migration on the international scene through their role in the HLD. Large emigration countries such as Morocco and the Philippines also became more visible, in the hope of impacting on their ongoing bilateral negotiations with destination states (the European Union for Morocco, and the Gulf states for the Philippines). Additionally, some of these large emigration countries had recently also become so-called transit or immigration countries owing to their geographical position, and had thus become key players in the externalised border politics of destination states. In this context, states largely relied upon cooperation with the IOM to enforce migration control, notably with regard to irregular migration, and in order to bypass UN-led multilateral cooperation. Overall, the IOM appeared to foster a state-led regulation of migration movements. Key examples of such cooperation are readmission and return programmes – often jointly organised with the UNHCR (Koch, 2014) – and anti-emigration campaigns, as well as information provision for the purpose of migration control and deterrence. This focus of the IOM’s work led scholars to adopt a critical stance regarding the prospect of the IOM’s inclusion in the UN system (Geiger and Pécoud, 2020). Indeed, keynote speakers from the UN system consistently acknowledged the role of the IOM

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Global encounters  139 but avoided formulating any explicit commitment to include the organisation fully in the UN system. In off-the-record discussions, UN staff clearly identified the IOM as the main competitor to a UN-led and rights-orientated multilateral governance of migration, under the model of the UNHCR and the forced migration regime. The IOM, however, received robust support from states throughout the HLD, with litanies of pro-IOM pledges as state representatives took it in turn to speak in favour of the IOM in plenary and side events.6 Stefan Rother details the various strategies of ‘self-promotion’ and enhanced ‘actorness’ of the IOM throughout the second HLD (Rother, 2020, pp. 2–3), and the vocal support that the IOM received from governments. This support, manifested throughout the HLD events and roundtables, was aimed at pressuring the SG to entrust the IOM with a leadership role in the infrastructure of global migration governance. The IOM thus visibly appeared to be a state-friendly organisation rather than a migrant-friendly one, whose activities were determined by governments and primarily benefited states (Ashutosh and Mountz, 2011; Georgi, 2010). While the HLD arena discursively focused on rights and collaborative regulations, there was competition between, on the one hand, migration diplomacy and bilateral and multilateral agreements between states, and on the other hand, multilateral regulations and rights-based critiques of migration politics (notably of Western states). An example of this competition is found in the intervention of the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants at the side event on Human Rights at International Borders on 4 October 2013, whose statement was entitled ‘Securitisation and Externalisation of the Borders Alone Will Not Stem Irregular Migration’. The HLD thus offered the spectacle of dissonance between the intentions of the UN and state mobilisation in favour of sovereign migration control, with the IOM serving as a middleman between states and the UN.

GFMD: A STATE-LED INITIATIVE BRINGING TOGETHER STATES AND CIVIL SOCIETY REPRESENTATIVES Considering the circumstances under which the GFMD was created – as an ad hoc compromise in which institutional and procedural aspects were developed almost ‘on the fly’ – it has demonstrated remarkable longevity. Rarely has a new global, multistakeholder forum been set up in such a short time; it took less than ten months from the first HLD in New York to the start of the first GFMD meeting in July 2007 in Brussels. For this meeting, a format was developed that has seen several modifications over the years, but the basic structure has remained fairly stable. It is built upon the principle of a non-binding, state-led and informal process, meaning that no legally binding outputs are expected of the discussions, which take place in an informal manner, and that it is states that are the main stakeholders behind the process, setting the agenda and hosting events. Although there is a small support structure, including the GFMD secretariat hosted by the IOM (the GFMD support unit) and bodies of supporting states (the GFMD Steering Group), as well as international organisations and regional processes (Friends of the Forum), the hosting state has significant influence over the organisation and agenda of the meeting. The initial plan was that states which are primarily countries of origin or destination would take turns hosting the forum; this principle has generally been adhered to, with instances of joint chairmanship (Germany and Morocco in 2017/2018 and France and Senegal planned in 2023/2024; however, Senegal withdrew).

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140  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The GFMD format consists of meetings of government representatives, where high-level bureaucrats and in some cases also secretaries or ministers of relevant state departments discuss issues related to migration and development. Besides plenary sessions with a varying number of formal speeches and panel debates, the core of the GFMD lies in its roundtable sessions. These focus on specific aspects of the overall theme that has been chosen for the (almost) annual meeting, and aim to ‘facilitate discussion and cooperation in exploring good practices and their wider global applicability’.7 While a two-hour informal discussion may not seem to constitute a significant contribution to global governance in itself, one also has to take into account what comes before and after the actual meeting: priority issues are discussed and agreed upon during the lead-up to the GFMD, background papers are drafted, often by or with international organisations and academics, countries sometimes cooperate in jointly chairing sessions, examples of good practices are exchanged and documented, and summaries and concluding reports are written. In sum, and as an ongoing process for over a decade, these interactions and outputs can be seen as a trust-building measure capable of socialising states into more cooperative behaviour (Rother, 2019). While this may be considered a low threshold for success, one must assess it against the background of the previous situation in which, for a long time, including at the time of the first HLD, many governments, especially countries of destination, had been unwilling to discuss the issue of migration in international forums at all. This trust-building potential of the GFMDs also extends to other stakeholders involved in the process, namely actors from migrant civil society. From the first GFMD onwards, there has been a dedicated space for migrant support and self-organisations, on the designated Civil Society Days (CSDs). These usually take place before (occasionally after or partially parallel to) the meeting between government representatives, and follow a similar structure; in particular, the roundtable themes often mirror those being discussed at the government meetings. This can provide an opportunity for exchange, and the space for interaction between the two meetings has indeed grown substantially over the years.8 Initially, there were rather restricted ‘interface sessions’ but, starting with the Mexican GFMD, a whole day came to be dedicated to a ‘common space’ where representatives of governments and civil society actors could meet. Regarding the organisation of the CSDs, migrant civil society has achieved more agency over the years. Up until the Mexican GFMD, the meetings were organised by major foundations in the host countries, such as the King Baudouin Foundation (Belgium), the Onassis Foundation (Greece) and Bancomer (Mexico). Since 2013, the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) has taken over this role, which has led to more continuity and institutionalisation of the process. However, this trend towards more openness in the GFMD is not always a linear process, since the organisation of the meetings reflects the policies of the respective host governments and their attitudes towards civil society. Consequently, domestic civil society organisations lacked representation during the 2015 GFMD in Turkey (Soykan and Şenses, 2018), and the space for international migrant civil society to put forward their agenda was then rather limited overall. These occasional setbacks notwithstanding, these interactions seem to have contributed to mutual trust-building between states and migrant civil society; during the 2021 GFMD, hosted by the UAE, no distinction was made between government and Civil Society Days. The COVID-19 pandemic indirectly contributed to this situation of equal access, since it resulted in a ‘zoomification’ of the meeting (Rother, 2022), and the representatives had (almost) equal access to the online sessions. By this time, migrant civil society had been joined by other

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Global encounters  141 stakeholders who participated in an institutionalised manner. The private sector is represented in the GFMD Business Mechanism, and there is also a GFMD Mayors Mechanism (Thouez, 2020) and a GFMD Youth Forum. Just as the space for participation has expanded over the years, so too has the agenda of the meetings. Whereas, in the beginning, the focus was on a rather narrow concept of development – primarily related to the financial remittances being sent home by migrants – later meetings increasingly discussed a broader range of issues related to human development, as well as connected issues such as gender, climate-induced migration, irregular migration, and a rights-based approach to migration. The topic of a rights-based approach to migration had been controversial during the early years, with organisers claiming that governments did not want to talk about rights (McGregor-Lebon, 2020; Rother, 2019). It can thus be considered a success on the part of migrant civil society that it has been able to place at least parts of its rights-based concerns onto the agenda of GFMD deliberations. For civil society organisations, the GFMD is not only an important forum in which to participate, but also a site to rally around while creating their own independent spaces. As a response to the very limited opportunities for participation in the first HLD, several global migrant civil society organisations – networks of networks – organised a Global Community Dialogue on Migration Development and Human Rights, which would later become the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA). The PGA has been held before or in parallel to most of the GFMD meetings, as well as on the occasion of the second HLD and the Intergovernmental Conference to Adopt the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018). The PGA is more inclusive, since it involves no selective accreditation procedure, as is standard for organisations applying to send delegates to GFMD meetings. However, many of these delegates attend both meetings, and carry the results of the PGA meetings into the GFMD Civil Society Days and deliberations with governments. Obviously, there is not one migrant civil society, but rather a plurality of actors, some of which are strongly opposed to the GFMD, since they consider it a forum for ‘modern slavery’ and the commodification of migrant labour; these networks have organised their own independent counter-process, the International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR) (Rother, 2018). This indicates that the observation made above regarding the internal dynamics of the GFMD also hold true for its ‘outside’ effects: while some may consider it a mere talking shop, it provides a political opportunity structure for interaction, trust-building, and also in some cases vocal opposition. It has contributed indirectly to the creation of several forums and mechanisms that are active in relation to the GFMD, but also beyond the annual event itself. These positive contributions notwithstanding, the GFMD continues to face several challenges and shortcomings. Owing to its state-led nature, the process relies heavily on the goodwill, commitment and ultimately the financial support of UN member states. There is no fixed budget to speak of, and so continuous pledges for financing must be made, in particular when the hosting government is a country of origin with limited funds. More than once, governments have withdrawn from formal or informal commitments to host the process (among them South Africa and Argentina, the latter owing to its economic crisis). In these cases, other governments had to fill in, or there was a temporary vacuum with regard to upcoming chairs (in principle the GFMD operates according to a rotating troika system, where chairs past, present and future cooperate in organising the forum).

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142  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance GFMD meetings have been well documented, and a Platform for Partnerships (PfP) has been established that ‘features government policies and programmes (practices) that have been inspired by the GFMD discussions and recommendations’.9 As of February 2022, it features 1281 such policies and practices, showcased by 188 governments. Recent initiatives include the GFMD Ad Hoc Working Group on Public Narratives on Migration, initiated by Canada, the German Development Cooperation (GIZ)-funded programme Towards a Holistic Approach to Labour Migration Governance and Labour Mobility in North Africa (THAMM), and Migra Empresas, a project created by the municipality of La Pintana, Chile, ‘which seeks to bring job offers to migrants and where the city administration provides legal and technical assistance to companies’. Admittedly, not all of the programmes are direct results of GFMD deliberations, but they are at the very least related to the process and its mechanisms (for example, the Migra Empresas project is connected to the GFMD’s Mayors Mechanisms). There is a GFMD Working Group on Sustainable Development and International Migration – initially ad hoc, and now established on a permanent basis – that focuses on the implementation, follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). Nonetheless, there remains obvious room for improvement in the concrete follow-up to the GFMD’s deliberations and overall continuity. The GFMD has also experienced an identity crisis of sorts as a result of the GCM process: what role should, and could, the informal process play when a more formal – although still non-binding – process is under way? However, the GFMD could rightly claim to have laid the foundations for the GCM, through its trust-building processes between countries of origin and destination, migrant civil society, and various other stakeholders. The two meetings held during the GCM deliberations – 2016 in Bangladesh and 2017 in Germany – also served as relevant waypoints and resources for the ongoing negotiations. This function can be seen as a clear indicator that the GFMD has moved beyond its initial development focus; while the issue of development still plays a significant role – and can be seen as the framing that made cooperation possible in the first place – the Forum has become a governance institution that, owing to its informality and increasing multistakeholder nature, might be here to stay at least in the medium term, and can provide a space to further develop the global governance of migration.

CONCLUSION: CONVERGENCE AND CONTRADICTIONS OF GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE This chapter has mapped out the long and winding road towards the emergence of global frameworks for the governance of migration. The HLDs and the GFMD formed the first arenas for multistakeholder discussions on the subject; they can be seen as a ‘prequel’ to the Global Compact. Both processes have opened new spaces for deliberations on global migration, and the key issue has been that of development. By linking the issue of migration, firstly, to the Millennium Development Goals (which, conversely, made no explicit link to migration), and later to the Sustainable Development Goals (in which migration is mentioned several times), they provided states with a positive framing with which to approach migration. The relevance of the development framing is manifested in the GCM, whose call ‘for safe, orderly and regular migration’ is a direct quotation from the Sustainable Development Goals, as recalled in the New York Declaration and the United Nations Network on Migration, set up by the SG.10

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Global encounters  143 In these new spaces, power dynamics have been played out, and in some instances reconfigured. States that were primarily countries of origin engaged in dialogue with countries of destination on an eye-to-eye level. Civil society organisations worked to expand their space for participation and establish themselves as critical but constructive partners. Besides gaining ground in ‘invited spaces’, global civil society networks have also set up independent ‘invented spaces’, from which they challenge dominant paradigms and what they consider to be inadequate migration policies. International organisations continued their turf wars in these new forums, with the IOM emerging as the dominant institution, having positioned itself as an attractive partner for states (partly through remaining a ‘non-normative’ agency) while trying to reach out to other stakeholders. Migration governance thus became institutionalised to a certain extent, whether through UN-led encounters or through intergovernmental encounters under the auspices of and in collaboration with UN, non-UN, and non-governmental organisations. Yet this institutionalisation is only temporary and fragile, and we suggest using the concept of ‘temporary institutions’ to describe the role of global encounters. Characterising the institutions analysed in this chapter as ‘prequels’ does not mean that they should be considered as obsolete; although the HLD format may have served its purpose as a ‘temporary institution’ that now seems to have merged into the GCM process, the GFMD is likely to be here to stay, at least in the near future, as France and Senegal have taken on a joint chairmanship for 2022–2023. While the output of the GFMD has, at most, inspired policy measures on various levels, the importance of the aspects of trust-building, process and format should not be underestimated. At the time of writing (December 2021), a substantial number of consultations are taking place for the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) of the GCM in May 2022. During these debates (mostly held online), stakeholders such as civil society actors and mayors have complained about the limited space for their participation at the UN, and have referred to the more inclusive format of the GFMD as an example of good practice. In terms of content, the GFMD can be seen as an attempt to ‘outsource’ deliberations on migration under the framing of development. The issues debated in an informal setting, including diaspora engagement, climate-induced migration, gender, the role of irregular migration, and access to services, have diffused back into UN deliberations, as can be seen in the case of the GCM. Likewise, a diffusion of the multistakeholder approach of the GFMD could lead to more inclusive forms of deliberations at the UN that go beyond what has been achieved in the two HLDs.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

It came into force in July 2003 after reaching the threshold of 20 ratifying states. This is based on fieldwork observations and interviews conducted in 2006. See https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​ga/​68/​meetings/​migration/​about​.shtml. See https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/events/informal-thematic-debate-international​-migra tion-and-development. 5. Interview, October 2013. 6. Fieldwork observations. 7. Source: https://​www​.gfmd​.org/​meetings/​belgium2007. 8. https://​gfmdcivilsociety​.org/​. 9. http://​www​.gfmd​.org/​pfp/​home. 10. See Chapter 11 by Guild and Allinson in this Handbook.

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144  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance

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11. Making a global compact: the objectives and institutions of the Marrakesh Compact Elspeth Guild and Kathryn Allinson

INTRODUCTION The international community as represented in the United Nations (UN) has an ambiguous relationship with the issue of migration. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that whenever migration is discussed, states are actually speaking of one another’s citizens. One state’s citizen is another one’s migrant, the latter simultaneously remaining a citizen of their home country (Guild et al., 2017b, p. 2). While migration may have been a relatively non-normative term at some point in the past, this has no longer been the case for the past 50 years. The ‘migrant’ is a figure of multiple identities, yet none of these is particularly attractive. Among the many identities that each of us holds and shares (citizen, worker, family member, and so on), that of the migrant is one of the least popular. This is hardly surprising, since claiming the identity of ‘migrant’ rarely brings benefits, instead often placing the person in question in a precarious and unpopular category. There are many terms used to describe migration and people who move from one state to another. For the purpose of this chapter, we use the definition adopted by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR): a migrant is a person who lives outside their country of birth or citizenship, irrespective of intention (Inter-Parliamentary Union et al., 2015, p. 18). The development of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (hereinafter referred to as the Marrakesh Compact, or the Global Compact for Migration, GCM) was an inherently complex process. There were conflicting goals and interests between many institutions and actors of varying influence and size. According to the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (hereinafter referred to as the New York Declaration), this was to be a ‘state-led process’ (UN General Assembly, 2016b, para. 52), but UN state members were, and still are, by no means in agreement on the way in which migration should be addressed. Several states of the Global North consider that migration control and management is the paramount objective, with a view to reducing immigration, whereas many states of the Global South see migration as a legitimate strategy for their citizens seeking to improve their lives (Bailey and Mulder, 2017; Nawyn, 2016; Sørensen, 2012). UN institutions therefore had to give voice to these competing perspectives, bearing in mind that Global North states hold the key to international organisations’ funding, but Global South states have the numerical advantage in voting in the UN General Assembly. Furthermore, the populist rhetoric according to which migration was ‘a drain on national resources’, and thus had to be curtailed and controlled, was gaining currency in some states of the Global North (see Simpson, 2016; United Kingdom Home Office, 2005). In this context, the moral high ground – human rights for everyone, including migrants – became the mediating standard to which all states had already committed themselves and around which the Global Compact for Migration could be designed, regardless of conflicting Global North and Global South state political pressures. 146 Elspeth Guild and Kathryn Allinson - 9781789908077 37:16AM

Making a global compact  147 We should note that categorising UN member states as belonging to either the Global North or the Global South obviously means that some of the finer points of these states’ differing positions are lost. We nevertheless use this distinction as a shorthand to help us unravel the complex dynamics of the GCM negotiations, while recognising that states, whether they are part of the Global North or the Global South, do not necessarily align consistently with their group’s position (see Oelgemoller and Maple, 2018).1 This set of conflicting goals and interests is our theoretical entry point and informs our approach to the GCM development process. We argue that the attempt by some Global North states to use the Marrakesh Compact to appeal to their right-wing populist constituencies was doomed to failure. Their efforts were frustrated by the majority of states in the UN system as these wanted a progressive, potentially innovative, rights-based approach to global migration challenges which, in turn, put pressure on the international organisations involved in the GCM process to support the human rights of migrants. Those Global North states that sought to design a restrictive Marrakesh Compact in order to appease their populist right eventually discovered that this would be a difficult, if not altogether impossible, task for two main reasons: firstly, the composition of the UN, wherein Global South states are numerically superior; and secondly, the very nature of their populist movements, which any policy countenancing immigration could never satisfy. No measure whatsoever, be it national or international, could placate these right-wing populist actors for whom immigration has become a rallying cry and who have used a national-patriotic rhetoric, distinguishing ‘real’ citizens from ‘others’ undeserving of rights, to wrap themselves in the flag. Throughout the GCM development process, many UN and regional organisations, representing the majority of UN member states, continually pushed for migrants’ human rights to be given a prominent place in the Compact, for the creation of legal pathways for migrants, and for the recognition of the inherent vulnerability of migrants in mixed flows. International organisations, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and OHCHR, worked closely together to ensure a coherent message that would reflect the position of the majority of their constituents and achieve as much convergence as possible between the Global North and the Global South. As a result, the Marrakesh Compact goes remarkably far in maintaining the human rights of migrants. It is abundantly clear, however, that those actors and institutions which succumbed to the populist rhetoric of the right not only failed to win their positions internally, but also lost influence at the international level. When states and organisations yield to the right, they lose valuable ground on core human rights and governance protections. For example, with respect to Objective 5 of the Marrakesh Compact, which is concerned with providing options for legal pathways for migrants and thus reducing reliance on unsafe, irregular channels (UN, 2018e, para. 21), progress was lost during the drafting process (Groenendijk, 2018). Yet such moves still failed to garner support from the populist right because no measure could ever go far enough to appeal to this constituency while operating within the confines of binding international law and existing international treaties: in the case of legal pathways for migrants, for example, this entails preserving the right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulement, as well as providing mechanisms for regional migration flows such as work visas, and so on. These political actors thus find themselves in an indefensible position. Many right-wing populist parties gain their attractiveness by demonising minority groups such as migrants. They have therefore no interest in compromise, since this would only make them less of a draw for their voter base. Trying to appease such parties by lowering international standards on migrant

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148  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance rights will never succeed in getting them on board, as supporting any immigration-related initiative would destroy their position in the political marketplace (Castles, 2013). Furthermore, the Global Compact for Migration was to a large extent drafted by diplomats, who tend to be disconnected from their own governments and their right-wing populist message, especially in international settings. Therefore, there is a disjunction between national politicians succumbing to the populist rhetoric, and international representatives who work on drafting international agreements through a process of influence and compromise. The inherent divide between these two operations leads to difficulties in ratification because the resulting agreements do not align with the message that politicians are trying to convey at home. As a result, even after the Marrakesh Compact was drafted and the ink had dried on the document, many state representatives, who throughout the process had given in to the populist right in their respective countries and regions, failed to gain the necessary support to sign the Compact on behalf of their states. This meant not only that the Compact had potentially less political, normative and legal authority, but also that it was limited in advancing the human rights of migrants and broader migrant protections. By exploring how this process of give-and-take played out in the different contributions made by key institutions and actors, the following pages shed light on the way in which the Compact developed. To do so, this chapter examines the Marrakesh Compact from the perspective of the many institutions and actors that framed its content, looking at the controversies that surrounded its development. Firstly, it analyses the relationship between migration, human rights and development to explain the framework within which the Compact was conceived and developed. It then provides a brief overview of the GCM drafting process, before assessing the contributions made by key actors throughout the two years during which the Compact took shape. It explores the struggles between the different actors involved, their motivations and their fundamental differences in the way in which they view the relationship between human rights, development and migration. The chapter concludes that the internal dynamics underpinning the GCM drafting process led to a push for a non-legally binding instrument, an inherent consequence of the fact that the Compact originated from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

A MIGRATION COMPACT FOUNDED ON HUMAN RIGHTS, IN THE PURSUIT OF DEVELOPMENT In September 2016, the UN decided to make a fresh start in reaching international agreement on the treatment of migration (see Chapter 9 in this Handbook). This took the form of the New York Declaration adopted on 19 September of that year by the UN General Assembly (2016b), which called for the negotiation of two Compacts: one for ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’, which would result in the Marrakesh Compact; and the other on refugees, which would eventually become the Global Compact on Refugees (hereinafter referred to as the Refugee Compact). The Refugee Compact was from the outset firmly in the hands of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which managed the year-long period devoted to stocktaking as well as the writing of the successive drafts and, moreover, assumed an exclusive role in monitoring progress towards its implementation. In contrast, the Marrakesh Compact was something of a battleground for international agencies, each with its own agenda and vision of the future.

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Making a global compact  149 Both Compacts would end up being placed within the framework of the SDGs. While to the outside world this may have seemed a somewhat odd choice, for insiders it was seen as a way to achieve progress on migration issues among an international community in which a number of major actors, such as China and the United States (US), were opposed to the expansion of migration into the area of human rights (Haimei, 2011; Peters, 2014). The use of the term ‘Compact’ was new to the UN (with the exception of the 2000 UN Global Compact for business, which aims at promoting corporate social responsibility, and is a very different document), and it had no specific legal meaning at the time of the adoption of the New York Declaration. This would, indeed, be the subject of considerable discussion during the negotiation of the two Compacts, with the outcome that neither would be legally binding as such, but instead would express political will (Guild and Grant, 2017). Migration and Human Rights Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and to this day, the object of human rights is, bar a few exceptions, the human being. Human rights instruments are drafted in terms of rights applying to everyone. The objective of human rights is to establish the level of acceptable state behaviour towards anyone who, as per Article 2 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), is ‘within [a state’s] territory and subject to its jurisdiction’ (UN General Assembly, 1967). For instance, in accordance with Article 7 of the ICCPR and with the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), states are prohibited from engaging in torture (UN General Assembly, 1984). This is a legal threshold below which a state cannot act without breaching its human rights obligations. Such a right applies to everyone: a state cannot choose to refrain from torturing its citizens but not foreign nationals. In 1951, the international community adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereinafter referred to as the 1951 Refugee Convention), which became a permanent international instrument as a result of the 1967 Protocol and the removal of the time limits and the geographic limitation clause (UN, 2011). However, refugees were defined as a very specific type of migrants: according to Article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees were people who were at risk of persecution in their own country and therefore forced to flee to seek the protection of another country (UN, 2011, p. 14). As such, the international community considered them to be deserving of legal protection, a position that also, and most importantly, conveyed the idea that refugee protection could not be a reason for friction between states. Migrants, on the other hand, were viewed as individuals who moved voluntarily and, therefore, who could choose to return to their home country if they were unhappy with their treatment in the host country. Nevertheless, as human beings, migrants were, and remain, covered by the rights and protections established by the body of UN human rights conventions (Guild et al., 2017b). The creation of a separate convention setting out the human rights of migrants was thus not seen as necessary until the 1980s. In 1990, the UN opened the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW) for signature and ratification. The ICRMW covers both the human rights of all migrants (irrespective of the nature – regular or irregular – of their stay in a receiving country) and the rights attaching to migrants in a regular situation vis-à-vis the authorities of a host state (UN General Assembly, 1991). Although this convention currently has 58 state parties, and another 11 states have signed it, it has been

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150  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance shunned by powerful states in the international community that see themselves as destination countries, such as Australia, Canada, the US, and all European Union (EU) member states. Moreover, some academics hailing from those countries have derided the ICRMW as both unrealistic and unworkable (Ruhs, 2012); whether this view is now turning out to be incorrect is still a matter of academic debate. However, the General Comments issued by the Committee on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (CMW), the treaty body monitoring the implementation of the ICRMW, have gained increasing authority over state practice, even that of non-signatory states (Carraro, 2019; Chetail, 2020). The adoption of this convention effectively marked the end of UN institutional efforts to incorporate migration into binding human rights instruments. Migration and Development The SDGs had a long gestation period, beginning in the early 1970s and culminating in the adoption of 17 goals by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, a year before the New York Declaration was issued. The process had begun to take shape with the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1992 and the adoption of Agenda 21, a UN non-binding action plan regarding sustainable development. It came to fruition in 2015 with the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, specifying SDGs to be achieved by 2030 (UN General Assembly, 2015). Unlike human rights, which are driven by law, the development and environmental approach underpinning the 2030 Agenda is results-oriented; the objectives set by the 2030 Agenda are designed to address the issues identified as global challenges: poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice (Preamble, p. 2). There are multiple means of implementation, ranging from national action plans to monitoring mechanisms (paras 39–48). In order to achieve the SDGs, enormous efforts have gone into financing the related programmes via both public and private funds. Goal 16 – to promote peace, justice and strong institutions (pp. 25–26) – would seem a natural or logical place to raise the issue of migration, since it is the most ‘legal’ of the SDGs. But Goal 10, which calls for the reduction of inequalities, was chosen instead. It advocates economic growth to reduce inequality, while at the same time acknowledging that this will not be sufficient, as all three dimensions (economic, social and environmental) of sustainable development have to be addressed. In the midst of a series of targets to reduce inequality both between states and within them, then, migration makes an unexpected appearance: target 10.7 pledges to ‘facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies’ (p. 21). Given the place where it is mentioned in the SDGs, one cannot fail to notice that according to the 2030 Agenda, (international) migration is about reducing inequalities between states and, therefore, the type of migration flows with which the SDGs are concerned are those from poor to richer countries. The utilitarian approach may not be attractive, but the point remains that the SDGs do not recognise that richer states have a vested interest in attracting workers. It bears emphasising, however, that official statistics indicate that most labour migration flows to developed countries originate from other developed countries (see OECD, 2019, p. 21, table 1.1; OECD, 2021, p. 22, table 1.1). Moreover, the difficulty that arises from conceptualising migration as a poor-to-rich country phenomenon is that any attempt to liberalise the movement

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Making a global compact  151 of persons becomes embroiled in the politics of poverty. This, indeed, would be the fate of the Marrakesh Compact. Target 10.7 of the SDGs was therefore the starting place for the Marrakesh Compact and, as mentioned above, it tied migration and development together (Piper, 2017): what has come to be known as the migration‒development nexus (see Chapter 6 in this Handbook). The international community’s position to date is that development and migration are interlinked, in that migration can be a means to foster development, and moving from one country to another to find employment can assist in poverty reduction. This may not be a strikingly original idea, in particular because intra-state relocation to find employment and seek economic improvement is already encouraged in many states; but when such relocation involves crossing international borders, it becomes international migration, thereby heightening concerns about its management, control and regulation. Preparing and Negotiating the Marrakesh Compact In 2016, following the UN Secretary-General’s (2016b) recommendations laid out in his report In safety and dignity: Addressing large movements of refugees and migrants (see also UN Secretary-General, 2017), as well as the output from the UN High-Level Summit on Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants held on 19 September 2016, the New York Declaration set out the objectives of the two Global Compacts as well as a timetable for their adoption (UN General Assembly, 2016b). It endorsed a set of commitments applying to both migrants and refugees, and therefore relevant to the Global Compact for Migration; in particular, to: ● ‘Fully protect the human rights of all refugees and migrants, regardless of status’ (para. 5), including the human rights of women and girls, and promote the latter’s ‘full, equal and meaningful participation in the development of local solutions and opportunities’ (para. 31). ● Ensure that all refugee and migrant ‘children are receiving education within a few months of arrival’ (para. 32). ● Prevent and combat sexual and gender-based violence (para. 31). ● Support those countries rescuing, receiving and hosting large numbers of refugees and migrants (paras 26, 28, 38). ● Work towards ending the practice of detaining children for the purpose of determining their migration status (para. 33). ● Strongly condemn manifestations of xenophobia, racism, racial discrimination and intolerance against refugees and migrants, and support a global campaign to counter xenophobia (paras 14, 39). ● Recognise and strengthen the ‘positive and profound contributions’ made by migrants ‘to economic and social development in their host societies’ (para. 46). ● Strengthen the global governance of migration by bringing the International Organization for Migration (IOM) into the UN system as a related organisation (para. 49). To achieve these objectives, the UN General Assembly released in January 2017 a document (adopted in April 2017) outlining the modalities of the GCM negotiations and stating that the process would begin in April 2017 with an 18-month consultation and negotiation period (para. 14). From April to November 2017, then, there were consultations with stakeholders

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152  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance focusing on five thematic areas: (1) ‘human rights of all migrants, social inclusion, cohesion and all forms of discrimination’; (2) ‘irregular migration and regular pathways’; (3) ‘international cooperation and governance of migration’; (4) ‘contributions of migrants and diasporas to all dimensions of sustainable development’; and (5) ‘addressing drivers of migration’ as well as the ‘smuggling of migrants, trafficking in persons and contemporary forms of slavery’ (para. 15). These consultations took place with multiple regional, state and non-state actors, including migrants themselves. Next, there was a period of stocktaking from December 2017 to January 2018. This part of the process included a conference held in Mexico from 4 to 6 December 2017 (the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the UN had been appointed as one of the two facilitators, the other being that of Switzerland, and their role is discussed in further detail below). The conference served to showcase the results of the consultation exercise. It was also notable in that the American delegate used this event to denounce the GCM as a whole, and the US withdrew from the process altogether. Obviously, this was something of a blow, since the US was, and still is, a large destination country; but at the same time, with a virulently anti-immigrant president in the White House, it may have been a blessing in disguise, allowing as it did a more balanced debate among UN member states. The next stage was that of the intergovernmental negotiations, which ran from January to July 2018, that is, until the publication of the final draft.2 In ‘UN-speak’, a ‘zero draft’ is the first text submitted during negotiations and, in this instance, it was released on 5 February 2018 (UN, 2018g). Slightly unusually, a ‘zero draft plus’ was produced a month later on 5 March (UN, 2018h), followed by a first revised draft on 26 March (UN, 2018b), and then a second one on 28 May 2018 (UN, 2018c). A third revised draft was published on 29 June (UN, 2018d), with the final draft issued quickly after on 11 July 2018 (UN, 2018e). We have examined elsewhere the changes that were introduced in the text during the negotiation process (Guild and Basaran, 2018b; see also Pécoud, 2021). The final document was adopted at a special meeting of the UN, the Intergovernmental Conference, held on 10–11 December 2018 in Marrakesh (Morocco), hence the name of the Compact (UN, 2018f); and then formally by the UN General Assembly on 19 December 2018, with 152 votes in favour, five against (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Poland and the US), and 12 abstentions (UN, 2018a; UN General Assembly, 2019).3

THE KEY ACTORS AND INSTITUTIONS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MARRAKESH COMPACT This section discusses the input from key actors and institutions as well as their role in the development of the Marrakesh Compact. It elucidates the motivations and dynamics animating these different actors through an examination of core inputs, meeting reports and the successive drafts of the Compact. During the negotiations, all the actors involved were keenly aware of the increased migration flows and resulting insecurities that had led to this point. As several scholars have shown, such circumstances inevitably affect the diplomatic interactions of actors in the international system (Gabaccia, 2012; Thiollet, 2011). We therefore seek to open a window on the ‘migration diplomacy’, that is, the effect of migration on various forms of interstate and interagency diplomacy (Adamson and Tsourapas, 2019; Thiollet, 2011, p. 110), at work in the development of the Marrakesh Compact.

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Making a global compact  153 The UN Special Representative for International Migration The Refugee Compact had clear leadership from the outset: with the High Commissioner at the helm, UNHCR was charged with managing the Compact’s development process in consultation with states and key institutions. The same was not true of the Global Compact for Migration. It was not until March 2017 that Louise Arbour (Canada) was appointed UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration. Prior to this, Peter Sutherland (Ireland) had served as UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration and Development (hereinafter referred to as the UN Special Representative for Migration) for more than 11 years (see Chapter 9 in this Handbook). His role had been instrumental in the lead-up to the 2016 High-Level Summit for Refugees and Migrants, and he was in the process of writing a report for the UN Secretary-General when he fell very ill in September 2016 and died shortly thereafter. Over the subsequent months, his team finalised this report, which would remain influential in shaping the Compact’s development process (UN Special Representative for Migration, 2017). However, the loss of Sutherland at such a critical moment was an important factor in the evolution of the Marrakesh Compact. Many of the foundational aspects of his original proposal, such as having three separate, albeit closely related, Compacts ‒ between states and migrants, among states, and between states and key stakeholders, respectively – were left out in the later drafting of the Compact (UN Special Representative for Migration, 2016, p. 2; UN Special Representative for Migration, 2017, paras 15–47). As such, Arbour took up her post with a mandate to build on and continue Sutherland’s work and to coordinate UN efforts to implement the New York Declaration. However, by coming in six months after the process had started, a period during which there had been no one directing the proceedings, Arbour was at a disadvantage. Control had already begun to dissipate and was dispersed among several organisations and individuals, notably the Co-Facilitators. The bulk of the Compact’s development therefore fell to Arbour, who had an unenviable amount of ground to make up and, moreover, had to wrestle back control of an increasingly fragmented process. For instance, we distinctly remember arriving in Geneva (Switzerland) in April 2017 to find that many OHCHR staff members were being swiftly flown out to New York to bolster the human rights aspect of the process at the behest of Arbour, who was seconding relevant staff from agencies across the UN system. Whilst Arbour’s position was at first difficult, she successfully organised staff and institutions around her mandate, and managed to lead the UN system-wide preparations for the 2017 intergovernmental conference. Arbour consistently resisted state pressure, be it from the Global North or the Global South, in order to ensure that the process retained a degree of independence as well as a focus on the human rights of migrants.4 In contrast to the Refugee Compact’s process driven by UNHCR, then, she saw to it that, while state-led, the GCM process did not simply bend to the whims of the interior ministries of Global North governments and that, instead, it remained in compliance with existing international legal obligations, these having been designed to meet the modern challenges that the Compacts were also meant to address in the first place.

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154  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The Co-Facilitators: The Permanent Representatives of Mexico and Switzerland to the UN In October 2016, the President of the UN General Assembly appointed the Permanent Representatives of Mexico and Switzerland to the UN as Co-Facilitators of the GCM development process. Mexican Ambassador Juan José Gómez Camacho and Swiss Ambassador Jürg Lauber were charged with ‘leading open, transparent and inclusive negotiations with States’ (UN General Assembly, 2016a, p. 1). As such, they played a central role in representing and negotiating with member states. Led as they were by one facilitator hailing from a Global North state, and the other from a country at the centre of migration flows across the Americas, these negotiations, however, were conducted with specific priority issues in mind, namely migration governance, control and border protection. Indeed, for all his diplomatic caution and negotiation skills, Ambassador Lauber still failed to convince Switzerland to vote in favour of the Marrakesh Compact; a disappointing failure, as it marked a concession to right-wing populism. In particular, the Co-Facilitators had a key role in the stocktaking meeting which followed the consultation and thematic discussions and was held in Mexico in December 2017 (UN, 2017b). The previous phases had served to include input from multiple actors encompassing institutions, academics, experts and member states. The Co-Facilitators were present throughout these discussions, providing summaries of key inputs and meetings (UN, 2017a). The stocktaking meeting was the first stage of the ‘state-led’ intergovernmental negotiations, in that state representatives sought to put their stamp on the Marrakesh Compact. The discussions were chaired by the Co-Facilitators, along with the UN Special Representative for Migration, who played a critical role in steering the debate and setting up the programme of negotiations. Following the stocktaking meeting, this work came together during the negotiation phase. But it was the Co-Facilitators’ teams that released the Zero Draft of the Compact (UN, 2018g). These teams worked tirelessly, gathering feedback on early drafts, feeding it into new drafts, and acting as coordinators between the many different organisations and actors involved in the process. A close analysis of the several drafts produced along the way shows that a delicate balancing act had to be struck between the conflicting interests of various actors, and that the two Co-Facilitators played a facilitative role by negotiating between them.5 This can be seen at two key points in the process, the first being the release of the Zero Draft Plus on 5 March 2018 (UN, 2018h), only a month after the publication of the Zero Draft and following a short intergovernmental consultation. The Zero Draft Plus reflects a much more Global North, state-centric approach aiming to control migration flows and to reduce the drivers of migration. There is no clear explanation for this shift to be gleaned from meeting reports, but the statement issued by the Bahamas, one of the few documents on the intergovernmental negotiations available, demonstrates this focus (UN, 2018i). However, in the aftermath of the abrupt withdrawal of the US, the most vocal advocate of the Global North’s anti-immigrant rights position, from the GCM process, pressure grew from a minority of states to adopt a more restrictive approach. The Zero Draft Plus was thus put together to avoid a situation in which more states would turn their backs on the Global Compact for Migration. Following further consultations and negotiations in which both OHCHR and UNHCR were involved, there was a swing back to a focus on human rights protection in Draft 1 (UN, 2018b). However, the second moment when ground was lost in terms of migrants’ human rights and rights protection was Draft 2 (UN, 2018c), in which the principle of non-refoulement as an

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Making a global compact  155 integral part of any substantive measure to address migrants’ vulnerability appears to have been left out (Majcher, 2018). The publication of this draft was preceded by key meetings devoted to migration management (UN, 2018j), the contribution of migrants to sustainable development (GMG, 2018), and migrant return and reintegration (IOM, 2018b). As a result, the focus of the Marrakesh Compact shifted to a conception of migrants’ rights protection as conditional on their contribution to development in both their countries of origin and their host societies. In May and June 2018, a number of side events were held, defending the idea that migrants’ vulnerabilities and rights protection should have a central place in the Compact (OHCHR, 2018c; UN, 2018k), and leading to yet another turnaround, with much of the ground that had been lost in terms of human rights protection being regained in Draft 3 (UN, 2018d), and eventually maintained in the Final Draft (UN, 2018e). These pendulum swings demonstrate the facilitative role that the Co-Facilitators and the UN Special Representative for Migration played, balancing Global North state interests on the one hand, and the demands of the Global South for the protection of migrants’ rights on the other hand. The International Organization for Migration In 2016, IOM became a related organisation of the UN (UN Secretary-General, 2016a). However, ‘related organisation’ was a new term, and there was considerable uncertainty about the actual role that IOM would play in the upcoming GCM negotiations (Guild et al., 2017c). Unlike core UN organisations with a normative mandate, IOM had not incorporated a human rights-based approach into its programmes, and there were fears that following its formal integration into the UN system, the human rights framework would be sidelined in favour of IOM’s neoliberal, market-driven understanding of migration (Pécoud, 2018, pp. 1629–1632). Until 1989, IOM had been a small organisation that gravitated toward the US, but as a result of its efforts to provide support to states to facilitate the movement of their citizens, IOM membership grew significantly and shifted from the Global North to the Global South. It now had to respond to the needs of these new member states, and thus there was a substantial change in its discourse and rhetoric during the 1990s and in the early twenty-first century. The IOM that became a related organisation of the UN in 2016 was, indeed, very different from the agency that had been founded in 1951 (see Chapter 2 in this Handbook). IOM was only a small organisation compared to the huge UN agencies, and giving it an enhanced role had been an essential part of the mandate of its influential Director General, William Lacy Swing, who stepped down in September 2018 when his second term ended. At the time of the Compact negotiations, then, his successor had not yet been elected. When the new Director General was appointed, the fact that the candidate put forth and strongly supported by the US was not elected came as a surprise to many actors in the GCM negotiations and beyond. This was further evidence of a shift in IOM away from the Global North and towards the preoccupations of those states that now constituted the majority of its membership, namely the Global South. IOM member states chose António Vitorino, a former EU Commissioner from Portugal, as the new Director General (Borger, 2018). Much like the situation of the UN Special Representative for International Migration, IOM’s leadership was in transition when the Compact’s development began, and therefore its role in the process was unclear. Despite these institutional difficulties, IOM took on an important role in the development of the Marrakesh Compact, seeking in this way to mirror the role of UNHCR as the lead

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156  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance organisation in the development process of the Refugee Compact. However, IOM’s imminent change of leadership weakened its position, and Arbour, having previously served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was very familiar with the corridors of UN power, and therefore well placed to keep a firm grip on the process. Nevertheless, IOM was designated in the UN document specifying the modalities of the GCM negotiations as one of the key organisations tasked with facilitating the development of the Compact (UN General Assembly, 2017, para. 11). Furthermore, as the Compact took shape, IOM gave itself the role of a gatekeeper overseeing its implementation and monitoring (see IOM, 2017a, 2017b).6 In June 2018, the UN Deputy Secretary-General issued a statement reaffirming that IOM was an integral part of the UN system and that, as such, it would act as coordinator of the work towards the Marrakesh Compact (UN Secretary-General, 2018), thus clarifying IOM’s role in the Compact’s development process as well as in its follow-up and review mechanisms. Upon agreement on the final draft of the Global Compact for Migration, IOM secured the position of coordinator and secretariat of the newly created United Nations Network on Migration, which was set up by the UN Secretary-General (UN General Assembly, 2019, para. 45). This network was designed ‘to ensure effective and coherent system-wide support for implementation’ of the Compact (para. 45), reporting to the UN General Assembly biennially (para. 46), as well as feeding into the intergovernmental review of the implementation of the Compact conducted by the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF), which would be held every four years (para. 49). Thus, IOM carved out for itself a central role in the development, implementation, follow-up and review of the Marrakesh Compact, indeed packaging itself as ‘the UN Migration Agency’ in the process. The International Labour Organization The substantial role that IOM acquired in the development of the Marrakesh Compact stood in stark contrast to the position of the ILO. Following the release of the New York Declaration, the ILO had expected to be given a major part in drafting and overseeing the Global Compact for Migration. Indeed, it had developed its own fundamental rights conventions addressing the abolition of forced labour, the elimination of child labour, trade union rights, as well as non-discrimination and equality of treatment in employment and occupation, thereby promoting synergies with the ICRMW (ILO, 1998, 2011; see also Chapters 5 and 21 in this Handbook). The ILO had repeatedly called for greater collaboration between the organisation and the CMW to ensure coherence between international human rights law and labour standards (Cholewinski, 2017). Despite this rich background, and the fact that the New York Declaration clearly stated that the ILO would actively contribute to the GCM negotiations (UN General Assembly, 2016b, Annex II, para. 13), it was sidelined from the very beginning of the drafting process. The ILO’s focus in the Compact’s development process had been on the protection and promotion of the rights of migrant workers (UN, 2017a, 2017c), but this emphasis was lost: IOM and its ‘migration governance’ discourse prevailed instead, an approach that was favoured by those Global North states seeking to appease their populist constituencies. Ultimately, the role of the ILO in the Compact was amalgamated into a commitment to improve and protect worker standards as part of Objective 6.7 The ILO, then, was gradually marginalised in the negotiation and implementation process of the Marrakesh Compact.

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Making a global compact  157 The role outlined for the ILO in the Marrakesh Compact had been delineated in the organisation’s input on the UN Secretary-General’s 2017 report: ‘to lead coordination of UN support for commitments adopted on decent work and labour migration, in cooperation with and complementing the work of other organisations like IOM, OHCHR, UNHCR, and other members of the Global Migration Group [GMG]’ (ILO, 2017, p. 2). The ILO, indeed, contributes to the GMG, an interagency group bringing together the heads of various agencies to encourage the implementation of all relevant instruments relating to migration, as well as the adoption of more coherent approaches to international migration. In practice, however, the role of the ILO has been limited to promoting the inclusion of standards for migrant workers’ rights and monitoring compliance with such standards as part of the implementation of the Marrakesh Compact. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees OHCHR was also specifically mentioned in the New York Declaration as one of the main agencies involved in the development of the Global Compact for Migration (UN General Assembly, 2016b, Annex II, para. 13). It was already coordinating the CMW and thus had oversight of the ICRMW (UN General Assembly, 1991). As a result, it played a critical role in pressing for the protection of the human rights of migrants in the GCM negotiations and wielded considerable influence in the process, often being instrumental in rolling back some of the more restrictive moves in the successive drafts (Allinson, 2018; Brandl, 2018; Majcher, 2018; Stefanelli, 2018). It provided a voice for many Global South states that considered themselves ‘migrant-sending countries’ and whose interests, therefore, were to protect their citizens who were migrants in the Global North. However, underlying the Compact negotiations was a power struggle between OHCHR and UNHCR, in that both agencies sought control over key issue areas. The first issue concerned the protection of migrants from refoulement (see OHCHR, 2018a, 2018b). UNHCR, which was tasked with developing the Global Compact on Refugees, had its own priorities. It had already drafted its Refugee Response Framework (RRF) when the New York Declaration was released,8 and this was the focus of its efforts as it tried to respond to the concerns of the Global North, which controlled much of its funding. In demarcating its area of activity by way of the RRF and the preservation of the role of the 1951 Refugee Convention, UNHCR sought to keep protection from refoulement as part of its remit, despite the fact that the principle of non-refoulement under the provisions of core international human rights instruments, such as Article 7 of the ICCPR and Article 3 of the CAT (UN General Assembly, 1967, 1984), is much more inclusive. UNHCR was keen to ensure that the specificity of refugee protection was maintained. As a result, the principle of non-refoulement was only explicitly mentioned in Draft 2, and even then, in very succinct terms that did not provide substantive protection for migrants (UN, 2018c, para. 23a, para. 36). By the time the final draft of the Compact was produced, any mention of the principle of non-refoulement had been removed (Majcher, 2018). The other key issue area was the vulnerability of migrants. Both OHCHR and UNHCR wanted to highlight the idea that migrants should not be seen merely as individuals moving for economic reasons, but also as persons forced to move, and therefore in a situation of heightened vulnerability (OHCHR, 2017; UNHCR, 2017). The Marrakesh Compact contains an

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158  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance objective specifically addressing vulnerabilities in migration (Objective 7), and the commitments and protective measures regarding migrants in vulnerable situations that are stipulated in the Final Draft (UN, 2018e, para. 23) are stronger and more elaborate than in the Zero Draft (UN, 2018g, para. 21; see Atak and Nakache, 2018). This led to a clash with UNHCR over the definition of ‘mixed flows’, which can include ‘vulnerable migrants’, as is the case in both the Global Compact for Migration and that on Refugees (UNHCR, 2018). While it championed the concept of ‘migrants in vulnerable situations’ (UNHCR, 2017), UNHCR wanted to keep the notion of ‘mixed flows’ out of the Compacts, as it would blur the distinction between refugees and migrants and thus, much like the principle of non-refoulement, result in a crossover in terms of protection. Whilst non-refoulement remained the sole remit of UNHCR, the protection of vulnerable migrants was enshrined in Objective 7 of the Marrakesh Compact (UN, 2018f, para. 23). The Role of Regional Bodies After the US government announced that it would not participate in the GCM negotiations, the EU was one of the few major regional powers in the Global North left in the process. As stated emphatically in the EU’s input on the UN Secretary-General’s (2017) report on the Marrakesh Compact, EU member states insisted that it should not be a legally binding instrument (EU, 2017, p. 1). This was a matter of EU internal political manoeuvres. On 21 March 2018, the European Commission presented a proposal for a Council Decision providing that the Council of the European Union would exceptionally authorise the Commission to approve the Global Compact for Migration on behalf of the EU at the end of the process. This was an attempt by the Commission to wrestle power from the Council to negotiate the Compact and, if successful, it would mean that the Commission would have an exclusive mandate to finalise the adoption of the Compact. Under the Sole Article of the proposal, there would be no need to revert back to the Council as long as no substantial change was introduced in the final draft of the Compact (European Commission, 2018, p. 6). However, this provision was contingent on the Zero Draft clarifying that the Marrakesh Compact was non-legally binding. In its attempt to get the Council to grant it the authority to finalise the negotiations, the European Commission (2018) emphasised that there had been a ‘unified EU approach’ in the elaboration of the Global Compact for Migration and that this had resulted in the Zero Draft, which ‘largely [reflected] EU acquis and policy’ on migration (p. 1; see also Guild and Weatherhead, 2018). Despite its best efforts to ensure that the Marrakesh Compact would not be legally binding and would be aligned with EU migration policies, the Commission still failed to get a mandate to finalise the adoption of the Compact on behalf of the EU. Furthermore, the Commission’s claim about a ‘unified EU approach’ was undermined by the fact that among those states which either voted against or abstained from endorsing the Global Compact for Migration at the UN General Assembly, the majority were EU member states (UN, 2018a).9 This not only made the European Commission look incompetent, but also meant that it had ceded ground to those advocating coercive immigration policies. Other regional bodies had more cautious contributions to make towards the GCM process compared to their pushy European counterpart. But they also came to the negotiating table with a different agenda: indeed, the African Union, the countries part of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the Arab region, constitute a large portion of the Global South, often seen as the primary source of migration flows. They

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Making a global compact  159 came to the negotiations seeking a legitimate strategy to manage global movements, preserve legal pathways for migrants and formally incorporate the role of migration in development into the Marrakesh Compact (see the reports of the regional consultations: UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, 2017; UNECA, 2017; ECLAC, 2018).10 The African Union’s report of its regional consultation meeting on 26–27 October 2017 reflects such a focus, which is in stark contrast to the coercive immigration policies pursued by the EU (UNECA, 2017). Whilst these regional organisations represented the countries most active in the UN General Assembly (and therefore the UN was keen to secure their votes), they did not have the financial leverage of the Global North, in which the EU was now a key player. Academics At the beginning of the GCM development process, IOM set up an academic group called the Migration Research Leaders’ Syndicate (MRLS). Academics participating in such processes ought to be independent. However, given that this group was ultimately part of IOM ‒ which, as shown earlier, was focused on migration management with the protection of migrants’ rights conditional on their productivity ‒ its role within IOM undermined its ability to contribute objectively to the GCM process. The Syndicate held a side event in April 2018 on ‘Effective and sustainable solutions for migration management’ as part of the third round of the Compact negotiations (IOM, 2018a). The report that the MRLS (2017) produced to support the development of the Global Compact for Migration is evidence that its focus was on migration management rather than the protection of migrants. IOM commissioned a report to assess the contribution of the Syndicate to the development of the Compact, which we asked to see (IOM declined our request). What was clear, however, was that the academics involved in this process were those who would promote the idea of a link between migration and wealth for destination states, and thus champion the Global North states’ approach to migration as a tool for development, contingent on migrants’ contribution to host societies (see Betts and Collier, 2017). This instrumental conception of migration was favoured over the need to protect migrants’ human rights. As such, the Syndicate’s portfolio of work revealed the tension between the approach pursued by the Global North and that of the Global South. In contrast to the institutionalised MRLS, another group of academics was actively advocating the importance of having the human rights of migrants enshrined in the Marrakesh Compact. The Queen Mary University of London’s Global Compacts Research Group published two books – Human rights of migrants in the 21st century (Guild et al., 2017a) and Global labour market and the migrant premium (Basaran and Guild, 2018) – designed to influence the GCM negotiations. Once the drafts of the Global Compact for Migration started to be released, the Research Group conducted a detailed analysis of the Zero Draft (Guild and Basaran, 2018a), then produced a commentary on the drafting process (Guild and Basaran, 2018b), followed by a blog post series on proposed indicators for each of the Compact’s objectives (Guild and Basaran, 2019). Reports from a workshop on the Global Compact for Migration held at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility (6 February 2018), and from the Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakesh (10–11 December 2018), highlighted the influence that these scholarly contributions had on the GCM negotiations and on the thinking of the UN Permanent and Special Representatives, all of whom had attended meetings with the Research Group. The Research Group’s efforts were focused exclusively on ensuring that the human rights of migrants were fully embedded in the Marrakesh Compact so that it

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160  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance would complement existing UN human rights instruments, not resile from their standards. It comprised a diverse group of academics and institutional actors, thereby providing an external view of the best ways to communicate and entrench migrants’ rights in the GCM institutional framework. Migrants and Civil Society Migrants were supposed to be key actors in the elaboration of the Global Compact for Migration, but in practice, other than fairly symbolic representation in meetings held during the stocktaking phase and their inclusion in the final Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakesh, there was little space for them to actually participate in the negotiations. This is because UN negotiations are a strictly interstate affair. Yet the ways in which migrants will contribute to the implementation of the Marrakesh Compact through its ‘whole of society’ approach will be integral to the Compact’s success and potential impact (Guild et al., 2019). Indeed, migrants and civil society organisations (CSOs) will be those holding states accountable for their adherence to the Compact.11 However, the role that these actors played in the GCM development process fell short of that goal. To this day, the disconnect between the absence of civil society actors in the drafting of international agreements intended to address global challenges, and these actors’ centrality in their implementation, continues to undermine the effectiveness of such agreements (see Piper, 2015; Piper and Rother, 2012). The role of CSOs in addressing migration issues is growing into what Panizzon and van Riemsdijk (2019) have described as an emerging ‘multi-level, rather than global, migration governance’ framework (p. 1230). While the migration governance landscape remained fragmented among a multiplicity of actors and organisations, CSOs had moved quickly ahead of the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants, hosted by the UN General Assembly on 19 September 2016 and culminating in the adoption of the New York Declaration, to self-organise into the High-Level Meeting 2016 Civil Society Action Committee, whose purpose was ‘to support civil society advocacy on the outcomes [of the summit] and implementation thereof’ (International Council of Voluntary Agencies et al., 2016, p. 1; see also Rother and Steinhilper, 2019, p. 247). Spearheaded by the International Catholic Migration Commission, this group was formed to bring together non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and CSOs to deliver the commitments set out in the New York Declaration, which called for the development of the two Compacts through an ‘open, transparent and inclusive’ process of multilateral consultations and negotiations, thus implying the effective participation of all relevant stakeholders (UN General Assembly, 2016b, Annex II, para. 11). Civil society was prepared, then, to take an active part in the deliberations of the Marrakesh Compact. Assessing the contribution that CSOs, notably migrant associations, made to the Global Compact for Migration as a result of this civil society mobilisation, Rother and Steinhilper (2019) found that throughout the thematic consultations, CSOs were able to influence and contribute extensively to the discussions; which, moreover, was encouraged by IOM’s renewed support for migrants’ rights activism (ibid., pp. 247–249). Civil society participation also played an important role in the stocktaking meeting held in Mexico (4–6 December 2017) and led by the Co-Facilitators and the UN Special Representative for Migration, where CSOs continued to engage both formally and informally in the GCM consultations. Once the intergovernmental deliberations began, however, there was less evidence of CSOs’ direct influence on the drafting process, since states and their representatives took over at that point, and civil

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Making a global compact  161 society participation was limited to statements and comments during the negotiation phase (ibid., pp. 251–252). It can be argued that one of the reasons that the Marrakesh Compact was watered down during that phase is that migrants and migrant organisations had a reduced role. Once the Compact was finalised, CSOs sought to have their voice heard during Migration Week (5–9 December 2018), a week-long series of events on migration that was organised in Marrakesh ahead of the Intergovernmental Conference and attended by a coalition of over 120 CSOs (Global Coalition on Migration, n.d.). But, arguably, it is now and in the near future, during the implementation phase of the Compact, that the role of these organisations will be critical to ensure that states comply with their international obligations and fulfil their commitments.

CONCLUSION: WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE MARRAKESH COMPACT? Discussions on the future impact of the Global Compact for Migration are still ongoing (Gammeltoft-Hansen et al., 2017; Klein Solomon and Sheldon, 2018; Newland, 2018). Given the complexity of the GCM process and the many political goals underpinning it, the very fact that the Marrakesh Compact ultimately maintained a human rights focus is vitally important. It is, indeed, rooted in human rights, combining the rights of migrants into a single document that states have agreed to adhere to and implement (Guild et al., 2019). Despite the tension resulting from the differing objectives pursued by the Global North and the Global South in the Compact negotiations, the decisive input provided by key organisations ensured that whatever ground had been lost to right-wing populism did not undermine the core human rights protections to which migrants are entitled; and in certain areas, some of this ground was regained. The Compact received considerable support at the Intergovernmental Conference in Marrakesh despite a last-ditch attempt by some Global North states susceptible to the politics of their populist right to abandon it. However, there is widespread agreement that the Marrakesh Compact is a non-legally binding instrument (Allinson et al., 2019). At the same time, it is a politically binding document that represents a commitment by states to protect the human rights of migrants (Guild and Wieland, 2020). Originally founded on the SDGs – and therefore based on a development-oriented approach – the Compact shows the allowances that were made for the state focus on development as a driver of migration, and for the desire of some states to limit as much as possible the free movement of people from the Global South to the Global North, or at the least to make it conditional. The ability of international agencies, NGOs, CSOs and courts to use the Global Compact for Migration to hold states accountable for breaches of the commitments made therein remains to be seen. It will depend on how well the Compact is communicated, and on how effectively international and national actors take ownership of it. At the institutional level, the IMRF is to be the main intergovernmental platform for states to share progress on the implementation of the Compact, including its coherence with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The IMRF is meant to convene once every four years starting in 2022, and to produce at each of such meetings an intergovernmentally agreed Progress Declaration (UN General Assembly, 2019, para. 49). Furthermore, the Global Forum on Migration and Development is to serve as a space for annual information exchange on the implementation of the Compact, and to report the resulting findings and best practices to the IMRF (para. 51). Likewise, other regional and

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162  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance international forums are invited to contribute to this review process ‘by providing relevant data, evidence, best practices, innovative approaches and recommendations as they relate to the implementation’ of the Compact (para. 52). However, the indicators to monitor progress towards the achievement of the Compact’s 23 objectives remain unspecified to date. It is unclear whether progress on the implementation of the Compact would be measured as part of the SDGs or human rights monitoring mechanisms. The Marrakesh Compact provides another important benchmark against which to assess state conduct in relation to migration, but in order for the Compact to be a useful instrument in the pursuit of ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’, this will have to translate into national monitoring and review mechanisms in the coming years.

NOTES 1. For instance, Germany showed strong support for the Marrakesh Compact, while Bermuda apparently favoured a more security-driven approach. We discuss this aspect in further detail below. 2. All the successive drafts of the Global Compact for Migration produced during the six rounds of intergovernmental negotiations are available on the UN’s Refugees and Migrants website, https://​ refugeesmigrants​.un​.org/​intergovernmental​-negotiations. 3. The 12 countries that abstained were: Algeria, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Chile, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Romania, Singapore and Switzerland; a majority of states of the Global North. See the complete voting record of the resolution at https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1656414. 4. See Louise Arbour’s closing remarks at the Preparatory Meeting in Mexico (4–6 December 2017), where she declared that whilst states had to be fully supported by the UN system, so too had migrants in their ‘legitimate demands … that the words of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights apply to them as to all others’ (UN, 2017d, p. 2). 5. All the successive drafts of the Global Compact for Migration, as well as the concept notes and meeting reports produced during the six rounds of intergovernmental negotiations, are available on the UN’s Refugees and Migrants website, https://refugeesmigrants.un.org/intergovernmental​ -negotiations. 6. All the documents produced by IOM as part of the GCM development process are available on its website, https://​www​.iom​.int/​gcm​-development​-process. 7. In the final draft, the Preamble simply states that the Global Compact for Migration rests on several international instruments, including ‘the International Labour Organization conventions on promoting decent work and labour migration’, specified in a footnote as the ‘Migration for Employment Convention of 1949 (No. 97), Migrant Workers Convention of 1975 (No. 143), Equality of Treatment Convention of 1962 (No. 118), Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers of 2011 (No.189)’ (UN, 2018e, para. 2). In addition, Objective 5 sets out a commitment to develop labour mobility agreements, ‘drawing on relevant ILO standards, guidelines and principles, in compliance with international human rights and labour law’ (para. 21 a). Finally, Objective 6 entails a commitment to develop national policies and programmes relating to international labour mobility, ‘including by taking into consideration relevant recommendations of the ILO General Principles and Operational Guidelines for Fair Recruitment’ (para. 22 l). 8. The New York Declaration states that ‘Annex I … contains a comprehensive refugee response framework and outlines steps towards the achievement of a global compact on refugees in 2018’ (UN General Assembly, 2016b, para. 21). 9. See the complete voting record of the resolution at https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1656414. 10. Details about the regional consultations and all supporting documents are available on the UN’s Refugees and Migrants website, https://​refugeesmigrants​.un​.org/​regional​-consultations. 11. J. Kevin Appleby, Senior Director of International Migration Policy at the Center for Migration Studies of New York and the Scalabrini International Migration Network, stated during the closing session of the 2018 Civil Society Days organised by the Global Forum on Migration and Development in Marrakesh ahead of the Intergovernmental Conference (6 December 2018): ‘The

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Making a global compact  163 people in this room and our colleagues around the globe are the ones who are going to make or break this Compact. The UN migration system will be there to help but they won’t be able to hold the governments accountable. We are the only ones that can do that’ (quoted in Rother and Steinhilper, 2019, p. 243). See also Appleby (2018, 2020).

REFERENCES Adamson, F.B., and Tsourapas, G. (2019). Migration diplomacy in world politics. International Studies Perspectives, 20(2), 113–128. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​isp/​eky015. Allinson, K. (2018). Objective 17: Eliminate all forms of discrimination and promote fact-based public discourse to shape perceptions of migration. In E. Guild and T. Basaran (eds), The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Analysis of the final draft, objective by objective (pp.  48–50). Refugee Law Initiative. https://​rli​.sas​.ac​.uk/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Global​%20Compact​ %20for​%20Migration​_RLI​%20blog​%20series​.pdf. Allinson, K., Erdunast, P., Guild, E., and Basaran, T. (2019, 31 January). GCM Commentary: The legal status of the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in international and UK law. Refugee Law Initiative Blog on Refugee Law and Forced Migration. https://​rli​.blogs​.sas​.ac​.uk/​ 2019/​01/​31/​gcm​-commentary​-the​-legal​-status/​. Appleby, J.K. (2018). The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration: The implementation phase. CMS Essays. Center for Migration Studies. https://​doi​.org/​10​.14240/​cmsesy113018. Appleby, J.K. (2020). Implementation of the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration: A whole-of-society approach. Journal on Migration and Human Security, 8(2), 214–229. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1177/​2331502420907377. Atak, I., and Nakache, D. (2018). Objective 7: Address and reduce vulnerabilities in migration. In E. Guild and T. Basaran (eds), The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Analysis of the final draft, objective by objective (pp. 23–24). Refugee Law Initiative. https://​rli​.sas​ .ac​.uk/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Global​%20Compact​%20for​%20Migration​_RLI​%20blog​%20series​.pdf. Bailey, A., and Mulder, C.H. (2017). Highly skilled migration between the Global North and South: Gender, life courses and institutions. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 43(16), 2689–2703. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​1369183X​.2017​.1314594. Basaran, T., and Guild, E. (eds) (2018). Global labour and the migrant premium: The cost of working abroad. Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9780429467387. Betts, A., and Collier, P. (2017). Refuge: Transforming a broken refugee system. Allen Lane. Borger, J. (2018, 29 June). UN snubs Trump by rejecting US pick for migration agency. The Guardian. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2018/​jun/​29/​un​-trump​-migration​-agency​-snub​-nomination​-rejec ted-iom. Brandl, U. (2018). Objective 16: Empower migrants and societies to realise full inclusion and social cohesion. In E. Guild and T. Basaran (eds), The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Analysis of the final draft, objective by objective (pp. 45–47). Refugee Law Initiative. https://​rli​.sas​.ac​.uk/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Global​%20Compact​%20for​%20Migration​_RLI​%20blog​ %20series​.pdf. Carraro, V. (2019). Promoting compliance with human rights: The performance of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review and treaty bodies. International Studies Quarterly, 63(4), 1079–1093. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​isq/​sqz078. Castles. S. (2013). The forces driving global migration. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 34(2), 122–140. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​07256868​.2013​.781916. Chetail, V. (2020). The Committee on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. In F. Mégret and P. Alston (eds), The United Nations and human rights: A critical appraisal (2nd edn) (pp. 601–644). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1992.) Cholewinski, R. (2017). Working together to protect migrant workers: ILO, the UN Convention and its Committee. In A. Desmond (ed.), Shining new light on the UN Migrant Workers Convention (pp.  151–174). Pretoria University Law Press. https://​www​.pulp​.up​.ac​.za/​edited​-collections/​shining​ -new​-light​-on​-the​-un​-migrant​-workers​-convention.

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164  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance European Commission (2018). Proposal for a Council Decision authorising the Commission to approve, on behalf of the Union, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in the area of immigration policy (COM/2018/168 final). European Commission. https://​eur​-lex​.europa​.eu/​legal​ -content/​en/​ALL/​?uri​=​CELEX:​52018PC0168. European Union (EU) (2017). EU input to the UN Secretary-General’s report on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. European Union. https://​www​.europarl​.europa​.eu/​cmsdata/​ 131081/​eu​-input​.pdf. Gabaccia, D.R. (2012). Foreign relations: American immigration in global perspective. Princeton University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​j​.ctt7rk0q. Gammeltoft-Hansen, T., Guild, E., Moreno-Lax, V., Panizzon, M., and Roele, I. (2017). What is a Compact? Migrants’ rights and state responsibilities regarding the design of the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. https://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.2139/​ssrn​.3051027. Global Coalition on Migration (n.d.). UN Migration Week – Marrakech. https://​www​.gcmigration​.org/​ our​-work​-past/​un​-migration​-week​-marrakech. Global Migration Group (GMG) (2018). The contribution of migrants to sustainable development: Side event during the GC/M negotiations (15 May 2018). https://​refugeesmigrants​.un​.org/​sites/​default/​ files/​the​_contribution​_of​_migrants​_to​_sustainable​_development​.pdf. Groenendijk, K. (2018). Objective 5: Enhance availibility and flexibility of pathways for regular migration. In E. Guild and T. Basaran (eds), The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Analysis of the final draft, objective by objective (pp. 19–20). Refugee Law Initiative. https://​rli​.sas​.ac​.uk/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Global​%20Compact​%20for​%20Migration​_RLI​%20blog​ %20series​.pdf. Guild, E., and Basaran, T. (2018a). First perspectives on the Zero Draft (5 February 2018) for the UN Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Legal Studies Research Paper no. 272/2018. Queen Mary University of London. https://​ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​3123876. Guild, E., and Basaran, T. (eds) (2018b). The UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Analysis of the final draft, objective by objective. Refugee Law Initiative. https://​rli​.sas​ .ac​.uk/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Global​%20Compact​%20for​%20Migration​_RLI​%20blog​%20series​.pdf. Guild, E., and Basaran, T. (2019, 14 February). GCM indicators: Monitoring implementation of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Refugee Law Initiative Blog on Refugee Law and Forced Migration. https://​rli​.blogs​.sas​.ac​.uk/​2019/​02/​14/​gcm​-indicators​-monitoring​-imple mentation​-of​-the​-global​-compact​-for​-safe​-orderly​-and​-regular​-migration/​. Guild, E., Basaran, T., and Allinson, K. (2019). From zero to hero? An analysis of the human rights protections within the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). International Migration, 57(6), 43–59. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​imig​.12609. Guild, E., and Grant, S. (2017). Migration governance in the UN: What is the Global Compact and what does it mean? Legal Studies Research Paper no. 252/2017. Queen Mary University of London. https://​ ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​2895636. Guild, E., Grant, S., and Groenendijk, C.A. (eds) (2017a). Human rights of migrants in the 21st century. Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9781315145396. Guild, E., Grant, S., and Groenendijk, C.A. (2017b). Introduction. In E. Guild, S. Grant and C.A. Groenendijk (eds), Human rights of migrants in the 21st century (pp. 1–15). Routledge. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.4324/​9781315145396​-1. Guild, E., Grant, S., and Groenendijk, K. (2017c). IOM and the UN: Unfinished business. Legal Studies Research Paper no. 255/2017. Queen Mary University of London. https://​ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​2927414. Guild, E., and Weatherhead, K.T. (2018, 6 July). Tensions as the EU negotiates the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. EU Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy. https://​ eumigrationlawblog​.eu/​tensions​-as​-the​-eu​-negotiates​-the​-global​-compact​-for​-safe​-orderly​-and​-regu lar-migration/. Guild, E., and Wieland, R. (2020). The UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: What does it mean in international law? In G. Ziccardi Capaldo (ed.), The Global Community Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence 2019 (pp. 191–209). Oxford University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​oso/​9780197513552​.003​.0009.

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168  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (2017). Regional consultation on international migration in the Arab region in preparation for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration: Summary of key messages. United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. https://​archive​.unescwa​.org/​sites/​www​.unescwa​.org/​files/​events/​files/​regional​ -consultation​-2017​-outcome​-document​-en​_0​.pdf. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) (2017). African regional consultative meeting on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. https://​hdl​.handle​.net/​10855/​24310. United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2018). Final report of the Latin American and Caribbean regional preparatory meeting of international migration experts on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (LC/TS.2018/15). Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. http://​hdl​.handle​.net/​11362/​43354. United Nations General Assembly (1967). International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (A/ RES/2200(XXI)[A]). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​660187. United Nations General Assembly (1984). Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (A/RES/39/46). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​ record/​74216. United Nations General Assembly (1991). International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (A/RES/45/158). United Nations. https://​ digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​105636. United Nations General Assembly (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​3923923. United Nations General Assembly (2016a, 23 November). Letter from the President of the General Assembly to all Permanent Representatives and Permanent Observers regarding intergovernmental negotiations leading to the adoption of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. United Nations. https://​www​.un​.org/​en/​ga/​president/​71/​pdf/​letters/​Intergovernmental​-negotiations​ -leading​-to​-the​-adoption​-of​-a​-global​-compact​-for​-safe​-orderly​-and​-regular​-migration​.pdf. United Nations General Assembly (2016b). New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (A/ RES/71/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​844669. United Nations General Assembly (2017). Modalities for the intergovernmental negotiations of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (A/RES/71/280). United Nations. https://​ digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1288911. United Nations General Assembly (2019). Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (A/ RES/73/195). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1660537. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2017). ‘Migrants in vulnerable situations’: UNHCR’s perspective. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. https://​ www​ .refworld​ .org/​ docid/​ 596787174​.html. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2018, December 19). UNHCR welcomes agreement on Migration Compact. Press release. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​news/​press/​2018/​12/​5c1a7d4e4/​unhcr​ -welcomes​-agreement​-migration​-compact​.html. United Nations Secretary-General (2016a). Agreement concerning the relationship between the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration: Note by the Secretary-General (A/70/976). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​833655. United Nations Secretary-General (2016b). In safety and dignity: Addressing large movements of refugees and migrants – Report of the Secretary-General (A/70/59). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​ .un​.org/​record/​828239. United Nations Secretary-General (2017). Making migration work for all: Report of the Secretary-General (A/72/643). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1470423. United Nations Secretary-General (2018, 7 June). Deputy Secretary-General’s remarks to fifth round of negotiations towards a Global Compact for Migration. Statement. https://​www​.un​.org/​sg/​en/​content/​ dsg/​statement/​2018​-06​-07/​deputy​-secretary​-generals​-remarks​-fifth​-round​-negotiations​-towards. UN Special Representative for Migration (2016). The Sutherland Report – Abridged executive summary. United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration and Development. Global Forum on Migration and Development. https://​www​.gfmd​.org/​files/​documents/​ the​_sutherland​_report​_abridg​_ed​_executive​_summary​_9dec​.pdf.

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Making a global compact  169 UN Special Representative for Migration (2017). Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Migration (A/71/728). United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration and Development. United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​ .un​.org/​record/​860922.

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12. ‘Workers of the world unite’: unions and immigration, a global history Leo Lucassen

INTRODUCTION ‘Proletarians of the world unite!’ – the famous rallying cry from the Communist Manifesto – has proved very difficult to put into practice, not least in the modern era of neoliberalism, globalisation and rising nationalism (Bieler and Lindberg, 2011; O’Brien, 2019, p. 194). In the time of Marx and Engels, too, an era referred to as ‘the first round of globalisation’ (O’Rourke and Williamson, 2002), this creed often clashed with the reality of labour relations on the ground. Engels himself, three years earlier, in his book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (Engels, 1845), had depicted Irish migrants as ‘drunkards devoid of any civilization’, a ‘Lumpenproletariat’ that lowered wages and accepted the most abhorrent working conditions, thus posing a threat to English workers in the textile mills (Engels, 1845, pp. 92–96; Lucassen, 2005, p. 36). This (nationalist) sentiment pervaded from the start the thinking of many trade unions, whose roots lay in the industrialising British Midlands of the 1820s and 1830s, and became a permanent feature from the 1850s onwards (Webb and Webb, 1894, pp. 120–124; for the prehistory of unions and strike activity, see Lis et al., 1994). Unions, defined as ‘a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment’ (Webb and Webb, 1894, p. 1), have played, and continue to play, an important role in determining the position of labour migrants in various parts of the world. Their attitude varies from radical exclusion and blatant xenophobia, to helping and organising immigrants in order to protect them from exploitation. Although, at a global scale, we can observe a trend towards greater inclusion over time, this development is by no means linear or universal. To understand why, we need to study the different historical and political contexts in which the often tense relationship between organised labour (unions and social-democratic political parties) and migrants has been shaped in the era of nation states. Two accusations are central here, whether they are accurate or not: (1) migrants are prepared to work for lower wages; and (2) migrants accept dismal working conditions, and as such can easily be deployed by employers as strike breakers. These assumptions legitimise anti-migration positions and are partly rooted in economic interests, but are in many cases also heavily coloured by nationalist, xenophobic, racist and eugenic ideas and persuasions. Such exclusionary attitudes are often mobilised by employers and politicians who use nationalist slogans – centred around the idea of putting native workers and home-made products first – in order to further their own interests and simultaneously attack union rights, lobby against welfare spending, and offshore production and profits (O’Brien, 2019, pp. 42–43). Calls by unions to protect native workers were mostly directed at excluding workers coming from other countries and continents, but also sometimes – until late in the twentieth century – targeted internal migrants who were regarded as inferior, such as African Americans 170 Leo Lucassen - 9781789908077 37:17AM

‘Workers of the world unite’  171 moving from the deep South to the North and West of the United States (US), black workers in South African diamond mines, and South Sea Islanders in Australia. These nativist and racist reflexes only slowly gave way to a more equal and inclusive stance, starting in Argentina in the 1930s, and more broadly from the 1960s in North America and Western Europe. Nonetheless, migrant workers often remained isolated. Meanwhile, in East and South-East Asia, ethnocentric sentiments are still entrenched in the ideology of most unions, as we see in Japan, Malaysia and Taiwan (Ford, 2019). In Japan this even extends to return migrants from Brazil, the so-called Nikkeijin, who have been accused of lowering wages and stealing jobs (De Carvalho, 2003). This comparative chapter analyses why, and to what extent, the attitudes of unions changed over time across the world. It also develops some ideas about the role that unions play as an institution in shaping migration and integration processes, and how this relates to specific types of state formation and welfare policies.

UNIONS AND MIGRATION IN THE ERA OF NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM In 1872, the Bendigo Miners Union was established in the Australian gold mining region of Victoria. The creation of this union and many others in the New World was intimately linked to the immigration of Chinese miners. As Huttenback put it, ‘it was labor that provided perhaps the first examples of cooperative effort against the Chinese’ (Huttenback, 1976, p. 75). Just as had happened in California a few decades earlier, the union accused the Chinese of lowering wages and breaking strikes. Instead of organising these foreign co-workers, white Australian miners immediately demanded that all Chinese be banned entirely, with arguments that were unequivocally marked by a racist worldview. The Bendigo miners were far from unique. An aversion against non-white labour was widespread throughout the British empire and beyond. In 1879, for example, the first Intercolonial Trade Union Congress in Sydney unanimously adopted a motion against ‘Asiatic immigration’. This gesture was immediately picked up by the white supremacist politician Henry Parkes in New South Wales, who successfully mobilised the white urban working class through anti-Chinese agitation as the central strategy of his political campaign (Huttenback, 1976, p. 79). In nearby New Zealand, similar sentiments were prevalent, leading to the Asian and Other Immigrants Restriction Bill in 1895, proposed by the Minister of Labour, the Fabian William Pember Reeves. Due to opposition from London, which was centred on the imperialist and paternalist myth of a global commonwealth, the bill was not passed, but the message from organised labour was crystal clear. Moreover, it was not uncommon to hear (socialist) Fabians (Lucassen, 2010) using eugenic and racist arguments to legitimise the exclusion of Asian workers (Olssen, 1995). In some cases, Chinese or Japanese workers were employed in segregated workplaces, such as plantations (Gabaccia, 1997, p. 191). Racist conceptions among Australian unions also extended to ‘swarthy’ European migrants, especially Southern Italians, who, as ‘the Chinese of Europe’, were seen through a similar lens (Gabaccia, 1997, p. 190; Indelicato, 2020, pp. 106–107). Especially after 1890, labour unions in Australia and New Zealand shifted in a white supremacist direction. The Australian Socialist League, followed by most craft unions, spread

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172  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance ideas about ‘undesirable races’, which were rooted in the eugenicist conceptions of the ‘survival of the fittest’ developed by Herbert Spencer, who also warned against the ‘inbreeding of races’ (Markey, 1995, pp. 364–368; see also Lucassen, 2010). This reaction of the labour movement in Oceania laid the foundation for the well-known white Australia policy, as well as for similar stances in other (former) dominions, such as Canada and South Africa. The exclusion of Asians from the Western hemisphere was not limited to the British Empire. In the nineteenth century, the United States in particular became an influential laboratory for racist-inspired migration controls (Zolberg, 2006; McKeown, 2008). Agitation started in the 1860s, and both the Knights of Labor (in 1869) and the American Federation of Labor (in 1886) called for limits on the ‘importation of pauper labor from Europe’, such as the ‘degraded, ignorant, brutal Italians and Hungarians’ (Zolberg, 2006, pp. 194–195). In this context too it was Chinese workers who were the first to suffer; these workers were banned by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was followed by other laws to exclude other migrants from Asia. However, the hostility of American unions towards foreign labour was not limited to Asians, and – as in Oceania – it also targeted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe (Ehrlich, 1974; Huttenback, 1976; Vittoz, 1978; Olzak, 1989; Briggs, 2001; Zolberg, 2006). Nonetheless, the reality in the workplace was quite different. Despite occasional and recurring incidents, strike breaking by migrant workers was not a structural phenomenon. While there were claims lamenting the existence of ‘armies’ of immigrant scabs undermining strike action, such cases pale in comparison to the overwhelming number of instances of strike breaking in which there was no reference to the role of foreigners (Ehrlich, 1974, p. 542). Furthermore, especially in the 1890s, recent immigrants joined unions in significant numbers and participated widely in strikes, thereby showing a class consciousness that they had been assumed to lack (Vittoz, 1978, p. 59). Moreover, wages in sectors with high concentrations of migrants rose considerably at the end of the nineteenth century, which debunks the often repeated claim that migrants have a depressing effect on wages (Vittoz, 1978, p. 56). In reality, the problem was rather the other way around, with unions failing to acknowledge the active role of immigrants, as is demonstrated by the unwillingness of the United Garment Workers to support a strike led by female immigrant workers in the Baltimore clothing industry in 1913. This reluctance sprang from the dominant conservative current found within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an umbrella organisation whose craft unions of (male) skilled white workers exhibited a firm hostility towards the broader representation that many immigrant workers were advocating for. The end result was that migrants founded the inclusive Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Meanwhile, in Europe, unions were struggling with the question of how to balance their internationalist creed, upheld at the conference of the Second International in Stuttgart in 1907, with opposition from the rank and file, who regarded immigrants from neighbouring countries as a threat. These nationalist feelings were shared by many socialist representatives, who, at the 1904 Amsterdam conference, depicted foreign workers as ‘poorly-paid, tractable elements eager to work … who are lured by unscrupulous capitalists to undercut native workers with cheap labour, to provide strike breakers’ (Elsner, 1988, p. 16). In the decades before the outbreak of the Great War, labour migration reached large proportions in Europe, with workers especially being drawn to the British Midlands (Irish), to industrial centres in France (Italians, Belgians), and to the Ruhr area (Dutch, Italians and ethnic Polish Germans). Clashes occurred, with English workers attacking Irish quarters in the

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‘Workers of the world unite’  173 1860s, and their French compatriots chasing and killing Italian migrants in the 1890s (Noiriel, 2018, pp. 401–405). However, migrants soon either joined local unions or established their own unions, as was the case with Polish-speaking Germans who had migrated (internally) from Silesia to the mines in the Ruhr area after 1870 (Lucassen, 2005). Nevertheless, the labour movement in Europe slowly moved towards a restrictionist position. Whereas in the 1880s freedom of migration had been embraced, and international labour rights had been actively promoted (Forberg, 1990), the integration of social-democratic parties in national governments during the First World War gave the final push towards a prioritisation of the national labour market (Van der Linden, 1988; Lucassen, 1998). Attitudes towards migrant workers did not then fundamentally differ from those in the US and white settler colonies. This became most visible in the anti-Chinese campaigns conducted by Western European unions of seamen. For example, in 1926, in a context of increased recruitment of Chinese, Indian and Indonesian sailors for the Dutch merchant fleet, the Centrale Bond van Transportarbeiders (CBTA) started a racist campaign aimed at excluding them. Together with British unions, the Dutch seamen raised the ‘Asian sailors question’ within the International Transport Workers’ Federation, arguing that non-Europeans by nature accept low wages and bad working conditions (Van Rossum, 2015, p. 744). These ideas were rooted in prevailing racist and eugenic ideas that portrayed Asian and ‘coloured’ migrants as inferior and unfree: ‘backward and impoverished people, ignorant of their own rights and incapable of mobility without coercion or the assistance of indenture’ (McKeown, 2008, p. 67). Due to the dominance of intra-European migrants, the anti-migration discourse of unions in Europe was characterised more by a nationalist discourse than by blatant racism, with the exception of the anti-Semitic reactions of English unions against Jewish immigrants from Russia at the end of the nineteenth century (Feldman, 1994). Biological racism was largely reserved for colonial labour migrants, who found themselves in limbo: although many had the status of citizens, as was the case for Algerians and other colonial migrants in France, local police and other authorities treated them much more as aliens, compared with their dealings with either Poles or Italians (Rosenberg, 2006; Lewis, 2007, pp. 20–21; Lucassen, 2020). In Latin America, the situation in Argentina and Brazil was somewhat different from that of the increasingly restrictionist attitude exhibited by labour movements in the Atlantic (and Oceanic) world. Unions in these countries had largely been created by migrants from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany, which therefore moderated their anti-immigrant sentiments (Bailey, 2003, p. 7; Moya, 1998, p. 218). The dominance of (anarcho-)syndicalist unions in particular – although these were largely opposed to the equality of black workers – and the multi-ethnic composition of the labour movement prevented the emergence of the racialist stigmatisation of Southern Europeans that prevailed at the time in Australia and the US (Gabaccia, 1997, p. 194; Moya, 1998; Fitzgerald and Cook-Martín, 2014). The attitude of these unions towards Japanese labour migrants in the 1920s and 1930s, however, was far more negative (Hastings, 1969, p. 36). To conclude, from the middle of the nineteenth century, organised labour in the Western hemisphere, and especially the unions, massively supported immigration restrictions, despite their internationalist ideals. This stance can only partly be explained by a fear that migrant workers would break strikes and lower wages. In most cases, these effects were actually either marginal or non-existent, but combined with prevalent racist worldviews, the idea of unfair competition proved to be a powerful rhetoric device.

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174  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Internal Migrants Finally, it is important to note that this rhetoric was not limited to union members (who represented only a minority of workers) (Alesina et al., 2006, p. 29; Huberman and Minns, 2007), and that agitation was not limited to migrants coming from abroad. In the US, for example, nativism directed against foreigners from Asia and African Americans who, from the First World War onwards, migrated from the South of the US to the industrialised North and the West, had a broader breeding ground. A crucial factor in this case was the legacy of slavery, and particularly the racial segregationist Jim Crow legislation enacted in the late nineteenth century, which constituted African Americans and other people of colour as the ultimate ‘others’. Even when African Americans organised and joined unions (as far as it was allowed), this attitude did not change. Although strike-breaking by black workers did occur, as in New York’s garment district in the spring of 1913, when 100 ‘negro women’ were brought in (Olzak, 1989, p. 1304), the overall reaction to migrants from the South was marked by racism. It was therefore no coincidence that outbursts of urban violence were more directed against blacks than against immigrants (Olzak, 1989, p. 1305), with the Chicago riots in 1919 as an extreme example (Tuttle, 1996). The picture was not all bleak, however, and in particular the ‘new unionism’ of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s managed to unite white and black workers in the meatpacking industry in Chicago and other Mid-West centres. Shared participation in militant direct action helped to reduce racial tensions and build solidarity (Horowitz, 1997, pp. 74–78; Halpern, 1997). Such solidarity was unthinkable in South Africa, where, as in Oceania, organised labour preferred to remain a closed shop for white workers, and where black South Africans were situated in a second segment, with much lower wages and fewer civil rights, with ‘coloured’ workers (mostly South Asians) occupying a position somewhere in between (Olsson, 1995, p. 382). Even in South Africa, however, labour market dynamics also sometimes forced (poor) whites into a situation of competition with non-white workers, as occurred in the construction industry after the First World War. In the mining industry, white workers were much more successful in maintaining a split labour market. Whereas white workers dominated in skilled occupations, black migrants worked for very low wages in the ‘compound system’, which forced them to remain in a constant state of circulation, preventing them from settling and uniting with their families back home (Greenberg, 1980, pp. 150–155). Migrants from Europe in these settler colonies soon internalised this racism, and were the first to maintain the racial boundary and prove their own ‘whiteness’, especially those who were distrusted because of their complexion (Italians) or religion (Irish, Jews) (Guglielmo, 2003; Alba, 2020). This historical evidence contradicts the competition thesis of Susan Olzak, who argued that competition for resources was the main cause for ethnic conflicts. This thesis also fails to explain why, in the US, non-competitive blacks were far more often the victim of ethnic violence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than white European immigrants were over this same period (Hechter, 1994).

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‘Workers of the world unite’  175

MIGRATION AND MEMBERSHIP: NEW DIRECTIONS AFTER THE GREAT WAR The integration of the labour movement in the nation state during the First World War in Europe did not entirely extinguish the creed of international solidarity. Although, with the rise of universal suffrage and nationally bounded social rights, the gap between native and foreign workers grew and most unions took a more nativist stance, the post-war period started with an internationalist bounce. This brief ‘workers of the world’ moment occurred in France immediately after the signing of the Armistice in November 1918. French union leaders, such as Léon Jouhaux, hoped that they could capitalise on the strong position that they had acquired during the War to push for an ‘international labour reformism’ that would guarantee equal wages and working conditions within Europe, and thus equal (social) rights for (European) migrants (Lewis, 2007, p. 19). This position, which would eventually be realised almost a century later with the emergence of freedom of movement within the European Union (EU), corresponded with that of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which was established in 1919 to protect the social position of workers, including those who were active abroad (including refugees), while paying due attention to the interests of employers and states (see Chapter 5 by Piper in this Handbook). Although this internationalist moment would soon draw to a close, it is misleading to characterise the Great War as a turning point towards nativism in the labour movement. The decades immediately following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles can be considered as an incubator of major innovations that, with numerous variations, have determined the attitude of unions towards migrant workers until today, including at the global scale. In terms of membership and social rights we can distinguish four important developments: (1) exclusion by segregation; (2) gradual inclusion; (3) formal inclusion and social exclusion; and (4) scaling up national membership. Exclusion by Segregation The practice of recruiting foreign workers while severely limiting (or even denying) them basic political, social and economic rights has deep historical roots, going back to various forms of slave labour. If we limit ourselves to the last century we find a number of variants, starting with the forced labour of enemy citizens and prisoners of war in Germany during the two World Wars, the colonial roots of the present kafala system in the Gulf, the compound system under Apartheid in South African mining areas, Palestinian workers in Israel, and the highly regulated hanba system for Koreans in the Japanese labour market since 1910 (Herbert, 1990; AlShehabi, 2019; Greenberg, 1980; Kawashima, 2009; Costello and Freedland, 2014). The role of unions, as far as they were allowed, tended to support such forms of segregation for the benefit of their (native or white) members, and their policies ranged from the total exclusion of rights to forms of partial membership. A recent example of the latter is the Israeli visa system that came about in 1993, which linked migrant workers (from Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia) (Gottlieb, 2002) to specific employers. These migrant workers were ignored by the Israeli trade union (Histadrut), which created a segregated system in which migrant workers were not only tied to their employer, but also received lower social benefits and could not join the Histadrut (Albin, 2014, p. 142). The features that these programmes have in common are high levels of coercion, and the restriction of access to social, political and

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176  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance residential rights, which were often combined with barely concealed discriminatory and racist overtones. Inasmuch as unions were involved (for example, in Israel, Japan, South Africa and the US) they tended to support these state- and employer-dominated regulatory systems that maintained split labour markets. A case in point is the example of South Africa during Apartheid, where whites were ‘insiders’ and black internal migrants suffered the same fate as migrants from other African countries do now. Since the fall of the Apartheid regime, politicians and many union leaders have adopted a nativist discourse that has led to xenophobic (‘Afrophobic’) attitudes towards labour migrants from other African countries (Neocosmos, 2010, p. 147; Chigumadzi, 2019). Unlike in the Gulf states, however, (black) native workers do not enjoy highly developed social rights, and (rightly or wrongly) consider foreign workers and entrepreneurs as direct competitors. In Japan and South Korea, trade unions, which until the 1990s opposed the immigration of workers, have very hesitantly started to provide some support, while acknowledging that labour laws should apply to newcomers (Ford, 2019, pp. 122–123). Pressure from international confederations, such as the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), created a greater awareness among these unions, and has contributed to them viewing migrants primarily as workers, instead of the other way around (Ford, 2019, p. 4). An additional problem in many Asian countries (such as Myanmar and Thailand) is that union activity is severely limited, and that it is forbidden for them to organise labour migrants. This has led to an important role for non-governmental organisations (NGOs), churches and global union federations (GUFs) in bringing about change and advocating a rights-based approach. The role of the ILO in advocacy regarding migrants’ rights has been more limited, given its tripartite (unions, employers and states) nature and the influence of neoliberal policies. Although the organisation has more recently moved towards a more rights-orientated orientation, and greater cooperation with other international actors, including NGOs, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), countries in the Global South increasingly use other platforms to further migrants’ rights (see Chapter 5 by Piper in this Handbook; and Piper, 2006). Gradual Inclusion The second innovation that occurred in the context of post-1914 nation states was the emergence of various forms of regulation and inclusion that opened the door to the acquisition of social rights for those foreign workers who were included in bilateral treaties between labour-abundant and labour-poor states. A well-known example is the early form of guest worker system that France introduced after the First World War, with a close collaboration between the state and employers, while the unions took a back seat. Treaties with countries such as Belgium, Italy, Poland and Czechoslovakia guaranteed a constant supply of workers, who, at least officially, could benefit from a slowly expanding range of social rights and benefits. Although many local unions soon became wary of these labour importing schemes, organised labour supported this system because regulation offered a way out of the dilemma between internationalism and undercutting. The basic idea was that these ‘most favoured’ foreign workers would receive the same wages as native workers, and would only be admitted in sectors where the native supply of labour was lacking (Lewis, 2007, pp. 19–24, 41–47). One

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‘Workers of the world unite’  177 of the consequences was that left-leaning unions, such as the United General Confederation of Labour (Confédération générale du travail unitaire, CGTU) in France, developed strategies to incorporate migrant workers, among whom there were significant numbers of activists. In France, this led to some unions reaching out to migrants by subsidising the production of leaflets and other forms of propaganda and information in foreign languages, such as Spanish, Italian and Polish (Lewis, 2007, p. 46). In the view of these unions, it was only by organising migrant workers that they could prevent employers from using them as a weapon (Schain, 1998, p. 101). This practice continued after the Second World War in the Western hemisphere, as unions accepted state regulation on the condition that migrants would be paid equal wages and granted social rights in order to avoid unfair competition in the labour market (Marino et al., 2017). Once again, unions tried to find a compromise between national economic interests and continuing resistance among part of their native membership. A telling example is that of the European Volunteer Workers (EVWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) immediately after the Second World War. Most of these workers originated from Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states) and were selected by Western European states from displaced persons camps in Germany to be assigned to specific sectors (mining, textiles, agriculture). Unions agreed to this on the condition that the scheme would be strictly monitored and that promotion to better jobs would be out of the question (Tannahil, 1958, p. 59; Kay and Miles, 1992). Similar demands were made by unions on the Continent, which soon extended to guest worker schemes that started appearing from the mid-1950s onwards, first with workers from Southern European countries, North African countries and Turkey. Unions in Germany and the Netherlands initially rejected the guest worker programme, but as employers and state officials applied pressure, they grudgingly agreed, on the condition that the migrant workers would be paid the same wages as native workers, including all social contributions. However, from the mid-1950s, unions in Germany made efforts to organise guest workers such as those from Italy and Turkey. Initially they were not very successful, partly because many migrant workers did not see the need to join a union. This changed when Turkish workers with trade union experience in their country of origin joined German unions and started to actively recruit their countrymen, resulting in a rate of 25 per cent union membership among Turkish guest workers in the mining industry in 1963, and similar results in the car industry (Hunn, 2005, pp. 120–124). Although unions were not very proactive in recruiting and organising migrant workers, they nevertheless functioned as a channel for integration. In France, as early as the 1920s and 1930s, many Poles, Italians and Spaniards joined unions, and this continued after the Second World War. From the 1960s onwards, the French CGTU and the more left-wing French Democratic Confederation of Labour (Confédération française démocratique du travail, CFDT) started to reach out to migrant workers, not least because many of them, although non-organised, participated very actively in spontaneous strikes. Initially, Algerian workers were ignored, on the assumption that they would return to their country of origin, but these workers too were gradually targeted (Schain, 1998, pp. 100–105). With the onset of recession in the 1970s, unions in Europe argued once again for restrictions on immigration, but at the same time they became more active in trying to organise foreign workers, and thus created important pathways for integration. At this time, unions had to find a balance between the

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178  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance nativist sentiments that were prevalent among their native rank-and-file members and the more inclusive, anti-racist positions of their leadership. Formal Inclusion and Social Exclusion The work of regulating and organising migrant workers could go hand in hand with the exclusion of racialised outsiders, as it did for Mexican workers under the Bracero system in the US (1942–1964) (Calavita, 1992). In Western Europe, attempts were made to develop such fissured segregationist systems, such as the European Volunteer Workers programme in the UK and the guest workers system, both of which were supported by the unions, but these soon failed. This failure was to a large extent due to the unintended (inclusionary) effects of the welfare state and the rise of a (general) ideology of equality. Paradoxically, due to union demands that guest workers be treated the same as native workers, they not only entered the national territory but also became integrated in the welfare state, in which they gradually accumulated rights. These ‘embedded rights’ also extended to the domain of residence rights, and opened up possibilities for family reunification (Hollifield, 1992; Bonjour, 2011). Attempts to formally exclude colonial migrants also failed, but for different reasons. In the nineteenth century, migrants from the colonies already came to their respective European metropoles, as workers, students and temporary visitors. During the First World War, their numbers increased rapidly, especially in France (and the UK) where Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians and West Africans were recruited as soldiers and workers (Storm and Tuma, 2015). After the First World War, movement continued of labour migrants from colonies such as Algeria and West Africa (to France), and the West Indies (to the UK). Although they were legally part of the nation and were free to move, in practice the authorities, as well as unions, treated them with greater distrust than they did with regard to European immigrants (Rosenberg, 2006; Rich, 1990). Furthermore, during the 1960s and 1970s in the UK (and elsewhere), many of them experienced what John Wrench called ‘occupational apartheid’, as a result of conscious political control and the attitudes of employers, the state and labour unions (Wrench, 1995, p. 625; for the US, see Davis, 2016). To a lesser extent, this also affected the post-colonial migration of ‘repatriates’ in countries such as France, Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands (Smith, 2003; Bosma et al., 2012; Eyerman and Sciortino, 2020). The racialisation of migrants from other continents – as well as native minorities in Europe, North America and Oceania – came under fire from the emerging ideology of anti-racism and equality that arose in the wake of the civil rights movement in the US and simultaneous cultural revolutions in Western Europe. However, when the onset of the Cold War was followed by a ‘clash of civilizations’ ideology, migrants from Islamic countries and their offspring, as well as those from former colonies, were confronted with increasing exclusion, racism and discrimination in countries in which, at least formally, they enjoyed full membership. Most unions in Europe have since taken a much more progressive position and openly oppose radical right-wing anti-immigration parties and white supremacist movements, while trying to organise recent migrants, many of whom find themselves in precarious work situations. This greater openness towards migrant workers can also be witnessed in the US, where, at the end of the 1990s, declining union membership rates strengthened more progressive forces within the leadership of unions, who realised that supporting immigration restrictions would alienate possible new members. As a result, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which for almost a century had followed a restrictionist

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‘Workers of the world unite’  179 course, decided to open up to immigrants (Schmitter-Heisler, 2006, pp. 207–208). Unions thus started to reach out to migrants, including undocumented ones, although this varied widely between different trades (Mantouvalou, 2014). An important role was played by immigrants themselves, both men and women, whose activism has energised labour movements in the US and Canada, providing them with innovative new strategies, as was shown in the case of union victories for homecare workers (Fernandez et al., 2017, p. xxix). A telling example is that of the campaigns run by Justice for Janitors (J4J), which were initiated by the America-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from the late 1980s. In the early 2000s they successfully organised (largely) migrant workers in California, working in one of the most precarious sectors. Building on this experience, the SEIU launched a strategy to forge international coalitions outside the US, and the initiative was soon taken up by activists in other countries, such as the Netherlands (Knotter, 2017). Scaling Up National Membership The fourth development pertains to labour migration from (often neighbouring) countries which realise the reciprocity of labour flows and choose to allow some degree of reciprocal open access for each other’s citizens. An early example of this involved the Netherlands and Germany, which from the early 1900s onwards largely exempted each other’s citizens from immigration restrictions and labour market checks, in the knowledge that unilateral restrictions would have negative repercussions for their own emigrants (Van Eijl, 2008). Before addressing the long-term influence of these four new interwar regimes, it is necessary to dwell on the issue of racism within unions, and its partial demise in the course of the 1950s and 1960s. With the enlargement of the European Union and the establishment of freedom of movement within it, unions have again been confronted with a large number of temporary migrant workers (starting with those from Poland in 2004) who, due to their high degree of mobility, are difficult to organise, but whose freedom of movement (and freedom to take up employment) is guaranteed by EU legislation. Some of these migrant workers join trade unions, and in many Western European countries, such as the Netherlands, union officials have become very active in addressing abuses and exploitation and – together with labour representatives in the European Parliament – pushing for better workplace controls. But they have also called for limitations on the activities of transnational employment agencies and other intermediaries, who use their freedom to ‘post’ migrant workers as a way of undercutting wages. This has proved to be an arduous process, often transcending the national level, which makes the position of trade unions a difficult one (Seeliger and Wagner, 2016; Rijken and De Lange, 2018). Moreover, at the national level, there are additional institutional obstacles, such as the nature and range of collective agreements with respect to insiders and outsiders, which vary by country (Pulignano et al., 2015). Nevertheless, as an example of the increasing importance that is attached to international solidarity and the equality of workers in Western Europe, it is telling that the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in the UK has largely shaken off its restrictive stance, as illustrated by the fact that it did not request the use of transitional measures upon the enlargement of the EU in 2004, and now follows a much more inclusive strategy aimed at vulnerable workers, including undocumented and non-union members (Bogg and Novitz, 2014, p. 362). Furthermore, it spoke out against the xenophobic reactions that accompanied the Brexit campaign, and criticised the infringement of the rights of EU workers in the UK (Parks, 2019, p. 110). In

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180  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance September 2019, in its harsh critique of a hard Brexit, it explicitly defended the rights of migrant workers: ‘We will stand together to defend the rights of migrant workers against the bad bosses who seek to exploit them. Regardless of race, religion, nationality or background, everyone should be treated with decency and dignity at work and receive the rate for the job’ (TUC, 2019). Although the EU constitutes a free space for internal migrant workers, their rights are often limited by a plethora of contracts and arrangements imposed on them by recruiting agencies and employers. This is even more the case for those coming from outside the EU. In some respects, the situation of these so-called ‘third country nationals’ resembles that of the European Voluntary Workers in the late 1940s, whose temporary contracts bound them to specific employers. Furthermore, recruitment agencies now have the right to ‘post’ such workers to other EU states. Recently, Eastern European states such as Poland and Hungary have become an entry point into the EU for migrant workers from South and South-East Asia (Mendoza, 2020; Calavita, 2017), while countries such as Sweden are experimenting with seasonal labour schemes that bring in Thai workers for picking berries, whose vulnerable position has caused Swedish trade unions (sometimes in collaboration with Thai unions) to raise concerns about their treatment.

CONCLUSION When it comes to migrant workers, trade unions face several dilemmas. The greatest of these is that, by holding on to the internationalist creed of the Communist Manifesto, they run the risk of estranging native workers who fear unfair competition. On the other hand, by supporting restrictions they may hamper economic growth and thereby limit the creation of new jobs. Finally, unions which reach out to migrant workers who are allowed to enter the country or who have gradually secured a permanent place in society may face opposition from native workers, who resent what they perceive as the special treatment of minorities (Marino et al., 2015, 2017). How unions react to these challenges depends on many factors and differs over time and space. Taking into account developments over the last century and a half, we can conclude that the rise of trade unions coincided with the burgeoning of the nation state, colonialism, imperialism and the rise of nativism. This simultaneity explains the outright negative and dismissive attitudes towards migrant workers of many unions in the North Atlantic and Oceania, especially with regard to those workers who were considered as being racially inferior: above all ‘Asians’, but also sometimes Italians and Eastern Europeans. However, examples of exclusion and discrimination are not limited to Europeans, nor to the distant past. There are current examples of segregation and discriminatory treatment of foreign workers in Japan, Russia, the Gulf states and South Africa, to name only a few labour-importing regions. In these world regions, labour unions – inasmuch as they exist – have given at most lukewarm support to migrants, and the ideology of equality and non-discrimination is largely trumped by nativism, sometimes pouring over into xenophobia and ‘autochthony’ (Bøås and Dunn, 2013). In East and South-East Asia, unions may have become somewhat more inclusive, but this is often mainly a symbolic change, carried out under pressure from international confederations and NGOs. Pressure from civil society groups has only very recently led to these unions taking incremental steps towards expanding services for migrants (Chung, 2020).

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‘Workers of the world unite’  181 We should realise, however, that when unions adopt a restrictive course, they do not necessarily obstruct migrants from joining and integrating through union networks. A good example is that of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) before the First World War, which argued in favour of limiting migration from Europe, but at the same time welcomed those who did arrive, often by means of ethnic networks of co-nationals who had settled earlier. The same is true for Italians in France in the same period, and many others elsewhere. On the other hand, an open stance does not always guarantee an active involvement in recruiting migrant workers or developing specific programmes (such as language-teaching programmes). Since the end of the twentieth century, at least in Europe and North America, unions have stood up for migrant workers, irrespective of whether they are union members. This is explained not only by an increasing ‘workers of the world’ awareness, but also by the fact that membership rates are going down while employers have become much more transnational, using all available loopholes to weaken the position of unions. Fighting against the exploitation of migrant workers is therefore perceived by unions as being not only the right thing to do, but also in their own interest. One and a half centuries after the Communist Manifesto, migrant workers are increasingly seen and treated primarily as co-workers instead of competitors. In this respect, the Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights (SIGTUR) is of interest, as it unites (left-wing) unions in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, the Philippines, South Africa and South Korea in order to coordinate collective actions and demands for anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and empathetic internationalism (O’Brien, 2019). Although this transnational dimension of union activity is not new (Italian and French unions cooperated as early as the late nineteenth century), it is now taking on new and interesting forms, driven by grassroots activists. In this sense, as remarked by Marino and colleagues in their recent overview of the relation between migrants and unions in Europe, this widening social sphere has made unions increasingly aware that they should also act as social and political actors (Marino et al., 2017, pp. 382–383). Despite the withering strength of unions globally and their dilemmas (and at times racism) with respect to migrant workers, unions remain crucial institutions that can further the interests of migrants and offer channels for integration. In this sense, the invocation of the Communist Manifesto has not lost its relevance.

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184  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Neocosmos, M. (2010). From ‘foreign natives’ to ‘native foreigners’: Explaining xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa. CODESRIA. Noiriel, G. (2018). Une histoire populaire de la France: De la Guerre de Cent Ans à nos jours. Agone. O’Brien, R. (2019). Labour internationalism in the Global South: The SIGTUR initiative. Cambridge University Press. Olssen, E. (1995). The New Zealand labour movement and race. In M. Van der Linden and J. Lucassen (eds), Racism and the labour market (pp. 373–391). Peter Lang. Olzak, S. (1989). Labor unrest, immigration, and ethnic conflict in urban America, 1880–1914. American Journal of Sociology, 94(6), 1303–1333. O’Rourke, K.H., and Williamson, J.G. (2002). When did globalization begin? European Review of Economic History, 6(1), 23–50. Parks, L. (2019). All quiet on the Brexit front? UK civil society before and after the UK’s referendum on membership of the EU. In L. Antoniolli, L. Bonatti and C. Ruzza (eds), Highs and lows of European integration: Sixty years after the Treaty of Rome (pp. 105–120). Springer. Piper, N. (2006). Migrant worker activism in Singapore and Malaysia: Freedom of association and the role of the state. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 15(3), 159–380. Pulignano, V., Meardi, G., and Doerflinger, N. (2015). Trade unions and labour market dualisation: A comparison of policies and attitudes towards agency and migrant workers in Germany and Belgium. Work, Employment and Society, 29(5), 808–825. Rich, P.B. (1990). Race and empire in British Politics. Cambridge University Press. Rijken, C., and De Lange, T. (eds) (2018). Towards a decent labour market for low-waged migrant workers. Amsterdam University Press. Rosenberg, C. (2006). Policing Paris: The origins of modern immigration control between the wars. Cornell University Press. Schain, M.A. (1998). Immigration and trade unions in France: A problem and an opportunity. In H. Chapman, M. Kesselman and M.A. Schain (eds), A century of organized labor in France: A union movement for the twenty-first century? (pp. 97–114). St Martin’s Press. Schmitter-Heisler, B. (2006). Trade unions and immigrant incorporation: The US and Europe compared. In L. Lucassen, D. Feldman and J. Oltmer (eds), Paths of integration: Migrants in Western Europe (1880–2004) (pp. 201–221). Amsterdam University Press. Seeliger, M., and Wagner, I. (2016). Workers united? How trade union organizations at the European level form political positions on the freedom of services. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Smith, A.L. (ed.) (2003). Europe’s invisible migrants: Consequences of the colonists’ return. Amsterdam University Press. Storm, E., and Tuma, A.A. (eds). (2015). Colonial soldiers in Europe, 1914–1945: ‘Aliens in Uniform’ in wartime societies. Routledge. Tannahill, J. A. (1958). European volunteer workers in Britain. Manchester University Press. Trades Union Congress (TUC). (2019). TUC General Council statement on Brexit: No to no deal, for a future fit for working people. TUC. https://​www​.tuc​.org​.uk/​news/​tuc​-general​-council​-statement​ -brexit​-no​-no​-deal​-future​-fit​-working​-people. Tuttle, W.M. (1996). Race riot: Chicago in the red summer of 1919. University of Chicago Press, University of Illinois Press. Van der Linden, M. (1988). The national integration of European working classes (1871–1914): Exploring the causal configuration. International Review of Social History, 33, 285–311. Van Eijl, C. (2008). Tracing back ‘illegal aliens’ in the Netherlands, 1850–1940. In M. Schrover, J.v.d. Leun, L. Lucassen and C. Quispel (eds), Illegal migration and gender in a global and historical perspective (pp. 39–56). Amsterdam University Press. Van Rossum, M. (2015). The ‘yellow danger’? Global forces and global fears in the North Sea and beyond (1600–1950). International Journal of Maritime History, 27(4), 743–754. Vittoz, S. (1978). World War I and the political accommodation of transitional market forces: The case of immigration restriction. Politics and Society, 8(1), 49–78. Webb, S., and Webb, B. (1894). The history of trade unionism. Longmans, Green Co.

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‘Workers of the world unite’  185 Wrench, J. (1995). Racism and the labour market in post-war Britain: The ‘second generation’ and the continuance of discrimination. In M. Van der Linden and J. Lucassen (eds), Racism and the labour market (pp. 621–643). Peter Lang. Zolberg, A. (2006). A nation by design: Immigration policy in the fashioning of America. Harvard University Press, Russell Sage Foundation.

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13. At the crossroads of climate and migration governance: institutional arrangements to address climate-induced migration François Gemenne

INTRODUCTION Early works and concerns about the climate‒migration nexus appeared in the early 1990s, and a clear divide quickly emerged between those who adopted a maximalist perspective and those with a minimalist perspective: the former insisted on the existence of strong causal relationships between both sides of the nexus, whereas the latter stressed the multi-causality of the nexus and other intervening factors. Accordingly, scholars with a maximalist perspective forecasted waves of ‘environmental refugees’ and pinpointed environmental factors as a major driving force of migration; whereas scholars with a minimalist perspective adopted a more sceptical stance regarding the empirical reality of such migration flows, emphasising the complexity of the migration process. This divide between ‘alarmists’ and ‘sceptics’ was more than a scientific controversy, and shaped the early policy debates on environmental migration. Policy coalitions initially formed around scholars from different disciplines: alarmists were mostly security experts and scholars from the natural sciences, while sceptics were found among social scientists, and migration scholars in particular. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and interest groups usually sided with the alarmists, and the grey literature also tends to adopt a maximalist perspective. This debate emerged soon after the coining of the term ‘environmental refugee’, and has been ongoing since then. Suhrke noted that: While literature on environmental change and population movement is quite limited, two different and opposing perspectives can be discerned. One – which I call the minimalist view – sees environmental change as a contextual variable that can contribute to migration, but warns that we lack sufficient knowledge about the process to draw firm conclusions. The other perspective sets out a maximalist view, arguing that environmental degradation has already displaced millions of people, and more displacement is on the way. (Suhrke, 1993, p. 4)

Such debates bring to light the fact that institutions which address the climate‒migration nexus lie at the crossroads of climate and migration policies. These two policy areas are often extremely different from each other, and the process of shaping of institutions to address the climate‒migration nexus reflects the mutual influences and progress of both policy areas. It is fair to say that, until the mid-2010s, environmental policies were much quicker to embrace the policy challenges of climate-induced migration, while migration policies remained blind to this emerging issue for a long time.

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At the crossroads of climate and migration governance  187

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS The taxonomy of climate-induced migration established by El-Hinnawi (1985) and Jacobson (1988) paved the way for an alarmist perspective that was used to forecast substantial migration flows connected to a wide variety of environmental changes. Many scholars who adopted this perspective were initially interested in the environment‒security nexus, out of concern for the linkage between environmental disruption and conflicts, and deployed refugee flows as an exploratory variable to justify a causal relationship between environmental change and conflict. To summarise the general approach of these works, the initial alarmist approach to the nexus assumed that environmental disruptions were major contributors to insecurity. Migration was conceptualised both as a consequence of environmentally induced conflicts and as a trigger of future conflicts over natural resources. The theories were deeply rooted in a neo-Malthusian perspective, and gave authority to the commonly held perception that climate change was a threat to the world’s security. From the mid-2000s onwards, different governments commissioned or were recipients of reports warning about the threat that climate change posed to national or international security. The first report of this kind – and the one portraying the most pessimistic scenario – was commissioned by the United States (US) Department of Defense, and was reportedly censored by the White House. The report evokes an apocalyptic scenario in which a brutal change of weather conditions, induced by the crossing of a climate threshold, triggers massive flows of migrants worldwide, who compete for resources and ultimately threaten US and international security (Schwartz and Randall, 2003). The report warns that such a scenario is plausible, yet not the most likely, and reveals its political agenda by urging the United States government – which, notoriously, did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol – to take climate change more seriously. A report prepared for the European Council adopts a similar stance, warning that ‘Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure’, especially from Africa (Council of the European Union, 2008, p. 4). The report recommends that a comprehensive European migration policy should take into account environmentally triggered additional migratory stress, but does not further elaborate on this. Overall, the alarmist approach viewed climate-induced migration as a security threat. Building upon this initial approach, some scholars, such as Norman Myers (2002), tried to forecast future migration flows on the basis of climate modelling. Their studies fed the well-known media appetite for numbers, sometimes at the risk of oversimplifying a complex situation (Gemenne, 2011). Numerous reports from NGOs have also contributed to the alarmist, deterministic perspective, and provided additional estimates and forecasts. The Red Cross stressed in its World disasters report 2001 that more people were forced to leave their homes because of environmental disasters than because of war (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2001). Lester Brown, who in the 1970s was among the first to use the term, noted that flows of ‘environmental refugees’ were just in their early stages and were ‘yet another indicator that our modern civilization is out of sync with the earth’s natural support systems’ (Brown, 2004). Adopting a neo-Malthusian approach, Brown recommended the use of family planning techniques and a reduction of carbon emissions to solve the problem and stabilise the Earth’s climate. In a much-debated report, the NGO Christian Aid dramatically revised

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188  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Myers’s forecasts, and predicted that up to 1 billion people could be displaced by environmental disruption by 2050 (Christian Aid, 2007). Even though environmental degradation had been recognised as a root cause of refugee flows by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since 1993 (Ogata, 1993), many scholars nonetheless lamented that no real protection had been developed to help people displaced by environmental change. Accordingly, they initiated a debate at the policy level, where the alarmist perspective translated into a case for the development of new policies and instruments to fill in what was perceived as a protection gap. Conisbee and Simms (2003), for example, made a case for a radical policy change, and argued for the inclusion of ‘environmental refugees’ in the population protected by the Geneva Convention, arguing that environmental degradation is, in many ways, a form of political persecution. Yet, at the same time, two senior figures in migration studies, Gaim Kibreab and Richard Black, contended that the concept of climate-induced migration made little sense, and that environmental impacts on migration flows were grossly overestimated. Kibreab (1997) was the first to attack the alarmist approach, which was increasingly accepted as ‘scientific truth’. According to Kibreab, the concept of environmental migration served to depoliticise the causes of displacement, allowing states to avoid their obligations to provide asylum, since ‘environmental conditions [did] not constitute a basis for international protection’ (Kibreab, 1997, pp. 20–21). He perceived the concept as a threat to refugee protection, and an excuse for governments to justify restrictive asylum policies. Black adopted a similarly sceptical approach in his milestone book Refugees, environment and development, published in 1998. The book investigates the reason for the linkage between forced migration and environmental change. Black notes that ‘one reason frequently given in recent years to explain mass population displacement is the growth of environmental problems’, and wonders ‘in whose interest it is that environment degradation should be seen as a possible cause of mass displacement’ (Black, 1998, p. 1). He considers that it is ‘academically (or, rather, “theoretically”) interesting to consider relationships between forced migration and environmental change’, but that it is also far from unproblematic. Black, however, refutes Kibreab’s argument that the concept is just an excuse for Northern governments to enforce tighter asylum policies, given that most of the literature on the topic calls for an extension of the current refugee regime, rather than a restriction. Yet he agrees with Kibreab that most of the ‘alarmist’ literature ‘serves only to differentiate a single cause of migration’ (Black, 1998, p. 12) and may therefore lead to restrictions in asylum policies in the North, which is important because most of these migration flows occur in developing countries. In a subsequent working paper for UNHCR’s ‘New Issues in Refugee Research’ series, Black further questions the very concept of ‘environmental refugees’, saying that the ‘linkages between environmental change, conflict and refugees remain to be proven’ (Black, 2001, p. 3). He presents various empirical cases that show little evidence of a direct causal linkage, stressing that migration can also be seen as a coping strategy, for example, in the case of desertification. He sees more justification for the concept of environmental migration in the case of extreme disasters, which must be analysed in conjunction with human-induced environmental degradation. Black asserts that current statistics and case studies on ‘environmental refugees’ are not ‘encouraging in terms of staking out a new area of academic study or public policy’ (ibid., p. 11), and that these so-called refugees may be no more than a myth. However, he concedes that environmental changes can be factors behind large-scale migration, but raises doubts about the possibility of defining these migrants adequately. He concludes with

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At the crossroads of climate and migration governance  189 some reflections on a possible international protection regime for ‘environmental refugees’, asking whether such a regime would help or hinder ‘the battle to focus the world’s attention on pressing environmental problems’ (ibid., p. 15). Castles (2002) reaches the same conclusion as Kibreab and Black: ‘the notion of the “environmental refugee” is misleading and does little to help us understand the complex processes at work in specific situations of impoverishment, conflict and displacement’. However, he acknowledges that environmental factors are not unimportant in these situations, but rather are part of ‘complex patterns of multiple causality, in which natural and environmental factors are closely linked to economic, social and political ones’. He therefore calls for ‘much more research and better understanding’ (Castles, 2002, p. 5). He further sides with Black in arguing that the term ‘environmental refugee’ is ‘simplistic, one-sided and misleading, [and] implies a mono-causality that very rarely exists in practice’ (ibid., p. 8). Regarding a possible extension of the category of ‘international refugee’, he stresses the importance of a better, clearer definition, and warns that there is currently no political consensus concerning the extension of the refugee regime, and that a concept such as that of the ‘environmental refugee’ might be harmful for the current regime. The demarcation between the alarmist and sceptical views lies principally in their stance towards the importance of environmental factors as (sole) migration drivers. The controversy between the two is connected to the very conceptualisation of climate-induced migration, and impacts upon the debate on policy implications, with alarmists favouring reform and sceptics favouring the status quo. This debate was first addressed by legal scholars, then by a new, revived stream of research on the topic, prompted by natural disasters in the mid-2000s and the materialisation of the impacts of climate change.

MIGRATION IN THE CLIMATE REGIME The international negotiations on climate change have long been perceived as the primary forum for policy initiatives related to human mobility induced by climate change. Historically, the climate regime has remained largely focused on mitigation, and has put little emphasis on adaptation. Despite repeated calls to develop this aspect of the fight against climate change, normative frameworks remain vague and instruments to enforce them scarce. As for the funds allocated to support adaptation, they remain chronically insufficient, since they largely depend on voluntary contributions by member states, and not on mandatory commitments. In climate talks, migration was initially mostly presented as the undesirable outcome of a failure to cope with changing conditions; a strategy of last resort. The presentation of migration as a problematic phenomenon was reflected in a policy focus on influencing the modality, volume and geographic bounds of migration flows rather than on facilitating human mobility for the potential positive outcomes of migration (DFID, 2013; Black et al., 2006). From the late 2000s onwards, however, works highlighted that migration could be a powerful adaptation strategy for populations faced with environmental changes. Black et al. (2011) noted that ‘although environmental change will alter an already complex pattern of human mobility, migration will offer opportunities as well as challenges’, and called for fresh discourse and research on the linkages between migration and adaptation. In a paper prepared for the World Bank, Barnett and Webber (2010) argued that ‘migration is itself a strategy to sustain livelihoods in the face of environmental and economic perturbations and change’, and that ‘in many cases migration enhances the sustainable development of both sending and host

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190  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance areas’. In the same vein, McLeman and Smit (2006) presented a model framing migration as a possible adaptive response to climate change, which they had tested with the case of the Dust Bowl migration that took place in Oklahoma in the 1930s. It has also been observed that environmental variability overall may influence the longer-term vulnerability of households, which may lead to out-migration in a gradual, ‘erosive’ process that may subsequently prevent households from utilising migration as a strategy (Warner and Afifi, 2014). Migration in anticipation of future shocks and changes can therefore also serve as an adaptive strategy. As a result of this, migration was increasingly regarded in terms of adaptation in the context of the global climate regime. Combined advocacy efforts led to migration being recognised as a possible strategy for adapting to climate change impacts in the Cancun Adaptation Framework, adopted in 2010. Paragraph 14F of the Framework invites parties to undertake ‘measures to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation with regard to climate change induced displacement, migration and planned relocation, where appropriate, at the national, regional and international levels’ (UNFCCC, 2011). Meanwhile, the Paris Agreement, signed in 2015 at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21), has logically become the main framework for action on climate change in the coming years, and especially following its implementation in 2020. The Paris Agreement contains important provisions for adaptation, loss and damage, and climate finance. All these provisions can support and provide a legal grounding for future policy initiatives. COP21 also requested the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage to establish a taskforce ‘to develop recommendations for integrated approaches to avert, minimize and address displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change’. This taskforce provided its first recommendations to the WIM ExCom at COP24 in Katowice (Poland) in December 2018. The taskforce includes constituencies from diverse branches and agencies of the United Nations (UN). At the national level, only a small number of countries have included migration policies in their National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA). Among developing countries, migration was most commonly addressed in African countries: three of the ten countries where migration issues were mentioned at least 20 times in their NAPA were West African countries.1 Among the policies in NAPAs that are considered to address migration, a key priority appears to be the limitation of rural exodus, which is mentioned by 13 countries (Sward, 2012). Sward warns, however, that such adaptation policies in rural areas cannot be expected to limit rural-to-urban migration, as such policies have failed in the past and risk ‘creating barriers to people leaving fragile ecological zones, potentially resulting in increased vulnerability to climate change impacts’ (Sward, 2012, p. 3). Most West African countries have addressed migration in their adaptation plans, but often with a view to reducing it. Other countries have addressed displacement more specifically, also with a view to its reduction.

CLIMATE IN THE ASYLUM AND MIGRATION REGIME The asylum regime associated with the Geneva Convention has repeatedly been called into question for its lack of concern towards climate-induced displacement. Critiques of the regime have argued that reforms are necessary to make the regime relevant again, and that in its current state it is not able to accommodate the large numbers of forcibly displaced people who

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At the crossroads of climate and migration governance  191 are not currently granted the status of refugees. As a result, some initiatives officially called for the recognition of ‘environmental refugees’ within the Geneva Convention. For example, in 2006 the Belgian Senate passed a resolution urging the Belgian government to work towards better protection of ‘environmental refugees’ in the Geneva Convention. This, to date, is the most advanced official position on the matter taken by any state. From time to time, legal initiatives to create a refugee status for those displaced by climate change continue to emerge, but they have yet to gain any meaningful political traction. However, two regional conventions that sought to extend the scope of the Geneva Convention, in Africa and Latin America, respectively, provide some form of protection: the 1969 Convention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees. These regional conventions originated in developing countries’ dissatisfaction with the international refugee regime, which was perceived as being overly Eurocentric. The Geneva Convention was perceived to be disconnected from the realities of forced migration in the Global South, and it was thought that regional instruments would more adequately address regional refugee issues. The OAU even sought to establish its own regional refugee organisation, and UNHCR worked closely with the OAU to convince the latter of its capacity to provide regional refugee assistance (Orchard, 2008, p. 303). Above all, its main achievement was to significantly expand the definition of a refugee so as to be more inclusive. The 1969 OAU Convention thus extended the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention definition of a refugee, to include: Every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality. (OAU, 1969)

The definition primarily relates to situations of mass violence, which triggered major refugee flows in Africa throughout the 1960s. However, the expression ‘events seriously disturbing public order’ could certainly encompass natural disasters, and African countries have consistently interpreted the definition in an expansive way, and seldom reject such refugees at the border. Furthermore, the OAU Convention also considered the security implications of refugee flows, and focused on solutions to refugee situations, such as the promotion of voluntary repatriation and burden-sharing. The Cartagena Declaration, adopted in 1984, proposed a similar expansion of the definition of a refugee: The definition or concept of a refugee to be recommended for use in the region is one which, in addition to containing the elements of the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol, includes among refugees persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order. (UNHCR, 1984)

Unlike the OAU Convention, however, this document was not adopted by a regional organisation, but rather by an ad hoc group of experts and representatives from Central American governments who participated in a conference in Colombia. Although the Declaration is not binding, it has come to assume the status of a principle of customary law in the region, and

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192  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance the expanded definition has been recommended for application in situations of mass influx (Goodwin-Gill, 1996, p. 21). Both conventions have made significant progress towards a more inclusive, less Eurocentric definition of a refugee. This development of alternative definitions was paralleled by the changing role of UNHCR: until the 2004 tsunami, UNHCR’s involvement with natural disasters had been limited to exceptional cases. It mostly consisted in contributions of money and relief items, as well as in assistance to governments lacking the capacities to respond to disasters. UNHCR gave multiple reasons for this limited involvement. Since then, however, UNHCR has assumed a greater role in the assistance of people displaced by environmental changes, and now has a dedicated climate change unit. The most significant change in policy in the migration and asylum regime, however, came with the adoption of the Global Compact for Migration. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) is an intergovernmental agreement and the first instrument to encompass and tackle migration issues in a comprehensive manner – including the issue of climate-induced migration – in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (goal 10.7). The GCM consultation, stocktaking and intergovernmental negotiation process was initiated in April 2017 as a follow-up to the adoption of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants on 19 September 2016. It involved stakeholders ranging from governments, civil society, the private sector, academic institutions and parliaments, to diaspora communities and migrant organisations. The GCM includes a section specifically dedicated to climate change, which is officially recognised as a root cause of migration, and suggests possible ways for international cooperation to prevent migration and displacement as a result of climate change.

THE NANSEN INITIATIVE AND THE PLATFORM ON DISASTER DISPLACEMENT From the summary provided above, it seems clear that, thus far, the asylum and climate regimes were evolving in different directions regarding climate-induced migration: while the former was aiming to prevent migration, the latter sought to encourage it as an adaptation strategy. However, an intergovernmental initiative was about to try to reconcile the two approaches. On 5–7 June 2011, to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Fridtjof Nansen, a national hero, polar explorer, humanitarian, and the first High Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian government organised the Nansen Conference, dedicated to ‘climate change and displacement in the twenty-first century’. The Conference was attended by a wide range of academics, practitioners and government representatives. It concluded with the adoption of the Nansen Principles, a series of ten recommendations that aimed ‘to guide responses to some of the urgent and complex challenges raised by displacement in the context of climate change and other environmental hazards’. It was expected – or at least hoped – that the Principles would feature prominently at the 2011 UNHCR Ministerial Meeting, coinciding with the commemoration of the 60th and 50th Anniversaries of the UN Refugee Convention and the Statelessness Convention, respectively. As it turned out, the final communiqué made no mention of the topic. As noted by Kälin (2012, p. 49), ‘this was no accident but rather the expression of a lack of willingness by a majority of governments, whether from reasons of sovereignty, competing priorities or the lead role of UNHCR in the process’.

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At the crossroads of climate and migration governance  193 To overcome the obstacle, the Norwegian government found another way to promote the Nansen Principles, and teamed up with the government of Switzerland to launch the Nansen Initiative in October 2012. The Initiative described itself as a ‘state-led, bottom-up consultative process intended to build consensus on the development of a protection agenda addressing the needs of people displaced across international borders by natural disasters, including the effects of climate change’. It was expected that this global agenda would include a: common understanding of the issue, its dimensions and the challenges faced by relevant stakeholders; good practices and tools for the protection of persons displaced across borders in the context of natural disasters; key principles on the three areas of inter-state/international cooperation; standards of protection of displaced people; and operational responses; recommendations on the respective roles and responsibilities of relevant actors and stakeholders; and an action plan for follow-up.

The Initiative conducted a series of five regional consultations in 2013 and 2014. It was formally supported by a steering group made up of Australia, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Germany, Kenya, Norway, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. It was also supported by a Consultative Committee made up of academics and practitioners, together with a small secretariat, and was headed by a Special Envoy of the Chairmanship of the Initiative. Following these consultations, the Initiative came up with a Protection Agenda, a concise document outlining different recommendations for ways in which states and international organisations can foster the protection of those displaced by climate change and disasters. The Agenda was adopted by 110 governments in October 2015. This adoption led to the creation of the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD), an intergovernmental organisation that seeks to supervise and monitor the Protection Agenda. So far, the Nansen Initiative is the only state-led, intergovernmental process that has sought to address the protection of those displaced by climate change, even though it focuses on only a subgroup of them: those displaced across borders. Although this subgroup represents only a small fraction of those migrating for environmental reasons, it probably corresponds to the population for which the protection gaps are most obvious.

CONCLUSION In short, there are currently three policy processes that seek to address climate-induced migration: the international negotiations on climate change, the Global Compact for Migration, and the Platform on Disaster Displacement. The PDD, which is supported by both UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), is the only one that has achieved the creation of new, dedicated institutions. Arrangements within the climate negotiations are no less powerful, but differ substantially from the direction taken by the Global Compact for Migration, although this process currently appears to have stalled. Policy coherence is a crucial challenge if one is to meaningfully address climate-induced migration. Although significant progress has been made over the years in the negotiations on climate change, one should not forget that migration is unlikely to become a matter of environmental policy in the near future. It is therefore essential to bring climate and migration policy perspectives closer to each other; failure to do so is likely to result in ineffective policies.

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194  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Furthermore, climate-induced migration and displacement are often presented in public debates as a future risk. Yet they are already observable in reality, and demand immediate attention and policy responses. Projections of spectacular numbers of people being displaced by 2050 or the end of the century overshadow the fact that millions of people are already being displaced. Climate-induced displacement is not a looming disaster: it is first and foremost a present reality that needs to be addressed. Strong and coherent institutional arrangements will be key to achieving this goal.

NOTE 1. Eritrea’s NAPA also features migration prominently, but this country is currently suspended from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).

REFERENCES Barnett, J., and Webber, M. (2010). Accommodating migration to promote adaptation to climate change. Policy Research Working Papers series. World Bank. Black, R. (1998). Refugees, environment and development. Addison Wesley Longman. Black, R. (2001). Environmental refugees: Myth or reality? Working paper series New Issues In Refugee Research (34). UNHCR. Black, R., Bennett, S.R.G., Thomas, S.M., and Beddington, J.R. (2011). Migration as adaptation. Nature, (478), 447–449. Black, R., Crush, J., Peberdy, S., Ammassari, S., McLean Hilken, L., Mouillesseux, S., et al. (2006). Migration and development in Africa: An overview. Idasa. Brown, Lester R. (2004). Plan B updates. Troubling new flows of environmental refugees. Blog post, 28 January 28. https://​www​.earth​-policy​.org/​?/​plan​_b​_updates/​2004/​update33/​. Castles, S. (2002). Environmental change and forced migration: Making sense of the debate Working paper series New Issues In Refugee Research (70). UNHCR. Christian Aid (2007). Human tide: The real migration crisis. Christian Aid. Conisbee, M., and Simms, A. (2003). Environmental refugees: The case for recognition. New Economics Foundation. Council of the European Union. (2008). Climate change and international security: Paper from the High Representative and the European Commission to the European Council. European Commission. https://​op​.europa​.eu/​en/​publication​-detail/​-/​publication/​489ee3e8​-41d1​-4af1​-bdcf​-fa42f3355af1/​lang uage-en. DFID (2013). Policy review: Attitudes toward migration in African development bank Country Partnership Strategy Papers (CPSPs). Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium. El-Hinnawi, E. (1985). Environmental refugees. UNEP. Gemenne, F. (2011). Why the numbers don’t add up: A review of estimates and predictions of people displaced by environmental changes. Global Environmental Change, (21), S41–S49. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1016/​j​.gloenvcha​.2011​.09​.005. Goodwin-Gill, G. S. (1996). The refugee in international law. Clarendon Press. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2001). World disasters report 2001: Focus on recovery. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Jacobson, J. (1988). Environmental refugees: A yardstick of habitability. WorldWatch Paper (86). WorldWatch Institute. Kälin, W. (2012). From the Nansen Principles to the Nansen Initiative. Forced Migration Review, (41), 48–49. Kibreab, G. (1997). Environmental causes and impact of refugee movements: A critique of the current debate. Disasters, 21(1), 20–38.

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At the crossroads of climate and migration governance  195 McLeman, R.A., and Smit, B. (2006). Migration as an adaptation to climate change. Climatic Change, 76(1–2), 31–53. Myers, N. (2002). Environmental refugees: A growing phenomenon of the 21st century. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 357(1420), 609–613. Orchard, P. (2008). A right to leave: Refugees, states, and international society. Doctoral thesis, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Ogata, S. (1993). The state of the world’s refugees 1993. Penguin. Organization of African Unity (OAU) (1969). Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. Organization of African Unity. Schwartz, P., and Randall, D. (2003). An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States National Security. US Department of Defense. Suhrke, A. (1993). Pressure points: Environmental degradation, migration and conflict. American Academy of Art and Science. Sward, J. (2012). Migration in National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs). Brighton. UNFCCC. (2011). Cancun Adaptation Framework. Cancun: Conference of the Parties (16th session). UNHCR (1984). Cartagena Declaration on Refugees. UNHCR. Warner, K., and Afifi, T. (2014). Where the rain falls: Evidence from 8 countries on how vulnerable households use migration to manage the risk of rainfall variability and food insecurity. Climate and Development, 6(1), 1–17.

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14. The gendered governance of migration Laura Foley

INTRODUCTION This chapter analyses the ways in which gender shapes labour migration dynamics, from the different migration and employment experiences of men and women, to the various ways in which men’s and women’s migration is framed, categorised and addressed by the policy-relevant actors who make, or seek to shape, the governance of migration. This is important to investigate, as migrant women are often systematically socially, culturally, legally and economically disadvantaged (Piper, 2011; Benería et al., 2012; Holliday et al., 2019; Hennebry and Petrozziello, 2019; Foley and Piper, 2020). In analysing how gendered ideologies permeate the rules, norms and practices aimed at facilitating the management of migration, this chapter sheds light on the roles of state and non-state actors. This chapter is based on empirical material drawn from a case study of the governance of temporary labour migration in Malaysia,1 a country that receives the highest number of migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, in Southeast Asia (Kaur, 2010, p. 391; ILO, 2018b, 2021). This study examined how, why, and with what consequences the governance of migration is underpinned by both implicit and explicit ideas and understandings of gender. It involved interviewing a wide range of public and private actors, including government officials, trade unionists, employers’ organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), recruitment agencies and diplomatic representatives. It analysed the constitution of the governance system, investigating how policy-relevant actors interact, how they understand men’s and women’s migration, and how they develop policy narratives based on these understandings. The rationale behind this research project was that in order to understand governance and the ways in which it is gendered, one needs to elucidate the roles, perceptions and actions of the actors operating within governance systems and, moreover, to establish whether, and to what extent, women’s ideas, understandings, needs, interests and issues have a chance to make it to the political agenda, and thus can be incorporated into the policy-making process. Stereotypical representations of men and women migrant workers can lead to discriminatory policies that render invisible the ways in which migrant women’s needs and interests differ from those of migrant men (Lim and Oishi, 1996). It is therefore essential to shed light on the actors actually involved in migration policy-making processes and to determine whether gender bias pervades the construction of problems and solutions.

GENDER AND LABOUR MIGRATION Gender has been described as a ‘highly contested’ (Hawkesworth, 1997, p. 650), ‘persistently invisible’ and ‘politically loaded’ concept (Prügl and Meyer, 1999, p. 5). Gender does not mean ‘women only’ (Piper, 2003), but instead refers to the socially and culturally constructed meanings, beliefs, interpretations, identities and relationships associated with the perceived 196 Laura Foley - 9781789908077 37:20AM

The gendered governance of migration  197 differences between men and women (Connell, 1989; Peterson, 1992). The world, and the ways in which we understand it, is fundamentally influenced by gender relations: they ‘embody ideas, values, and identities; they allocate labour between different tasks, activities, and domains; they determine the distribution of resources; and they assign authority, agency, and decision-making power’ (Kabeer, 2005, p. 23). Gender intersects with other social relations, such as migration status, age, class, religion, nationality, ethnicity and race, to produce ‘a complex map of stratification ... with its own dynamics of exclusion/inclusion and power relations’ (Piper, 2008b, p. 1). Migration is a gendered phenomenon, yet historically, many migration studies have overlooked the importance of gender dimensions, and the bulk of research on international migration has focused solely on the experiences of men (Brettell, 2016). In fact, the persistent invisibility of women in migration scholarship has only been exposed in recent decades. Eberhardt and Schwenken (2010) observe that early scholars writing on migration had a ‘thin comprehension of gender’ and ‘implicitly [assumed] the male as the prototypical migrant’ (p. 100). Women, on the other hand, were framed mainly as ‘trailing wives’ or as ‘associational migrants’ (Bastia and Piper, 2019, p. 16). Since the 1990s, the number of women migrating for work has rapidly increased. This ‘feminisation of migration’ has generated a growing body of scholarship that has emphasised the ways in which gender dimensions shape all stages of the migration and employment processes (Piper, 2003, 2008a, 2008b; Benería et al., 2012; Petrozziello, 2013). Women’s labour migration is driven by several key factors in countries of origin and destination. These include gender-specific factors, such as inequalities and gender-related discrimination, which determine who gets to work and where, and who gets to move (Piper, 2008a, 2008b). There are also structural factors in countries of origin motivating women’s labour migration: insufficient social safety nets, the poverty level, men’s under- or unemployment, or the absence of an income provider (Piper, 2009a, 2009b; Foley and Piper, 2020, p. 1). In countries of destination, the outsourcing of care is an important ‘pull’ factor (see Rianne Mahon’s Chapter 21 in this Handbook). While the number of women migrating for work has grown, the choice of jobs that workers have in receiving countries remains constrained by the gendered division of labour that characterises the world of work, wherein migrant men and women tend to dominate different employment sectors or perform different duties within the same sector (Piper, 2011; Bastia and Piper, 2019). Women, especially migrant women, are more likely to be employed in jobs at the bottom ranks, involving tasks that are socially and culturally devalued and receive less socio-legal recognition (Chafetz, 1988; Piper, 2011). Of the estimated 164 million migrant workers worldwide in 2017 (ILO, 2018b, p. ix), around 58 per cent were men and 42 per cent women, a difference that, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), could stem from ‘possible discrimination against women that [reduced] their employment opportunities in destination countries’ (ILO, 2018b, p. x). Likewise, in its latest estimates (a total of 169 million international migrant workers in 2019, of which men constituted 58.5 per cent and women 41.5 per cent), the ILO (2021) found that the smaller share of women migrant workers could be explained by the fact that ‘women [faced] more economic and non-economic obstacles’ and, moreover, ‘[experienced] gender discrimination in the labour market’ (p. 12). Women, especially migrant women, are disproportionately represented in the more precarious, insecure and informal occupations, which receive low pay and enjoy limited income security and social protection compared to the male-dominated employment sectors. Migrant

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198  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance women are largely concentrated in child and elderly care, domestic work, cleaning and nursing (UN Women, 2017b, p. 1). In the workplace, women migrant workers face higher risks of exploitation and greater barriers against access to justice in cases of workplace abuse, are more likely to experience poor working conditions and violence compared to men (Montúfar, 2018), and will often encounter difficulties accessing sexual and reproductive healthcare (UN Women, 2020, p. 3). In Malaysia’s documented migrant workforce, an estimated 80 per cent are men, and they dominate the construction, agriculture, manufacturing and services sectors, whereas migrant women are mainly employed in domestic work, with small numbers working in manufacturing, services and plantations. Women migrant workers’ labour is often constructed as ‘disposable’ (Wright, 2006), and this is especially the case for women migrant domestic workers (MDWs) (Yeates, 2009) whose labour is largely considered ‘unskilled’, receives low pay, and remains invisible as, by definition, it tends to take place in the private sphere (Piper, 2005b, p. 27). Domestic work, and the experiences of MDWs, has attracted significant scholarly and international attention, a lot of which has focused on the physical, verbal and sexual abuse and exploitation that women MDWs often endure (Human Rights Watch, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2017; Kaur, 2007; Elias, 2013; Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2015). Domestic worker migration is usually governed by bilateral labour agreements such as non-binding Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs), that is, by states. In Malaysia, migrant women are mainly employed in domestic work, and the country has signed MoUs on domestic worker migration with Indonesia and Cambodia, while domestic worker out-migration from the Philippines is regulated by this state’s own labour-sending agreements. This form of migration is strictly temporary, and MDWs are not allowed to settle in Malaysia permanently (Kaur, 2010, pp. 391–394). Migrant women employed in the domestic work sector in Malaysia are disadvantaged in multiple ways. In terms of national labour legislation, MDWs are consistently denied the same rights as other workers and are specifically excluded from many of the labour protections afforded to other sectors, such as a weekly rest day, leave entitlements, severance benefits, and provisions limiting permissible working hours (ILO, 2016, pp. 21–22; Women’s Aid Organisation, 2019, pp. 316–317). This sector, moreover, falls entirely outside of the remit of labour inspections, since the workplace, by definition, is located inside the home (ILO, 2016, p. 22). MDWs are also prohibited from joining a trade union. Their work permits are tied to their employer, who often retains their passport, and MDWs’ ability to move freely is severely restricted (Kaur, 2007, paras 55–60; Kaur, 2010, p. 393; Elias, 2018), more so than in other sectors, due to the fact that they live primarily in their workplace, that is, their employer’s residence. Furthermore, in Malaysia, as elsewhere, women MDWs’ reproductive rights are also strictly limited, as they must undergo mandatory pregnancy tests, and workers risk having their contract terminated and being liable to deportation if they become pregnant (Elias, 2018, p. 282; Constable, 1997, pp. 71–72; Liang, 2011). Finally, when cases of employer abuse of women MDWs have been tried in Malaysia’s judicial system, the sentencing for such offenses has been extremely lenient or non-existent (see Straits Times, 2019).

GENDERED MIGRATION GOVERNANCE Migration governance can be defined ‘as the norms and organizational structures which regulate and shape how states respond to international migration’ (Betts, 2011b, p. 2). Borrowing

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The gendered governance of migration  199 from Levi-Faur (2012, pp. 8–9), it can further be described as encompassing the structures (institutions as well as the systems of rules, norms and practices), strategies, policy-making processes, and decision-making and compliance mechanisms that, taken together, serve to manage the movements of people. A complex array of state and non-state actors are involved in migration governance across local, national, regional and international levels (Geddes et al., 2019, p. 9). These actors belong to various types of institutions and organisations, which have specific migration responsibilities or whose wider remit includes migration (Geddes et al., 2019, p. 8; Kessler, 2018), and they may be formal and informal, as well as licit and illicit. In particular, the private ‘migration industry’, which consists of both formal actors (for example, licensed recruitment and employment agencies) and informal actors (for example, village-level recruiters, labour brokers, middlemen and smugglers), plays a key role in migration governance (Goh et al., 2017, pp. 405–407). In Malaysia, and across Southeast Asia, the range of actors concerned with migration governance comprises intergovernmental organisations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), international organisations such as the ILO and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and regional and civil society organisations (CSOs), in addition to national employers’ federations, workers’ organisations and the migration industry. Although there is an increasing number of international and regional forums and declarations relating to migration, to date there is no coherent, single, overarching international governance regime regulating states’ responses to migration. What does exist has been varyingly described as ‘multilayered’, ‘ad hoc’ and ‘uncoordinated’, as it is spread across various policy areas and different levels of governance (Betts, 2011a; Grugel and Piper, 2011; Kunz et al., 2011; Betts and Kainz, 2017; Cholewinski, 2018). In the absence of a global regime, labour-sending and -receiving states occupy a central place in migration governance and have a critical role in regulating migration flows through legal and policy measures (Betts, 2011a; Kessler, 2018). Given the multi-actor and multi-level nature of such governance, however, the context in which the state operates has changed. In Southeast Asia, regional governance has expanded over the past two decades as states have been actively engaged in wide-ranging dialogues, programmes and regional discussions on migration issues, which bring together neighbouring countries and in which non-state actors and sub-state actors have also been able to participate (Rother and Piper, 2015). The state nonetheless remains the paramount actor in migration governance in Southeast Asia, as the region’s experience of colonial rule and the perceived need to vigorously defend borders have led to the construction of immigration control regimes (Nah, 2012; Case, 2013). In Malaysia, the state is the most powerful actor in the governance system, since immigration policies are designed, implemented and enforced by government agencies, that is, through the state apparatus.2 However, labour-sending countries also play a key role in migration governance through their out-migration policies, by restricting the countries and sectors that their female citizens can enter overseas, for example. In Malaysia, a public‒private partnership exists, whereby licensed recruitment agencies have been granted the responsibility to facilitate the hiring, transport and placement of migrant workers, and these agencies operate alongside a network of informal brokers and middlemen (Kaur, 2010, pp. 392–393; Elias, 2018, pp. 283–292). Hennebry and Petrozziello (2019) note that ‘migration governance historically has been “gender-blind”’ and has thus overlooked ‘the ways in which gender shapes migration, in particular the gendered realities and risks for women migrants’ (p. 117). There is an array of important international instruments designed to protect women migrant workers. These

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200  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance include the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, the ILO Domestic Workers Convention No. 189 (hereafter ILO Convention No. 189), the ILO Migration for Employment Convention No. 97, the ILO Migrant Workers Convention No. 143, the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, and the ILO non-binding Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration, in addition to the United Nations (UN) Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Yet there is often a disconnection between international human rights norms and standards on the one hand, and the domestic laws and policies of many countries on the other hand, with many ILO conventions ‘generally undersubscribed by UN Member States, in particular migration destination countries’ (Kunz et al., 2011, p. 8). There is, moreover, considerable regional variation as, for example, many countries in Latin America have ratified ILO Convention no. 189 (see Rianne Mahon’s Chapter 21 in this Handbook), while the Philippines is the only Asian country to date to have done so (ILO, n.d.-a). Malaysia, in particular, has resisted ratifying international conventions concerning migrants and women MDWs, and believes that ‘states should keep their full sovereignty with regards to migration policies’ (Rother and Piper, 2015, p. 42). In light of the disjuncture that often exists between international standards and domestic policies, CSOs are actively trying to transform migration governance from the bottom up, and have played a decisive role in lobbying for change and increasing awareness of migrants’ rights, with transnational networks of activists a crucial mechanism through which various CSOs are working together (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Kalm, 2010; Piper, 2006; Rother and Piper, 2015). This is particularly evident in Asia. Many CSOs engage in transnational activism to garner support for key issues facing women workers, be they migrants or not (Piper, 2006). For instance, as Rianne Mahon recounts in Chapter 21 in this Handbook, international labour federations, networks of domestic workers, migrant rights organisations, and human rights and feminist NGOs coalesced into a transnational movement in the course of their campaign for the recognition of domestic workers’ rights, which culminated in the adoption of ILO Convention No. 189 in 2011 (Boris and Fish, 2014). It should be stressed, however, that this convention was not created explicitly for MDWs, and very little of its content addresses MDWs specifically (Mahon and Michel, 2017). In Malaysia, CSOs working on migration and labour issues point out that they engage extensively with the ILO: through seminars and training sessions, for example. Malaysian CSOs also invoke international standards, in particular ILO Convention No. 189, in their advocacy efforts to try and amend the national legislation relating to domestic work. In terms of policy, however, international human rights and global labour standards concerning women migrant workers, and domestic workers in particular, have had a limited impact on Malaysia’s national policies.

GENDER-BIASED INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANISATIONS Feminist scholars have exposed the ways in which the state, hence governance, is gendered and produces, and reproduces, gender-biased norms, processes and discourses (Duerst-Lahti, 2002; Hawkesworth, 2005; Connell, 2009). Gender is embedded within state institutions in both the nominal sense – they are staffed predominantly by men – and the substantive sense: they tend to systematically represent the collective interests of men (Witz and Savage, 1992, pp. 37–47). The nominal gender dimension of the state refers to the fact that historically, and

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The gendered governance of migration  201 to this day, men have dominated state institutions and have been overrepresented in positions of power compared to women. While the number of women working in state institutions has increased over time, these institutions are still shaped by ‘the codes of masculinity’ on which they have been based and which have been built into them (Lovenduski, 1998, p. 339) and, moreover, they continue to ‘operate on a logic of appropriateness based on masculine norms, expectations, and practices’ (Chappell, 2013, p. 612), the substantive gender dimension of the state. In Malaysia, the design and implementation of the country’s laws and policies are ‘controlled mainly by elite men’ (Chin, 1998, p. 7). The majority of organisations and institutions within Malaysia’s migration governance system are run by men, including government institutions, ministries, employers’ organisations, trade unions, and labour brokerage or recruitment agencies. Furthermore, in Malaysia’s Parliament, only 32 seats out of 222 were filled by women in 2018.3 The relative presence, and therefore representation, of men and women in organisations and state institutions matters, because men and women bring different knowledge, experiences, interests, understandings and ideas to the table. Male dominance also extends to the decision-making positions in many non-state organisations, such as employers’ organisations and national workers’ organisations or trade unions (Dean, 2006; Blaschke, 2015), the two key social partners of the ILO.4 This is problematic in terms of policy outcomes since, as UN Women (2017a) notes, women’s ‘participation in worker organizations, cooperatives, [and] trade unions ... plays an important role in upholding women’s labour rights, ensuring decent work and defining policy priorities’. At the same time, while international organisations have yet to achieve full gender parity, the number of women working in such organisations has increased (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, 2012). In fact, in Asia and the Pacific, women hold powerful official positions, including at management level, in some leading international and intergovernmental organisations working on issues related to migrants, refugees, domestic workers and labour, notably in the ILO.5 In Malaysia, there are also many women employed, and occupying executive positions, in various national CSOs, including faith-based, legal, women’s and migrant rights organisations. In an effort to reduce gender inequality, gender mainstreaming, or the institutionalisation of gender, has been adopted as a global strategy by many states and international organisations since the fourth UN Conference on Women held in Beijing (China) in 1995 (Charlesworth, 2005; Caglar, 2013). Kunz et al. (2019) observe that gender mainstreaming has led to the emergence of gender expertise in global governance and that, as a result, many gender experts are now employed in governments, international organisations and international NGOs and are specifically tasked with advancing gender equality (p. 24). International organisations and forums have included gender mainstreaming frameworks in the documents and reports that they produce, and such frameworks can then be used by national and local groups to hold their governments accountable on issues of gender equality, although it does not necessarily follow that governments will actually implement the measures outlined in these frameworks (Prügl and Meyer, 1999, p. 13). In this regard, CSOs have played a key role in gender mainstreaming efforts in migration governance (Hennebry et al., 2019). However, gender mainstreaming has also attracted widespread criticism, with some scholars arguing that it has not led to positive gender equality outcomes. For example, Charlesworth (2005) argues that ‘the use of gender mainstreaming as a reform strategy has made issues of inequality between women and men harder to identify and deal with’ (p. 2). And while many international organisations have developed a gender equality lens (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, 2012),

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202  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Caglar (2013) notes that their definitions of gender mainstreaming often fail to specify what exactly gender equality amounts to and what goals it actually seeks to achieve, which leaves gender mainstreaming open to interpretation, thus leading to divergent policies and practices (pp. 337–338). Furthermore, gender experts are often based in organisations’ head offices, and given the decentralised structure of some organisations, such as IOM, this makes it difficult for gender expertise to filter down to country offices, local offices and outreach offices (Mahon, 2020, p. 55).

ANDROCENTRIC MIGRATION POLICY OUTPUTS While there has been a proliferation of gender mainstreaming strategies to combat gender inequality, migration laws and policies, although usually couched in gender-neutral terms, often do not treat men and women equally and are gender-biased or gender-blind. Migration policies overlook gendered power imbalances and the ways in which gender-segregated labour markets affect men and women differently (Hennebry and Petrozziello, 2019, p. 117). Moreover, they still largely operate under the assumptions of the male breadwinner, female dependent spouse model (Briones, 2009, p. 40). Furthermore, feminist scholars have highlighted the ways in which the definition of ‘skills’ in migration policies is not gender-neutral, but rather gender-biased, in that sectors considered ‘high-skilled’ are heavily male-oriented (Stasiulis, 2008, p. 97). In particular, the effect of migration policies has been to ‘keep migrant domestic workers suppressed at the bottom rung of the production ladder’ (Briones, 2009, p. 40). During my fieldwork in Malaysia, policy actors categorised migrant men and women in different ways. The discussions revolved around male migration flows and the impact of such flows on societies and labour markets across Southeast Asia. Migrant men were largely depicted as the norm, and the majority of discussions focused on male-dominated employment sectors, mainly construction, plantations and manufacturing. These sectors were deemed economically valuable for Malaysia and, moreover, the importation of men to work in these sectors was seen as financially beneficial for the government as Malaysian employers have to pay a ‘migrant levy’ for each worker that they bring into Malaysia (ILO, 2016, p. 19). Women’s migration was rarely mentioned. When participants looked at the factors behind migration policy-making, the narrative centred on the need to both financially profit from and control migrant men’s labour.6 This was especially the case for government actors, employers’ organisations and business associations. Migrant women’s labour was understood as having little economic value attached to it, as it was mainly framed as domestic work. Interviewees revealed highly stereotypical understandings of femininity and masculinity in their explanations of what constituted ‘migrant men’s work’ and ‘migrant women’s work’, and why. Certain sectors such as construction were described as requiring men due to the labour intensity of the job: ‘The company that engages people to do construction work will never want to bring in [females]’ (male manager of an employers’ organisation, personal communication, March 2018). At the same time, interviewees explained that households, on the other hand, deemed it unsuitable for a man to perform the caring duties involved in domestic work: ‘With maids, it’s generally women, generally no man will do this’ (male government official, personal communication, April 2018). When women migrant workers were, indeed, mentioned, they were mainly portrayed as naive, isolated victims whose fate was controlled by others and who, moreover, were suscep-

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The gendered governance of migration  203 tible to deception and vulnerable to exploitation by family members, recruitment agencies, human traffickers and employers during their migration and employment. Most importantly, women migrant workers were even characterised as having ‘no rights at all’ in Malaysia: For the women, it’s worse. The women, they have no rights at all. Once they land here, they go into families, or even to a place to work; even sometimes they work in the shops and restaurants, that’s it. And then, they are being abused in the family, sexually abused, raped and all that. It happens, so there’s nobody there to protect her. So unless she tried to ask for help outside, and then also she needs to … How can she reach out? She can’t reach out. (Female government official, personal communication, March 2018) Unfortunately, many Malaysians, even the government, are not truly giving domestic workers the due recognition for what they’re doing. See, they’ve actually left their loved ones, and their entire home, to come to these people, and they’re there 24 hours [a day], but that kind of recognition is very poor, very low. Like in law, they’re not given the due recognition, they’re not given the minimum wage, they’re not given the weekend rest, they’re not even able to join a union. (Male trade unionist, personal communication, February 2018)

In particular, migrant women employed in Malaysia’s domestic work sector were widely described as the most vulnerable, abused and exploited workers due to societal attitudes towards migrant women, the tasks involved in domestic work, and the legal and policy frameworks in place. Conversely, the narratives of vulnerability and victimisation during labour migration largely excluded men migrant workers, who also experienced abuse and exploitation, possibly because they did not conform to the patriarchal image of a victim, which was constructed as feminised.

MIGRANT WOMEN AS TRAFFICKING VICTIMS The dominant policy narrative about women’s migration appears to be centred on the idea that migrant women need to be protected from harm, especially from trafficking, and that such protection is achieved mainly through border control and migration bans or restrictions. Schwenken (2008) argues that this prevailing discourse of protection is largely based on the assumption that migrant women are being trafficked into sex work by male criminal traffickers (p. 773), thus leading policy-makers who perceive migrant women as helpless victims to support various forms of protection mechanisms and actions, such as anti-trafficking measures (pp. 771–772). As a male representative from a regional organisation (personal communication, February 2018) stated: ‘For the situation of human trafficking, the mindset of the law enforcer is only thinking about prostitution.’ The emphasis placed on sexual exploitation in the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000) has contributed to such an understanding and resulted in a wide range of strategies designed to protect women from sex trafficking (Chuang, 2006a). During my fieldwork, a male Nepali official (personal communication, March 2018) cited fears of exploitation, sexual abuse and trafficking as the primary reasons why Nepal did not allow its female citizens to take up employment in Malaysia’s services and domestic work sectors: ‘We’ve not allowed labour permits for women to be employed in cleaning, domestic maid, and similar service sectors ... as we think that there’s not enough legal protections from exploitation and misuse for trafficking and for sexual abuse.’

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204  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance It remains difficult to produce quantitative data about the extent of trafficking due to disagreements about the definition of trafficking (Piper, 2005a, pp. 218–224) and to the ways in which countries manage data, which can lead to problematic statistics being cited as fact.7 Nevertheless, combating trafficking is a priority for many state and non-state actors, with funding for anti-trafficking initiatives often provided by the European Union, the Australian government, the UN, IOM and United States (US) donor agencies (Piper, 2005a, pp. 213–216; Elias, 2018, pp. 287–288). In Southeast Asia, which is considered one of the world’s ‘hotspots’ for trafficking (Ford et al., 2012, p. 1), these donors are often the driving force behind anti-trafficking programmes.8 Moreover, a large number of political measures directed at migrant women across the region are aimed specifically at combating trafficking (Oishi, 2005, pp. 184–187), including most of the regional migration forums and agreements, such as the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, and the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative against Trafficking. This is a reflection of the fact that on migration-related matters, ASEAN’s focus has long been mainly on trafficking, as this is seen as an issue with a higher potential for joint action and agreement between sending and receiving countries (Rother and Piper, 2015, p. 42). Anti-trafficking policies and initiatives have generated substantial controversy, a comprehensive analysis of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Two main points, however, should be stressed. Firstly, there are concerns that anti-trafficking initiatives, and the discourse surrounding them, distract from the need to address the lack of labour rights afforded to migrant women workers, as well as migrant women’s inability to access justice for labour and human rights violations. As the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women (2010) notes, ‘anti-trafficking measures are commonly developed to “protect women”, rather than to protect their rights’ (p. 17), and therefore dealing with migrant women primarily through a ‘trafficking lens’ means that migrant women’s labour and human rights ‘remain largely unaddressed’ (Basok and Piper, 2012, p. 53). As regards IOM, Mahon (2020) highlights the fact that the organisation’s discourse on the rights of women migrant workers is often overshadowed by its anti-trafficking activities, since ‘a considerable share of the IOM’s gender-related activity has focused on anti-trafficking’ (p. 61). In the course of my fieldwork, some non-state actors echoed this view, arguing that anti-trafficking measures diverted attention from issues of migrants’ labour and human rights. For example, one female representative from an international organisation (personal communication, May 2018) was critical of Southeast Asia’s ‘obsession’ with trafficking and the resulting raft of anti-trafficking measures which, according to her, was a ‘distraction’ from the need to address the exploitation of migrant workers during their migration and employment and to ensure access to decent work: We’ve had this obsession with trafficking over the last 15 or so years since the Palermo Protocols. Over the last maybe 5 years, we’ve had this slightly different obsession with the concept of slavery, both of which, to me, are huge distractions from the broader problem of migrant worker exploitation. I don’t think that the policy movements around ensuring efficient migration procedures, and then decent work, have been responsive to that situation, and instead we’ve seen this blossoming of anti-trafficking processes [and] national action plans.

The second criticism that has been levelled at anti-trafficking projects is that they serve as top-down policies to control women’s movements and morality and, moreover, to determine, and often restrict, the sectors in which they are allowed to work. Although they often purport to protect migrant women, such measures can in fact ‘exacerbate the criminalisation of migra-

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The gendered governance of migration  205 tion and drive migrants to traffickers and unscrupulous intermediaries’ (Holliday et al., 2019, p. 2558), thereby making women more vulnerable. Indeed, in the context of domestic worker migration, anti-trafficking initiatives often lead to exploitation, since these measures, as Elias (2018) observes, are ‘so easily ... picked up and used by employers, recruiters and placement agencies in order to limit the freedoms of workers and to subject them to multiple forms of abuse’ (p. 288).

BARRIERS TO ACCESSING RIGHTS There have also been instances where countries in Southeast Asia have responded differently to issues of abuse depending on the worker’s gender. In a report on women’s labour migration in ASEAN countries commissioned by the ILO and UN Women, Napier-Moore (2017) finds that when action is taken to counter the exploitation of men migrant workers, this usually takes the form of an effort to negotiate better conditions; on the other hand, when women migrant workers, such as those employed in domestic work, experience exploitation abroad, both sending and receiving countries generally choose to impose restrictions on women’s labour migration (p. xii). When women migrant workers, especially domestic workers, suffer exploitation while working overseas, some countries of origin have reacted by implementing policies such as migration or travel bans, rather than by pushing for labour protections. Such bans are highly problematic as they curtail migrant women’s mobility rights and drive women to migrate using informal channels and irregular routes, thus leaving them susceptible to further exploitation (Napier-Moore et al., 2017, pp. 37–40; Holliday et al., 2019, p. 2558). One female official from an international organisation (personal communication, May 2018) stated that these differing state responses stemmed from the fact that a different value was placed on men’s and women’s labour, which she deemed ‘pure sexism’. Many national actors in Malaysia portrayed women migrant workers, especially those in sex work or domestic work, as trafficking victims, thus conflating women’s labour migration with trafficking. Yet, despite the existence of these powerful narratives, there has been a notable lack of tangible action to actually protect migrant women from harm in their workplace or during their migration. The ILO (2016) notes that Malaysia’s bilateral labour agreements on domestic worker migration hardly mention workers’ rights or contain specific protection measures, and instead are chiefly concerned with the administrative procedures for regulating the flow of workers (p. 13–16). For example, the MoU that Malaysia and Indonesia renegotiated and signed in 2011 to manage domestic worker migration (valid until 2016) was prompted by the migration ban that Indonesia had introduced in 2009 following a series of abuse cases involving Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia. However, this new MoU was seen by many CSOs as a weak mechanism for managing domestic worker migration, and moreover one that had a limited impact on the level of exploitation to which Indonesian domestic workers were subjected in Malaysia. Such agreements were also viewed as insufficient, since they were non-binding and did not supersede Malaysia’s national labour laws, thereby doing little to protect MDWs: The MoU doesn’t give the workers any rights really, because it just says that you must have an employer, you must have a place to stay, and the conditions of your work should be the same as in Malaysian law. But Malaysian law doesn’t say anything about domestic workers, except to say that

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206  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance they’re exempted from all provisions of the Employment Act, so that MoU is basically saying that you have no rights. (Female representative of an NGO, personal communication, February 2018)

Furthermore, the Indonesia–Malaysia MoU stipulated the responsibilities of recruitment agencies, which charged high fees, in managing domestic worker migration, and this was understood by some non-state actors as essentially trapping Indonesian women in a cycle of debt. The Malaysian government has long been silent on domestic workers’ issues, since the plight of MDWs has been seen as inconsequential to the state, MDWs’ employers, and the Malaysian public at large (Chin, 1998). From a national perspective, then, one of the only actions that it has ever taken has been the publication of a booklet entitled Guidelines and tips for employers of foreign domestic helpers (Ministry of Human Resources, 2017), devised jointly by the ILO and the Malaysian Ministry of Human Resources in consultation with MDWs’ employers, stakeholders and advocates. These guidelines provided details on ‘best practice’, laws and policies related the hiring and employment of MDWs, and aimed ‘to portray the seriousness of the Government and the Ministry, especially in ensuring the welfare, rights and protection of foreign domestic helpers be given top priority’ (statement from the then Minister of Human Resources, quoted in Sivanandam and Kaos Jr, 2017). However, these guidelines, while a symbolically important step, have not been supported by legal provisions or enforcement measures, and there is no incentive for employers to read them or to adhere to them. They also fall far short of giving MDWs labour rights, or offering mechanisms through which they can access justice for labour and human rights violations: these guidelines thus pay lip service to the idea of protection, but do nothing to address the structural factors that perpetuate exploitation. In Malaysia, there are still significant barriers that need to be overcome in order to place women migrant workers’ rights firmly on the policy agenda. Migration policy- and decision-making remain state-centric and involve ‘an elite group of politicians ... people with connections, and people who are in the [inner] circle and who understand the issues a certain way’ (male journalist, personal communication, March 2018). Many organisations are still excluded from policy-making mechanisms and consultative processes. During my fieldwork, many non-state actors described how government ministries and policy-makers actively refrained from engaging with other actors on migration issues in order to avoid criticism. For example, a male employers’ representative (personal communication, March 2018) observed that the Ministry of Home Affairs, the key migration policy-maker in Malaysia, ‘seldom [believed] in tripartisanism’ and seemed to never initiate discussions with social partners during the migration policy-making process. Confronted with these exclusionary policy-making mechanisms, some CSOs in Malaysia have formed coalitions with national and regional organisations, working together to advocate for migrants’ rights, monitor the Malaysian government’s actions, and collate information on the issues facing migrant workers, which they then provide to government officials. The ILO has been instrumental in fostering dialogue between state and non-state actors on labour migration issues. Malaysian NGOs have also reached out to other national actors, such as trade unions and employers’ organisations, with which they did not necessarily have a history of cooperation on migration issues. For instance, the Migrant Workers Right to Redress Coalition, a broad alliance of NGOs, CSOs, trade unions and other actors, focuses on issues of access to justice for migrant workers and has drafted a Comprehensive policy on labour migration for Malaysia (Migrant Workers Right to Redress Coalition, 2017).9 Such coalitions have played

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The gendered governance of migration  207 a significant role in drawing attention to the issues affecting migrant workers, in particular MDWs. However, the overall lack of interaction between Malaysian government ministries and non-state actors, especially NGOs dedicated to migrant rights, women’s organisations and groups representing domestic workers, remains problematic in terms of the ideas about gender and work that enter into the policy-making process and are reproduced by it. As one female expert on domestic workers in an international organisation (personal communication, January 2018) remarked in relation to policy-making for women MDWs: ‘Policy at this stage is not necessarily reflective of the needs ... preferences, and ... situation of ... workers and ... households because their voices are not really represented yet in that policy space.’ The exclusion of non-state actors from policy spaces, which besides are already largely male-dominated and permeated by male bias, makes it difficult to introduce alternative perspectives on migration into the policy-making process, and therefore hard to get women migrant workers’ needs and interests on the policy agenda.

CONCLUSION Migration governance involves multiple actors and occurs at multiple levels. Notwithstanding the strides that have been made in creating and codifying international human rights and labour standards concerning migrant workers at the global level, such international legal advancements often have a limited impact on the national policies and practices of key destination countries such as Malaysia. This is because migration policy-making remains excessively shaped by states that continue to overlook and undervalue the labour of migrant women, especially those in the domestic work sector – with significant consequences for women migrant workers. As this chapter has shown, stereotypical ideas and gendered understandings elicit different policy responses to labour migration, depending on whether men or women migrant workers are at issue. This is compounded by the fact that in Malaysia, migration policy-making is the preserve of a limited number of elite actors, primarily men, operating in a rather closed setting in which the needs and experiences of migrant women are disregarded. Migrant women are overwhelmingly associated with victimisation and exploitation, a narrative that has mainly led to anti-trafficking initiatives instead of policies addressing migrant women’s lack of labour rights. This is problematic because the lack of labour rights is one of the major reasons that issues of abuse of women migrant workers remain prevalent. When states have made efforts to address the structural issues contributing to gendered migration risks, they have predominantly chosen to ‘[tweak] migration policy and border security regimes’, largely through the implementation of gender-based migration bans and restrictions, rather than to tackle the ‘root causes within the system’ (Hennebry and Petrozziello, 2019, pp. 116–117). Such restrictions, which are often imposed by sending countries, curtail women’s mobility rights and increase the risks that they face, while doing little to challenge the sources of the exploitation endured by women migrant workers. Gender bias is embedded in migration governance – in the structures, organisations, institutions, laws, policies and practices shaping migrants’ mobility and lives, as well as in the ideas and discourses underpinning migration policy- and decision-making mechanisms. This has produced a system that primarily disadvantages women migrant workers. As Holliday et al. (2019) argue, until there is a systemic change in the ways in which migration and labour are understood and governed, many of the positive outcomes of women’s labour migration (for the

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208  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance workers themselves, their families and their communities) and the potential for gender equality will not be realised (p. 2552).

NOTES 1. The study, which ran from 2016 to 2019, with fieldwork conducted from January to May 2018, was part of the Prospects for International Migration Governance project, led by Professor Andrew Geddes at the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute. 2. Malaysia’s recruitment system for foreign workers is a ‘labyrinth of jurisdictions’ with complicated administrative frameworks (Kaur, 2010, p. 392). The Immigration Department of the Ministry of Home Affairs is responsible for migrant workers’ admission and stay, while the Ministry of Human Resources (that is, the Ministry of Labour) manages migrant workers’ terms of employment and work conditions. 3. This represents 14.4 per cent, which is an increase from the 23 women elected to Parliament in 2013 (that is, a 10.4 per cent representation). 4. An examination of the employers’ and workers’ representatives of the ILO’s Governing Body (regular members, deputy members and substitutes) between 2017 and 2021 reveals that women constitute 23 per cent of employers’ representatives and 33 per cent of workers’ representatives (ILO, 2018a). 5. See the staff list of the ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (ILO, n.d.-b). 6. It should be noted, however, that certain actors, namely those in government positions and working in employers’ organisations, also associated migrant men with criminality and the spread of diseases in Malaysian society. 7. For example, some countries do not disaggregate their data on trafficking, irregular migration, smuggling, and sex work. 8. Since the adoption of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000) and the publication of its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, the US has designated itself as the ‘global sheriff’ on human trafficking (Chuang, 2006b, p. 439), and as a result of this prioritisation of trafficking, vast amounts of funding have been channelled into anti-trafficking programmes, even in countries where there is little evidence of actual trafficking occurring (Wong, 2005, pp. 76–80). 9. This coalition comprises various organisations, including the Malaysian Trade Union Congress, the North–South Initiative, the Socialist Party of Malaysia, and Tenaganita.

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The gendered governance of migration  211 International Labour Organization (ILO) (2018b). ILO global estimates on international migrant workers: Results and methodology. International Labour Office. https://​www​.ilo​.org/​global/​ publications/​books/​WCMS​_652001/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. International Labour Organization (ILO) (2021). ILO global estimates on international migrant workers: Results and methodology. International Labour Office. https://​www​.ilo​.org/​global/​topics/​labour​ -migration/​publications/​WCMS​_808935/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (2012). The long walk to gender parity in international organizations. Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale. https://​www​.ispionline​.it/​it/​ pubblicazione/​long​-walk​-gender​-parity​-international​-organizations. Kabeer, N. (2005). Gender equality and women’s empowerment: A critical analysis of the third Millennium Development Goal. Gender and Development, 13(1), 13–24. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 13552070512331332273. Kalm, S. (2010). Limits to transnational participation: The global governance of migration. In C. Jönsson and J. Tallberg (eds), Transnational actors in global governance: Patterns, explanations and implications (pp.  134–154). Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​9780230283220​_7. Kaur, A. (2007). International labour migration in Southeast Asia: Governance of migration and women domestic workers. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, (15). http://​ intersections​.anu​.edu​.au/​issue15/​kaur​.htm. Kaur, A. (2010). Labour migration trends and policy challenges in Southeast Asia. Policy and Society, 29(4), 385–397. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.polsoc​.2010​.09​.001. Keck, M.E., and Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Cornell University Press. http://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​10​.7591/​j​.ctt5hh13f. Kessler, C.S. (2018). State and civil society: Global context, Southeast Asian prospect. SOJOURN, 33(S), 131–155. https://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​26531810. Kunz, R., Lavenex, S., and Panizzon, M. (2011). Introduction: Governance through partnerships in international migration. In R. Kunz, S. Lavenex and M. Panizzon (eds), Multilayered migration governance: The promise of partnership (pp.  1–20). Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9780203827833. Kunz, R., Prügl, E., and Thompson, H. (2019). Gender expertise in global governance: Contesting the boundaries of a field. European Journal of Politics and Gender, 2(1), 23–40. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​ 2515​10819X1547​1289106112. Levi-Faur, D. (2012). From ‘big government’ to ‘big governance’? In D. Levi-Faur (ed.), The Oxford handbook of governance (pp. 3–18). Oxford University Press. https://​ doi​ .org/​ 10​ .1093/​ oxfordhb/​ 9780199560530​.013​.0001. Liang, L.-F. (2011). The making of an ‘ideal’ live-in migrant care worker: Recruiting, training, matching and disciplining. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34(11), 1815–1834. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​01419870​ .2011​.554571. Lim, L.L., and Oishi, N. (1996). International labor migration of Asian women: Distinctive characteristics and policy concerns. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 5(1), 85–116. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​ %​2F01171968​9600500105. Lovenduski, J. (1998). Gendering research in political science. Annual Review of Political Science, 1(1), 333–356. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1146/​annurev​.polisci​.1​.1​.333. Mahon, R. (2020). Gendering migration management. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The International Organization for Migration: The new ‘UN migration agency’ in critical perspective (pp.  53–73). Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​978​-3​-030​-32976​-1​_3. Mahon, R. and Michel, S. (2017). Out of focus: Migrant women caregivers as seen by the ILO and the OECD. In S. Michel and I. Peng (eds), Gender, migration, and the work of care: A multi-scalar approach to the Pacific Rim (pp.  269–291). Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​978​-3​-319​ -55086​-2​_12. Migrant Workers Right to Redress Coalition (2017). Towards a comprehensive national policy on labour migration for Malaysia. Migrant Workers Right to Redress Coalition. https://​partisosialis​.org/​ wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Towards-A-Comprehensive-National-Policy-on-Labour-Migration-forMalaysia.pdf. Ministry of Human Resources (2017). Guidelines and tips for employers of foreign domestic helpers. Ministry of Human Resources. https://​apmigration​.ilo​.org/​resources/​guidelines​-and​-tips​-for​-em ployers-of-foreign-domestic-helpers.

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212  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Montúfar, V. (2018, November 27). Women are most likely to be affected by violence in the workplace, but we are all victims. Public Services International. https://​publicservices​.international/​resources/​ news/​women​-are​-most​-likely​-to​-be​-affected​-by​-violence​-in​-the​-workplace​-but​-we​-are​-all​-victims​?id​ =​6688​&​lang​=​en. Nah, A.M. (2012). Globalisation, sovereignty and immigration control: The hierarchy of rights for migrant workers in Malaysia. Asian Journal of Social Science, 40(4), 486–508. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1163/​15685314​-12341244. Napier-Moore R. (2017). Protected or put in harm’s way? Bans and restrictions on women’s labor migration in ASEAN countries.  https://​www2​.unwomen​.org/​-/​media/​field​%20office​%20eseasia/​ docs/​publications/​2017/​06/​wcms​_555974​-compressed​.pdf​?la​=​en​&​vs​=​4604. Napier-Moore, R., International Labour Organization and United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (2017). Protected or put in harm’s way? Bans and restrictions on women’s labour migration in ASEAN countries (RAS/15/01/UNW). International Labour Organization/United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. https://​ www​.ilo​.org/​asia/​publications/​WCMS​_555974/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (2015). Behind closed doors: Protecting and promoting the human rights of migrant domestic workers in an irregular situation (HR/PUB/15/4). United Nations. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​publications/​special​-issue​-publications/​behind​-closed​ -doors​-protecting​-and​-promoting​-human​-rights. Oishi, N. (2005). Women in motion: Globalization, state policies, and labor migration in Asia. Stanford University Press. Peterson, V.S. (1992). Transgressing boundaries: Theories of knowledge, gender and international relations. Millennium, 21(2), 183–206. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%2F​0305829892​0210020401. Petrozziello, A. (2013). Gender on the move: Working on the migration-development nexus from a gender perspective. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​digital​-library/​publications/​2013/​12/​gender​-on​-the​-move. Piper, N. (2003). Bridging gender, migration and governance: Theoretical possibilities in the Asian context. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 12(1–2), 21–48. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%​2F01171968​ 0301200102. Piper, N. (2005a). A problem by a different name? A review of research on trafficking in South-East Asia and Oceania. International Migration, 43(1–2), 203–233. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.0020​-7985​ .2005​.00318​.x. Piper, N. (2005b). Gender and migration. Global Commission on International Migration. http://​incedes​ .org​.gt/​Master/​pipersesentacuatro​.pdf. Piper, N. (2006). Migrant worker activism in Singapore and Malaysia: Freedom of association and the role of the state. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 15(3), 359–380. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%​ 2F01171968​0601500304. Piper, N. (2008a). Feminisation of migration and the social dimensions of development: The Asian case. Third World Quarterly, 29(7), 1287–1303. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​01436590802386427. Piper, N. (2008b). International migration and gendered axes of stratification: Introduction. In N. Piper (ed.), New perspectives on gender and migration: Livelihood, rights and entitlements (pp. 1–18). Routledge. Piper, N. (2009a). Conclusions: Gender and migration – public and social policy interventions concluding remarks. In International Organization for Migration (ed.), Gender and labour migration in Asia (pp.  293–297). International Organization for Migration. https://​publications​.iom​.int/​fr/​books/​gender​ -and​-labour​-migration​-asia. Piper, N. (2009b). Overview: Gender and labour migration in Asia. In International Organization for Migration (ed.), Gender and labour migration in Asia (pp. 21–42). International Organization for Migration. https://​publications​.iom​.int/​fr/​books/​gender​-and​-labour​-migration​-asia. Piper, N. (2011). Toward a gendered political economy of migration. In N. Phillips (ed.), Migration in the global political economy (pp. 61–82). Lynne Rienner. Prügl, E., and Meyer, M.K. (1999). Gender politics in global governance. In M.K. Meyer and E. Prügl (eds), Gender politics in global governance (pp. 3–16). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Rother, S., and Piper, N. (2015). Alternative regionalism from below: Democratizing ASEAN’s migration governance. International Migration, 53(3), 36–49. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​imig​.12182.

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The gendered governance of migration  213 Schwenken, H. (2008). Beautiful victims and sacrificing heroines: Exploring the role of gender knowledge in migration policies. Signs, 33(4), 770–776. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1086/​528744. Sivanandam, H., and Kaos Jr, J. (2017, May 25). Guidelines for employers of foreign domestic helpers launched. The Star. https://​www​.thestar​.com​.my/​news/​nation/​2017/​05/​25/​guidelines​-for​-employers​ -of​-foreign​-domestic​-helpers​-launched/​. Stasiulis, D. (2008). Revisiting the permanent–temporary labour migration dichotomy. In C. Gabriel and H. Pellerin (eds), Governing international labour migration: Current issues, challenges and dilemmas (pp.  95–111). Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9780203564479. Straits Times (2019, April 22). Anger as Malaysian cleared of murdering Indonesian maid in Penang. The Straits Times. https://​www​.straitstimes​.com/​asia/​se​-asia/​anger​-as​-malaysian​-cleared​-of​-murdering​ -indonesian​-maid​-in​-penang. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) (2017a). In focus: CSW61 top stories – Women organizing. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​news/​in​-focus/​csw61/​ women​-organizing. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) (2017b). Women migrant workers’ contributions to development (Policy Brief no. 2). United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​digital​-library/​ publications/​2017/​7/​women​-migrant​-workers​-contributions​-to​-development. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) (2020). Guidance note: Addressing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on women migrant workers. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. https://​www​.unwomen .org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/04/guidance-note-addressing-the-impacts-of-the-covid-19pandemic-on-women-migrant-workers. Witz, A., and Savage, M. (1992). The gender of organizations. In M. Savage and A. Witz (eds), Gender and bureaucracy (pp.  3–62). Blackwell. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1467​-954X​.1991​.tb03355​.x. Women’s Aid Organisation (2019). The status of women’s human rights: 24 years of CEDAW in Malaysia. Women’s Aid Organisation. https://​wao​.org​.my/​publications/​the​-status​-of​-womens​-human​ -rights/​. Wong, D. (2005). The rumor of trafficking: Border controls, illegal migration, and the sovereignty of the nation-state. In W. van Schendel and I. Abraham (eds), Illicit flows and criminal things: States, borders, and the other side of globalization (pp. 69–100). Indiana University Press. https://​muse​.jhu​ .edu/​chapter/​306038. Wright, M.W. (2006). Disposable women and other myths of global capitalism. Routledge. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.4324/​9780203390313. Yeates, N. (2009). Globalizing care economies and migrant workers: Explorations in global care chains. Palgrave Macmillan.

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15. The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking: institutions and networks Anna Triandafyllidou and Letizia Palumbo

INTRODUCTION Migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings are two interrelated phenomena. While in theory, they can be clearly distinguished – smuggling is consensual since migrants ask for an (illegal) service for which they pay, whereas trafficking implies deceit and exploitation, and thus consent is not relevant – in practice, only a very thin line separates them. Furthermore, trafficking does not necessarily involve the crossing of international borders (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2011; Palumbo, 2016), and therefore is not always related to international migration (although in fact it often is). Human trafficking has typically been conceptualised as a crime against the person, targeting women and children in particular, especially in relation to sex work. More recently, however, the emphasis on labour trafficking has shown that its victims include not only minors, but also adults, both women and men. Smuggling and trafficking can occur on the same routes, relying as they do on the same methods of transport. It may happen that a travel facilitation arrangement that began as migrant smuggling turns into trafficking, as the smuggled migrant ends up trapped in the smuggling network and is forced to work for it for little or no pay and without the possibility of escaping (Triandafyllidou and Maroukis, 2012). Moreover, the organised criminal networks running migrant smuggling and human trafficking operations may use the same modus operandi and perform both types of ‘services’. This also applies to the intermediaries involved in migrant smuggling and/or trafficking, such as employment or travel agencies, corrupt government officials and border guards, so that the two phenomena are ultimately part of the same broader institutional governance sphere. Indeed, despite their formal distinction, as enshrined in the 2000 Palermo Protocols, and their different legal definitions, which we discuss in detail below, migrant smuggling and human trafficking are addressed by the same set of international organisations, such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), given that the majority of asylum seekers are involved in the smuggling process and that many asylum seekers and refugees are victims of trafficking. Even the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which is specifically concerned with trafficking, has intensified its efforts to combat smuggling in recent years. The European Union’s (EU) border agencies, such as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), have also become more active in the field of both smuggling and trafficking. This chapter begins with a discussion of the distinction between migrant smuggling and human trafficking, emphasising the ways in which the two are intertwined and partly overlapping, even if they each possess their own dynamics, which are closely related to (irregular) 214 Anna Triandafyllidou and Letizia Palumbo - 9781789908077 39:07AM

The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking  215 migration. It then explores the transnational networks comprised of institutions and other actors that are involved in the governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking. We focus specifically on the case of Frontex, its role in policing the Mediterranean, and its efforts to prevent and combat both migrant smuggling and human trafficking, as a typical example of the ways in which a transnational agency may engage with other institutions and networks to create securitisation discourses and practices. We also describe the manner in which this dominant transnational network competes with alternative networks that give priority to different issues, notably human rights. We show how these networks combine the governance of migrant smuggling and of human trafficking while pursuing rather opposite objectives. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of transnational networks made up of different actors that shape the governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking, and examines the implications that conflating and confusing these two phenomena have for such governance.

MIGRANT SMUGGLING AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING: DISTINCT YET CONNECTED In the early scholarship on migrant smuggling, and to some extent to this day, the terms ‘migrant smuggling’ and ‘human trafficking’ have been used almost interchangeably. A seminal article by Salt and Stein (1997), entitled ‘Migration as a business: The case of trafficking’, exemplifies this kind of confusion. Indeed, they define trafficking as ‘an intermediary part of the global migration business facilitating movement of people between origin and destination countries’ (p. 467). Like Kyle and Koslowski (2011) and the contributors to their book, Salt and Stein do not draw a clear distinction between trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling. The same is true, for instance, of Tamura’s (2007) analysis of the impact of policies to combat irregular migration at the border on the exploitation of migrants by smugglers. Tamura also characterises smuggling and trafficking as practices that are so closely interwoven that it is difficult to talk about smuggled migrants without referring to trafficking, and thus confusing one with the other. In the remainder of this section, we attempt to disentangle the two phenomena while acknowledging the close links that, indeed, exist between them and, in particular, showing how hard, methodologically speaking, it is to distinguish between smuggling and trafficking practices. The United Nations (UN) adopted an official definition of migrant smuggling in 2000, as part of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which was supplemented by the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, one of the three Palermo Protocols (UNODC, 2004).1 According to Article 3 of this Protocol, migrant smuggling is ‘the procurement, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit, of the illegal entry of a person into a State Party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident’ (pp. 54–55). Article 6 requires states to criminalise both the smuggling of migrants and practices enabling a person who is not a national or a permanent resident to remain in a country illegally, as well as aggravating circumstances that endanger the lives or safety of migrants, or entail inhuman or degrading treatment of migrants (pp. 55–56). The Convention and the Protocol note that almost every state in the world is either a country of origin, transit or destination for migrants smuggled by profit-seeking agents. The Protocol draws attention to the fact that migrant smuggling is a transnational crime and that smuggled

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216  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance migrants are often subjected to life-threatening risks and exploitation, while smugglers make huge profits by taking advantage of people’s hope for a better life. Fifteen years later, in 2015, the EU launched its official Action Plan against Migrant Smuggling in the aftermath of the so-called 2015–2016 refugee ‘crisis’ (European Commission, 2015). In that document, smuggling is not defined as such, but referred to as a ‘highly profitable business’ conducted by ‘ruthless’ criminals (p. 1). The Plan aims to both ‘counter and prevent migrant smuggling, while ensuring the protection of the human rights of migrants’ (p. 2). It acknowledges the relationship between migrant smuggling, the root causes of migration in countries of origin and transit, and the need to open more safe and legal pathways for migrants into the European Union (EU). The Plan emphasises that action taken against migrant smuggling networks is a strong deterrent for their customers, that is, migrants (while the term ‘customers’ is not used as such, one might argue that the notion is implied). Nowhere in the document are smuggled migrants defined as victims, even though the risk of losing their lives in the process is mentioned, and the anti-smuggling plan is, indeed, presented as a way to reduce the loss of life. The document leaves little room for ambiguity about the agency of migrants and clearly states that while human trafficking is interlinked with migrant smuggling, it should be addressed through a distinct policy and strategy. Furthermore, the 2002 EU Facilitators Package, comprising the Facilitation Directive and the Framework Decision (Council of the European Union, 2002a, 2002b), distinguished between two criminal concepts: facilitation of entry and transit, and facilitation of residence and stay. The former does not require proof of financial or other material benefit to be considered a crime. This has created legal uncertainty as to which activities fall within the scope of criminal offence, thus expanding the definition of individuals who may be considered ‘smugglers’ (Carrera et al., 2018b, pp. 10–12). By contrast, the definition of human trafficking provided in 2000 by the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and by Article 3 of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (UNODC, 2004, pp. 42–43), and later incorporated into the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (2005) and into EU Directive 2011/36/EU with some additions, paints a rather different picture of human trafficking and, in particular, does not describe those trafficked as ‘customers’, instead clearly identifying them as victims. More specifically, according to Article 2 of EU Directive 2011/36/EU (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2011), trafficking in human beings consists in: 1. ‘The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or reception of persons, including the exchange or transfer of control over those persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.’ Article 2 goes on to elaborate on these terms: 2. ‘A position of vulnerability means a situation in which the person concerned has no real or acceptable alternative but to submit to the abuse involved.’ 3. ‘Exploitation shall include, as a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, including begging, slavery

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The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking  217 or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the exploitation of criminal activities, or the removal of organs.’ 4. ‘The consent of a victim of trafficking in human beings to the exploitation, whether intended or actual, shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth in paragraph 1 has been used.’ In reality, however, if we compare them, the difference between migrant smuggling and human trafficking lies not so much in the acts committed by either traffickers or smugglers (the threat or use of force, coercion, the abuse of power or vulnerability, and fraud) as in the means used by traffickers specifically (abduction and deception) and in the purpose of their acts (the exploitation and not just the transport of a person in exchange of money). Thus, both migrant smuggling and human trafficking are closely connected to irregular migration as well as to asylum seeking (see Figure 15.1), since people on the move often have mixed motivations for leaving their home country: they may flee for protection, but also in search of a better life. Migrant smuggling and human trafficking do not overlap, but they certainly adjoin and come into contact with each other. Indeed, there are many cases in which a relationship initially about migrant smuggling can evolve into exploitation, coercion and abuse en route, and may even lead to exploitation after arrival. Despite their neat distinction in international legal instruments and related EU directives, then, the two phenomena are actually intertwined and, moreover, often governed by the same institutions and networks of actors; to a large extent, the same actors that are involved in the governance of (irregular) migration (see Triandafyllidou, 2017).

Figure 15.1

Irregular migration, migrant smuggling and human trafficking

In a recent study, Kuschminder and Triandafyllidou (2020) further complicate the picture, noting that the distinction between (voluntary) smuggling and (coerced) trafficking presumes the existence of ‘rule of law’ to some degree as well as that of an agreed ‘contract’, which the

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218  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance smuggler is deemed to have breached if the migrant is not delivered to the destination country. However, as they argue, when migrants cross the territory stretching from Eritrea and Ethiopia to Libya, and further afield to the Mediterranean coast ‒ that is, an area where a tribal regime controls the territory, where there is not much difference between migrant smuggling networks and ‘border guards’, or where the border tribes are actually the border guards and purveyors of justice ‒ the entire distinction between migrant smuggling and human trafficking becomes meaningless.

INSTITUTIONS AND NETWORKS FOR THE GOVERNANCE OF MIGRANT SMUGGLING AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING International migration has gradually become the subject of a global governance framework, which began as a flexible, informal and consultative process, exemplified by the work of the Global Commission on International Migration in the mid-2000s, and later by the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). The GFMD has been ongoing since 2007, leading to the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (UN General Assembly, 2016), which, in turn, resulted in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (UN General Assembly, 2019) and the Global Compact on Refugees (UN, 2018). While this now transnational institutional framework is not as formalised as those organisations dedicated to trade or health, the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization, the two Compacts, along with the adoption of IOM as a UN related agency in 2016, have created a significant organisational structure within which migration-related issues are addressed. Regarding issues of irregular migration and migrant smuggling or human trafficking, this institutional framework, moreover, is complemented by UNODC and the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), and at the European level, by the EU Justice and Home Affairs agencies, including the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) and Frontex. Europol, in particular, has stepped up its efforts to combat migrant smuggling and human trafficking (Europol, 2016; Carrera et al., 2019). In 2007, the agency launched an operational project addressing human trafficking, and 25 countries are currently participating in this initiative. Human trafficking, moreover, constitutes one of the priorities of the European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats (EMPACT), Europol’s priority crime areas, under both the 2018–2021 and 2022–2025 EU Policy Cycles (Europol, 2022b). These activities need to be situated in the broader context of the EU Strategy towards the Eradication of Trafficking in Human Beings 2012–2016 (European Commission, 2012), which identified as one of its priorities the need for improved policy coherence, coordination and cooperation among key actors (pp. 11–13, sect. 2.4). As for anti-smuggling operations, in 2016, Europol established its European Migrant Smuggling Centre (EMSC), which aims to ‘support EU Member States in targeting and dismantling the complex and sophisticated criminal networks involved in migrant smuggling’ (Europol, 2022a; see also Europol, 2016, pp. 13–14). The EMSC mainly serves as a migration management tool (Carrera et al., 2019, p. 27). For instance, the EMSC develops strategic analysis and tailored analytical products, and supports police and border authorities to coordinate cross-border anti-smuggling operations (Europol, 2022a). As such, the EMSC cooperates closely with other EU agencies, such as the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust) and Frontex, and with the

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The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking  219 European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR Med) – Operation Sophia, a military mission that was set up in 2015 to address and disrupt the business model of trafficking and smuggling networks in the southern Mediterranean, with a view to preventing further loss of life at sea (Council of the European Union, 2016). As we have argued elsewhere (Triandafyllidou, 2017), in order to best analyse the governance of practices such as migrant smuggling and human trafficking, we need to acknowledge the existence of irregular migration systems, which are governed by transnational networks of actors. An irregular migration system is defined similarly to any migration system, that is, as a set of sending and receiving countries that experience sustained inflows and outflows and, moreover, share some common socio-economic and political features. Migration systems, whether they concern legal or irregular flows, or indeed mixed flows, may involve neighbouring or distant countries. What matters is that these migration flows reflect the formation of wider social and economic exchanges – the latter also taking place as a result of the establishment of communities and the emergence of chain migration – which change over time. The system has a level of fixity, but it is not a structure; it can evolve with time in response to social change, economic fluctuations or political upheaval (see Massey et al., 1993, p. 454). The development of an (irregular) migration system, moreover, entails the formation of transnational networks (for a thorough discussion, see Triandafyllidou, 2017): migrants, whether travelling legally or without appropriate documentation, become involved in formal and informal networks, which include not only other migrants in destination countries, employment agents, travel companies and corrupt public servants, but also migrant support organisations, lawyers, education institutions, local and national authorities, and international organisations. The notion of transnational networks is a crucial one as it allows us to capture two elements that characterise irregular migration systems: firstly, the intermediate, informal, non-state actors and their role in the whole process as facilitators in the movement of people (see Belloni, 2016); secondly, the emerging and ever-increasing role of transnational actors such as IOM or, indeed, UNHCR in these processes, as well as that of regional actors, such as Frontex and Europol in the European context. It is important to note, however, that transnational networks develop at different levels and in parallel, operating in the same area but only marginally intersecting. A transnational network may thus comprise migrant smugglers, employment and travel agents, corrupt public servants, as well as migrant support organisations and pro bono lawyers. Another transnational network may consist of national border authorities, local governments, European agencies such as Frontex or Europol, and international organisations such as IOM. And yet another transnational network may again include migrant smugglers and their local accomplices on transit routes, but also IOM and UNHCR along the way and in receiving countries, local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at destination or transit points, and the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA, formerly the European Asylum Support Office), for instance. In other words, while these transnational networks operate at different levels and have different purposes, they occasionally intersect, notably at the border, where both migration control and support may take place (see Pinelli, 2018). International and regional actors partly represent state interests and state funding, but at the same time they have acquired a logic of their own, driven as they are by the ongoing expansion of their activities as well as their own rationale and administrative culture (Geiger and Pécoud, 2014). In the following section, we focus on Mediterranean border crossings from Libya into Italy, the role of Frontex as the institution entrusted with border management in this region,

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220  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance and the transnational networks comprised of different types of actors that have developed as a result, albeit with competing objectives and narratives. We critically examine the ways in which these various transnational governance networks operate, with ultimately detrimental consequences for both smuggled and trafficked migrants.

TRANSNATIONAL GOVERNANCE NETWORKS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN Focusing first on the evolving role of Frontex in the fight against irregular migration in the Mediterranean, we shed light on the emergence of competing transnational networks of actors that set out to address migrant smuggling and human trafficking in this region. We use Frontex as our entry point because of the pivotal role that this agency has come to play in the past few years at the EU’s southern external borders. By analysing the transnational networks that have coalesced both around Frontex and in opposition to it, we seek to offer a critical perspective on the transnational governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking today. Since its creation in 2005, Frontex has grown rapidly in staff, resources, competences and responsibilities. Besides coordinating cooperation between EU member states, it has become an important actor in providing specific border management services with a view to strengthening border security. Since its first missions, carrying out maritime joint operations in international and third-country waters, Frontex has contributed to the development of the EU border as a delocalised space (Kasparek, 2010). From the outset, moreover, it has given special attention to the fight against cross-border crimes, such as human trafficking and migrant smuggling (Carrera, 2007, pp. 2–3, 17–18; Carrera et al., 2019). In 2016, EU Regulation 2016/1624 (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2016) expanded Frontex’s mandate in order to enable it to operate outside the EU, with the express intention that the agency be used to address the pressure created by immigration and asylum seeking across the Mediterranean. Frontex gained a greater role to coordinate national border and coast guard authorities, as well as broader competences in the area of return operations and third-country cooperation. In addition, it was given explicit competence for search and rescue (SAR) missions at sea (Carrera et al., 2019). With regard to the agency’s powers to detect, prevent and counter human trafficking and smuggling, the new mandate provided for the possibility of joint operations or rapid border interventions as part of multipurpose operations, which according to EU Regulation 2016/1624 (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2016), ‘may involve coast guard functions and the prevention of cross-border crime, including the fight against migrant smuggling or trafficking in human beings’ (art. 15, para. 5). Frontex has thus become part of a wider transnational network consisting of state actors, transnational – namely European – and international agencies, and non-state actors, with which it works, both inside and outside the EU, to combat migrant smuggling and human trafficking. According to EU Regulation 2016/1624 (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2016), Frontex, moreover, cooperates with EU Home Affairs agencies and other EU institutions with a view to ‘better addressing migratory challenges and preventing and detecting cross-border crime such as migrant smuggling, trafficking in human beings and terrorism’ (art. 52, para. 1). The agency has thus become an integral part of a broader network of European agencies and state authorities working on security (for example, Europol) and

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The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking  221 on asylum (for example, the EUAA). Frontex officers have actively participated alongside national agents in the implementation of what has come to be known as the ‘hotspot approach’ in Italy and Greece. As such, they have helped to carry out border control and identification tasks, but their main focus has been on fighting cross-border crimes and identifying smugglers and traffickers among those who have disembarked (Carrera et al., 2018a, p. 246). Drawing on Frontex’s policy documents and statements, as well as its official presentations (including on its website and in press interviews), several scholars have highlighted and documented the growing importance of humanitarian rhetoric in the agency’s discourse and approach (Campesi, 2014; Perkowski, 2018). These studies have shown that by combining security, humanitarian and human rights concerns and narratives, Frontex has increasingly stressed its role as a champion of fundamental rights, saviour of lives, and protector of migrants against traffickers and smugglers. Frontex’s discursive turn reflects an attempt to pre-empt and appease its critics, who have challenged the purpose of its operations as well as its role in European border governance (Cuttitta, 2019), and it is, moreover, designed to facilitate the agency’s cooperation with, among others, NGOs working at European borders to assist migrants. The ambiguous and opaque role of Frontex, invoking as it does the protection of human rights while favouring and promoting migration containment and return operations (Howden et al., 2020; Vassallo Paleologo, 2020), has become increasingly clear, however. Frontex’s pledge to safeguard human rights in fact contributes to supporting restrictive and stringent migration and border policies (Cuttitta, 2019; Perkowski, 2018). From this perspective, increased efforts to combat smugglers and traffickers are justified as necessary not only to protect the EU from organised crime, but also to prevent and deter migrants from attempting unsafe border and sea crossings, and thus risking their lives. As Cuttitta (2019) argues, in the name of humanitarianism, then, migrants are forced to remain in or return to countries where they are systematically subjected to abuse, human rights violations and inhumane treatment (p. 25). While the role of Frontex may be crucial in this respect, the fact that it operates from within a wider transnational network of institutions and actors has created a smokescreen to hide its activities from the public eye. This humanitarian rhetoric has been used by the entire network of actors in charge of policing the EU external borders in order to justify greater border control and, moreover, to criminalise the work of another transnational network of actors, that of the NGOs, both local and transnational, that are active in the Mediterranean. In the institutional discourse of Frontex and its allies, these NGOs have been depicted as part of the criminal networks of smugglers and traffickers profiting from irregular migration. NGOs engaged in SAR operations have been accused of acting as a ‘pull factor’ for irregular migration and of being involved with smuggling and trafficking networks (Allsopp, 2017; Carrera et al., 2019; Sciurba, 2019; Vassallo Paleologo, 2020). In 2016, Frontex raised concerns of possible interactions between SAR NGOs and smuggling groups operating in Libya, pointing out that ‘criminal networks were smuggling migrants directly on an NGO vessel’ (Robinson, 2016). The agency claimed that such NGOs encouraged the action of smugglers while not cooperating with the police (Cuttitta, 2020, p. 123). In February 2017, Frontex publicly expressed its concerns in its annual risk analysis report, citing the NGO vessels’ proximity to Libyan waters and the increasing number of migrants rescued by NGOs every month (Frontex, 2017, pp. 32–33; see also Carrera et al., 2018b, pp. 70–72; Carrera et al., 2018a, pp. 248–249). Similar accusations were levelled against SAR NGOs by the national authorities and prosecutors of some EU member states such

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222  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance as Italy (Carrera et al., 2018b, pp. 72–77; Carrera et al., 2018a, pp. 247–253; Sciurba, 2019; FRA, 2019). As a result, NGO vessels were excluded from SAR operations, rescue ships were seized, and legal proceedings were initiated against crew members for facilitating irregular migration as well as for a range of administrative issues (Tonacci, 2018; Sciurba, 2019). SAR NGOs operating in the Mediterranean reacted angrily to these accusations, denying any cooperation with smugglers and stressing instead the importance of their work in saving thousands of lives in the central Mediterranean (Carrera et al., 2018b, pp. 72–79; Carrera et al., 2018a, p. 250). As a report issued by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) in June 2019 emphasised, many of the cases that had been opened against SAR NGOs by then had ‘ended with an acquittal or [had been] discontinued due to the lack of evidence, while others were still pending’ (FRA, 2019). What we witness here, then, are the operations of two competing transnational networks that have tried to address migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings in very different ways. The network comprised of mainly European and international agencies as well as national governments has sought to securitise migration flows across the Mediterranean, portraying people on the move as irregular economic migrants who should be sent back to Libya. By contrast, the transnational network consisting of NGOs and European agencies such as FRA has prioritised human rights and adopted a humanitarian approach to migration flows. By criticising and challenging European and national migration and border policies, and by countering their humanitarian narrative, some NGOs, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Sea-Watch and Mediterranea Saving Humans, have drawn on ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin, 2012), using the issue of SAR as ‘an instrument for the repoliticisation of the Mediterranean border’ (Cuttitta, 2019, p. 23), and thus showing that they take human rights seriously. These NGOs have denounced the abuse committed by the Libyan authorities, tried to prevent pushbacks to Libya, and monitored the practices of Italian, European and Libyan authorities in the central Mediterranean (Sciurba, 2019; Vassallo Paleologo, 2020). They have argued that by supporting the so-called Libyan coast guard, whose members are often recruited from militiamen, smugglers and traffickers (UN Panel of Experts on Libya, 2017, pp. 21, 41, 63–64), to intercept refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly return them to Libya (Santer, 2019; Howden et al., 2020), EU member states have pursued a policy of migration containment in the Mediterranean, thus exposing migrants to violence, extortion and trafficking (UN Support Mission in Libya and UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2018; UN Secretary-General, 2019, para. 50–53).

CONCLUDING REMARKS Migrant smuggling and trafficking in human beings are, by definition, transnational phenomena. However, they have only become the subject of transnational governance in the last 20 years, since the adoption of the Palermo Protocols in 2000. This chapter examines the emergence of competing transnational networks of actors that seek to govern these two phenomena. Such networks are multilevel in character, involving as they do actors from different areas of government (national, transnational and local) and of various types (both public and private, state and non-state, for-profit and not-for-profit). Focusing on the management of Mediterranean migration flows, particularly from Libya to Italy, we shed light on the complex nature of these transnational networks as well as on their competing agendas and discourses.

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The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking  223 Indeed, these networks compete not only for dominance, but also for legitimacy in normative and legal terms, by arguing that they comply with international norms and seek to offer international protection to migrants when they need it. Two findings stand out in our analysis, prompting further reflection. Firstly, each of these networks involves a varied set of actors – local, national and transnational, as well as state and non-state, legal and illegal. They are therefore multilevel both in a horizontal and a vertical sense. These transnational networks compete with each other not only in the field of law and policy implementation, but also through discursive practices. Security and border control actors such as Frontex have adopted a human rights and solidarity discourse in an effort to increase their legitimacy; while conversely, they have attributed criminality and illegal action to civil society actors. Yet the competing actions of these transnational networks have also opened up discursive and policy spaces for new courses of action. Indeed, as a European Parliament resolution on preventing and combating human trafficking in human beings stressed in 2016: ‘in order to prevent THB [trafficking in human beings] and people smuggling, it is important to create safe legal migration channels for women and children (such as humanitarian visas)’ (European Parliament, 2016, para. 20). Likewise, transnational NGOs, such as the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (2020) and Amnesty International (2017), have highlighted the need to protect the human rights of migrants, the illegal nature of pushback operations to Libya, and the necessity to shift the focus from deterrence to protection. Secondly, another element requiring further investigation and reflection is the fact that even those networks made up of state and international organisation actors may be linked to criminal groups and illegal actors. Such was, indeed, the case of the Italian authorities, Frontex officials, and a notorious Libyan trafficker, who was found to have attended a series of official meetings in Sicily and Rome in May 2017 in his capacity as a ‘commander of the Libyan coastguard’ (Scavo, 2019; Tondo, 2020). This incident exemplifies not only the transnational character of the networks governing migrant smuggling and human trafficking, but also the unorthodox coalitions that may be formed in an effort to make territorial borders impenetrable.

NOTE 1. The UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, adopted by UN General Assembly Resolution 55/25 of 15 November 2000, is the main international instrument in the fight against transnational organised crime. It was opened for signature by member states at a high-level political conference convened for that purpose in Palermo (Italy) on 12–15 December 2000, and entered into force on 29 September 2003. The Convention is supplemented by three Protocols, each targeting a specific area and manifestation of organised crime: the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children; the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air; and the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, their Parts and Components and Ammunition (see UNODC, 2004).

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The governance of migrant smuggling and human trafficking  225 European Parliament (2016). Preventing and combating trafficking in human beings: European Parliament resolution of 12 May 2016 on implementation of Directive 2011/36/EU of 5 April on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims from a gender perspective (2015/2118(INI)) (OJ C 76/61). Official Journal of the European Union. https://​eur​-lex​ .europa​.eu/​legal​-content/​EN/​TXT/​?uri​=​CELEX:​52016IP0227. European Parliament and Council of the European Union (2011). Directive 2011/36/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 April 2011 on preventing and combating trafficking in human beings and protecting its victims (OJ L 101/1). Official Journal of the European Union. http://​data​ .europa​.eu/​eli/​dir/​2011/​36/​oj. European Parliament and Council of the European Union (2016). Regulation (EU) 2016/1624 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 September 2016 on the European Border and Coast Guard (OJ L 251/1). Official Journal of the European Union. http://​data​.europa​.eu/​eli/​reg/​2016/​1624/​ oj. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) (2019, 19 June). 2019 update – NGO ships involved in search and rescue in the Mediterranean and criminal investigations. https://​fra​.europa​.eu/​ en/​publication/​2019/​2019​-update​-ngos​-sar​-activities. European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) (2016). Migrant smuggling in the EU. Europol. https://​www​.europol​.europa​.eu/​publications​-events/​publications/​migrant​-smuggling​-in​ -eu. European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) (2022a, 22 February). European Migrant Smuggling Centre – EMSC: Tackling the organised criminal groups profiting from migrant smuggling. https://​www​.europol​.europa​.eu/​about​-europol/​european​-serious​-and​-organised​-crime​ -centre​-esocc/​european​-migrant​-smuggling​-centre​-emsc. European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) (2022b). Trafficking in human beings. https://​www​.europol​.europa​.eu/​crime​-areas​-and​-statistics/​crime​-areas/​trafficking​-in​-human​ -beings. Fassin, D. (2012). Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present (R. Gomme, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 2010.) https://​doi​.org/​10​.1525/​california/​ 9780520271166​.001​.0001. Geiger, M., and Pécoud, A. (2014). International organisations and the politics of migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(6), 865–887. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​1369183X​.2013​.855071. Howden, D., Fotiadis, A., and Campbell, Z. (2020, 12 March). Revealed: The great European refugee scandal. The Guardian. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2020/​mar/​12/​revealed​-the​-great​ -european​-refugee​-scandal. Kasparek, B. (2010). Borders and populations in flux: Frontex’s place in the European Union’s migration management. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), The politics of international migration management (pp.  119–140). Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​9780230294882​_6. Kuschminder, K., and Triandafyllidou, A. (2020). Smuggling, trafficking, and extortion: New conceptual and policy challenges on the Libyan route to Europe. Antipode, 52(1), 206–226. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1111/​anti​.12579. Kyle, D., and Koslowski, R. (eds) (2011). Global human smuggling: Comparative perspectives. Johns Hopkins University Press. Massey, D.S., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaouci, A., Pellegrino, A., and Taylor, J.E. (1993). Theories of international migration: A review and appraisal. Population and Development Review, 19(3), 431–466. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​2938462. Palumbo, L. (2016). Trafficking and labour exploitation in domestic work and the agricultural sector in Italy. European University Institute. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2870/​384097. Perkowski, N. (2018). Frontex and the convergence of humanitarianism, human rights and security. Security Dialogue, 49(6), 457–475. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%2F0967010618796670. Pinelli, B. (2018). Control and abandonment: The power of surveillance on refugees in Italy, during and after the Mare Nostrum Operation. Antipode, 50(3), 725–747. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​anti​.12374. Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (2020, October 14). More detention, fewer safeguards: How the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum creates new loopholes to ignore human rights obligations. https://​picum​.org/​more​-detention​-fewer​-safeguards​-how​-the​-new​-eu​-pact​ -on​-migration​-and​-asylum​-creates​-new​-loopholes​-to​-ignore​-human​-rights​-obligations/​.

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226  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Robinson, D. (2016, 15 December). EU border force flags concerns over charities’ interaction with migrant smugglers. Financial Times. https://​www​.ft​.com/​content/​3e6b6450​-c1f7​-11e6​-9bca​ -2b93a6856354. Salt, J., and Stein, J. (1997). Migration as a business: The case of trafficking. International Migration, 35(4), 467–494. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​1468​-2435​.00023. Santer, K. (2019). Governing the Central Mediterranean through indirect rule: Tracing the effects of the recognition of Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Tripoli. European Journal of Migration and Law, 21(2), 141–165. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1163/​15718166​-12340045. Scavo, N. (2019, 4 October). La trattativa nascosta: Dalla Libia a Mineo, il negoziato tra l’Italia e il boss. Avvenire. https://​www​.avvenire​.it/​attualita/​pagine/​dalla​-libia​-al​-mineo​-negoziato​-boss​-libico. Sciurba, A. (2019, 22 February). Mediterraneo reso tomba e deserto: Ma la società civile non abbandona la rotta dell’umanità. Studi sulla questione criminale. https://​stu​diquestion​ecriminale​.wordpress​ .com/​2019/​02/​22/​mediterraneo​-reso​-tomba​-e​-deserto​-ma​-la​-societa​-civile​-non​-abbandona​-la​-rotta​ -dellumanita​-di​-alessandra​-sciurba​-universita​-di​-palermo/​. Tamura, Y. (2007). Migrant smuggling. Warwick Economic Research Papers no. 791. University of Warwick. https://​warwick​.ac​.uk/​fac/​soc/​economics/​research/​workingpapers/​2007/​twerp​_791​.pdf. Tonacci, F. (2018, 7 November). I salvataggi fantasma che non arrivano alla ‘Mare Jonio’. La Repubblica. https://​www​.repubblica​.it/​cronaca/​2018/​11/​07/​news/​salvataggi​_fantasma​-210995585/​. Tondo, L. (2020, 16 October). Senior Libyan coastguard commander arrested for alleged human trafficking. The Guardian. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​global​-development/​2020/​oct/​16/​senior​-libyan​ -coastguard​-commander​-arrested​-for​-alleged​-human​-trafficking. Triandafyllidou, A. (2017). Governing migrant smuggling. In P. Bourbeau (ed.), Handbook on migration and security (pp. 210‒231). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4337/​9781785360497. Triandafyllidou, A., and Maroukis, T. (2012). Migrant smuggling: Irregular migration from Asia and Africa to Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​9780230369917. United Nations (UN) (2018). Global Compact on refugees. United Nations. https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​ 5c658aed4. United Nations General Assembly (2016). New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (A/ RES/71/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​844669. United Nations General Assembly (2019). Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration (A/ RES/73/195). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1660537. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) (2004). United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols thereto. United Nations. https://​www​.unodc​.org/​ documents/​treaties/​UNTOC/​Publications/​TOC​%20Convention/​TOCebook​-e​.pdf. United Nations Panel of Experts on Libya (2017). Final report of the Panel of Experts on Libya established pursuant to resolution 1973 (2011) (S/2017/466). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​ record/​1288668. United Nations Secretary-General (2019). United Nations Support Mission in Libya: Report of the Secretary-General (S/2019/682). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​3825317. United Nations Support Mission in Libya and United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (2018). Desperate and dangerous: Report on the human rights situation of migrants and refugees in Libya. United Nations. https://​www​.ohchr​.org/​en/​documents/​country​-reports/​ desperate​-and​-dangerousunsmil​-ohchr​-report​-human​-rights​-situation. Vassallo Paleologo, F. (2020, May 2). Vedere per non salvare: il ruolo di Frontex nel Mediterraneo centrale. Associazione Diritti e Frontiere. https://​www​.a​-dif​.org/​2020/​05/​02/​vedere​-per​-non​-salvare​ -il​-ruolo​-di​-frontex​-nel​-mediterraneo​-centrale/​.

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16. Global migration governance: positionality, agency and impact of civil society Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Raúl Delgado Wise and Aleksandra Ålund

INTRODUCTION: IS THERE A SPACE FOR COUNTERHEGEMONIC PARTICIPATION? The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), adopted by 164 of the UN’s 193 member states at an intergovernmental summit in Marrakesh in December 2018, was heralded as a historical turning point, announcing the emergence of a comprehensive and sustainable global governance of migration. The meeting in Marrakesh followed more than a decade of extensive intergovernmental consultations and deliberations, which had been initiated by the United Nations (UN) High Level Dialogue (HLD) on Migration and Development in 2006. Discussions had taken place most notably in the context of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and its embedded civil society organisation (CSO) assembly, the Civil Society Days (CSDs), and had centred on norms, strategies and institutional frameworks for the global governance on migration.1 The GCM is a non-binding intergovernmental agreement. It includes 23 detailed objectives, explicitly building on the aims and principles of the Charter of the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a range of declarations and covenants on civil and political rights, working conditions and sustainable development. The Compact was therefore presented as a milestone in the governance of migration, ‘grounded in values of state sovereignty, responsibility-sharing, non-discrimination, and human rights’ (UN, 2018).2 By this token, protagonists have described the GCM as a milestone on the path towards unknotting a formidable geopolitical, social, legal-institutional and humanitarian problem. Yet the reception of the Compact was far from being unanimously enthusiastic, in a changing global political context in which appeals to universal human rights are perceived as a threat to state sovereignty by xenophobic neoconservative coalitions. Thus, disapproval of the GCM on the part of several influential states from the Global North – the United States in particular – has been taken to indicate that the GCM could in fact be ‘dead on arrival’ (Rieffel, 2018). On the other hand, critical research highlights an ambiguous usage of the mantra of ‘human rights’ across the text of the Compact, which helps to mask a range of contradictions in its narrative of ‘an ideal migration world’ (Pécoud, 2020). This is dovetailed, as Oelgemöller and Allinson (2020) argue, with a polyvalent normative discourse on ‘responsibility’, which ultimately leaves ‘the responsible migrant standing answerable’. This ambiguous application of a mantra of ‘human rights’, combined with a plurality of contradictory statements and a disguised victim-blaming discourse, may indeed help to explain the diversity of responses to the Compact from a multifarious civil society: that is, from a multitude of CSOs across the world that had, throughout the 2000s, been engaged in placing an extended human and labour rights perspective on the agenda of numerous regional 227 Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Raúl Delgado Wise, and Aleksandra Ålund - 9781789908077 39:08AM

228  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance and global consultations, leading up to the intergovernmental summit in Marrakesh (Schierup et al., 2019b). In this chapter, in order to unravel the apparent contradictions of the GCM, we will examine the polyvalent struggles taking place over hegemony related to migration governance in an unsettled age of ‘forced migration’, in which contrasting ideopolitical schemes vie for dominance. We ask if there is indeed an authentic ‘space for counterhegemonic participation’ (Delgado Wise, 2018) on the part of a multifarious civil society in the global governance of migration. Or will civil society become depoliticised, in a ‘routinising of neoliberal processes of “participation”’?3 We review, retrospectively, the involvement of CSOs in recurrent intergovernmental deliberations initiated by the HLD in 2006; and, prospectively, civil society responses to the GCM. We focus on the trajectory of the global civil society network and event, the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA), as a way of illustrating the options and constraints of a counterhegemonic stance contesting dominant ideopolitical narratives on migration governance. We discuss, in conclusion, whether another compact is possible. This opens up the question of a politics of possibility situated between, on the one hand, the growing influence of vast corporate interests and transnational collusion between capital and the state, which continues to shape the global migration governance regime, and on the other hand, openings for capacity development, space for action, and the corporeal political impact of the networks and coalitions of civil society.

A NEO-GRAMSCIAN ANALYTICAL APPROACH: COUNTERHEGEMONIC MOVEMENTS BETWEEN INVITED AND INVENTED SPACES We have examined, from a composite neo-Gramscian perspective (Rother, 2018a; Ålund and Schierup, 2018; Delgado Wise, 2018), and based on long-term research extending from the HLD in 2006 to the intergovernmental meeting that adopted the GCM in 2018 (Schierup et al., 2019a), the processes of contestation, consultation and deliberation that have framed consensus-building around migration governance. This perspective involves exploring the issue of the global governance of migration in the broader context of an unstable neoliberal hegemony (Cox, 1983; Deak, 2005), entangled in contradictions and legitimacy problems, and facing challenges arising from compound movements in civil society. It speaks to the original Gramscian idea that, confronted with a fragmented socio-political field, a social movement needs to ‘widen itself … propagating itself throughout society … broadening its political identity’ through incorporating a wider array of ideopolitical perspectives (Purcell, 2009, pp. 295–296; cf. Hall, 1987). This leads us to adopt two main analytical foci on global, network-based mobilisation, in terms of what we, with reference to Purcell (2009) and Miraftab (2009), call ‘counterhegemonic movements’. The first focus relates to the idea of ‘transversal politics’ (Yuval-Davis, 1999), which involves dialogue between disparate actors on equitable terms; in other words, it relates to the immanent dynamics connected to the formation and transversal interconnection of composite social solidarities4 and movements. The second focus relates to the challenges faced by movements in a subordinate position within formalised intergovernmental and supranational policy spaces.

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Global migration governance  229 We operationalise the focus on the transversal interconnection of movements using the concept of ‘networks of equivalence’, understood as broad coalitions fusing ‘many different struggles, movements and groups’ (Purcell, 2009, p. 279). In this process, argues Purcell, a complex relationship between sameness and difference is played out. With reference to Gramsci (1971) and to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), he elaborates the dual concepts of ‘articulation’ (in the sense of interconnection) and ‘equivalence’, in order to ‘capture how groups join in forming a counter-hegemonic formation’, constructing a shared ‘common sense’, and establishing a collective ‘articulation’ of a new political will ‘without dissolving differences into a homogenous unity’ (Purcell, 2009, p. 303). A kindred theoretical and analytical position, explicitly relating to the interference of contestatory civil society networks in global governance, has been conceptualised by Hosseini et al. (2016) in terms of a ‘transversal cosmopolitanism’, which involves the creation of ‘a common ground for fruitful dialogue, constructive collective learning, progressive hybridization, and active political cooperation among diverse identities and ideological visions of contemporary global transformative movements’. This perspective speaks to the conception of so-called ‘new-new’ globalised social movements with a composite social basis and organised around informal networks, linking locally rooted activism to global events (Feixa et al., 2009). As Feixa et al. (2009, pp. 421–422) observe, such social movements are, like the neoliberal system that they oppose, situated in a globally networked space. An exemplary case related to these conceptualisations of contemporary hybrid movements is that of the World Social Forum on Migration (WSFM), which was founded in São Paulo as a key feature of the World Social Forum (WSF), and held its first global summit in Porto Alegre in 2006. Another, related, network born out of the alter-globalisation movement is the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA). The PGA, which held its first summit in Brussels in 2007, was shaped explicitly as a global event and as a contestatory civil society counterpoint to the annual intergovernmental meetings of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). In its annual events since then, parallel to the recurrent intergovernmental forums, the PGA started to gather a multitude of CSOs and critical intellectuals from across the globe, with a particular orientation towards the Global South. It endeavoured to amalgamate a diversity of subject positions advocated by diaspora movements, migrant advocacy organisations and faith-based and humanitarian CSOs, along with both old and new moral-political and organisational trade union orientations (Ålund and Schierup, 2018). This transversal nexus between, on the one hand, migrant organisations and advocacy organisations, and on the other hand, trade unions, federations and confederations, is of crucial importance for the construction of corporeal power and strategic capacity in movements fighting for migrants’ human and labour rights (Piper and Grugel, 2015). But it is also a potentially fragile link, due to the major differences between the various actors’ target groups, management style, overall ideopolitical orientation, and conception of human rights and labour, as well as their varying time horizons and readiness to engage collectively in politics related to precarious labour and livelihoods. An increase in the impact of civil society on the global governance of migration will, Piper and Grugel (2015) argue, depend on a catalytic fusion of ideological horizons. Trade unions, often operating with long-term political horizons, organise collective confrontations with corporations and the state, but tend not to be involved with the informal economy and the most precarious workers. NGO programmes, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with extreme poverty and the informal sector, but less focused on labour rights as such. They tend to be project-based, and therefore depend on

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230  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance governmental or corporate funding, with shorter action horizons, and therefore often settle for adopting a ‘watchdog role’ (Schierup et al., 2015b). Our second analytical focus is concerned with the challenge posed to global movements by the conditionality of ‘invited spaces’, a term theorised by, among others, Cornwall (2002), Gaventa (2006) and Miraftab (2009). It relates to the solicitation for civil society participation or consultation, thereby conferring ‘co-responsibility’ on them (e.g., Oelgemöller and Allinson, 2020) at different levels of governance. As Gaventa (2006, p. 23) contends, the creation of new institutional arrangements will not in itself lead to profound policy change. This depends on the nature of power relations in which new, potentially more democratic spaces are embedded. When a rhetoric of partnership or participation is used by powerful intergovernmental organisations (IOs) for the purpose of inviting ‘engagement on a “level playing field” [this] obscures inequalities of resources and power’, and it blurs ‘distinctions between economic power holders and those who might negatively be affected by their corporate practices’ (Gaventa, 2006, p. 23). We therefore need, argues Gaventa, to distinguish between ‘policy space’ and ‘political space’. While the former relates to institutionalised meeting places for deliberations and consultations involving civil society, governments, IOs, and so on, the latter relates to ideopolitical platforms and attendant institutional channels, strategies and practices through which CSOs may pursue their objectives. The idea of political space speaks to what Miraftab (2009, 2004) refers to as ‘invented spaces’, that is, critical political platforms developed independently by contestatory civil society movements outside the purview of the overseers of invited spaces. However, the strategies used by civil society movements may be flexible, and their actions may traverse both invented and invited spaces in order to advance their cause. Miraftab (2009) relates this flexibility to the Gramscian concept of hegemony – seen as a consensual ideopolitical rule – with an emphasis on the fluidity of relations between civil society and the state, in which civil society interpenetrates state, intergovernmental, or supranational institutions, and is enmeshed in struggles for hegemony. She uses the concept of counterhegemony to depict the flexible practices of CSOs that use a dominant regime’s political openings to establish contestatory engagement. In Gramscian terms, they launch a counterhegemonic ‘war of position’ (Gramsci, 1971).

AN UNSETTLED AGE OF (FORCED) MIGRATION The arena in which the debates on migration and development at the HLD and the GFMD have taken place is not neutral. It projects the main conflicts and contradictions underlying neoliberal globalisation: interimperialist disputes, extreme concentration and centralisation of capital, growing power asymmetries between countries and regions, rising social inequalities and deteriorating livelihoods, environmental crisis, ‘plunder of the commons’,5 including corporate land grabs, exploitative extractionism, and the emergence of severe forms of labour precarity. These conditions affect populations across all continents, but are concentrated in the ‘darker nations’ (Prasad, 2008) of the Global South. A combined, structurally engrained, political-economic and geopolitical scramble for hegemony in contemporary imperialism has caused forced migration at a vast scale: migration due to violence, conflict and catastrophe; human trafficking and smuggling; social dispossession, exclusion and unemployment; over-qualification, structural imbalances and a lack

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Global migration governance  231 of opportunities; and return migration in response to massive deportations (Delgado Wise, 2018). In this context, characterised by the advent of new and extreme modalities of unequal exchange, what can broadly be characterised as forced migration has thus expanded across the North‒South divide. Although the conventional concept of forced migration does not apply to all migrants, most current migration flows are coerced displacements, and therefore require a more accurate descriptor. In the field of human rights, the term ‘forced migration’ refers specifically to asylum seekers, refugees or displaced people. However, the dynamics of uneven development have led to structural conditions that foster the massive migration of a plurality of dispossessed, marginalised and excluded populations (Delgado Wise and Márquez, 2009). Neoliberal globalisation has been accompanied by a revamped politics of closure in a world of ‘walled states’ (Brown, 2010). Thus, the ideopolitical ideal of the limitless accumulation of capital is twinned with a systemic ‘global apartheid’ (e.g., Richmond, 1994); that is, a politics of social closure that is indispensable for transforming forced migration into hyper-exploited unfree labour. ‘Unfree labour’ is a term developed by Miles (1987) and Cohen (1987). It refers to migrants in vulnerable positions who are alienated from legal-political agency for opposing excessive exploitation, and who are left unable – due to their exclusion from diacritical civic, political, social and labour rights – to negotiate for a decommodification of their labour or to organise in struggles for decent work, social security and sustainable livelihoods. Even refugees and asylum seekers, although formally under the protection of the Refugee Convention and binding international law, are increasingly becoming subsumed as unfree labour following the logic of commodification and its maxim of ‘employability’ (e.g., Likić-Brborić, 2018, pp. 767ff.; Schierup and Scarpa, 2017), thus being thrown ‘from the frying pan into the fire’ (paraphrasing Koser, 1998). Exclusionary migration policies, together with the ‘irregularization’ of citizenship (Nyers, 2010) and exploitative chains of ‘bloody subcontracting’ (Schierup, 2007), have given rise to a fragmented and disposable hyper-mobile labour force in industry, temporary agricultural employment, entertainment, hospitality, care-work, cleaning and domestic services, subjected to long hours of ‘dangerous, demanding, demeaning and dirty work in permanent fear of dismissal and deportation’ (Kundnani, 2007, p. 62). On these principles, large-scale irregular migration and temporary migrant labour schemes fulfil the workforce demands of labour markets in the European Union, North America, the Gulf states and growth economies in South-East Asia, as well as in so-called developmental states such as South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Turkey, Thailand and Argentina, which have become dynamic sub-imperial nodes of accumulation. Yet migration regimes are not uniform or stable, but exist in a state of continuous transformation, contingent on changing state‒capital relations and shifting regional configurations. Some major general changes are related to a shift from the relative preponderance of an informalisation of labour as a covert corporate strategy for ‘flexibilisation’ towards formal ‘re-regulation’ as vehicle for the commodification or re-commodification of labour (Slavnic, 2010; Schierup et al., 2015a). This transformation goes hand in hand with a global tendency towards an incremental criminalising of ‘irregular migration’ and the reinforcement of schemes for tightly regulated and ‘securitized’ temporary and circular migration (Cassarino, 2013; Martin, 2018); a temporary status that ‘turns migrants into nomadic global laborers’ (Tazreiter, 2019). These schemes, described in terms of orderly and managed migration, are designed to meet employers’ demands for cheap, docile and flexible labour, while appeasing a xenophobic populism with the promise of a win‒win‒win formula, with (forced) return

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232  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance migration being supposedly to the benefit of countries of both immigration and emigration, and in the best interests of migrants themselves (Triandafyllidou, 2013). Under the umbrella of the apparently neutral concept of ‘managed migration’, new narratives have been promoted. These ‘international migration narratives’ (Pécoud, 2015) function to depoliticise migration, to obfuscate the existence of conflicting interests and asymmetries of power, to circumvent obligations imposed by international law, and to promote the idea that managing migration can be beneficial for all stakeholders: countries of destination, countries of origin and transit, as well as migrants themselves and their families. This unrealistic win‒ win‒win scenario in reality favours the interests of the migrant-receiving countries and the large multinational corporations based in them (Delgado Wise et al., 2013). While the dominant position in the migration and development debate, also referred to as ‘migration management’, is situated within a national security doctrine, an alternative approach prioritises a human security framework. The former position is structured by a model that legitimates corporate-driven public policies and temporary worker programmes as mainstream migration policies, while downgrading human rights. It derives its ideopolitical support from a dominant neoliberal General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO)-driven international trade regime with roots in the Washington Consensus, involving flexible labour laws and the downgrading of social policy in favour of the primacy of corporate social responsibility (Likić-Brborić and Schierup, 2015). It is an architecture for neoliberal globalisation, with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) increasingly in charge. This approach also embraces the idea of migrant remittances as a prime instrument for sustainable development, while downplaying the role of a growing and multidimensional social inequality, a structurally conditioned precarisation of livelihoods, and asymmetries between regions and countries as root causes of contemporary migration. In contrast, the alternative approach is based on an overarching human rights-based vision that places equitable and sustainable human development at its centre. Rather than opposing national sovereignty (since the dominant position is rooted in the national security doctrine), it focuses instead on historical-structural and institutional root causes of the problematic of international migration, and not only its consequences, encouraging free circulation regimes and decent work for all, including for irregular migrants and workers in informal employment. It is informed by a perception of the interconnection between global political economy, poverty and precarisation, and draws support from an alternative UN policy framework, which involves UN organisations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (Likić-Brborić and Schierup, 2015). A cornerstone of this position is the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW). The Convention encompasses the protection of social and labour rights, including rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, as well as the unconditional duties of states to protect migrant workers’ inclusion into, or their formation of, labour unions as well as other forms of collective organisation (OHCHR, 1990). The ICRMW is complemented by an ILO multilateral framework for globalisation with a social dimension, decent work and fair migration rules, including a range of migrant-specific policy instruments (Likić-Brborić and Schierup, 2015). This has been the pivotal ideopolitical axis for a global movement of civil society arguing for ‘human rights as migrant rights’.

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Global migration governance  233

‘OUTSIDE’ VERSUS ‘OUTSIDE-INSIDE’: THE GFMD AND THE POSITIONALITIES OF CIVIL SOCIETY These critical structural-institutional forces and competing ideopolitical positions at work in our current so-called ‘age of migration’ (Castles et al., 2020) frame an elevated, globally extended concern for migration and development on the part of governments, in both the Global North and the Global South, as well as in the UN and relevant IOs. The reinforcement of a global agenda on migration was demarcated by the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994.6 A watershed moment was that of the UN High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development in 2006, which initiated a continuous long-term intergovernmental dialogue on norms for global migration governance during recurrent annual summits of the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD); a process that reached its apogee with the adoption of the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) in Marrakesh in 2018.7 The GFMD remains (as of 2021) the most important intergovernmental forum for the development of common policy orientations on international migration. Since 2007, the GFMD has acted as an arena for dialogue between sending, receiving and transiting states on standards for global migration governance. From the time of its inception in Brussels in 2007 to its meeting in Marrakesh in 2018, GFMD summits have been organised by governments in six European cities (Brussels in 2006, Athens in 2009, Geneva in 2011, Stockholm in 2014, Istanbul in 2015, and Berlin in 2017), two Asian cities (Manila in 2008, Dhaka in 2016), one African city (Port Louis in 2012), and two Latin American cities (Puerto Vallarta in 2010, Quito in 2020), and in 2021 it was hosted as a digital conference (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) by the United Arab Emirates (Dubai). Although it is non-binding and situated outside the UN system, the GFMD process has remained embedded in the UN framework, and has regularly been followed up by actions taken within the UN system, such as the Second UN High Level Dialogue on Migration in New York in 2013. Similarly, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants in 2016 prepared the ground for the GCM. The GFMD has created designated spaces with the purpose of informing governments through consultations with international organisations, civil society and business. Since its inception, so-called Civil Society Days (CSDs) have been organised as a side event to the GFMD meetings, conceived as a global meeting space for CSOs concerned with migration, including selected migrant organisations, advocacy organisations, trade unions and actors from academia. The selection of actors to participate in this assembly has been monitored by the organising states. From 2010 this was complemented by a so-called Common Space, in which governments, the international business community, IOs and CSOs would meet for discussion and consultation (Wee et al., 2018). From 2011 onwards, the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), an international NGO, was placed in charge of the organisation of the CSDs and the Common Space on behalf of the responsible governments. This consultative space has gradually become three-pronged (GFMD, 2020). In 2016, in addition to the CSDs, the GFMD structure was complemented with a Business Mechanism, which was ‘concerned with facilitating a dialogue among governments in consultation with other relevant stakeholders in migration and development fields’. In 2018, in connection with the Marrakesh GFMD venue, a Mayors Mechanism (Rother, 2019) was added, with the aim of establishing ‘a platform to interact with states, civil society and the private sector’ and providing ‘avenues to bolster innovative solutions’.8 The Mayors Mechanism was established on the initiative of

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234  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance the 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration, and Development, held in Marrakesh in December 2018 (UNITAR, 2018), co-organised by, among others, the IOM and the WTO.9 A multifarious civil society, mobilised globally as a contestatory counterpart to the intergovernmental process of the GFMD, has continuously been propagating an agenda for a global governance of migration and development conceived in terms of human rights, including extended civic, political, social and labour rights. Some migrant and migrant advocacy CSOs, from early on, have distanced themselves explicitly from the GFMD intergovernmental process, actively criticising and contesting it, while declining to engage in deliberations or consultations within the forum. One example is that of the International Migrants Alliance (IMA), an umbrella organisation representing a ‘network of networks’. It has declared itself the only ‘genuine grassroots organisation run by and not for migrants’ (Rother, 2018a, p. 860). It has followed a course of criticism from the ‘outside’ (Rother, 2013), emphasising a distancing from what it considers a depoliticising ‘NGOism’ and forces of co-optation and depoliticisation that act through consensus-building processes, which it sees as the inevitable consequences of participation in forums such as the GFMD. Other civil society protagonists arguing for an extended human rights-based migration governance have consistently attempted to participate in and to shape civil society consultations and deliberations within the GFMD and UN settings. An example of this alternative tactic is the global civil society network of the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA, mentioned above), to which we shall return. The PGA’s quest for a human rights-based migration governance was presented early on by delegates to the formalised forums of the HLD/GFMD process, especially within the CSDs and the Common Space, and between annual events this quest was continuously pursued through consultations and dialogue with a range of national, regional and global stakeholders. A continuous low-key ‘war of position’ – acting within, being subordinated to, but also challenging the hegemonic objectives of dominant international migration narratives – has been the tactic of the PGA within an alternative so-called ‘outside-inside’ approach to participatory governance in general, and the GFMD in particular (Rother, 2013). The network has built its agenda on the principle of transnational grassroots mobilisation, yet with the rationale of instituting a civil society agenda of fundamental human rights as migrant rights within major intergovernmental and supranational forums.

POTENTIAL AND DISJUNCTIONS OF A TRANSVERSAL MOVEMENT The space allowed for civil society participation in the first summits (2006–2007) of the HLD and the GFMD was truly marginal. There was a lack of interaction between migrant communities, diaspora organisations and most of the civil society organisations participating in the CSDs. There was also a lack of propinquity, channels of communication and tangible mutual collaboration between civil society delegates, who had been handpicked by the GFMD organisers, and there were hardly any meetings or proper channels of communication between civil society and government delegates. This began to change after the GFMD summit in Brussels in 2007, as an incremental convergence of CSD participants with the parallel PGA forum started to open up an alternative outsider/insider space, with opportunities for networking and the development and staging of a broad human rights-focused agenda. A milestone in this

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Global migration governance  235 process was the GFMD summit in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 2010, where PGA delegates participated in the Common Space, launched that year. The International Working Group (IWG), which had been responsible for organising a preceding PGA event in Mexico City, aimed to build a transversal movement that would boost labour, social, civic and human rights for migrants and redress asymmetric power relations in migration governance in favour of the Global South. The PGA event took up the challenge of ‘thinking out of the box’, as expressed by Cassarino (2009, p. 2):10 that is, of developing critical counterknowledge aimed at contesting states’ and international organisations’ agenda on migration management, which is indispensable for developing a capacity to ‘acquire an authoritative role and provide real alternatives which may cast doubt on dominant schemes of interpretation and behaviors’. A series of advanced workshops and thematic position papers at the PGA summit in Mexico City thus gave credence to, as expressed by Motta (2011, p. 179), the capacity of contestatory popular movements ‘to develop theoretical knowledge via a systematisation based on their political experiences’. Its disposition as a product of the alter-globalisation movement came to expression in the network’s declaration (PGA, 2010), delivered to the CSD-Common Space of the Mexican GFMD, held in Puerto Vallarta. Its focus was on redrawing migration pathways and the precarious state of migrants, which were connected with a new, post-Cold War imperialism and unequal development structured by an asymmetric trade and financial system, which bolstered the control and power of the Global North. It critically confronted the undermining of human rights by corporate globalisation. The declaration stressed, among other things: the need for a broad human rights-centred approach to migration and development based on inter- and intra-regional reciprocity; ‘human security’ as a counterpoint to the perceived dominant national security framing of migration and to the exclusion and criminalisation of migrants; non-discrimination and decent labour standards for all, including irregular migrants; a call for governments to ratify the ICRMW as well as other core UN documents and ILO instruments on the rights of migrants; and the urgency of democratising the GFMD. Another milestone in the formulation of a comprehensive and coherent human rights-based programme of action in the trajectory initiated by the PGA was the 5-Year, 8-Point Action Plan delivered to the HLD in 2013. This programme was the product of work by the Global Coalition on Migration, founded in 2011 as a standing body of regional and international networks of migrant associations, migrant rights organisations, trade unions, faith groups and academia, with a background in the mobilisation that had taken place since 2006 within forums such as the WSFM and the PGA. It had been involved in concerted actions, including more than 20 preparatory events around the globe, as well as a UN civil society hearing, as groundwork for the development of inputs to the debates at the HLD. The UN declaration following the HLD welcomed the work of the Global Coalition on Migration and stressed the importance of regular interaction between the Coalition and UN member states (UNGA, 2013, p. 5). In this sense, the HLD in 2013 figures as a high point in the inclusion of civil society as a partner in global migration governance and the adoption of a human rights discourse. However, it also came to represent a setback for the transversal link of solidarity between human rights-focused CSOs and trade unions by which the PGA was originally constituted as a potentially powerful global network. The fact that the HLD in 2013 now appeared to embrace the message of CSOs, urging for the incorporation of a human rights agenda in deliberations on global migration governance, did not impress participating trade unions. They tended to perceive the appropriated discourse

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236  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance of human rights as window dressing, obscuring the reality of a partisan, business-friendly agenda. This was expressed clearly in a letter of grievance to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, from the Global Unions trade union federation, which had participated actively in the work of the Global Coalition on Migration in preparing for the HLD (Global Unions, 2013). It criticised an alleged concerted exclusion of civil society in general, and labour unions in particular, from wielding an effective voice in the context of hearings at the HLD, and their marginalisation to the benefit of business-related backers of corporate social responsibility. In effect, this was perceived as the result of a stratagem for marginalising the labour unions that had constituted a powerful political link in the global movement for migrant rights. It argued that the HLD had created a space for co-opting actors with less organisational and political stamina, and with the potential for ‘screening, embedding and NGOising’ contestatory civic agency (Ålund and Schierup, 2018, pp. 816ff). The apparent success of the Global Coalition on Migration, which was signified by its being adopted as a legitimate partner in international and intergovernmental invited spaces, appeared to portend the demise of the PGA and its offshoots as a viable invented space, due to the processes of co-optation and depoliticisation. The fractioning of the movement mentioned above, marked by the undermining of trade union activism in the global civil society network, came to be manifested in consecutive GFMD and PGA events in Sweden (Stockholm in 2014) and Turkey (Istanbul in 2015). These events were marked by a noticeable lack of interest from these countries’ national union federations (Ålund and Schierup, 2018; Erdoğdu, 2018; Soykan and Şenses, 2018). At the same time, discussions in the invited space of the CSDs and the Common Space seemed to lose track of the ground causes of migration (Toksöz, 2018). Positions insisting on fundamental labour rights, substantive social rights for all workers, including irregular migrants, the safeguarding of rights and actual opportunities for organisation, decommodifying migrant labour, and opposing the capricious power of employers, increasingly gave way to discussion of the technocratic win‒win‒win scenario of a disempowering ‘migration management’. The overall balance of civil society participation shows that the formal/institutional participation of CSOs in the invited spaces remains a chimera. There is a lack of mechanisms to follow up on agreements, including the main resolutions that were approved by consensus in the 2013 HLD. With respect to the cause of a rights-based approach to migration, a regressive trend became clearly apparent in the GFMD meeting in Germany 2018. Here the CSDs were sidelined and preferential space was granted to the Business Mechanism. Many positions belonging to the migration management perspective were reincorporated into the agenda, such as the presentation of temporary migrant workers’ programmes as good practice as part of the mainstream package of migration policies (Delgado Wise, 2018, p. 9). As for civil society engagement, the participation of trade unions and workers’ organisations continued to diminish. The marginalisation of radically critical civic activism, originally associated with the PGA, was exacerbated by funding mechanisms. After the GFMD in Mexico (2010), responsibility for the organisation of successive CSD events was transferred to the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), an international NGO with a long historical record of engagement with international migration. However, instead of boosting the independence of the CSD assembly, it appears to have exacerbated its subordination to the governmental process, with the ICMC’s role in organising the CSDs and defining civil society losing independence to the benefit of governments, to the point of raising suspicions that it had been co-opted (Rother,

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Global migration governance  237 2018b). This also impacted on PGA events, which, lacking alternative funding, became dependent on the same sources of financing as the CSDs, channelled by the ICMC, which was itself embedded in the intergovernmental policy framework. This financial dependence on the same agency that the PGA, as a contestatory civil society network, was supposed to criticise was partially broken at the summits in Berlin and Marrakesh, when it was financed instead by an independent think tank, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Yet, as discussed above, the PGA became exposed to fracturing in connection with the New York HLD. Its offshoot, the Global Coalition on Migration, has become progressively embedded into the invited space of the GFMD and the UN process (Rother, 2020), and exposed to a cross draught of conflicting ideopolitical schemes vying for hegemony.

THE VICISSITUDES OF A HYBRID HEGEMONY These processes are all embedded in a major transformation of the asymmetrical global power geometrics of migration governance. Taking stock of this, critical studies have focused on major institutional changes related to the UN’s engagement with migration policy (Rother, 2020; Pécoud, 2020, 2018; Likić-Brborić, 2018; Likić-Brborić and Schierup, 2015; Geiger and Pécoud, 2013). One particularly important development is a gradual marginalisation of the ILO within the UN architecture for migration management, which is matched by the parallel reinforcement of the role of the IOM.11 Understanding this overall development and its wider implications entails, argues Georgi (2010), the examination of several conflicting schemes for the formation of a hegemonic ideopolitical framework for migration governance. He distinguishes between three major competing framings. One is the national sovereignty approach. It subscribes to a sharing of best practices and increased informal cooperation in migration control between states. It stresses the continued centrality of the power of nation states in determining the entry, stay and removal of non-citizens. It is opposed to the creation of any binding international or global framework. The second is the rights-based approach (discussed above). Its focus has been on binding conventions regarding rights to mobility and global citizenship (civil, political, social and labour rights), and the right not to migrate (development). It has, Georgi argues, privileged the rights of workers, including labour migrants and refugees, over the interests of technocratic schemes for a global ‘management of migration’. This corresponds to the original platform of contestatory global civil society, as manifested by, for example, the PGA, and supported by major international institutions in the UN framework, particularly the ILO. The strong presence of the ILO, with its insistence on unconditional labour rights as migrants’ rights (see Likić-Brborić and Schierup, 2015), was pivotal for the support of this approach by the international trade union movement. The third approach vying for hegemony is what Georgi calls the liberal approach, but which might more accurately be termed neoliberal (driven by the GATT‒WTO framework). It favours the creation of a binding, treaty-based, supranational regime embedded in a firm framework of migration management. It propagates, argues Georgi, a business-friendly, just and humane ‘regulated openness’ with respect to the useful migration of the economically desirable and the politically acceptable, yet coupled with restrictive border controls and effective deportation systems. Concerning international migration, its main protagonist in the

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238  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance international system is the IOM, an organisation that puts forward an image of ‘managing migration for the benefit of all’ (Rother, 2020, p. 10), but which has been criticised in research for its top-down technocratic approach to migration and its shallow conception of migrants’ rights and agency (cf. Geiger and Pécoud, 2010, 2013; Pécoud, 2018; Delgado Wise, 2018). The ‘migration and development’ discourse of the GFMD suits the IOM particularly well, argues Rother (2020, p. 14; cf. Piper and Rother, 2014), ‘since it provides the opportunity to focus on the positive aspects of migration and success stories without having to engage with rights-based discourses’. The IOM, which was originally situated outside the UN framework, has come to occupy an increasingly central role in a changing UN architecture for ‘managed migration’ as a component in the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (Likić-Brborić, 2018), and was, in 2016, designated as an associated IO assigned with overall responsibility for the management of migration. In light of the Global Compact for Migration’s (GCM) ambiguous narrative on migration (discussed above), it appears that this three-pronged struggle for hegemony has given rise to a merger of the national sovereignty approach and the (neo)liberal approach, albeit with homage paid to human rights and the position of civil society, given the need to create broad legitimacy through hegemonic consensus management. However, with the ILO downgraded to an increasingly inferior position in the UN system (Likić-Brborić, 2018; and Chapter 5 by Piper in this Handbook), and with the role of labour unions generally derailed, the rights-based approach has lost stamina. The IOM, in contrast, has come to occupy the role of a spider in its web, sewing together a wavering hybrid hegemony. This includes the monitoring of a range of old and new UN-related IOs, NGOs and civil society networks concerned with migration, as well as a central position in organising the intergovernmental forum of the GFMD, including the three-pronged consultancy structure of the CSDs, the Business Mechanism and the Mayors Mechanism. It has not, however, entailed a dislodging of the original leaders of the global and regional civic network for migrant rights, whether those who were at the forefront of the PGA at its peak, or those in senior position in the Global Coalition on Migration. On the contrary, several of these people have had successful careers and obtained privileged positions12 through a skilful manoeuvring across the complex institutional web of the new hybrid hegemony embedded in the GFMD and a changing UN system, with the IOM increasingly pulling the strings (e.g., Rother, 2020). It appears obvious, maintains Rother (2020, p. 17), that ‘civil society is the next in the row of stakeholders the IOM tries to reach out to’. This raises the question of what a hybrid hegemonic accord over the Global Compact for Migration will truly involve: a co-optive coup de grâce for the cycle of global civil society contestation, or the continuation of a counterhegemonic ‘war of position’ under new historical and structural-institutional conditions?

OPPORTUNITY OR DELUSION: CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE GLOBAL COMPACT FOR MIGRATION In fact, CSOs from across the world, converged at the CSD assembly in Marrakesh, immediately endorsed the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) as ‘a historical achievement’, as a ‘comprehensive framework for multilateral cooperation on international migration’ (ICVA, 2018). This, ostensibly, lent the GCM the status of a hegemonic accord, legitimated by consensus among global civil society. Nonetheless, most members of the civil society

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Global migration governance  239 alliance mentioned above, the Global Coalition on Migration (GCM, 2020), a principal civil society partner in participatory intergovernmental consultations and a political platform for 20 civil society organisations and alliances for migrants’ rights worldwide, expressed a more pragmatic stance. Although the GCM was seen to fall short of many of its demands for a rights-based global governance regime, which had been advocated for years by CSOs, most members of the Global Coalition on Migration nevertheless saw the Compact as the best possible multiple-stakeholder accord under the prevailing global political and social conditions. The GCM would, seen from that standpoint, be a ‘floor’ to stand on, a point from which global, regional and national coalitions of CSOs could continue to mobilise. It would be an opportunity to shift the narrative on migration (PICUM, 2018) and to use the available follow-up mechanisms of the GCM as a platform for further deliberations with governments and international organisations concerning the extension, and actual observance, of human, labour and citizens’ rights for millions of migrants across the world. In contrast, several disenchanted CSOs have portrayed the non-binding character of the Compact as delusive, and its perceived shallow adoption of a discourse on human rights as a smokescreen, obscuring the fact that the GCM bypasses fundamental binding UN conventions on migrants’ unconditional civic, political, social and labour rights. One example is the Transnational Migrant Platform ‒ Europe (TMP‑E), a regional CSO coalition, which is a member of the Global Coalition on Migration, yet is highly critical of the GCM. The TMP-E aims – as expressed in an address in the context of regional consultative processes preceding the final draft of the GCM – to facilitate the convergence of efforts to reclaim the rights enshrined in binding UN conventions and declarations at a ‘juncture of globalization’ where ‘the mechanisms used by capital to … maintain its profit rates escalate, extending to exploitation, expulsion by dispossession and necropolitics’ (TMP-E, 2018). This critical perspective on the perceived root causes of forced migration and the management of a plurality of unfree precarious workers left hardly any traces in the concluding text of the GCM (Pécoud, 2020). A similar attitude was manifested by the Mediterranean‒Sub-Saharan Migration Trade Union Network (RSMMS, 2018), in an address to the intergovernmental conference in Marrakesh. The RSMMS reminded delegates of pivotal clauses in the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW, mentioned above) and of several ILO conventions. These conventions’ principles of comprehensive labour rights and social protection, and of unconditional freedom for migrant workers to organise, as the RSMMS pointed out, are virtually absent from the script of the GCM. The statement of the RSMMS echoes commentaries on the script of the GCM by the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), claiming that this failure to guarantee migrant workers’ rights, which were enshrined in core conventions of the ILO, would further ‘entrench two-tier labour markets where an underclass of workers who happen to be migrants are left without guarantees of freedom of association, collective bargaining and other vital protections’. In consequence, concluded the Euro-Moroccan Chair for the summit in Marrakesh of the PGA, in an appeal for ‘equal rights and social justice’ (MDDC, 2018), in the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration the rich countries have found a means to marginalise and obstruct the 1990 ICRMW, which was a central charter for contestatory civil society. From this perspective, the GCM appears to corroborate rather than disavow the terse judgement by Piper and Grugel (2015, p. 3) that ‘global governance reproduces, rather than mediates, the exclusion that is at the heart of the contemporary global political economy’. It

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240  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance appears to signal a debacle for a global mobilisation of civil society, drawing its roots from the critical trajectory of the World Social Forum and its maxim that ‘another world is possible’. It underscores the importance of critically reassessing the past, present and future role of CSOs, the space that is available for them, and their organisational capacities, in a supposedly dawning era of ‘sustainable development’ (Likić-Brborić, 2018).

IN PLACE OF A CONCLUSION: IS ANOTHER COMPACT POSSIBLE? The incorporation of civic agency into invited spaces may mediate democratic change while, on the other hand, defusing counterhegemonic discourse and activism through appropriative consensus-making (Coy and Hedeen, 2005). It may transform imaginaries and the agency of contestatory counterhegemonic movements through subsumption under the mechanisms of a technocratic neoliberal model of governance (cf. Kaldor, 2003). The case of civil society involvement with the HLD and the GFMD illustrates the dilemmas faced by the CSOs engaged as partners in participatory governance, and how, in the course of their engagement, they have often been induced to adopt tactics of subtle deliberation rather than ‘confrontationalist politics of direct action’ (cf. Veltmeyer, 2009, p. 90). However, it is also a process through which they may become transformed from contestatory movements into institutionalised and pragmatically orientated NGOs, subjected to the power geometrics and depoliticising dynamics of invited spaces. This is a common process in the age of (forced) migration, which has exposed the inherently fragile constitution of networks of equivalence and transversal politics. It has demonstrated their vulnerability to fracturing in confrontation with co-optation and the tactics for depoliticisation used by dominant institutional actors. These are, more broadly, problems connected with the dynamics and conditionality of invited spaces as contested political spaces at a particular historical-structural juncture. Consequently, analysing participatory governance entails, as discussed above, conceptualising invited spaces as fields of struggle embedded in wider regional and global constellations of power and hegemony. Taking stock of this, let us return to the problematic announced at the beginning of this chapter, asking whether it is indeed possible for contestatory civic movements to impact on the implementation of the GCM, and to make further gains starting from this ‘floor’, despite the Compact’s nature being, according to some critics, chimeric or incomplete. In other words, is another compact possible? The efforts to build an institutional framework for a rights-based global governance of migration have followed a complex and uncertain route. The non-ratification of the 1990 UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families by most migrant-receiving countries exemplifies the inherent complexity and limitations of this endeavour. In September 2016, the UN General Assembly formally designated the IOM as the official UN migration agency. On that occasion, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants was unanimously adopted, giving rise to an intergovernmental consultation and negotiation process that culminated with the adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Secure Migration in Marrakesh in December 2018. The promotion of this new hybrid hegemonic accord entails a recognition of the limitations of the HLD and the GFMD as means to advance towards the establishment of a coherent global migration regime (Martínez Pizarro, 2020).

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Global migration governance  241 If the designation of the IOM as the UN migration agency (in 2016) could be interpreted as a step forward in the adoption of a migration management approach, the simultaneous approval of the 2016 New York Declaration represents a move towards a human rights-centred outlook. It is important to add that the first draft of the GCM, which was the product of regional and global consultations with extensive participation from CSOs, was tailored under a human rights perspective. However, the final draft discussed in Marrakesh, after a year of intergovernmental consultations, introduced many of the precepts of the national security doctrine, combined with a commodifying migration management perspective bowing to the position of agencies in the service of transnational capital. This amalgam of positions reflects the difficulty of creating common ground for constructive and collective exchange and learning in relation to the creation of a rights-based global migration regime. A significant outcome related to the PGA process discussed in this chapter was the creation of the Global Coalition on Migration. Although this umbrella organisation – as an invented space – had a counterhegemonic potential, it became mainly focused on the consultation and negotiation process for the implementation of the Global Compact for Migration. Thus, its main concern, as posited by the Coalition’s then International Coordinator, Monami Maulik,13 in 2017 (OHCHR, 2017), has been to actively mobilise ‘as central actors of the phases of design, development, implementation, and monitoring of the Global Compact … [in order] to translate the human rights commitments of the New York Declaration into concrete action’; yet, in the view of leading civil society activists, this negotiation ultimately largely excluded the voices of migrants themselves (Bouknight, 2018). However, these efforts of involved CSOs to impact on the terms and practices of implementation of the GCM are still ongoing, especially at the regional level.14 This entails a persistent pragmatic positioning, which continues to mirror Alexander Betts’s (2010, p. 1) overall depiction of global migration governance, a decade ago, as one that ‘remains incoherent, poorly understood, and lacks an overarching vision’. It is still too early to predict the outcomes of the GCM process. The GCM is an instrument of the so-called ‘soft law’ approach of the UN; that is, the use of non-binding flexible accords that are capable of adapting to different contexts and situations (Martínez Pizarro, 2020). However, its key terms, ‘safe, orderly and regular migration’ have no accountable international normative definitions, in contrast to terms of rights, justice, equality/non-discrimination and social protection, which are normatively defined and recognised widely in international law and jurisprudence as applicable to all migrants. Nevertheless, despite its ambiguity and its normative and political limitations, many governments, migrant organisations and civil society networks see the GCM as the best available platform for advancing relevant public policy issues at local, national and regional levels. In sum, the GCM, adopted in December 2018 by the UN, may have become one of its most controversial documents, dividing nations as well as civil society, ‘wielding little power’, yet ‘offering some hope’ (paraphrasing Bouknight, 2018). Following the adoption of the GCM, the PGA and the Global Coalition on Migration have, as indicated above, become marked by conflicting perspectives on the Compact among their members (e.g., PGA, 2018). This may jeopardise their capacity to coordinate an equivalence of direction, and the political space of an allegedly global civil society may be increasingly confined to the CSDs and to UN-linked networks, which are not autonomous invented spaces per se. They are systemic platforms conditioned by and embedded in the invited space of the GFMD, or into a wider, changing UN architecture for the management of migration; yet, as mentioned above, with several seasoned

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242  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance spokespersons of global activist networks and political platforms, such as the PGA and the Global Coalition on Migration, in strategic positions. It remains to be seen where this will lead. At this point, it is crucial to acknowledge that, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, humanity has come to face one of its most severe and distressing crises, with more uncertainties than ever before in the history of capitalism, and with forced migration in its various forms as a central and increasingly controversial and divisive issue. This crisis, envisioned by Foster (2013) as an epochal crisis, involves the convergence of economic and ecological contradictions to such a degree that they pose a threat to the survival of our societies on a planetary scale. This tribulation has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, as ‘nature’s revenge for over forty years of nature’s gross and abusive mistreatment at the hands of a violent and unregulated neoliberal extractivism’ (Harvey, 2020). The force of the pandemic has been expanding at an exponential rate, leading to a global recession that exposes the features of a class, gendered and racialised crisis. It has fuelled nationalism, populism and social closure, bringing new and critical challenges to the UN’s efforts to institutionalise a global migration regime. But the pandemic has also created possibilities for social transformation, for deep restoration of inner life, ecological balance, ethics, peace, human solidarity and unity, and the idea and practices of the commons. It is, quoting Gills (2020, pp. 2–3), ‘giving us pause. Time to stop. Time to think. Time to awaken. A different reality is possible. It is we who must respond to the crisis and collectively create a different future.’ This call for alternative imaginaries and solidarities, insisting that ‘another world is possible’, is still resounding from the World Social Forum and from its offshoot, the World Social Forum on Migration (WSFM), the precursor of the global movement for migrant rights. In contrast with the PGA and the Global Coalition for Migration, the WSFM continues to represent a genuinely autonomous invented space. One vision emerging from the meeting of the WSFM in Mexico City in 2018 was that of promoting a global network of cities that would build on the experience gathered in the context of already existing initiatives, in terms of ‘sanctuary cities’ (Bauder, 2017), ‘urban citizenship’ (Smith and McQuarrie, 2012), ‘solidarity cities’ (Solidarity Cities, 2020), ‘welcoming’ or ‘sustainable cities’ (Taran et al., 2016), and a new ‘municipalism’ (Agustín, 2020), as a multifaceted space for transversal solidarity and the organisation of transformative social change (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2020).15 Around the world, cities have reacted to the disjuncture between exclusionary national migration and residence policies, and the everyday, local need to be inclusive (Jørgensen and Schierup, 2021). Focusing on the city brings out a distinct perspective and a practical alternative. Yet this urban focus cannot be a universal solution. The solidarity city as a space for inclusion of vulnerable migrants has been observed to work best in communities with left-leaning local governments, and those where immigrants and post-migrants constitute a substantial part of the city electorate, as well as of decision-making structures, and with the presence of transversal coalitions between established migrant organisations and strongly positioned labour unions (de Graauw and Vermeulen, 2016; de Graauw et al., 2020; de Graauw and Gleeson, 2020). Another vision of transversal solidarity was generated in the process of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT)16 throughout its 45th Session, centred around the theme ‘Violations with Impunity of the Human Rights of Migrant and Refugee Peoples’. The session was co-convened by the Transnational Migrant Platform ‒ Europe (TMP-E, mentioned above), in conjunction with several other organisations, networks and movements, including La Via Campesina Europe, and in response to the demand of more than 500 migrant, refugee and solidarity organisations. The PPT’s 45th Session was launched in Barcelona in July 2017 and

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Global migration governance  243 subsequently organised a series of Hearings17 – in Palermo (December 2017), Paris (January 2018), Barcelona (June 2018) and London (November 2018) – which used its own narrative on migration to challenge the discourse of securitisation and migration management promoted by the Global Compact for Migration in Marrakesh in December 2018. A subsequent Brussels Hearing of the tribunal was organised in April 2019. A further Hearing, held in Berlin in October 2020, emphasised that the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum (European Commission, 2020) of September 2020 represents a further legitimation of ‘necropolitics’ and the denial of rights.18 Responding to the challenges raised in the PPT’s Berlin Judgment, during its presentation in a Public Forum (online) on 16 December 2020, the participating networks and movements launched an appeal for an alternative human rights and justice framework: a call for a Global Pact of Solidarity for the Rights of Migrants and Refugee Peoples, to be built from the bottom up by social movements and organisations, aspiring towards an equivalence of struggles linking a multitude of disenfranchised people.19 This illustrates an urgent plea for a (still) ‘realizable utopia’20 in a crisis-ridden twenty-first century, one that situates migrants and refugees as subjects of rights and places them centre stage in a sustainable future.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

For a critical discussion on the architecture of the UN-initiated process, see Likić-Brborić (2018). A detailed account of the GCM is provided in Chapter 11 by Guild and Allinson in this Handbook. Paraphrasing Carroll and Jarvis (2015, p. 277). See also Likić-Brborić (2018, pp. 773ff). For definition of the notion of ‘transnational solidarity’, see Agustín and Jørgensen (2021). This phrase was coined by Standing (2019) in his book bearing this title. Chapter 6 by Breda in this Handbook provides an exploration of the role of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the evolution of international migration management. Chapter 9 in this Handbook by Crépeau and Purkey provides a detailed account of the development of multilateral UN-framed deliberations on global migration governance. The Mayoral Forum was launched as an annual event in 2013 at the HLD in New York, as a space ‘where local leaders can share practical and inventive solutions for governing migration, protecting rights, and promoting inclusive urban economic growth’ (Migration 4 Development, 2020). The Mayors Mechanism of the GFMD was established on the initiative of the 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration, and Development, held in Marrakesh in December 2018 (UNITAR, 2018), co-organised by, among others, the IOM and the WTO. At the 13th GFMD summit, organised (online) by the United Arab Emirates in January 2021, delegates from all three GFMD mechanisms (CSDs, Business, Mayors) were, for the first time in the history of the GFMD, invited to participate directly in most sessions of the summit. In a position paper presented to the GFMD-CSD in Athens in 2009. Chapter 5 in this Handbook by Piper provides a detailed examination of the changing impact and role of the ILO in global migration governance, and Chapter 3 by Ahouga examines the role and impact of the IOM. This includes, for example, the international Steering Committee for the Civil Society Days of the GFMD, the IOM, the ILO, the ICMC, the Civil Society Action Committee, the United Nations Network on Migration, and the Women in Migration Network. Maulik is currently (as of 2021) Civil Society Liaison Officer at the Secretariat for the UN Network on Migration (UNM, 2021). This UN embedded network is committed to the support, implementation, follow-up and review of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). It is located at the IOM office in Geneva and coordinated by the Director of the IOM, Antonio Vitorino. One example is the regional platform Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM, 2021), a network of organisations providing assistance to, and advocating for the rights of, undocumented migrants in Europe. Another example is the Migrant Forum in Asia

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244  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance (MFA, 2021), which is engaged in, among other things, advocating for and shaping ‘fair recruitment corridors’ for migrants and preventing the exploitation of migrant workers (ILO, 2020). Leaders of the two regional platforms have been among the co-founders of civil society networks and political platforms such as the PGA, the Global Coalition on Migration, and Migration as Development (MADE), and have acted as their spokespersons in international and intergovernmental forums. 15. This vision of the WSFM for a network of ‘sanctuary cities’, which is not to be confused with the Mayors Mechanism embedded in the GFMD architecture (mentioned above), was echoed in the Conclusions of the People’s Global Action (PGA) at the PGA Summit in Marrakesh, 8–9 December 2018 (PGA, 2018). 16. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT, 2020) was established in Bologna in 1979 as a direct continuation of the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966–1967) and Latin America (1973–1976). The PPT was set up to give recognition, visibility and a voice to peoples experiencing violations of their fundamental rights, who, according to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, proclaimed in Algiers in 1976, were marginalised in international law, which had increasingly become devoted to protecting the interests of the public and private holders of political and economic power. 17. Information on the hearings is available at: https://ppt.transnationalmigrantplatform.net/hearings​ -migrant-rights/. 18. The PPT Berlin jury included high-level magistrates, lawyers and academic experts from five European countries, and included in its consideration and assessment accumulated testimonies and evidence: spoken, written, photographic and video. The jury identified widespread human rights violations as a product of ‘necropolitics’, practiced within and on the borders of Europe. In its judgment, it declared that ‘what across the chronicles could sometimes appear a fragmented situation, must be qualified, as a “systemic crime”’; a judicial category included in the statutes of the PPT as an indicator of higher severity, contingent on the structural and systemic character of the human rights violations in question. The Berlin judgment pointed, moreover, to a problematic lack of instruments for addressing the accountability of these policies, and addressed the impunity of a crime that it designated as ‘an ongoing genocide’. For more information, see: http://​perm​ anentpeopl​estribunal​.org/​the​-ppt​-judgment​-on​-the​-human​-right​-to​-health​-of​-migrant​-and​-refugee​ -peoples​-berlin​-23​-25​-october​-2020/​?lang​=​en. 19. Further information available at: https://ppt.transnationalmigrantplatform.net/sign-on-to-globalpact​-on​-solidarity/​. 20. The term ‘realizable utopia’ was coined by Lambert (2010).

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Global migration governance  247 Pécoud, A. (2018). What do we know about the International Organization for Migration? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(10), 1621–1638. Pécoud, A. (2020). Narrating an ideal migration world? An analysis of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Third World Quarterly. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​01436597​.2020​ .1768065. PGA (2010). Statement of the Peoples’ Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights. Peoples’ Global Action on Migration and Development. https://​www​.facebook​.com/​notes/​ 451443385836808/​. PGA (2018). Conclusions of the Peoples’ Global Action (PGA). 8th and 9th December, 2018. PGA. http://​www​.peoplesglobalaction​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2019/​01/​PGA​_Marrakech​_Eng​-2​.pdf. PICUM (2018). Statement Civil Society Days Marrakech: PICUM and its partners highlight realities of undocumented migrants. PICUM News. https://​picum​.org/​statement​-civil​-society​-days​-marrakesh​ -picum​-and​-its​-partners​-highlight​-realities​-of​-undocumented​-migrants/​. PICUM (2021). PICUM – Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants. https://​ picum​.org/​. Piper, N., and Grugel, J. (2015). Global migration governance, social movements and the difficulties of promoting migrant rights. In C.-U. Schierup, R. Munck, B. Likić-Brborić and A. Neergaard (eds), Migration, precarity and global governance: Challenges for labour (pp. 261–279). Oxford University Press. Piper, N., and Rother, S. (2014). More than remittances: Resisting the dominant discourse and policy prescriptions of the global migration-development-mantra. Journal für Entwicklungspolitik, 30(1), 44–66. PPT (2020). Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. PPT. http://​perm​anentpeopl​estribunal​.org/​?lang​=​en. Prasad, V. (2008). The darker nations. New Press. Purcell, M. (2009). Hegemony and difference in political movements: Articulating networks of equivalence. New Political Science, 31(3), 291–317. Richmond, A.H. (1994). Global Apartheid: Refugees, racism, and the new world order. Oxford University Press. Rieffel, L. (2018). The Global Compact on Migration: Dead on arrival? Brookings. https://​www​ .brookings​.edu/​blog/​up​-front/​2018/​12/​12/​the​-global​-compact​-on​-migration​-dead​-on​-arrival/​. Rother, S. (2013). A tale of two tactics: Civil society and competing visions of global migration governance from below. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), Disciplining the transnational mobility of people (pp. 41‒62). Macmillan. Rother, S. (2018a). Angry Birds of passage: Migrant rights networks and counter-hegemonic resistance to global migration discourses. Globalizations, 15(6), 854–869. Rother, S. (2018b). The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) as a venue of ‘state socialization’: A stepping stone for multi-layered migration governance? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(8), 1258–1274. Rother, S. (2019). Mayors Mechanism will become part of the #GFMD this year – Thouez: ‘bolsters position of GFMD in supporting implementation of Global Compact #ForMigration’. Blog post. https://​ gfmd2010​.wordpress​.com/​2019/​01/​14/​mayors​-mechanism​-will​-become​-part​-of​-the​-gfmd​-this​-year​thouez-bolsters-position-of-gfmd-in-supporting-implementation-of-global-compact-formigration/. Rother, S. (2020, November). ‘The’ or ‘A’ leading organization in migration? IOM as an actor in global migration governance. Migración y Desarrollo. RSMMS (2018). Position du Réseau Syndical Migration Méditerranéennes-Subsahariennes (RSMMS) sur le ‘Pacte mondial pour des migration sûres, ordonnées et régulières’. RSMMS. https:// ​d6scj24zvfbbo​.cloudfront​.net/​41f​1848737401​bc08b82356​f873dba70/​200000357​-a459da5443/​FRA NCES​%20​-​%20Position​_RSMMS​_PMM​_Marrakech​_dec2018​_FR​%20​%281​%29​.pdf​?ph​=​3628173 699. Schierup, C.-U. (2007). ‘Bloody subcontracting’ in the network society: Migration and post-Fordist restructuring across the European Union. In E. Berggren, L.-B. Branka, G. Toksöz and N. Trimikliniotis (eds), Irregular migration, informal labour and community: A challenge for Europe (pp. 150–164). Shaker Publishing. Schierup, C.-U., Ålund, A., and Likić-Brborić, B. (2015a). Migration, precarization and the democratic deficit in global governance. International Migration, 53(3), 50–63.

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248  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Schierup, C.-U., Branka, L.-B., Delgado Wise, R., and Toksöz, G. (eds) (2019a). Migration, civil society and global governance. Routledge. Schierup, C.-U., Delgado Wise, R., Rother, S., and Ålund, A. (2019b). Postscript: The Global Compact for Migration: What road from Marrakech? In C.-U. Schierup, R. Munck, B. Likić-Brborić and A. Neergaard (eds), Migration, civil society and global governance (pp. 156–164). Routledge. Schierup, C.-U., Munck, R., Branka, L.-B., and Neergaard, A. (2015b). Introduction: Migration, precarity and global governance: Challenges and opportunities for labour. In C.-U. Schierup, R. Munck, B. Likić-Brborić and A. Neergaard (eds), Migration, precarity and global governance: Challenges and opportunities for labour (pp. 1–24). Oxford University Press. Schierup, C.-U., and Scarpa, S. (2017). How the Swedish model was (almost) lost: Migration, welfare and the politics of solidarity. In A. Ålund, C.-U. Schierup and A. Neergaard (eds), Reimagineering the nation: Essays on twenty first century sweden: Political and social change (pp. 41–84). Peter Lang. Slavnic, Z. (2010). Political economy of informalization. European Societies, 12(1), 3–23. Smith, M.P., and McQuarrie, M. (eds). (2012). Remaking urban citizenship: Organizations, institutions and the right to the city. Transaction Publishers. Solidarity Cities (2020). Solidarity cities. https://​solidaritycities​.eu/​ Soykan, C., and Şenses, N. (2018). The problem of representation: The civil society organizations from Turkey in the GFMD Process. Globalizations, 15(6), 824–837. Standing, G. (2019). Plunder of the commons: A manifesto for sharing public wealth. Pelican. Taran, P., Neves de Lima, G., and Kadysheva, O. (2016). Cities welcoming refugees and migrants: Enhancing effective urban governance in an age of migration. UNESCO. https://​unesdoc​.unesco​.org/​ ark:/​48223/​pf0000246558. Tazreiter, C. (2019). Temporary migrants as an uneasy presence in immigrant societies: Reflections on ambivalence in Australia. International Journal of Comparative Sociology. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​ %2F0020715219835891. TMP-E (2018). A platform for action towards the Global Compact on Migration: Reclaiming the human rights of migrant peoples. TMP-E. https://​transnat​ionalmigra​ntplatform​.net/​campaigns​-advocacy/​tmp​ -e​-recommendations​-to​-global​-compact​-on​-migrants/​. Toksöz, G. (2018). Irregular migration and migrants’ informal employment: A discussion theme in international migration governance. Globalizations, 15(6), 779–794. Triandafyllidou, A. (ed.). (2013). Circular migration between Europe and its neighbourhood: Choice or necessity? Oxford University Press. UN (2018). Global Compact for Migration. United Nations. https://​refugeesmigrants​.un​.org/​migration​ -compact. UNITAR (2018). UNITAR co-hosts 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration, and Development at the historic UN Migration Week. UNITAR. https://​www​.unitar​.org/​about/​news​-stories/​news/​unitar​ -co​-hosts​-5th​-mayoral​-forum​-human​-mobility​-migration​-and​-development​-historic​-un​-migration. United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) (2013). Declaration of the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development. UNGA. https://​www​.iom​.int/​files/​live/​sites/​iom/​files/​ What​-We​-Do/​docs/​Final​-Declaration​-2013​-En​.pdf. UNM (2021). United Nations Network on Migration. United Nations Network on Migration. https://​ migrationnetwork​.un​.org/​. Veltmeyer, H. (2009, summer/fall). Democratic governance and participatory development: The role of development NGOs. Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, 89–109. Wee, K., Vanyoro, K.P., and Jinnah, Z. (2018). Repoliticizing international migration narratives? Critical reflections on the Civil Society Days of the Global Forum on Migration and Development. Globalizations, 15(6), 795–808. Yuval-Davis, N. (1999). What is ‘transversal politics’. Soundings, (12), 94–98.

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17. Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements: two institutions that shaped European migration history (1945–2020) Olivier Clochard

In January 2016, more than 2000 foreigners were arriving on the Greek islands of the Aegean Sea every day. This movement was due, on the one hand, to the exile of men, women and children coming mainly from Syria and neighbouring countries after transiting through Turkey, and on the other hand, to Angela Merkel’s humanitarian declarations in the summer of 2015. With her announcement ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (‘We can do it!’), the German Chancellor sent a strong signal to all those seeking protection and better living conditions: by the end of summer 2015, a humanitarian corridor had been set up from Greece to Germany via the Balkans. As a result, almost 1.3 million asylum seekers arrived in European Union (EU) member states, almost half of them in Germany; a record number in the country’s history. In light of these large-scale arrivals, the EU and its member states announced in the spring of 2016 that they would block the Balkan route by setting up camps (‘hotspots’, administrative detention centres, and so on). In addition, an arrangement with Turkey1 substantially and temporarily decreased the number of arrivals in Greece, and aimed to guarantee a return to closed borders and a ‘better management’ of migratory flows. However, arrivals on the Greek islands continued and the Balkan route continued to be used. Since the end of the Second World War, the arrival and presence of foreigners in European states as a result of crises and conflicts have often been accompanied by suspicion, exclusion, and even the forced return of some of these communities to their country of origin. European governments have always exercised control over some of the new arrivals, as well as over foreigners who are already present, and even over so-called ‘undesirables’ (stateless persons, and so on), and this surveillance is partly carried out through the use of detention camps for foreigners and agreements between states. Almost all European governments have resorted to the use of detention camps for foreigners, under the pretext of addressing the issue of displaced persons and refugees, or that of political and economic tensions. As Marc Bernardot observes, ‘detention camps for foreigners constitute one of the central forms of modernity … Their use has been extended to the point of becoming commonplace models for the management and separation of groups viewed as representing problems, risks, or threats’ (Bernardot, 2009, p. 41).2 Another mechanism is that of agreements between states aimed at managing these populations, including bilateral, multilateral and community agreements (since the construction of the EU), and even tacit agreements. Depending on the case, one of these control methods may be used, or sometimes both. The aim is always to demonstrate to national public opinion or to certain parts of the nation (such as trade unions, political parties, and so on) that the authorities are managing the presence of ‘undesirables’ on their territory, and the arrival of migrants.3 250 Olivier Clochard - 9781789908077 39:08AM

Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements  251 However, since 1945, these measures have never succeeded in preventing a certain proportion of migration from taking place in an unregulated manner. Furthermore, it can be observed certain places have been used to control very different populations of migrants or ‘undesirable’ persons, over periods of greater or lesser duration. For example, in the aftermath of the Second World War, in Czechoslovakia, the Nováky camp, a former Nazi concentration camp, held more than 5000 German-speakers intended for deportation to Germany. On 15 August 1946, John Colville, a senior official at the United Kingdom (UK) Foreign Office and a former private secretary to Winston Churchill, concluded that ‘the concentration camps and all that they represented had not disappeared with the defeat of Germany’ (Douglas, 2012, pp. 166–168). In France, the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes, which had contained large numbers of Spanish refugees from 1939 onwards, also received foreign Jews, Gypsies and political opponents between 1940 and 1942 (more than 21 000 people were interned there between 1941 and 1942). While it was occupied by German troops, it transformed once again into a military camp, but following the Liberation it became a centre de séjour surveillé (guarded residence camp), for interning people who had been affiliated with the enemy (including soldiers, French nationals and foreigners). From 1945 onwards, the Liberation army turned it into a dépôt de prisonniers de guerre (prisoner of war depot), containing mostly Germans but also Austrians and Italians. Although the departure of these prisoners led to the closure of the facility, from the end of the Algerian War onwards the site was once again put into operation, receiving large numbers of Harkis. Then, from 1985 to 2007, part of this site was used as an administrative detention centre, consisting of several prefabricated buildings where foreigners awaiting deportation were held (Clochard, 2020, pp. 71–72). Through a chronological and critical approach to the history of migration, this chapter examines how migration from or to Europe, or even within the Continent, has evolved from 1945 to the present day. It views these changes through the lens of three specific periods, each of which begins in the post-war years, and which broadly follow on from each other, while also overlapping: 1945–1957, focusing on the major displacements of people resulting from the Second World War; 1946–1974, focusing on the increased use of immigrant workers; 1957–2020, focusing on the establishment of a free movement area and the strengthening of border controls. As the field of study is very large, for each of these periods we address the migration agreements established between states and the use of detention camps for foreigners that was connected to those agreements, both of which reveal the attitudes of those countries’ governments towards foreigners.

GERMANY: THE EPICENTRE OF POST-WAR DISPLACEMENT In 1945, in Germany and Austria, out of 10.5 million stateless people, prisoners of war and forced labourers who had survived the concentration camps, about 4.5 million returned to their countries of origin in Central and Eastern Europe (Fassmann and Münz, 1995, p. 48). The remaining people moved either within Germany and Austria, or to Palestine, Western European countries, or even the countries of North and South America. Conversely, many German-speaking people from European countries (the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and so on) ‘were dislodged from their homes and sent to Germany’ (Douglas, 2012, p. 9). Thus, post-war migration was mainly from or to Germany, but other European states were also

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252  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance involved. In total, almost 15.4 million Europeans left their country of origin in the aftermath of the Second World War, and this figure approaches 30 million once internal displacements within states are taken into account (Fassmann and Münz, 1995, p. 47). These migrations are made up of three main types of displacement: the return of people who had been detained in Nazi camps, the exile of displaced persons (DPs) linked to the territorial redrawing of nation states and the new geopolitical context of the Cold War that was then beginning to emerge, and the return of prisoners of war. The Return of People Detained in Nazi Camps While some of the survivors of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps returned to their country of origin, some refugees from the interwar period had no choice but to return to their first host country, such as the 73 Spanish Republican exiles who arrived in Angoulême in 1939 and were then deported on 20 August 1940 to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.4 Many survivors of the camps, after having been detained between 1945 and 1957 in camps in Germany (Köhn, 2015) – sometimes the very ones in which the Nazis had detained them, such as Auschwitz 1 (Poland) or Nováky (Czechoslovakia) – left for Palestine, Canada or the United States (US) (Ouzan, 2005). Thus, survivors of the camps and DPs ‘served as test subjects for practices of identification, selection and assistance, which have since become part of the contemporary handling of refugee problems in Europe’ (Cohen, 2000, p. 58). This management was mainly carried out under the aegis of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and subsequently by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).5 The Exile of Displaced Persons During this period, Europe was marked by ‘an extraordinary intermingling of populations’ (Simon, 1995, p. 265). Of the 18 million Germans living in the eastern territories of the Reich, almost 14 million were deported to the West between 1945 and 1951, 12.5 million of whom were initially settled in the areas controlled by the American, British or Russian authorities (Oltmer, 2013, p. 128). The largest exodus – which was the result of decisions taken by the Allies at the Potsdam Conference6 – involved movement from Poland and the USSR after the respective annexations of German and Baltic territories: almost 7 million Germans and people of German origin went into exile to the West. Another example is that of Czechoslovakia, which between 1945 and 1947 expelled almost the entire Sudeten German population – almost 3.2 million people (Stola, 1992) – followed by the exile of 50 000 Czechoslovakians in 1948 after the communist takeover in Prague. Hungary expelled 225 000 of the 400 000 people of German origin present on its territory. The same process could be observed in Romania and Yugoslavia, which expelled 130 000 and 360 000 people of German origin, respectively (Fassmann and Münz, 1995). These displacements took place from huge camps of 20 000 people, such as those at Bonyhád (Hungary) and Rudolfsgnad (Yugoslavia). The latter camp ‘closed in March 1948, although many of its former inmates remained subject to compulsory labour in state “businesses” or farms’ (Douglas, 2012, p. 176). Between 1945 and 1950, one-third of these DPs (almost 4 million) were resettled in the eastern part of Germany, then under the control of the Soviet army.7 The remaining 8 million

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Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements  253 were taken to western Germany,8 of whom nearly 7 million ‘were officially labelled “displaced persons,” a status that offered the valuable possibility of emigration’ (Cohen, 2000, pp. 57–60). Many of these people were kept in camps for DPs such as Belsen, a former military camp adjacent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Cau, 2020). These places ‘became waiting rooms for emigration; [thus] 137,450 people immigrated to the United States between May 1945 and December 1952’ (Ouzan, 2004, p. 38). Yet, in this ‘convulsive phase’ (Simon, 1995, p. 265), other migrations related to the recently concluded conflict took place besides those displacements towards Germany: 115,000 Czechs and Slovaks (from Hungary and Sub-Carpathian Ukraine) were resettled in the Sudetenland, South Bohemia, South Moravia, and central Slovakia. About 50,000 Ukrainians were forced to leave Czechoslovakia; 518,000 Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians had to leave Poland. They were resettled east of the Polish‒Soviet border established in 1945. More than 100,000 Italians were forced to leave Istria and Dalmatia … while 100,000 Slovenes and Croats from the same regions, annexed to Yugoslavia in 1945, emigrated to Italy and other countries. About 315,000 people belonging to the Hungarian minorities in South Slovakia, Transylvania (Romania), and Vojvodina (Serbia) were transferred to Hungary or ‘exchanged’ following orders from their respective governments. (Heinz and Rainer, 1995, p. 49)

Prisoners of War: Between Return, Captivity Regimes and Settlement These displacements were also accompanied by the return of a large number of prisoners of war to the victorious countries (the UK, France, the USSR, and so on) following negotiations between certain states. Thus, in the German zone under its control, the USSR kept French and British prisoners for months, or even more than a year after the end of the war, to ensure that their own nationals who had been released by the other Allied forces (members of the Red Army and other Soviet prisoners of war; see Gousseff, 2007) returned – sometimes against their will – to the Soviet Union. However, at the end of 1946 the Western Allies stopped carrying out the forced repatriation of these Eastern Europeans (Fassmann and Münz, 1995, pp. 47–48), a decision that opened the way for these foreigners to settle in Germany or even to migrate to other countries (Cœuré, 2013). Out of ‘three million Polish workers deported to Germany between 1939 and 1945, nearly 300,000 refused to return to their country, for both economic and political reasons, as early as 1946’ (Cohen, 2000, p. 60). The presence and ‘diplacements’ of prisoners of war were important because they could contribute to the initiation of new migrations. Thus, ‘in June 1945, Maurice Couve de Murville, the French ambassador to Rome, demanded that migrant workers be sent to France in exchange for the release of Italian prisoners of war’ (Faïta et al., 2013, p. 270). In France, between 1945 and 1948, the number of Axis prisoners of war remained high, at around 1 065 000, including mainly Germans (907 000), and Austrians, Italians, Hungarians and Romanians. Although many of these foreigners were subjected to regimes of captivity in one of the 121 ‘depots’ spread across metropolitan France (Hanus, 2013, p. 256), such as the one in Larzac where almost 10 000 people lived between 1945 and 1948, most of them lived with families and enjoyed a certain degree of freedom. From April 1947 onwards, most of them returned to Germany, but almost 140 000 Germans opted for a free civilian worker status, some spending their holidays in Germany in the French occupied zone (Théofilakis, 2007) and then returning to work in France.

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254  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The same happened in Belgium, where, owing to a lack of manpower in the coal mines, the government employed – with the agreement of the US and the UK – nearly 64 000 German prisoners of war. This policy came to an end in March 1948 with the departure of the last prisoners, who had been kept in camps (Sunou, 1980). The release of prisoners of war, which was due to the will of the UK and the US, led France, Belgium and the Netherlands to call on Italian labour (Rinauro, 2012, p. 14) and even that of other countries, a process that began at the end of the war and accelerated considerably from 1948 onwards.

THE (SOMETIMES INGLORIOUS) YEARS OF THE ‘TRENTE GLORIEUSES’ According to Georges Tapinos (1975), two periods can be distinguished after the Second World War, broadly corresponding to the period referred to in French as the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ (the 30 glorious years) owing to the rapid economic growth that France experienced: firstly, the period of reconstruction and of the avatars of organised immigration (1946–1955); and secondly, the period of economic expansion (1956–1974), which culminated in states trying to better control migration. These two periods were marked in several European countries – Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and even Switzerland – by the encouragement of labour and settlement immigration. Nevertheless, these types of immigration continued, with variations over time, to run up against restrictive policies inherited from the 1930s relating to the Great Depression (Rinauro, 2012, p. 13). They were eventually modified, on the one hand, by the construction of the European Economic Community (EEC) (Ma Mung, 2004), and on the other hand, by colonial liberation movements. The Steady Growth in Labour Migration Between 1946 and 1948, several states (Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK) signed bilateral agreements with Italy, followed by Germany (1955), Luxembourg (1957) and Switzerland (1964). By 1970, these labour recruitment arrangements had been extended to other European countries (Spain, Greece, Portugal, Turkey and Yugoslavia), and even to countries across the Mediterranean Sea (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). Some geopolitical developments contributed to this expansion, such as the construction of the Berlin Wall by East Germany in 1961, which prevented workers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from travelling to work in West Germany.9 In Europe, Italy was, until the mid-1960s, the leading country of labour emigration;10 emigration became an important issue – even enshrined in its new constitution – conceived as a way of offsetting unemployment and the social movements connected to it, especially at the end of the 1940s with the return of Italian prisoners of war. In Belgium, the regular arrivals of Italian workers from 1946 onwards, and increasingly so from 1948 onwards, replaced manpower that had been lost with the departures of German and Hungarian prisoners of war. From 1946 to 1958, the Belgian coal federation (Fédechar), in agreement with the Belgian state, which favoured family immigration, transported 17 669 Italian families, including 29 875 children, to the mining basins11 by rail and road (Morelli, 1988, p. 96). France also encouraged large numbers of Italians to come and work in the mines, industries (metallurgy,

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Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements  255 manufacturing, and so on) and agriculture, and delegations of the Office National d’Immigration (National Immigration Office, ONI) were set up in Milan, Rome and Turin. In both Belgium and France, the authorities used camps to help manage the arrival of these populations. In Belgium, the government obliged Fédechar ‘to buy back the former prisoner-of-war camps that belonged to the Belgian state’ (Morelli, 1988, p. 100). These camps, made up of shacks in a poor state of repair,12 accommodated immigrant families for varying lengths of time. In France, camps13 were set up by the ONI ‘where workers were subject to medical and professional selection, before being regularised in varying proportions depending on the economic situation. Those who were deemed “unfit” were sent back to Italy’ (Rinauro, 2012, p. 19). Far from working to combat illegal migration, governments were also open to foreign workers arriving outside the established channels.14 Movement was at the heart of political and economic projects, such as that of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) established in 1951 and the Treaty of Rome of 1957, although sometimes with some reluctance: Luxembourg wanted to limit the movement of people for fear of being inundated by Italian workers (Fraudreau, 2016, at 30:00 minutes). Other countries also had open immigration policies. Although, for the Spanish and Portuguese, the various labour agreements limited illegal immigration, they did not entirely prevent it, and some of those whose application for immigration was rejected decided to make the journey anyway, and were sometimes granted official status at the border.15 Thus, as a result of the labour agreement signed in April 1964 between France and Portugal, and of Spain’s decision in 1965 to issue a 30-day guarantee of safe conduct to Portuguese entering its territory, the number of Portuguese immigrants increased considerably, to the point of becoming the leading foreign nationality in France and Luxembourg.16 The Effects of Decolonisation The European states, having conquered and dominated immense colonial empires over many years, have a continuing inheritance from these migratory histories, long after the time when their colonies obtained their independence (Simon, 1995, p. 266). In addition to the continuing migration of nationals from ‘new states’ to the former colonial powers, there have also been the departures of the colonists themselves, and even of a part of the population that had collaborated with the colonisers. Thus, between 1945 and 1957, almost 230 000 people of Dutch nationality travelled (or returned) from Indonesia to the Netherlands, along with a further 13000 people from the island of Amboine in the Moluccas who had served ‘in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, [and] transferred [to camps] in Holland in 1951 with their families’ (Henry, 1958, p. 705). After the independence of Tunisia (1956) and the Congo (1960), immigration continued from these two countries; including, respectively, the return of ‘Belgians from the Congo’ (nearly 383 000 people between January 1958 and July 1960; Florence, 2019, p. 37) and the ‘French from Tunisia’, as well as some of the ‘Italians from Tunisia’ who did not return to Italy (Mourlane, 2016, p. 160).17 At the same time, Italians without official status represented ‘for France the largest source of recruitment for the Foreign Legion for the wars in Indochina and Algeria’ (Rinauro, 2012, p. 19).18 The independence of Algeria (1962) led to the exodus of many French Algerians (800 000 in 1962; 170 000 in 1963) and tens of thousands of Harkis.19 Of the latter, both those who

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256  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance were repatriated with the ‘French’ and those who reached metropolitan France by their own means were confined to small settlements or camps. The Larzac camp, where nearly 10 000 German prisoners had been confined between 1945 and 1948, and almost as many prisoners during the Algerian war,20 ‘received nearly 12,000 Harki refugees, who called it the “plateau of a thousand tents”’ (Bernardot, 2009).21 The Rivesaltes camp mentioned earlier also received nearly 22 000 Harkis between September 1962 and December 1964. These situations, initially presented as temporary, lasted until the early 1970s. Another consequence of the Algerian War was the movement of people between the two shores of the Mediterranean, which was one of the issues at stake in negotiations between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (Blanchard and Bertrand, 2019, p. 331), but was not included in the Évian Accords. Nevertheless, even though the principle of free movement was accepted, controls were later strengthened with the first protocol on labour immigration of 1964 and the Franco-Algerian agreement of 1968 (Clochard and Lemoux, 2017). Thus, from 1963 onwards, the control of foreigners – and in particular Algerians – arriving in Marseille involved arbitrary detention in a large warehouse at Arenc (Naylor, 2014). This centre, which paved the way for the widespread use of administrative detention centres as we know them today, was not given a formal legal status until 1981.

TOWARDS A EUROPEAN AREA OF FREE MOVEMENT AND FURTHER STRENGTHENING OF BORDER CONTROLS With the 1973 oil crisis, several countries (including Germany and France) closed their borders to foreigners,22 thus marking the start of a new historical era in migration policy, in which states reconsidered the desirability of immigration. The following decade witnessed a convergence of legislation on migration controls in different countries, then in the 1990s, with the Schengen agreements and the Treaty of Amsterdam, a communitarisation of measures (visas, asylum, agreements aimed at returning illegal migrants, and so on), although there remained significant divergences between national policies within the EU. Finally, with the gradual globalisation of the European migration system (Simon, 1995, p. 285), and the fight against illegal immigration, cooperation with the countries of origin became an increasingly important part of the management of migration to Europe. The Communitarisation of Migration Policies and the Use of Interior Detention Camps An intergovernmental approach to migration policies took shape in 1984 with the Saarbrücken Agreement, which provided for the gradual abolition of controls at the Franco-German border, and which, in 1995, the Schengen Agreement extended to other European states. As a counterpart to this free movement, all the states in the Schengen area (Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal), which have become countries of settlement with different migration systems, have adopted increasingly restrictive policies. Visas have been made compulsory for nationals of many countries outside the EEC; there have been reductions in the rate of recognition of refugee status; and, more broadly, measures aimed at combating illegal immigration have led to the creation of whole networks of sites where illegal immigrants are detained before being expelled.

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Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements  257 The view held by many European politicians is that ‘immigration is both a demographic and an economic problem’ (Casella Colombeau, 2017, p. 28), although this may vary depending on the economic needs of the country (Laurens, 2019). However, in each EU member state, the share of citizens with non-EU nationality is generally less than 6 per cent,23 and if we look at the categories of asylum seekers and refugees alone, the numbers of people have always represented, between 1957 and 2017, less than 2 per cent of the population of the countries of the European Community. The project of harmonising migration policies was initiated with the summit in Tampere in 1999. This led to the creation of a framework for the use of detention systems and administrative detention, which became ‘a pillar of the policies of concentration and dispersion of migrants’ (Migreurop, 2017, p. 41). Faced with the perceived ‘migratory risk’, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, also known as Frontex, which has been coordinating the management of controls at the EU’s external borders since 2004, set up joint charter flights from the large administrative detention centres, relying on bilateral (for example, Spain‒ Senegal) or multilateral (agreements signed by the EU) cooperation, or even on agreements signed directly between Frontex and third countries, thus extending the reach of the EU’s policy outside its borders (Martin, 2017). Moving towards a Better Management of Migration Flows and the Use of Exterior Detention Camps Among these agreements, the European Neighbourhood Policy and Mobility Partnerships established between the EU and its neighbouring countries are generally conditional on the strengthening of migration controls. The aim is to return foreigners without legal status to their country of origin, or to the countries through which they have transited. In 2004 and 2007, the integration of new member states into the EU led to the implementation of policies for the identification, detention and removal of migrants in neighbouring countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia). New administrative detention centres were created, while the capacity of existing camps was increased. In 2008, Moldova was the first state to sign a Mobility Partnership with the EU, and between 2010 and 2012 it adopted a series of laws and amendments relating to the status of foreigners, border controls, ‘and the operation of an administrative detention centre for foreigners without legal status’ (Brouillette, 2018, p. 200). In 2014, the same happened in Georgia, which, under pressure from the EU, created an administrative detention centre while imposing visa requirements on nationals from a larger number of countries. On the southern shore of the Mediterranean, European states have also sought to maintain impervious borders through surveillance and a multitude of agreements with the countries of the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as with international organisations such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The use by European states of strident rhetoric directed against illegal immigration maintains the idea that African immigration could ‘surge’ into Europe, even though there are no figures to indicate this (Lessault and Beauchemin, 2009; Héran, 2018). The externalisation of European migration policies (Blanchard, 2006) contributes, on the one hand, to redirecting some migratory flows towards longer and more dangerous routes,24 and on the other hand, to marginalising a number of populations from African countries. The consequence of this is the creation of detention camps for foreigners. In Morocco, there are informal

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258  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance camps around the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, in addition to detention centres for foreigners operating without a legislative framework.25 In Libya, administrative detention centres have been largely financed by the EU: in 2008 Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, promised €5 billion to Colonel Gaddafi for limiting the departure of migrants from Libya; in early 2017, €237 million were pledged as part of the European Trust Fund for Africa; and in February 2017, Italy signed a Memorandum with the Libyan Government of National Accord, led by Fayez el-Sarraj.26 Following a UN fact-finding mission to Libya, it was concluded in October 2021 that the Libyan authorities had been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity since 2016, especially against migrants held in camps and prisons. In Niger, the deportation of migrants from Algeria and Libya, and the presence of foreign actors (from France, Germany, Italy, and so on), together with the receipt of financial aid, are also evidence of the EU’s external actions.

CONCLUSION Since the end of the Second World War, most European states have attempted to organise the arrival (or presence) of foreigners on their territory through various forms of encampments and/or bilateral or multilateral agreements between states. In some periods, the use of encampments preceded migration, such as during the great displacements that followed the Second World War; in other periods, life in camps followed after people’s migration to the host countries, as in the case of the Harkis following Algerian independence in 1962, or that of the use of administrative detention centres to hold undocumented foreigners. The common factor in the use of camps before and during migration is that they both involve processes of dehumanisation, which undermine the dignity of the people who are confined there. Contemporary camps for foreigners – including those existing in disguised forms, such as the ‘hotspots’ that, in theory, and according to the earliest official declarations about them, were supposed to help redirect certain migrants to other EU countries – bear strong resemblances to the camps of the post-war period or at the time of decolonisation, as depicted in studies on this subject: they are places where the right to life, work, health, family life and freedom are severely restricted, not only by dictatorial regimes, but also by democratic ones. Although there are oppositions and tensions between the logics of states, with their use of camps and agreements, and the migratory projects of individuals, these different measures for the management of migration also show ‘the limits of a planned immigration model between states’ (Spire, 2002, p. 10). Whatever the period in question, authorities in different European countries have had difficulty controlling all migratory flows. Nevertheless, the history of these immigrant populations, who adapt to the rules of those states, whether by respecting them, circumventing them, or even challenging them, is an integral part of European history.

NOTES 1.

2.

The EU‒Turkey Declaration of 18 March 2016, which seems to have become a reference point for European policy regarding the externalisation of migration controls. In a Communication of 7 June 2016 (COM/2016/0385), the European Commission praised it on the grounds that ‘its elements can inspire cooperation with other key third countries and point to the key levers to be activated’. All translations into English, except where stated otherwise, are my own.

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Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements  259 3. This was the case, for example, of the Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in Germany, whose stay, according to the authorities, was expected to be of short duration. 4. In France, this was the first civilian deportation convoy of the Second World War, involving a total of 927 people. See Boulligny and Brière (2009). 5. The UNRRA operated between 1943 and 1947. The IRO operated between 1946 and 1952, and was then replaced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In France this work is supplemented by that of the Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons). 6. The Potsdam Conference was held between 17 July and 2 August 1945 in order to determine the treatment of enemy nations. It was organised by the US, the USSR and the UK. France did not participate in this conference. 7. On the subject of the difficult reception of DPs in the Soviet occupation zone, Aurélie Denoyer (2017, p. 10) refers to the work of Alfred J. Ribeir (2000). 8. For 530 000 people of German origin (making up 4 per cent of the total number of German-speakers living in the eastern territories of the Reich) the territory of exile was Austria (Fassmann and Münz, 1995, p. 48). 9. About 2.5 million people from the GDR emigrated to West Germany between 1945 and 1961 (Simon, 1995, p. 275). 10. There were nearly 200 000 Italians in Belgium according to the 1961 census (representing 44 per cent of all foreigners). In France, their number was recorded as 571 684 in 1962 (representing 29 per cent of all foreigners). 11. Those found at Charleroi and Liège as well as in the regions of Campine and Hainaut. 12. Anne Morelli (1988, p. 100) mentions several of these ‘waiting camps’ (as they were called at the time) in the regions of Liège (Sclessin), Borinage (Ste Félicité, Flénu, Tertre ‒ 2 camps, Hensies, Wasmes ‒ 2 camps, Doux), Centre (Forchies-la-Marche, Fontaine-l’Evêque ‒ 2 camps), and Limburg, where a camp made of asphalt cardboard gave rise to a press campaign in Italy (see Louis Verschraegen, ‘La vie des mineurs italiens en Belgique’, Le Soir, 15 July 1955). 13. At Albertville, Montmélian, Bourg-Saint-Maurice, Modane, Nice, Menton, Marseille, Lyon, Nancy and Bordeaux. In total, the ONI ‘had 24 regional centres’ (Faïta et al., 2013, p. 270). 14. Anne Morelli (1988, p. 96) emphasises that such ‘individual’ arrivals probably made up the majority of labour migration. 15. ‘Between 1969 and 1971, 350,000 Portuguese reached Hendaye, an average of over 300 new arrivals per day’ (Pereira, 2019, p. 341). 16. In 1975, more than 750 000 Portuguese were registered in France (Poinard, 1993, p. 389). In Luxembourg, the number of Portuguese in 1974 was 12 800, representing 26.7 per cent of the foreign population (Gehring, 1981, p. 746). In West Germany, their number was about 47 000 in 1969 (Leloup, 1972, p. 70). 17. For a numerical estimate of French and Italian departures from Tunisia, see Wolkowitsch (1959, pp. 254–256). 18. About 5000 Italian legionnaires were fighting in Indochina at the end of the war in 1954, and some 1300 more had died during the war. At least 10 000 Italians had joined the Foreign Legion since the end of the Second World War, most of them illegal immigrants to France, thus making up the second-largest national group in the Legion after Germans. 19. The term ‘Harki’ refers to members of the auxiliary forces of the French army in Algeria, and their families. 20. From April 1959 to July 1962, Larzac was the main camp for Algerians in metropolitan France, and more than 3000 people were placed there at one time (Bernardot, 2009). 21. For a list of the places where the Harkis were taken in the South-East of France, see Histoire colonial et postcoloniale (2010). 22. There are exceptions to this general policy of closed borders, such as France’s reception of nearly 130 000 refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia between 1975 and 1984 (Meslin, 2006). 23. The exceptions to this are Estonia and Latvia, which both have a large foreign community with a Russian-speaking majority (representing almost 15 per cent of the population), which is a legacy of the geopolitical fragmentation that prevailed in Europe in 1989.

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260  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 24. More than 50 000 men, women and children died between 1993 and 2020 at the EU’s borders (see Lambert, 2020). 25. See the map in Elsa Tyszler’s (2015, p. 15) report. 26. For the location of camps in Libya, see the project ‘The Libyan Crossroad’ (https://​novact​.org/​ thelibyancrossroad/​).

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Detention camps for foreigners and international agreements  261 Hanus, P. (2013). Franz Ell, prisonnier de guerre allemand, de Toulon à Vassieux. In P. Hanus and L. Teulières (eds), Vercors des milles Chemins: Figures de l’étrangers en temps de guerre (pp. 256–265). Comptoir d’édition. Heinz, F. and Rainer, M. (1995). La migration d’Est en Ouest en Europe (1918‒1993). Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 11(3), 4366. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3406/​remi​.1995​.1477. Henry, L. (1958). Le rapatriement des Hollandais d’Indonésie. Population, (4), 705–706. https://​www​ .persee​.fr/​doc/​pop​_0032​-4663​_1958​_num​_13​_4​_5745. Héran, F. (2018). Comment se fabrique un oracle: La prophétie de la ruée africaine sur l’Europe. La vie des idées. https://​laviedesidees​.fr/​migrations​-afrique​-prejuge​-stephen​_smith​-oracle​.html. Histoire colonial et postcoloniale (2010). L’arrivée des harkis en France: Camps, hameaux de forestage et cités de transit. https://​histoirecoloniale​.net/​l​-arrivee​-des​-harkis​-en​-France​.html. Köhn, H. (2015). Jewish life in camps after 1945: Displaced persons camps in the US Zone of Germany. In A. Hoppe (ed.), Catastrophes: Views from natural and human science (pp. 63–80). Springer. Lambert, N. (2020, 26 February). Fermer les frontières tue! Neocarto. https://​neocarto​.hypotheses​.org/​ 9586. Laurens, S. (2019). 1973, date-pillier. In R. Bertrand and P. Boucheron (eds), Faire musée d’une histoire commune: Rapport de préfiguration de la nouvelle exposition permanente du musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (pp. 353–362). Seuil. Leloup, Y. (1972). L’émigration portugaise dans le monde et ses conséquences pour le Portugal. Revue de géographie de Lyon, 47(1), 59–76. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3406/​geoca​.1972​.1601. Lessault, D., and Beauchemin, C. (2009). Ni invasion, ni exode: Regards statistiques sur les migrations d’Afrique subsaharienne. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 25(1), 163–194. Ma Mung, E. (2004). French immigration policy during the last twenty years. In D. Turton and J. Gonzalez (eds), Immigration in Europe (pp. 113–126). University of Deusto. Martin, M. (2017). Frontex: Contrôlées en toute impunité, des frontières à géométrie variable. In Migreurop, Atlas des migrants en Europe: Approches critiques des politiques migratoires (pp. 110–111). Armand Colin. Meslin, K. (2006). Accueil des boat people: Une mobilisation politique atypique. Plein droit, (70), 35–39. https://​www​.cairn​.info/​revue​-plein​-droit​-2006​-3​-page​-35​.htm. Migreurop (2017). Atlas des migrants en Europe: Approches critiques des politiques migratoires. Armand Colin. Morelli, A. (1988). L’appel de la main d’œuvre italienne pour les charbonnages et sa prise en charge à son arrivée en Belgique dans l’immédiat après-guerre. Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine, (1–2), 83–130. https://​www​.j​ournalbelg​ianhistory​.be/​fr/​node/​645. Mourlane, S. (2016). La question migratoire dans les relations franco-italiennes dans les années 1950–1960. Cahiers d’études italiennes, (22), 159–173. http://​journals​.openedition​.org/​cei/​2938. Naylor, E. (2014). Le centre d’Arenc (1963–2006): Du refoulement des ‘hébergés’ à la rétention administrative. Appendix 12 in A. Battegay, S. Chabani, E. Naylor and M.-T. Têtu, Lieux à mémoire multiples et enjeux d’interculturalité: Le cas de deux lieux en cours de patrimonialisation: la prison de Montluc (Lyon) et le centre de rétention d’Arenc (Marseille). Ministère de la Culture (France). Oltmer, J. (2013). L’accueil et l’intégration des réfugiés et expulsés allemands de l’Est de l’Europe en Basse-Saxe. In Corinne Bouillot (ed.), La reconstruction en Normandie et en Basse-Saxe après la seconde guerre mondiale (pp. 269‒285). Presses Universitaire de Rouen et du Havre. https://​books​ .openedition​.org/​purh/​5346. Ouzan, F. (2004). La reconstruction des identités juives dans les camps de personnes déplacées d’Allemagne. Bulletin du Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem, (14), 35–49. https://​journals​ .openedition​.org/​bcrfj/​121​#text. Ouzan, F. (2005). Föhrenwald, dernier camp de personnes déplacées: Îlot de vie juive sur le sol allemand ou ‘salle d’attente de l’émigration’? Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, (182), 211–232. https://​www​.cairn​ .info/​revue​-revue​-d​-histoire​-de​-la​-shoah​-2005​-1​-page​-211​.htm. Pereira, V. (2019). 1964. Les régularisations de la gare d’Hendaye. In R. Bertrand and P. Boucheron (eds), Faire musée d’une histoire commune: Rapport de préfiguration de la nouvelle exposition permanente du musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (pp. 338‒341). Seuil. Poinard, M. (1993). Bilans et leçons de l’immigration portugaise en France. Espace, populations, sociétés, (2), 389–398. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3406/​espos​.1993​.1599.

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262  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Ribeir, A.J. (2000). Forced Migration in Central and Eastern Europe (1939–1950). Routledge. Rinauro, S. (2012). La frontière irrésistible: L’immigration irrégulière des italiens en France après la deuxième guerre mondiale. Migrations Société, (141–142), 13–26. Simon, G. (1995). Geodynamique des migrations internationals. Armand Colin. Spire, A. (2002). Un régime dérogatoire pour une immigration convoitée: Les politiques françaises et italiennes d’immigration/émigration après 1945. Studi emigrazione, (146), 309–323. https://​halshs​ .archives​-ouvertes​.fr/​halshs​-00721669/​document. Stola, D. (1992). Forced migrations in Central European history. International Migration Review, (2), 324–341. Sunou, P. (1980). Les prisonniers de guerre allemands en Belgique et la bataille du charbon (1945–1947). Musée royal de l’armée (Brussels). Tapinos, G. (1975). L’immigration étrangère en France de 1945 à 1973. Population, (2), 315–317. https://​www​.persee​.fr/​doc/​pop​_0032​-4663​_1975​_num​_30​_2​_15788. Théofilakis, F. (2007). Les prisonniers de guerre allemands en mains françaises dans les mémoires nationales en France et en Allemagne après 1945. Cahiers d’histoire: Revue d’histoire critique, (100), 67–84. http://​journals​.openedition​.org/​chrhc/​691. Wolkowitsch, M. (1959). L’émigration des Français de Tunisie. Annales de Géographie, (367), 253–257. https://​www​.persee​.fr/​doc/​geo​_0003​-4010​_1959​_num​_68​_367​_16315.

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18. Economic interests and EU border and migration control: from security hindrances to market opportunities Damien Simonneau

INTRODUCTION In the current era of securitisation of migration and neoliberalisation of public policies, private actors are involved in multiple ways in border and migration control and governance. Their involvement raises a number of dilemmas regarding public‒private relationships. The boundaries of state and sovereign activities are at stake, as are biases regarding the management of migration and trans-border circulation as security issues, with important implications for human rights both in Europe and in the Global South. This chapter delineates three positions of private actors in current European Union (EU) border and migration control policies. Firstly, border and migration control can be experienced, from a private interest perspective, as security hindrances to the circulation of workers and goods across borders. Indeed, business activities are dependent on (and constrained by) state norms regarding border control. However, the relevant literature suggests that border control should rather be considered as a tool aimed at the production of profits. State policies actually support the smooth circulation of goods while constraining and selecting the mobility of the migrant workforce. The involvement of private businesses is thus differentiated when considering the control of goods (especially when organised by free trade agreements and dedicated border infrastructure) and, alternatively, when considering the control of migrant workers. In the latter case, business involvement is more discreet and dependent on national political factors. Secondly, some private actors act as operators of border controls, through the outsourcing of migration policies, and they benefit from these activities. The New Public Management paradigm allows for multiple opportunities for private actors to participate directly in the various activities of border and migration control, including the detention and expulsion of migrants, as well as the issuing of visas. This position raises questions about the state’s avoidance of blame and use of practices of governance ‘from a distance’. It also raises questions regarding the role of private companies in the extraterritorialisation of border control, especially in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Thirdly, private actors, specifically private security companies, can be considered as policy drivers. In collaboration with national and EU institutions, they also provide technological solutions fulfilling the EU agenda of developing a security market. Consequently, while controlling migration or circulation, private actors benefit from public spending on border control technology, in a self-perpetuating logic. The strengthening of this market has little to do with defending the rights of people on the move or improving accountability for the increasing number of migrants’ deaths across the Continent. This chapter addresses these dilemmas in public‒private relationships, drawing on a literature review and some contemporary examples of the involvement of private actors. 263 Damien Simonneau - 9781789908077 39:08AM

264  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance

BACKGROUND AND DEFINITIONS OF THE PRIVATE ACTOR The evolution of EU border and migration control (Guild and Bigo, 2005; Guiraudon and Lahav, 2007) over the last two decades offers an interesting multilevel field for addressing the question of public‒private relationships. In a process that began among some EU member states in the 1980s, and which accelerated after the Tampere European Council and the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999, border and migration control policies have been partially brought under the remit of a new common EU migration and asylum policy. They have also been extraterritorialised to third-country territories, or localised to certain control spots situated within EU member states’ territories. They have been digitalised, becoming ‘smarter’ through a strategy of technology-driven control; and they have been militarised through Operation Sophia, the European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR Med) operation, and the building of fences along the Balkan route. Finally, EU border and migration control has given rise to discrimination in mobility, by guaranteeing freedom of movement throughout the Schengen space for EU citizens while creating obstacles for third-country nationals and asylum seekers. These processes have led to the proliferation of actors involved in border control, including not only state police and military, but also new supranational EU agencies dedicated to migration governance ‒ such as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (eu-LISA) ‒ and private actors. This has made it more difficult to interpret the web of migration policies. Indeed, the very definition of ‘private actors’ is at stake in this debate. In economics, a private actor is defined by their use of labour and capital, according to the relations between supply and demand, to produce and sell goods or services in a market so as to generate profits. A private actor could therefore be reduced to their pursuit of economic interest. However, political economy and sociology (Granovetter and Swedberg, 2018) situate this search for profit in the ‘politics of economic activity’ (Smith, 2016). Institutions – broadly defined as rules, norms, practices and conventions – need to be taken into consideration in order to grasp the representations and values, as well as the influence and interactions with state actors, that private actors develop. The involvement of private actors in politics is discussed in multiple ways (Ciepley, 2013), addressing the strategies used by private interests to influence public entities, the participation of these actors in state policies, and their impacts on models of public policy governance orientated towards ‘horizontality’ and ‘flexibility’. Some studies (Guiraudon, 2002; Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg-Sorensen, 2013; Infantino, 2016b) document the intertwining of private sector actors in the traditional strongholds of state prerogatives (police, justice, security, migration), highlighting the fuzziness of the classic delineation between the public and the private. The studies and examples discussed in this chapter all relate to the following questions: does the intervention of the private sector in migration governance qualify or challenge the authority of states? In other words, how do private actors shape and transform state sovereignty over migration control? What is the level of autonomy and agency of the private sector in migration governance in relation to states? How do the transformations brought about by migration impact private sector actors and lead them to address migration-related issues? The following sections detail three positions adopted by private actors in current EU border and migration policies. On this basis, the chapter argues that EU migration policy and its border

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Economic interests and EU border and migration control  265 dimension1 is dependent on a multiplicity of public‒private relationships that support trade and the recruitment of certain types of migrant workers, while performing control procedures and generating profits for private actors, thereby constructing a profitable security market. The classic criticism aimed at this development is that, while EU border and migration control leads to violent consequences and attacks on individual rights and refugee law, it simultaneously facilitates the avoidance of blame for these consequences.

BORDER AND MIGRATION CONTROL, BETWEEN FACILITATION AND CONSTRAINT OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY At first sight, border and migration control seems to represent a hindrance to economic activity. However, border control and capitalism have a shared history. From the Enclosure Movement in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (Jones, 2016) to the contemporary globalised economy, the productive power of border controls for generating and filtering flows of commodities, labour and information has been crucial to the development of the capitalist system. Despite some theses from the 1990s arguing for the irrelevance of borders and the idea of a zero-sum game between globalisation and borders, border controls ‘play a key role in the production of the heterogeneous time and space of contemporary global and postcolonial capitalism’ (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013, p. ix). Economic activity is impacted upon by security measures, but it is also produced by them. In this regard, the dilemma in public‒private relationships consists in arbitrating between, on the one hand, the facilitation of utilitarian mobility (of goods and workers), and on the other hand, border controls operated for the sake of security (threat management) and taxation (customs and fees). Public authorities currently support trade and the selection of migrant workers. Private actors seem to care about limiting obstructions to the circulation of goods, which influences public authorities to adjust supply chain management. When it comes to the regulation of the circulation of migrant workers, the mobilisation of private actors is more discreet and ambivalent. These tensions will be examined in light of the issues for border controls raised by Brexit, and the particular issue of migrant recruitment in agriculture. Regarding trans-border circulation, border studies draw attention to the shaping of border policies and conditions for trans-border cooperation (Brunet-Jailly, 2007; Hamez et al., 2013). Brunet-Jailly (2007, p. 2) identifies four factors that influence these processes: support for trans-border policies from different levels of decision-making, favourable local support, the sharing of a trans-border culture, and dynamics supported by market forces. In his model, top-down national security policies may contradict economic and trade interests. The role of supportive public‒private relations is thus key to the creation of ‘free zones’, trans-border metropoles (such as Lille‒Courtrai‒Tournai), or the harmonisation of trade and transport norms. Such strategies aimed at facilitating trade are at the heart of the EU project Interreg and the creation of European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTCs) with a view to reducing administrative barriers and enhancing trans-border projects. The role of private actors in facilitating international trade and shaping transnational norms through multilateral or bilateral agreements has also been demonstrated by studies in the field of international political economy (Graz and Niang, 2013; Bourguinat, 2019). Such transnational norms are squeezed between the imperatives of trans-nationalising production and protecting the national workforce and industry, and are also impacted upon by tax cuts, customs clearances

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266  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance and import‒export quotas. Spatial arrangements and infrastructure such as commercial zones, strategic corridors and transport hubs are also central elements for adding value to border areas and exchanges (Lebrun, 2013; Sohn, 2014). Preserving the capacity for prosperity of a political and economic entity in a context of risks and threats in the international system has come to constitute a national security issue (Dent, 2007). Commercial logistics, originating from military technology in the Second World War (Cowen, 2010; Levinson, 2016), have now come to influence the strategies of companies and national security policies abroad. Such strategic interests in the facilitation of trade can be seen with the implementation of fast inspections programmes, such as the US C-TPAT (Customs‒Trade Partnership Against Terrorism) for cargo inspections or the Container Security Initiative (CSI). The functioning of border ports of entry and customs procedures, whether at land or sea borders, strives to adhere to the principles of trade logistics and ‘just-in-time’ production (Heyman, 2004). Private actors and state authorities work hand in hand to assure the facilitation of trade. When border controls are disrupted, border trade actors become mobilised – sometimes quite vocally – to ensure the restoration of fluid supply chains. This has been the case regarding the management of borders between the EU and the United Kingdom (UK) in a post-Brexit era (McKinnon, 2019). When the UK left the Single Market and the Customs Union in 2021, UK business actors accused the UK government of increasing paperwork and waiting times at border points. Belgian business actors were worried about unexpected taxation and delays, as well as customs formalities. Since January 2021, they have tended to reconsider trading relations with UK companies and to reorganise their production. For business actors, the decisions that they make regarding the certification of products, customs declarations and the payment of tariffs need to be adjusted, depending on the role that they play in a specific supply chain (as producers, buyers, hauliers, port authorities, and so on). They also depend on the readiness of border infrastructure to operate health-related controls or implement temporary storage, especially along the London‒Dover‒Calais route. The bordering process is already impacting upon some very varied and trans-nationalised chains of production (The Economist, 2021). For instance, 60 per cent of components assembled at the BMW plant in Oxford (UK) are from other EU countries. The position of private actors regarding the circulation of migrant workers is more ambivalent, and mostly guided by utility. Due to the sensitive politicisation of migration, their mobilisation is more discreet, as the selection of migrant workers can conflict with rights and working conditions, often leading to illegality (De Genova, 2004). Border and migration controls play a role in the selection of foreign workers, the issuing of work visas, and selective regularisations. These measures also create comparative advantages based on the differences in wealth between developed and developing countries (Morice, 2004; Heyman, 2012). Some studies (Durand and Massey, 2004; Ruhs, 2013) measure the factors that influence employers’ unions in their decisions to intervene in the regularisation of foreign workers or in recruitment procedures. In the United States (US), Hollifield (1994) highlights the intervention of employers in the fresh produce sector in the South West and California in the regularisation of foreign workers at the time of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, in line with other business sectors that were similarly favourable to free trade agreements. Hollifield (1997) and Zolberg (2006) characterise such mobilisations as ad hoc coalitions of ‘strange bedfellows’, which have sometimes led market forces and defenders of rights to work together to influence immigration reforms. Looking at six European countries, Menz (2009, 2010) distinguishes the varying roles of employers’ unions in the design of migration policy, depending on the various

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Economic interests and EU border and migration control  267 labour regimes found across the EU, demands for high- or low-skilled workers, different modes of capitalism and growth models, as well as the different lobbying tactics used by sectors or umbrella organisations with different organisational capacities. He concludes by identifying the use of a discreet form of mobilisation, a silent lobbying, that is less homogeneous than it appears. For instance, Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to welcome 800 000 predominantly Syrian migrants could also be explained by the lack of workers identified by the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) (Laubenthal, 2019). Peters (2017) also adds to the understanding of the mobilisation of business interests, observing that certain opportunities to offshore production to countries with lower labour costs result in less involvement from the private sector in pushing for new migrant workers to add to the domestic labour force. Migration policies are often characterised by economic utility. This was the case in France in the aftermath of the Second World War, when state agencies played a prominent role in recruitment (Spire, 2005). In July 1974, the government officially suspended work migration schemes, but the principle of utility still predominates in certain sectors, such as agriculture, which has led to a greater complexity in the interventions of multiple private intermediaries. For example, the agriculture sector requires a flexible foreign labour force (of workers who are prepared to face difficult working conditions), and their needs depend on the farming calendar and the weather (Calavita and Kitty, 2005; Morice and Potot, 2010; Hellio and Moreno Nieto, 2018). European working regulations also impact on the recruitment of temporary workers in EU countries. For example, workers are now recruited by interim companies, such as ETT Terra Fecundis (Décosse and Desalvo, 2017), which is specialised in ‘international service provision’ using short-term contracts. Foreign workers are subordinated to their employers and interim agencies, leading to illegality, precarity, and the non-respect of working and wage standards. State actors are now marginal in the regulation of this process, with very few regularisation campaigns, which further lowers the status of these foreign workers. However, recent labour shortages during the first general COVID-19 lockdown of spring 2020 during harvest time illustrated the dependency of the agriculture sector in Western European countries on foreign workers from the Maghreb and Eastern Europe. The European Commission even considered such mobility as essential, thus easing border controls despite the health risks. Italy opted for the regularisation of undocumented workers who were already present, and extended temporary stays. Private actors in agriculture tend to consider migration through the lens of a maximisation of utility, while capitalising on the retreat of the state in this domain. Their mobilisation to influence the control of migrant workers is thus very discreet, and tarnished by precarity and illegality. Border and migration control represents a tool for the production of profits for private actors. However, we observe a different positioning in public‒private relationships when considering the circulation of goods and of migrant workers. Private actors openly influence public authorities with regard to cross-border supply chain management in the name of national security and free trade. Public authorities have internalised the just-in-time principle and the facilitation of trade, and try to minimise security hindrances. When it comes to the circulation of migrant workers, the mobilisation of private actors is more discreet and ambivalent. Their involvement is based on utility, to the detriment of working conditions. It relies upon a mix of economic conditions, the dependency of some industries on foreign workers, and the capacities of employers to organise.

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BORDER AND MIGRATION CONTROL AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR ECONOMIC PROFITS The chapter has shown that private actors are not passive in relation to border and migration control. Other studies analyse their direct involvement in migration control as part of the outsourcing of state activities. Private actors are therefore operators of border controls. This widespread process not only generates profits, but also raises questions about interactions with migrants in the issuing of visas, transportation, policing, detention and removals. It allows state actors to avoid blame and legal responsibility for the human consequences of their outsourcing of control. Words such as ‘outsourcing’, ‘privatising’ or ‘subcontracting’ point to the current neoliberalisation of many state policies (Hibou, 1998, 2004). They relate to various modalities for non-state actors, including business actors, to participate in sovereign policies such as migration controls (Kretsedemas, 2008). This process, marked by the evolution of most public policies towards the paradigm of the New Public Management (NPM) over the last 20 years, calls into question traditional conceptions of the legal-rational state. It is part of a macro-economic ideological shift, breaking from the state’s monopoly over certain areas of policy, and prioritising business-friendly relations and the preferences of the private sector. The process varies according to each national type of capitalism and political economy. For example, it is more pronounced in the UK than in Germany or France. NPM discourse views the market as tool of public action for improving the performance of public services by identifying the supposed dysfunctions of state policies. It promotes the use of public‒private cooperation as a means to solve these problems by achieving quantifiable results to the benefit of users (Bezes, 2009). State actors thus seek to reproduce market activities. NPM is not neutral, and is not aimed only at achieving efficiency or cost reduction. The process of outsourcing includes explicit, formal forms of privatisation set out in contracts between public and private actors, but also implicit forms of privatisation, through the appropriation by private actors of social functions formerly allocated to non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Outsourcing occurs through public bids, supposedly in the name of fair competition, but such processes actually reward trust, and favour the few companies that are able to provide such services. When applied to migration policies (Guiraudon and Lahav, 2000; Guiraudon, 2002; Menz, 2013; Gammeltoft-Hansen, 2013; Infantino, 2016a, 2016b), outsourcing actually reinforces the logic of control and the filtering of undesirable migration, resulting in a dilution of legal responsibility, depoliticisation through the reduction of possibilities for recourse, and governance ‘from a distance’. The rationale is one of reducing costs and using private actors to access the migrant population directly, all while distancing them from state actors. Despite some initial reluctance from both public and private actors, the process now seems to serve the interests of both the state and the private sector: while the state frees itself of the burden of directly managing the migrant population, the private sector makes profits at the expense of migrants themselves, who are treated as users and deprived of direct connection to state actors. States, thus, do not disappear, but rather modify their relations with both operators and users in a process that is difficult to curtail or reverse. The disciplinary effect does not disappear either, as the state involves private actors in migration control, especially in the control of unwanted migrants. The EU asylum and migration policy also supports this move by providing a legal framework for outsourcing, especially with regard to visa harmonisation, as detailed in the Schengen Convention of 1990, then later when the issuing of visas was brought under

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Economic interests and EU border and migration control  269 the remit of the EU from 1999. Varying degrees of outsourcing can be observed when looking at, for example, the involvement of transport companies in border control, the management of detention centres, and the issuing of visas in consulates. It should also be pointed out that researchers and activists in migration policies experience difficulties in accessing contracts or public bids, which are protected behind a corporate veil that hinders public oversight and independent scrutiny. At the turn of the century, studies analysed the involvement of transport companies (maritime, airline or road carriers) in migration control (Cruz, 1995; Zolberg, 1999; Le Bourhis, 2001). They highlighted the penalties that states imposed on transporters of undocumented migrants, stressing the initial reluctance from companies, particularly airlines, to be involved in what they considered as forced cooperation. However, the control rationale gradually became established in companies’ activities with the development of security units. Some of them cooperated with state control, being paid to do so (Menz, 2013). The context of the 1990s, characterised by an increase in asylum claims, led states to extend the use of sanctions on transporters in order to curb the rate of arrivals. This practice was endorsed by the 1990 Schengen Implementing Convention and also by the 2001 EU directive transferring the responsibility (and costs) of removing unwanted migrants onto the company. Transport companies thus became deputies of border police, through various contracts and Memoranda of Understanding (Guiraudon, 2002). Asylum seekers were prevented from reaching asylum and justice systems, at the expense of humanitarian considerations. Twenty years on, the role of transport companies is key in the operation of border controls, despite some objections to their relationship with the police and the fines that they still receive. For example, in 2016, Air France appealed to the Conseil Constitutionnel, after being fined twice in the same year, regarding its requirement to act in the place of the French border police (Anafé, 2020, p. 54). The Conseil concluded that companies would still be fined if they transport someone without proper documentation arriving from a non-Schengen area. However, it drew a limit to their involvement, recognising that checking travellers’ documents was still the responsibility of the police. It confirmed that, legally, there is no official delegation of this public service. Companies are thus reproducing police controls, or hiring private security companies to perform those controls, with the approval of the judicial system, and thereby further distancing asylum seekers from international protection. Private sector involvement in the 360 immigration detention centres across Europe, detaining some 47 000 migrants, varies considerably between states (Rodier, 2012; Tassin, 2016). It reveals the level of privatisation of state policies. In France, the food supply is mostly provided by Sodexo, the cleaning service by Elior, and building maintenance by Bouygues and Vinci (MIGREUROP, 2020). In Italy, pre-removal detention centres are managed by private companies and not-for-profit entities such as the Italian Red Cross, as a result of tenders, with contracts allocated according to financial criteria. Outsourced services include administrative management, medical assistance, transport, delivery of goods, meal provision and cleaning services. In Spain, only certain services are privatised, such as medical services and interpretation, raising serious issues regarding the right to private life and confidentiality around medical data, due to the information technology (IT) servers that are used. In Greece, since 2013, the security provider G4S has managed a number of migrant detentions centres. Additionally, since 2016, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) has held a contract with G4S for the security of its staff in the Moria hotspot on Lesbos. In Germany, in 2015, authorities turned to private management consultancy firms to streamline its asylum procedures. Moreover, private

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270  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance companies are contracted to provide services such as security, catering, social services, and psychological and medical assistance in various facilities. One of these companies is European Homecare, which has been involved in numerous scandals, including the mistreatment of detainees. In all countries, the process is raising serious concerns about conditions of detention and the respect of rights. The case of the UK is particularly illustrative. The UK was the first country in Europe to test the privatisation of migration detention in the 1970s (Bacon, 2005). Migration control, the management of detention centres, and removals procedures were outsourced completely to G4S, an international company specialised in ‘security and defence services’. The contract between G4S and the UK government, worth £13 million per year, for a detention centre near Gatwick airport involves deductions for under-occupation (£30 000 if someone escapes, or £10 000 if someone dies following ‘self-harm’; Corporate Watch, 2019), meaning that conditions of detention and brutality are not really taken into consideration, compared to the metric of bed occupation. Jimmy Mubenga died by asphyxia in October 2010 during his deportation under the control of three G4S guards (Corporate Watch, 2018, p. 122). No major prosecution was undertaken against them. This long history of outsourcing could also explain the lack of oversight of contracts by the UK Parliament, as well as the weak bargaining power of government when negotiating contracts. Most academic studies conclude that the outsourced services have seen a decline in quality, and that there has been a deterioration in conditions of detention, resulting in inhumane treatment and the violation of rights (Gammeltoft-Hansen, 2013; Bosworth, 2014). Detention centres are also the sites of regular revolts by detainees against their conditions of detention (MIGREUROP, 2016). Another modality of public‒private partnerships is at stake in the outsourcing of the issuing of visas from Schengen countries to private companies. Infantino (2016a, 2016b) examines this process by looking at a configuration of actors involving Belgium, France, Italy’s consulates in Casablanca, private companies such as VFSGlobal (the world leader in providing services to diplomatic missions), and the European Commission. These companies now deal with administrative tasks such as providing information, organising meetings, collecting papers, fees, and digital fingerprints, verifying documents, returning passports and delivering refusals to migrants. The companies thus imitate consulates’ practices. Some of them, such as the French company TLSContact, were even created by civil servants. They deal with operational work and relieve the state of the burden of dealing with interactions in the case of the rejection of visa applications. The official discourse behind this process is centred on cost reduction, increased productivity in the issuing of visas, reduction in delays, and avoiding the situation of being suspected of bribery. This process is also promoted by EU harmonisation around the use of biometrics. However, such outsourcing raises questions regarding the protection of personal data, and the perception of fees being charged to manage files. It is true that the cost of this operational work to states is reduced, but the costs are instead supported by migrants. In conclusion, border and migration control represents a field in which private sector actors can take on operations, negotiated in a framework of outsourcing and NPM in cooperation with public actors. Outsourcing leads to a technicity in migration management, a depoliticisation of its implementation, and a further distancing of migrants and visa applicants from state actors. In return, it reduces the possibilities for contesting these policies. It raises the issue of legal responsibility and blurs the definition of who is actually exerting control.

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Economic interests and EU border and migration control  271

BORDER AND MIGRATION CONTROL AS A PROFITABLE MARKET IN THE MAKING The evolution of border control and the securitisation of migration is creating a profitable security market. Private actors not only participate in operations of control, but also design the research and testing policies of the technology deployed, thus strongly shaping migration control, according to a self-perpetuating logic supported by the EU. Indeed, the EU promotes the participation of defence and security companies in the strengthening of a security market. Over the last decades, migrants’ desire to move and governments’ efforts to curb unwanted migration have created economic opportunities for a range of actors, including small entrepreneurs facilitating transportation, criminal networks involved in human trafficking, and multinational companies managing deportation. Early works described the intermediaries facilitating migration, with a strong emphasis on informal and illicit activities (Harney, 1977; Salt and Stein, 1997; Koslowski, 2001). Hernández-León (2013) drew connections between informal and formal activities by extending his focus to include activities linked to remittances and those of all entrepreneurs who are motivated by financial gain to facilitate migration. In the reference work by Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nyberg Sorensen (2013), the authors included control providers, transnational companies, recruitment agencies, clandestine criminal networks, NGOs and humanitarian actors, and migrant networks. They also stress the dynamics between control and smuggling, thereby blurring the lines between informal and formal activities. The boundaries of a ‘migration industry’ are thus debated in the literature. In order to understand a third type of public‒private dilemma, private security companies’ involvement in shaping the border and migration control market needs to be taken into consideration. Their involvement is driven by public investment in high-tech technologies, databases and software under the paradigm of the ‘smart border’. It was first formulated in an agreement between the US and Canada in December 2001, and subsequently extended to Mexico in 2002, which aimed to organise the protection of the US territory from terrorism and unwanted immigration, while facilitating the circulation of goods. It relies on the deployment of sophisticated technologies that track, identify, filter and save data about cross-border flows. Border control therefore involves the filtering of flows (Bigo, 1998; Walters, 2006; Hoijtink, 2014) through the use of digitalised programs deployed across a network of control points (Ceyhan, 2006; Lyon, 2006). ‘Border security’ could thus be defined as ‘a set of legal, expert and technical responses to complex political and economic problems that threaten to impede or illicitly benefit from the global circulation of privileged people and commodities (e.g., terrorism, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling)’ (Côté-Boucher et al., 2014, p. 196). However, technology is not neutral. It is embodied in knowledge and power, which bring with them the political, social, physical and symbolic consequences of their implementation. Critical works analysing the micro-practices of control, technics and infrastructures (Salter, 2004), as well as databases (Amoore and de Goede, 2008; Côté-Boucher, 2010; Leese and Wittendorp, 2017), focus on interactions between the plurality of private actors providing technology, police actors and users.2 They identify a system of border governance through risk analysis (Aradau and van Munster, 2007). The EU has also attempted to implement a ‘smart border’ approach, by connecting border and migration control to practices of ‘dataveillance’ (Amoore and de Goede, 2012; Jeandesboz, 2016), which is referred to using the concept of ‘integrated border management’. This is the wording that the European Commission has used since the beginning of the 2000s, and which was also reaffirmed in the European Security Strategy of

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272  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 2010. It relies heavily on the use of biometric programs to collect data in airports, refugee camps, consulates, and so on. These data are then saved in systems whose stores of personal records are constantly growing, such as the Visa Information System (VIS) for visa application, the Schengen Information System (SIS) for cross-border crime, European Dactyloscopy (Eurodac) for asylum application, the Registered Traveller Programme, and more recently the Entry/Exit System (for third-country travellers). Since 2011, the agency eu-LISA has been in charge of managing these systems and ensuring their interoperability. Once again, the strategy is one of favouring the mobility of EU citizens while imposing a thorough control on third-country nationals. The turn of policymaking towards dataveillance and control technology is driven by the strengthening of a worldwide market led by the defence industry (for example, Airbus, Leonardo, Thales, Indra) and companies specialised in communication, surveillance and biometrics. Border security practices, experts and knowledge circulate from one border field to another (Bigo, 2018), bringing with them security solutions. Such products show a convergence between technologies developed for policing and military purposes, which are now joined together under the concept of ‘homeland security’, which became prevalent in the context of the global ‘War on Terror’, which itself promoted an association between migration and terrorism (Boulanin and Bellais, 2014). The size of this market is difficult to measure, due to the combination of military and border security budgets and the secretive nature of such defence-related issues (De Goede et al., 2019). Based on budgets approved for some research programmes and for Frontex, spending on border security in the EU is estimated to amount to billions of euros, and is constantly increasing (Akkerman, 2019). Moreover, EU defence and security companies are among the foremost exporters in the world of such technology, especially to Middle Eastern countries. For example, Saudi Arabia signed a $3 billion contract with the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) to secure its borders. Companies are also able to capitalise on so-called successful border security programs, such as the Integrated System of External Vigilance (SIVE) along Spanish coasts and the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR). The expansion of this market is also benefiting from the extraterritorialisation of EU border control to African borders (Frowd, 2018). Private security companies are not only benefiting from the expansion of this market, but also contributing to defining which security services are needed (Leander, 2005). They frame security concerns and provide solutions to them. In other words, the same market actors who supply security technology are also creating the demand that they fulfil. This process is self-perpetuating, as it increases the demand for control through public spending and the identification of future threats. This dynamic can be illustrated by looking at cooperation between EU institutions and such companies in determining the research agenda of the EU regarding border security (in some journalistic and activist works: Hayes, 2006; Hayes et al., 2009; Akkerman, 2016; and in academic works studying the technological turn in decision-making: Lemberg-Pedersen, 2013; Jeandesboz, 2016). The EU actually opens up decision-making processes on this matter to private interests for the sake of the development of the security industry. A useful example is that of the development of EUROSUR, an outgrowth of Spain’s SIVE providing surveillance of cross-border movement using aerial and satellite images since December 2013. Its design was orchestrated in collaboration between companies, Frontex, and member state border guards, following technical feasibility studies carried out by large defence companies from 2009. The research and development (R&D) was outsourced to the German conglomerate ESG, which subcontracted work to Thales, EADS and Finmeccanica.

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Economic interests and EU border and migration control  273 The various subprojects (including some controversial ones devoted to developing drones) received subsidies from EU financial instruments, such as the External Borders Fund and the EU Framework Research Programme (FP7) (Lemberg-Pedersen, 2013; Bigo et al., 2014). The project also relied on cooperation with Libyan border guards from 2002 to stop ‘irregular migration flows’ (Boswell, 2003), which is a prime example of extraterritorialised cooperation and EU non-direct border control. Moreover, the design and testing process preceded legislative harmonisation at the EU level, which only occurred in 2013. Recent research (Bloom, 2015; Bonjour et al., 2017; Baird, 2018) sheds light on the alignment of EU decision-making and private interests in border and migration control policies. Policy preferences are co-constituted by private actors through strategic communications, which they undertake with a view to developing the potential of the Single Market on security matters, and to contextualising migration in terms of (current and future) security risks, which therefore require technological solutions. Private security companies use a variety of tools to promote their own policy preferences, ranging from direct communication during the legislation process, reporting and consultancy, the organisation of conferences, media advocacy, R&D projects through public‒private partnerships to delineate and attract research funding, expert consultation, and regular dialogue with the Commission. Some forums are dedicated to such dialogue: the European Security Research and Advisory Board (ESRAB), the European Security Research and Innovation Forum (ESRIF), Frontex’s R&D Unit, and the European Organisation for Security (EOS). EOS was created in 2007 and has 25 members from the security industry, including BAE, Thales and Fincantieri. It is organised into seven working groups, devoted to land, air and maritime border security (Lemberg-Pedersen, 2013). It would be too simplistic to conclude that the border security industry is directly driving policy development. Public actors, member states and EU institutions still dominate decision-making. However, the industry sets the scene for what is normatively possible, gaining legitimacy and making profits by doing so. It satisfies an interest on the part of the EU to sustain the standardisation of security technologies and to structure an ‘EU brand’ in border security, which can be exported worldwide (Akkerman, 2021). This public‒private decision-making raises a number of normative dilemmas. First of all, NGOs, members of the EU Parliament and civil society actors do not figure as prominently in the diverse forums’ activities, with the result that few alternative views are able to challenge the militarisation of European border control. The risk is that a self-perpetuating security market logic will prevail, which has less to do with managing trans-border violence or migration control, and more to do with the growth of the border security market itself. Secondly, the responsibility of the private sector for tragedies in the Mediterranean where border security programmes are deployed is not discussed. Thirdly, the opaqueness of the EU security budget is raising questions about the democratisation of EU decision-making more generally.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Border and migration control still remains a very symbolic demonstration of state sovereignty and is thus heavily politicised in most EU countries nowadays. However, in practice, migration and border control is no longer a state-centric activity. It is traversed by multiple public‒private relationships, allowing various opportunities for private sector actors to shape these activities. This chapter has delineated three positions of private actors: a dependence

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274  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance on state norms, a role as operators of border control through outsourcing, and a role as policy drivers in a security market in the making. These processes are supported by states and the EU in a context of NPM and neoliberalism, and with a view to enhancing the competitiveness of EU companies in the global market. These different types of public‒private partnerships are still conceived in terms of the Westphalian legal foundation of state sovereignty in dealing with borders and migration. However, the intervention of the private sector is raising a number of dilemmas: about the accountability of state actors when they distance themselves from the population that they aim to control; about respect for legal standards regarding migrants’ and refugees’ rights, especially when the control is performed by private actors; and about democratic oversight over the budget spent on control, and criticism of the self-perpetuating logic of the security market. This intervention has consequences regarding the increase in control of borders, all the way from the EU to the Global South, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. In the various current EU and international programmes aimed at strengthening African borders, the place of private actors needs to be further scrutinised, along with a questioning of the multiple modalities and interests at stake in the extraterritorialisation of EU control (Akkerman, 2021; Frowd, 2021). These dilemmas bring us back to two fundamental questions in political science, and their application to migration policies. The first question concerns the transformation of the neoliberalised state, reproducing and deregulating market practices, but also strengthening systems of control. It particularly concerns the challenge that neoliberalism poses to the traditional monopoly of the state over migration control, upon which our understanding of state activities and duties is built (Torpey, 1998; Noiriel, 2001), as well as the resulting exclusions of poor migrant workers and asylum seekers. The fundamental question at stake behind this transformation of the state is that of the democratic monitoring of control policies, which most scholars of neoliberalisation condemn as being insufficient (Wacquant, 2009). The second question relates to the interconnection between logics of economic utility, of rights and humanitarian concerns, and of security concerns in contemporary liberal migration policies. There is a need to reassess traditional models (Zolberg, 1999; Durand and Massey, 2004; Brettell and Hollifield, 2014) and to add insights from political economy and critical security studies in order to address the complexity of relationships between restrictionist and integrationist social forces in migration policies.

NOTES 1. Despite the fact that literature on borders and migration, respectively (Wilson and Donnan, 2012; Brettell and Hollifield, 2014), have different conceptual and normative approaches, EU border control affects migration, asylum, and economic and tourist circulation, and aims to filter all of these. Consequently, it is a mistake to divide these types of circulation. On the contrary, it is useful to address how private actors perceive the circulation/obstruction of all contemporary border crossings. 2. The use of such technology also reveals the biases – in terms of racial, gender and class discrimination – that are concealed in technical languages. This can be seen in the functioning of pre-clearance programmes (Côté-Boucher, 2008), as well as in the technical and human errors that occur in their operation, and in individual resistance to their implementation (Amicelle et al., 2015).

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REFERENCES Akkerman, M. (2016). Border wars: The arms dealers profiting from Europe’s refugee tragedy. TNI/ Stop Wapenhandel. Akkerman, M. (2019). The business of building walls. Stop Wapenhandel, TNI, Centre Delàs. Akkerman, M. (2021). Financing border wars: The border industry, its financiers and human rights. TNI. Amicelle, A., Aradau, C., and Jeandesboz, J. (2015). Questioning security devices: Performativity, resistance, politics. Security Dialogue, 46(4), 293–306. Amoore, L., and De Goede, M. (eds) (2008). Risk and the War on Terror. Routledge. Amoore, L., and De Goede, M. (2012). Introduction: Data and the war by other means. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5(1), 3–8. Anafé (2020). Refuser l’enfermement, critique des logiques et pratiques dans les zones d’attente, rapport d’observations 2018–2019. Aradau, C., and Van Munster, R. (2007). Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions, (un) knowing the future. European Journal of International Relations, 13(1), 89–115. Bacon, C. (2005). The evolution of immigration detention in the UK: The involvement of private prison companies. Oxford Refugee Studies Centre. Baird, T. (2018). Interest groups and strategic constructivism: Business actors and border security policies in the European Union. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1), 118–136. Bezes, P. (2009). Réinventer l’État: Les réformes de l’administration française. Presses universitaires de France. Bigo, D. (1998). Sécurité et immigration: Vers une gouvernementalité par l’inquiétude? Cultures & Conflits, 31–32. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4000/​conflits​.539. Bigo, D. (2018). Pour une sociologie des guildes transnationales. Cultures & Conflits, 109(1), 9‒38.‬‬‬‬ Bigo, D., Jeandesboz, J., Martin-Maze, M., and Ragazzi, F. (2014). Review of security measures in the 7th Research Framework Programme FP7 2007–2013. European Parliament. Bloom, T. (2015). The business of migration control: Delegating migration control functions to private actors. Global Policy, 6(2), 151–157. Bonjour, S., Servent, A.R., and Thielemann, E. (2017). Beyond venue shopping and liberal constraint: A new research agenda for EU migration policies and politics. Journal of Studies, 31(2), 171–186. Boswell, C. (2003). The ‘external dimension’ of EU immigration and asylum policy. International affairs, 79(3), 619–638. Bosworth, M. (2014). Inside immigration detention. Oxford University Press. Boulanin, V., and Bellais, R. (2014). Towards a high-tech ‘limes’ on the edges of Europe? Managing external borders of the European Union. In Elisabeth Vallet (ed.), Borders, fences and walls: State of insecurity? (pp. 231–246). Routledge. Bourguinat, H. (2019). Le protectionnisme avant et après Trump. Dalloz. Brettell, C.B., and Hollifield, J.F. (eds). (2014). Migration theory: Talking across disciplines. Routledge. Brunet-Jailly, E. (ed.) (2007). Borderlands: Comparing border security in North America and Europe. University of Ottawa Press. Calavita, K., and Kitty, C. (2005). Immigrants at the margins: Law, race, and exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge University Press. Ceyhan, A. (2006). Éditorial: Identifier et surveiller: Les technologies de sécurité. Cultures & Conflits, 64(4), 7–9. Ciepley, D. (2013). Beyond public and private: Toward a political theory of the corporation. American Political Science Review, 107(1), 139–158. Corporate Watch (2018). The UK border regime: A critical guide. London: Corporate Watch. https://​ corporatewatch​.org/​product/​the​-uk​-border​-regime/​. Corporate Watch (2019, 24 July). A life costs £10,000: How G4S’ Brook House detention contract works. https://​corporatewatch​.org/​a​-life​-costs​-10000​-how​-g4s​-brook​-house​-detention​-contract​-works/​. Côté-Boucher, K. (2008). The diffuse border: Intelligence-sharing, control and confinement along Canada’s smart border. Surveillance and Society, 5(2), 142–165.

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276  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Côté-Boucher, K. (2010). Risky business? Border preclearance and the securing of economic life in North America. In S. Braedley and M. Luxton (eds), Neoliberalism and everyday life (pp. 36–67). McGill-Queen’s University Press. Côté-Boucher, K., Infantino, F., and Salter, M.B. (2014). Border security as practice: An agenda for research. Security Dialogue, 45(3), 195–208. Cowen, D. (2010). A geography of logistics: Market authority and the security of supply chains. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(3), 600–620. Cruz, A. (1995). Nouveaux contrôleurs d’immigration: Transporteurs menacés de sanctions. L’Harmattan. De Genova, N. (2004). The legal production of Mexican/migrant ‘illegality’. Latino Studies, 2(2), 160–185. De Goede, M., Bosma, E., and Pallister-Wilkins, P. (eds). (2019). Secrecy and methods in security research: A guide to qualitative fieldwork. Routledge. Décosse, F., and Desalvo, A. (2017). Les détachés de l’agriculture intensive. Plein droit, 2(113), 7–10. Dent, C. (2007). Economic security. In A. Collins (ed.), Contemporary security studies (pp. 204–221). Oxford University Press. Durand, J., and Massey, D.S. (eds) (2004). Crossing the border: Research from the Mexican migration project. Russell Sage Foundation. The Economist (2021, 27 February). After Brexit: Counting the cost of Brexit’s impact on trade. Frowd, P.M. (2018). Security at the borders: Transnational practices and technologies in West Africa. Cambridge University Press. Frowd, P.M. (2021). Borderwork creep in West Africa’s Sahel. Geopolitics, 1–21. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​14650045​.2021​.1901082. Gammeltoft-Hansen, T. (2013). The rise of the private border guard: Accountability and responsibility in the migration industry. In T. Gammeltoft-Hansen and N. Nyberg Sorensen (eds), The migration industry and the commercialization of international migration (pp. 128–151). Routledge. Gammeltoft-Hansen, T., and Nyberg Sorensen, N. (eds) (2013). The migration industry and the commercialization of international migration. Routledge. Granovetter, M., and Swedberg, R. (eds) (2018). The sociology of economic life. Routledge. Graz, J.-C., and Niang, N. (2013). Services sans frontières: Mondialisation, normalisation et régulation de l’économie des services. Presses de Sciences Po. Guild, E., and Bigo, D. (eds). (2005). Controlling frontiers: Free movement into and within Europe. Ashgate Publishing. Guiraudon, V. (2002). Logiques et pratiques de l’Etat délégateur: Les compagnies de transport dans le contrôle migratoire à distance: Partie 1 & 2. Cultures & Conflits, 45. Guiraudon, V., and Lahav, G. (2000). A reappraisal of the state sovereignty debate: The case of migration control. Comparative Political Studies, 33(2), 163–195. Guiraudon, V., and Lahav, G. (eds) (2007). Immigration policy in Europe: The politics of control. Routledge. Hamez, G., Amilhat-Szary, A.-L., Paris, D., Reitel, B., and Walther, O. (2013). Guest editorial: Modèles de frontières. Belgeo, 1. Harney, R.F. (1977). The commerce of migration. Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études Ethniques au Canada, 9(1), 42–53. Hayes, B. (2006). Arming big brother: The EU’s security research programme. Transnational Institute, TNI Briefing Series, 1. Hayes, B., Rowlands, M., and Buxton, N. (2009). NeoConOpticon: The EU security‒industrial complex. Transnational Institute. Hellio, E., and Moreno Nieto, J. (2018). Les fruits de la frontière. Plein droit, 116(1), 31–34. Hernández-León, R. (2013). Conceptualizing the migration industry. In T. Gammeltoft-Hansen and N. Nyberg Sorensen (eds), The migration industry and the commercialization of international migration (pp. 42–62). Routledge. Heyman, J. (2004). Ports of entry as nodes in the world system. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 11, 303–327. Heyman, J. (2012). Capitalism and US policy at the Mexican border. Dialectical Anthropology, (36), 243–267.

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Economic interests and EU border and migration control  277 Hibou, B. (1998). Retrait ou redéploiement de l’Etat. Critique internationale, (1), 151–168. Hibou, B. (2004). Privatizing the state. Columbia University Press. Hoijtink, M. (2014). Capitalizing on emergence: The ‘new’ civil security market in Europe. Security Dialogue, 45(5), 458–475. Hollifield, J. (1994). Entre droit et marché. In B. Badie and C. Wihtol De Wenden (eds), Le défi migratoire: Questions de relations internationals. Presses de la FNSP. Hollifield, J.F. (1997). Immigration and integration in Western Europe: A comparative analysis. In D.J. Puchala (ed.), Immigration into Western societies: Problems and policies (pp. 28–69). Pinter. Infantino, F. (2016a). State-bound visa policies and Europeanized practices: Comparing EU visa policy implementation in Morocco. Journal of Borderlands, 31(2), 171–186. Infantino, F. (2016b). Outsourcing border control: Politics and practice of contracted visa policy in Morocco. Palgrave Macmillan. Jeandesboz, J. (2016). Smartening border security in the European Union: An associational inquiry. Security Dialogue, 47(4), 292–309. Jones, R. (2016). Violent borders: Refugees and the right to move. Verso Books. Koslowski, R. (2001). Economic globalization, human smuggling, and global governance. Global Human Smuggling: Comparative perspectives, (338), 340–342. Kretsedemas, P. (2008). Immigration enforcement and the complication of national sovereignty: Understanding local enforcement as an exercise in neoliberal governance. American Quarterly, 60(3), 553–573. Laubenthal, B. (2019). Refugees welcome? Reforms of German asylum policies between 2013 and 2017 and Germany’s transformation into an immigration country. German Politics, 28(3), 412–425. Leander, A. (2005). The market for force and public security: The destabilizing consequences of private military companies. Journal of Peace Research, 42(5), 605–622. Le Bourhis, K. (2001). Les transporteurs et le contrôle des flux migratoires. L’Harmattan. Lebrun, N. (ed.). (2013). Commerce et discontinuités. Artois Presses Université. Leese, M., and Wittendorp, S. (eds). (2017). Security/mobility: Politics of movement. Manchester University Press. Lemberg-Pedersen, M. (2013). Private security companies and the European borderscapes. In T. Gammeltoft-Hansen and N. Nyberg Sorensen (eds), The migration industry and the commercialization of international migration (pp. 152–172). Routledge. Levinson, M. (2016). The box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger – with a new chapter by the author. Princeton University Press. Lyon, D. (2006). Airport screening, surveillance and social sorting: Canadian responses to 9/11 in context. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 48(3), 397–411. McKinnon, A. (2019). The logistics of Brexit. Presentation at 36th BVL International Supply Chain Conference in Berlin, 25 October. https://​www​.alanmckinnon​.co​.uk/​newslayout​.html​?IDX​=​848​&​nsh​ =​y. Menz, G. (2009). The political economy of managed migration: Non state actors, Europeanization, and the politics of designing migration policies. Oxford University Press. Menz, G. (2010). Employers, trade unions, varieties of capitalism, and labour migration policies. In G. Menz and A. Caviedes (eds), Labour migration in Europe (pp. 25–53). Palgrave Macmillan. Menz, G. (2013). The neoliberalized state and the growth of the migration industry. In T. Gammeltoft-Hansen and N. Nyberg Sorensen (eds), The migration industry and the commercialization of international migration (pp. 128–151). Routledge. Mezzadra, S., and Neilson, B. (2013). Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. MIGREUROP (2016). La détention des migrants dans l’Union européenne: Un business Florissant. MIGREUROP and Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung. www​.migreurop​.org/​IMG/​pdf/​detention​-migrants​-eu​ -fr​.pdf. MIGREUROP (2020). Locked up and excluded: Informal and illegal detention in Spain, Greece, Italy and Germany. Report. http://​www​.migreurop​.org/​IMG/​pdf/​gue​_migreurop​.pdf. Morice, A. (2004). Le travail sans le travailleur. Plein droit, 2(61), 2–7. Morice, A., and Potot, S. (eds) (2010). De l’ouvrier immigré au travailleur sans papiers: Les étrangers dans la modernisation du salariat. Karthala.

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278  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Noiriel, G. (2001). État, nation et immigration: Vers une histoire du pouvoir. Belin. Peters, M.E. (2017). Trading barriers, immigration and the remaking of globalization. Princeton University Press. Rodier, C. (2012). Xénophobie business, A quoi servent les contrôles frontaliers? La Découverte. Ruhs, M. (2013). The price of rights: Regulating international labor migration. Princeton University Press. Salt, J., and Stein, J. (1997). Migration as a business: The case of trafficking. International Migration, 35(4), 467–494. Salter, M.B. (2004). Passports, mobility, security: How smart can the border be? International Studies Perspectives, 5(1), 71–91. Smith, A. (2016). The politics of economic activity. Oxford University Press. Sohn, C. (2014). Modelling cross-border integration: The role of borders as a resource. Geopolitics, 19(3), 587–608. Spire, A. (2005). Etrangers à la carte: L’administration de l’immigration en France (1945–1975). Grasset. Tassin, L. (2016). Les frontières de la rétention: Genre et ethnicité dans le contrôle des étrangers en instance d’expulsion. Critique internationale, (72), 35–52. Torpey, J. (1998). Aller et venir: Le monopole étatique des ‘moyens légitimes de circulation’. Cultures & conflits, 15, 31–42. Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neoliberal government of social insecurity. Duke University Press. Walters, W. (2006). Border/control. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 187–203. Wilson, T.M., and Donnan, H. (eds) (2012). A companion to border studies. John Wiley & Sons. Zolberg, A. (1999). Matters of state: Theorizing immigration policy. In C. Hirschman, P. Kasinitz, and J. Dewind (eds), The handbook of international migration: The American experience (pp. 71–93). Russell Sage Foundation. Zolberg, A.R. (2006). A nation by design: Immigration policy in the fashioning of America. Harvard University Press.

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19. Migration and religious institutions: (re)arranging itineraries and imaginaries Sophie Bava

INTRODUCTION: BUILDING A RELIGIOUS ANTHROPOLOGY OF MOVEMENT1 The task of building a religious anthropology of movement and/or mobility, which looks beyond religious transnationalisations enacted ‘from above’, involves studying over long periods of time the processes at work in the encounter between migrations and religious constructions arising from the mobility of people, knowledge, and practices; processes that confer meaning on both migrations and religions. Whether this concerns the effects of migrants in reconfiguring religious landscapes through their itineraries or the role of religious actors and institutions in making mobilities possible and establishing a form of governance of mobility, examples can be found from across history – from early conquests to the work of missionaries, from colonial policies to modern migration policies that establish a market approach to migration and border security – in which mobilities have transformed rites, practices, theological readings, religious training, and even institutions. In examining the religious renewal of the early twenty-first century, logics can be observed that are sometimes novel in comparison with historically established religious processes, and whose diffusion can be understood not only in terms of religious transnationalism from above, but also in terms of the circulation of individuals and of particular contemporary migrations. By their very nature, migrations revive and reconfigure the forms of religious life found in spaces of transit and those in which migrants establish either a temporary point of anchorage or a more permanent point of settlement. The circulation of migrants gives rise to new religious dynamics and reactivates old ones. Thus, when newly arrived migrants are not met by religious actors and faith-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the migrants themselves take the initiative in creating their own spaces of worship, either drawing on already existing religious networks or building new sites of religious practice. Whereas the link between migration and religion did not become a focus of migration studies until the 1990s, the increase and reshaping of migratory flows, together with the increased visibility of distinct forms of ‘migrant religion’, have prompted researchers to pay greater attention to the role of migration in the diffusion and creation of religion, as well as to the place of religion in the understanding of migration processes. It is now well known that religion provides spiritual and material resources on migration routes, but this encounter also sets religion itself in motion, overturning some assumptions held at the national level, and forcing religious leaders and states alike to reflect on and adapt to the situation. As far as my own work is concerned, an approach situated between religious anthropology and sociology of migration has arisen through an inductive process from my fieldwork on African Muslim and Christian migrations between sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean Africa and Europe. In these places of transit, anchoring and settlement I have been able to 279 Sophie Bava - 9781789908077 39:15AM

280  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance make long-term observations of different populations in several different contexts: I have observed Senegalese followers of the Mouride order of Islam in Senegal, France, Niger and Egypt; African students of the Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Senegal and Burkina Faso; and more recently, Christians and Muslims from sub-Saharan Africa in Morocco. On these migration routes between sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean Africa and Europe, historically established Muslim and Christian religious spaces have been revitalised by migrants, while others have been created from scratch, such as those of Congolese, Cameroonian and Nigerian house churches or the Dahiras established by Senegalese Mourides and Tijānī. Migrants also construct resource spaces or religious landmarks along trans-Saharan migratory routes. In so doing, they mobilise founding narratives and religious imaginaries in different ways depending on the context, particularly those relating to exile and exodus, thereby becoming both entrepreneurs of their religion in migration and creators of a theology of migration (Bava, 2021). Rituals are adapted, saints take to the road again, and both spirits and objects of protection are set in movement, challenging the religious institutions of the countries through which they pass and influencing the construction of new religious landscapes. However, my own approach differs from that of many historical works on this subject in that I take people rather than institutions as my starting point for observing these changes. This approach calls into question or renegotiates the dominant transnational religious models that have long accompanied the study of mobilities. My reflections in this chapter are rooted in the trajectories of men and women between sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean Africa and Europe, together with their perspectives, experiences and encounters, with a view to understanding the ways in which religion and migrations influence each other. In other words, my aim is to understand the role of religion in the ways in which migrations unfold and, conversely, the role of migrations in the changes and deliberations of religious institutions, and even in the theological reconfigurations taking place. To this end, I journey through this amorphous contemporary conceptual religious landscape, starting from the concept of religious transnationalism, but moving towards the construction of a religious anthropology of mobility, which aims to read contemporary mobility through religious practices and vice versa, and to apprehend and analyse the symbols and narratives mobilised by religious followers and leaders, in order to learn from this complexity. In this process, the dynamics of the sociology of migration and of religious anthropology intersect to give rise to new concepts, initially in the context of a broad reflection on the subject, and subsequently in a closer analysis of the situation in Morocco, where the religious landscape has changed in recent years in ways that reflect broader patterns of African migrations.

RELIGIONS AND TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATIONS From the middle of the twentieth century in Europe, it was primarily men with a religious background who, together with the associations that they led, opened the way to studies on migrations, initially with an ambiguous relation to colonial situations and later in defence of the cause of migrants.2 In recent decades, the relationship between migration and religion in the scientific field has developed further and been enriched by the emergence of many new debates. Today, in an era when migration is constantly in the international political spotlight and has become a crucial element of diplomatic negotiations between the states of the Global North and the Global South, it is all the more important to revisit the links between migration

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Migration and religious institutions  281 and religion in order to gain a better understanding of migratory journeys, the reshaping of routes, and of the territories that are crossed and settled by migrants. Addressing the religious dimension of migration does not constitute a new approach as such, and for the last 30 years or so, numerous works have been produced that deal with this question on all continents. In Europe, these works have reflected the approaches used for studies on migration in general, which have included the concepts of integration, acculturation, rupture, cultural in-betweenness, interethnic relations, and the status of immigrants as being neither from here nor from there, but then becoming migrants both from here and from there. Finally, these studies have reflected the changing conception of migrants and refugees, as understanding and migration policies have become more sophisticated (Bava, 2011; Streiff-Fénart, 2020). From the perspective of states, the religion of migrants has long been neglected: from a colonial point of view it was seen as a dimension that was cultural, traditional, or even exotic or popular; it later came to be a positively disturbing or frightening question, notably linked to Islam, attitudes of distrust, and fears regarding security. From an academic perspective, research on the concepts of religious identities in migration, and then of religion itself in migration, developed more quickly in the 1990s following the emergence of postcolonial studies (Said, [1978] 2003; Fanon, [1961] 2002) and studies on transnationalism. The pioneering work of Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc put forward the concept of transnationalism as a new analytical field for understanding migration. This approach, combining migration, religion and transnationalism, has begun to gain traction in the United States.3 By introducing into their studies the question of the circulation of transnational religions, the researchers were able to get closer to empirical reality without ethnicising their models or essentialising the processes observed. However, although there has been an increasing number of studies devoted to transnational religions and religion in migration, the theoretical question has been little addressed (Bava and Capone, 2010). Indeed, for any given type of religious practice that has become transnationalised, a new analytical framework must be developed that allows us to understand how religions ‘in migration’, while being constrained by the different registers of mobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Levitt, 2012), profoundly influence the entire migratory journey, while also leaving their mark on the societies of departure, transit and anchorage. The process of transnationalisation acts in both directions: it has a definite effect on the receiving society, but it also has consequences in the society of origin, since migrants bring back with them new ways of practising their religion that modify the so-called original practices in their countries of departure (Bava, 2017). Researchers have been able to use their study of religious circulation from the point of view of cultural transnationalisms, ranging from the deterritorialisation of religious movements in spaces of migration to their reterritorialisation in the country of departure, to increase our understanding of religious pathways, the transformation of religious landscapes through migration, the effects of religion on migratory routes, and the emergence of a religious movement in transit between several globalised territories. These circulations of people, knowledge and religious norms can be studied in the same way as the circulations of people, objects, transnational imaginaries, and the territories they link and connect. However, it is necessary to keep in mind the need to sometimes go beyond religious specialisms in order to be able to compare them, while trying to understand the different spaces of migration, and drawing, when possible, on the work of theologians; otherwise, just as for all the intangible circulations of cultures or religions, we will not be able to understand the particular frames of reference of

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282  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance the mobilisations or innovations linked to the production of transnational religious imaginaries that we are observing. On the model of Arjun Appaduraï’s concept of the ‘ideoscape’, Stefania Capone has suggested the concept of ‘religioscapes’, or in other words, ‘landscapes where religion plays the same role as the media or finance do in cultural globalisation’,4 acting as a facilitator, a mediator, and indeed also an agitator, since these mobilities call into question a link between religion and the nation state that is considered to be legitimate and is often rooted in societies. These religioscapes, these new conglomerations of religious knowledge, are constantly being rearranged by the growing mobilities of believers, the faithful, itinerant religious actors, the circulation of knowledge and religious objects, by the globalisation of religious training, and other ‘innovations’ that ‘are constantly injecting new flows of meanings’ by reformulating the territorial anchorings of religions and redefining their links with their territories of origin.5 Indeed, transnationalisation leads to the reshaping of religious landscapes, as it poses what Karen McCarthy Brown (1991) has called the ‘cosmological problem’, namely, the question of how to practise a religion that is tied to one or more particular places when one is elsewhere. And when physical landscapes are altered, so too are imaginaries. While migrants often use religion to affirm their membership of multiple communities, they also use it to create alternative ‘religious geographies’ that overlap with or transcend national political boundaries. These religious landscapes are not necessarily created ex nihilo, but are often adaptations to fit the new context that allow migrants to reproduce practices from their context of origin. This calls into question analyses that suggest that globalisation tends towards the loss of all territorial anchorage, through processes of displacement and uprooting in migratory journeys. However, the most recent research on religious transnationalisation has shown that processes of deterritorialisation rarely take place without a successive stage of reterritorialisation, due to the production in parallel of discourses on origins, which allow that which has been ‘deterritorialised’ to be ‘reanchored’ in new spaces, whether real or symbolic.6 Transnational religious practices rarely take place in an imaginary space, situated in an ‘in-between’, but rather in spaces that are strongly rooted in the local, although they bear the marks of the global (Argyriadis and Capone, 2004). Similarly, rather than weakening links with origins, transnational movements sometimes strengthen and revitalise discourses on origins by redefining religious territories beyond the boundaries of nation states, as can be seen in the case of religious humanitarianism.7 These territories are not exclusively linked to places of worship established along migration routes,8 nor only to pilgrimages, but also to objects of worship and protection that circulate, holy travellers who accompany migrants’ journeys,9 and to religious images. The circulation of people, objects, images and spirits establishes a whole religious system that recreates a territorial continuity between the different places of migration.10 Some religious networks are even at the origin of certain mobilities and even migrations, such as the networks of Islamic studies between sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Arab world, or the Christian networks that support the reception and placement of some migrants in particular fields of employment, such as domestic work. Very often these religious landscapes are not created from scratch, but are adapted to fit the new society, entering into negotiations with other religious practices.11 Since the 1990s these strands of research combining the concept of transnationalism with religious anthropology have thus enabled us to explore religion in movement through a multitude of paradigms, metaphors and comparisons. This religion in movement lives and is transformed by following the paths of people who circulate, pass through and settle. Indeed, while

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Migration and religious institutions  283 religion lies at the heart of the migratory experience, migration is also central to the religious experience, as it reflects the mobility that is inherent to all the characters of the great sacred and founding stories of religions. From the perspective of migration studies, approaching migration through the lens of the religious question casts light on the experience, journeys, transported imaginaries and practices of religious or faith-based institutions that accompany these migratory routes. In migration, religion therefore shapes identities, sometimes redirects migratory routes, revitalises religious spaces, calls into question migrants’ projects, enters and redefines urban territories, and influences policies for the reception of foreigners. From the perspective of studies on religions, the issue of migration raises questions regarding religious communities and groups, their strategies, and those of religious institutions in countries of departure, transit, anchorage and settlement, reviving and reconfiguring the religious practices present in certain large cities, giving rise to new religious dynamics and reactivating old ones, shifting theological projects and debates, and involving and challenging host societies. How, then, can these religious productions connected with mobility be characterised?

RELIGIOUS PRODUCTIONS CONNECTED WITH MOBILITY Religions are first and foremost promises, spiritual and symbolic resources that give men and women the strength to project themselves into migration, to overcome trials, to draw inspiration from texts, and to identify with saints, prophets and companions when their path becomes that of exile, exodus or Hijra. It provides the tools for thinking about the precariousness of the present moment and giving meaning to one’s journeys. Religious symbols are thus remobilised throughout migratory journeys, and we can even observe a genuine theology of migration in religious spaces in migration (Bava, 2019, 2016), as will be seen below. The religious objects (such as the Bible, the Koran, scriptures or jewellery) that one carries can also become objects of protection in the course of one’s adventure. Religion is thus a constitutive part, in an objective and/or symbolic way, of migratory journeys. Religious spaces also provide social, economic and political resources on migration routes. Thus, although migrants often begin their journey alone or in small groups, along the route and in countries of anchorage they often construct religious communities as the circumstances permit, or alternatively revitalise historical religious spaces. In this way, new actors take ownership of the social issue of migration, which is often neglected by nation states. These actors are not only made up of members of the diaspora gathered in autonomous collectives, associations that support migrants and defend their rights, but also NGOs and, increasingly, prominent religious actors (Bava, 2018). The Creation and Revitalisation of Religious Spaces through Migration In the course of my research into the experiences of migrants and religious constructions ‘from below’, over the 2010s I moved from formulating the hypothesis of the emergence of a religious marketplace on the routes of African migration to observing the concrete existence of such a marketplace. In reality, religious and faith-based bodies have accompanied the movements of men and women and adapted their own provisions by creating new religious landmarks on the routes taken by African migrants. This competitive spiritual context has led to a revitalisation of some Christian and Muslim religious institutions, and the emergence of

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284  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance religious associations, faith-based NGOs and religious training institutes, which sometimes find themselves competing with one another as migrants become potential believers or followers (Ruiz de Elvira and Saeidnia, 2020). Migrants are also the first entrepreneurs of their religion and create the necessary religious spaces, which are sometimes precarious and informal when migrants are still in transit, and become more or less functional, visible and formal when migrants are more permanently anchored (Bava, 2006). These new communities of circumstance and chance are created around spiritual kinships born out of movement (Rey, 2019). Collectives emerge which are based on shared symbolic resources and are likely to be reorganised according to the mobility of individuals. These spaces are sometimes linked to each other (such as the Dahiras of Mourides and Tijānī) or connected to institutions in the countries of origin, but this is not always the case (as for house churches or gurdwaras in the United Kingdom). Migrants are also the initiators of the revitalisation of Muslim and Christian religious spaces through their presence in countries of anchorage, and can also be perceived as a resource by religious institutions. Spaces of Religious Training and Tourism The impact of religious frames of reference, but also of religious spaces, in the very constitution of migratory trajectories is therefore significant, and certain religious networks are even the source of certain mobilities that can lead to migrations, such as the networks of Islamic studies spanning Black Africa and the Arab world (Bava, 2014), interlinked theological institutes in Africa and Europe, and the Catholic networks that help to receive certain migrants and place them in particular fields of work, such as domestic work. Religious training networks, such as those associated with Al-Azhar in Egypt, al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco or, on a smaller scale, the Imam training institute in Rabat, which are often seen as prestigious, also allow young graduates to get out of their homes and experience other opportunities. However, it should be noted that migration motivates the opening of religious training institutes in countries of settlement, such as the Al Mowafaqa Ecumenical Institute of Theology in Rabat, which was conceived and built to accommodate the diversity of Christian worship, especially that found among Protestants arriving in Morocco from African migrations, which has the potential to challenge the legitimacy of Christian practices already established in Morocco. In addition to their primary function, the particularly transnational structure of these training networks also allows them to create channels for the circulation of believers and religious actors. Religious bodies can therefore support migratory projects and the mobility of believers. These religious landmarks can sometimes redirect migratory routes, and religious networks can provide access to other places. Religion can also be considered as a support both for migration and for more temporary mobilities such as those of religious training, internships or religious tourism (Boissevain, 2014; Neveu, 2017; Lanza, 2014). Finding One’s Religious Vocation in Migration In situations of mobility, religious entrepreneurs are not always sent by their institutions to mentor migrant populations, and many of them instead find their vocation in the course of migration, when others from the country of origin have started to circulate and become itinerant sheikhs, pastors or prophets. In the case of Senegalese Muslims in France, some students, during a temporary stay, become caught up in the religion of their shared community and sub-

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Migration and religious institutions  285 sequently become imams. In Morocco, many pastors discover their vocation on their travels by setting up their own churches (Coyault, 2014). The hardships encountered and experienced on paths of migration provide religious actors with legitimacy and charisma, since mobility is a religious project in itself, with Biblical and Koranic parallels. Furthermore, the concept of performance in religious rituals is often linked to the trials that have been encountered and the means to overcome or exorcise them. Religious metanarratives in which mobility is inherent or even constitutive are combined with migrant pastors’ life stories and travel tales to produce their own theology connected to their own context. In practice, it is above all individuals, migrants, religious actors and religious leaders who are the entrepreneurs of this religion in migration, and bodies and organisations adapt to this reality while respecting their own religious agendas and projects. Mobilities and Adaptations of Practices, Rituals, Theology and Religious Spaces Religious movements also adapt to the religious practices of the migrants in their community, thus bringing about changes to those movements when the migrants themselves do not adapt their own practices: these can be changes of location, liturgy, theology, symbolic references, or even religious practices. Sometimes their imagination is captured by the experience of the migrants: ‘Spirits, more than religions, travel and reinvent themselves through migrations … In other words, religiosity enters an imagined territory of migration, when spirits are inspired by a process of migration’ (Burguet and Legripp-Randriambelo, 2021). For their part, religious entrepreneurs in the course of migration, who set up their churches in small apartments, also adapt spaces and ritual elements to fit the requirements linked to the precarious situation of migrants, as will be seen below. In migration, religious spaces, despite their small size, once again become social spaces that perform their function on a full-time basis, providing both spiritual and economic support, as well as advice on how to work or to continue one’s journey. These new religious topographies implemented by people in mobility, or creating new reference points for such people, also modify the urban space by increasing the religious provision in unexpected spaces (Picard, 2016). Particular spiritual logics and religious practices at work within migratory experiences can also be observed, such as those connected to the conversion of migrants, the accumulation of multiple religious affiliations, religious foraging, and other religious bricolages.

THE CIRCULATION OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE, NORMS AND OBJECTS Migrant men and women are therefore actors in religious transnationalisation, but also in the religious circulation of knowledge, ideas, music and religious norms (Bowen, 2005, 2015), thereby constructing circuits from below that are often very active, but sometimes having to negotiate with more historically established and national religious circuits for legitimacy. Hindered Mobilities In these analyses, constructions related to these ‘circulating knowledges’ are found, which can be analysed as social phenomena giving rise to continuity, resources, skills, creations,

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286  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance imaginaries and religious constructions that span several worlds. In this sense, the relationship between religion and migration is no longer only approached in terms of rupture or deculturation, but it is also necessary to take into account the obstacles resulting from restrictive migration policies and the brutality of international borders (Mbembé, 2020). Indeed, today, faced with what the media call the ‘migration crisis’ in response to the emergence of a marketised humanitarian and security situation that increasingly criminalises the migration issue (Schmoll et al., 2015; Pécoud, 2015a, 2015b), I consider that it is essential to integrate the long history of mobility and its various registers into our understanding and analysis of religious reconfigurations. It is particularly important to go beyond the concept of transnationalism or that of the transnational religious field by establishing a dialogue between, on the one hand, the different registers of mobility and religious practices of migrants, and on the other hand, the religious institutions of migrants’ place of origin or of the country of transit, anchorage or settlement. Thus, the course of migration, with its various routes, blockages, immobilisations and returns, is made up not only of stages but also of obstacles, and the concept of registers of mobilities developed by Nina Glick Schiller and Noel B. Salazar (2013) appears to be a useful one for understanding these mobilities in religious journeys, where the institutional logics that mark out the circulation of people, ideas and goods are negotiated. In these spaces of transit, where sometimes complex relationships with the host societies are maintained, religion often plays a central role since it makes it possible to link a particular pathway of mobility (or particular migratory project) with a (meta)narrative of mobility, while offering migrants spiritual and material resources in their places of transit, anchorage and then settlement. When the space of concrete possibilities is reduced, the imaginary and religion offers a more expansive space in which one can inscribe one’s own history and project one’s future. In the field of migration studies, the concept of mobility thus makes it possible to grasp the impact of circulations on religion, especially regarding the transformations of practices, affiliations or beliefs that often play out in the experience and context of migration rather than in religion as such. I will also show, in the case of Morocco, how religious constructions connected to migration are expressed differently depending on whether they operate in times of transit and temporary anchorage, or in times of immobility and settlement.

IN MOROCCO, A RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE CHANGING IN RESPONSE TO MIGRATION POLICIES Since the 2000s, the strengthening of the European Union’s (EU) external border controls has encouraged migrants to extend their stay in Mediterranean Africa. Indeed, the emergence of increasingly security-based measures linked to a redefinition of migration policies, both between Europe and Africa, and within the African continent, have ushered in a new stage in the understanding of the migration issue, requiring some countries to rethink not only their laws but also their relationship with foreigners and otherness. The increasingly long-term settlement of migrants in countries that were previously considered as places of transit, and thus rarely studied as places of anchorage, has raised new questions for researchers.12 At the same time, religious institutions and faith-based NGOs have turned their attention towards supporting the spiritual and social needs of migrants. However, beyond the scope of their charitable work, these actors are now also playing an increasing role in the governance of

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Migration and religious institutions  287 African mobility, with practices ranging from support, to the monitoring of migrants, thereby entering a poorly defined marketplace of humanitarian and security concerns (Andersson, 2017; Pécoud, 2015b). Indeed, in light of these anchorages, many religious or faith-based bodies have established a presence on these routes in order to facilitate the reception, training, and social and spiritual support of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. As we shall see, for religious actors, whether they were already in place or were summoned by institutions to support migrants, their project involves reaffirming the importance of their own institution, or even reinstating a religion in a territory that it had left over the course of the colonial era and the subsequent acquisition of independence. Although I have focused on religious histories anchored in certain territories, the religious constructions that I have observed are also responses to contemporary societies. Thus, in Morocco, religion plays a key role in the development of the issue of migration, while migration takes place in the context of contemporary religious reconfigurations. From Registers of Mobility to Theological Times of Migration in Morocco This dialogue between religions and migrations, which I had previously approached in my work with regard to several spaces and temporalities, took on its full meaning in Morocco, where I was able to observe and analyse in situ, over a period of more than seven years, the processes that led to an unexpected revitalisation, due to African migrations, of a form of Christianity that had been slowly dying out since Morocco gained independence. This transformation took place in the context of policies of economic and academic cooperation initiated by Morocco in the 1990s, and also the development of a Moroccan migration policy that has led Morocco to become, in just a few years, a country of reception and settlement (Alioua, 2018; El Qadim, 2015; Khrouz, 2019; Perrin, 2009). In 2013, Morocco implemented a new migration policy, on the advice of King Mohamed VI, who had called for ‘a more humane management of illegal migrants’, following the recommendations of the National Human Rights Council (NHRC) and responding to strong pressure from civil society. This migration policy led to two waves of granting amnesty to formerly illegal migrants, first in 2013–2015 and then in 2016–2018, which resulted in the regularisation of nearly 50 000 people of around 100 different nationalities. Initiatives from numerous religious bodies, varying in the degree of their religious character, were organised to facilitate the reception, training, and social and spiritual support of these migrants. I thus observed the ritual, liturgical and theological transformations that were taking place within Christian religious spaces, which were themselves renewed and diversified. I concluded, more generally, that there was a change taking place in the religious paradigm in Moroccan society, which was then becoming more pluralised by ‘welcoming’ (not without resistance from some quarters) African migrants, at the same time as the country was regaining its place within the African Union. This religious marketplace is based on an inescapable fact: in migration, recognition often comes through religious communities, which thus attain the power to determine one’s fate and attribute meaning. Indeed, over its long history, the time of migration has generally been a religious time in which one questions and anchors one’s faith, a time when religious practices are reinforced or sometimes find new directions, allowing one to reconstruct a religious meaning on the basis of the migratory experience. It is a time that is sometimes characterised by immobility and where boredom is one of the prevailing realities, when the days pass slowly,

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288  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance without money, without work, and in fear of tomorrow. It is also a time of independence, when one moves away from the gaze and control of elders to live one’s own life and religious experiences. In a sense, for believers, it is a time of negotiation between an inherited religion and a religion experienced in mobility, and potentially a time of ‘religious foraging’, which can lead to new encounters. Migration can therefore reveal new attachments, or disrupt or confirm old ones within one’s religious movement, but it is also a time of encounter with other religions present in the host country. In itself, migration is often experienced as a trial, which is sometimes assimilated in narratives to the experience of exile; for migration is constructed through a narrative, and it is this narrative that provides, or reconstructs, the meaning of the journey. The stages and different times of migration are presented in the narratives of certain migrants as a series of trials or rituals that lead symbolically to an anchoring of their faith. Thus, in Morocco, Catholic and Protestant Churches, which had been neglected since the end of the colonial era, have been revitalised over the last three decades, while increasing numbers of religious actors are also making their presence felt in the Moroccan and African religious landscape. Alongside the Catholic Church, which is the largest Christian grouping in the country, and whose long presence in Morocco is recognised by the existence of its two bishoprics in Tangiers and Rabat, there is also the Evangelical Church in Morocco (EEAM, Église Évangélique Au Maroc), which is the historic Protestant Church in the country, having existed in Morocco for more than a century after emerging from another instance of colonial mobility.13 From the end of the Protectorate until the 1990s, the EEAM experienced a major decline, with the closure of most of its parishes in the country. In the 1980s the EEAM had only one pastor and two or three regular places of worship, serving a few dozen people, largely expatriates or people married to Moroccans. Thirty years later, the same Church has 12 places of worship located throughout the country, and about 15 pastors or trainee pastors, which is more than it had in the colonial era. For Pastor Samuel Amédro, the former President of the EEAM from 2010 to 2015, this Church is ‘at the crossroads between Islam and Christianity, between Europe, Africa, and the Arab world, the old and the new, migrants and non-migrants’.14 The EEAM was then re-establishing itself at an exponential rate, with a very strong growth in the number of its members coming from different denominations in their countries of origin and crossing over within this large Protestant family. There were soon also tensions, divisions and a wave of newly created migrant churches in Moroccan cities (Coyault, 2014). This historic Church, like the Catholic Church in Morocco, also carries out a permanent work of refocusing and coordination on a daily basis in order to recreate coherence and confidence in Christian circles, and above all in relation to Moroccan society, in the wake of concerns at the time of the expulsion of a number of pastors in 2010. Faced with this emerging Christian diversity, this ‘Christian ferment’, as Pastor Daniel Dushimana called it,15 the churches have adapted themselves, notably through the work of certain religious leaders, and out of a concern to conform to the religious policy of Morocco. They have developed, opened new sites, welcomed believers, recruited pastors, initiated a training space, organised a mutual aid service and a scholarship scheme for students, developed interventions and events related to migration, and established services that are increasingly connected to the realities of its members. These situations are experienced by the religious actors present in Morocco as blessings, which they present as necessary trials in their religious career. For Protestants gathered within the EEAM, the increased presence of this

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Migration and religious institutions  289 denomination in Africa is perceived as the beginning of a new story, which gives meaning to the very existence of the EEAM in Morocco, even though it faces a complex situation, given the multitude of denominational affiliations. Thus, for the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Morocco, it was necessary to accommodate the strong demands of believers and to find a path between the multiple and sometimes radical directions that this Christianity could take (Coyault, 2016), while ensuring that they could maintain their official existence in Morocco without endangering their respective religious institutions. Motivated by this complex situation, certain religious actors undertook to consolidate the anchoring of Christianity in Morocco by establishing the Al Mowafaqa Ecumenical Institute of Theology in Rabat in 2012 (Bava, 2016),16 devoted to training both African and European students. This institute both provides university-level training to produce qualified religious leaders (a bachelor’s degree in theology) and continuing education for training the pastors of house churches through the FOREM scheme (Formation des responsables d’Églises de maison, or Training of Leaders of House Churches). Indeed, the debates provoked by this new Christian religious marketplace transcend colonial Christian history, in a context where Morocco is also questioning the religious diversity of its territory from a resolutely African perspective. The Christianity that is being rebuilt before our eyes is not just a legacy of the colonial period, nor is it a simple transfer from the transnational African Churches; instead, in this Mediterranean African country, it constitutes an expression of the Christian diversity of a whole continent. The Pope thus responded to the King’s invitation in 2019 to forge new shared religious and political goals, but he also responded to the need for legitimacy of a diverse Christian population in Morocco, including religious actors, migrants, Moroccan Christians, and those who are committed to inter-religious cooperation in Morocco, particularly through the training and support of migrants. The Protestant and Catholic Churches were legitimised by the speeches of the Pope (Lamberts, 2019) and of King Mohamed VI, on the subject of facing the challenges of migration and religious violence. The Pope concluded his speech by mentioning: ‘Christians living in Morocco [mostly migrants] who rejoice at the place they have been given in society’, and who are keen to ‘play their part in building a nation of solidarity and prosperity’. He emphasised the ‘significant’ commitment of the Church in the country, through its social works, especially in the field of providing education for all. Finally, Pope Francis encouraged Catholics and other Christians to be ‘servants, promoters, and defenders of human brotherhood’ in the country.17 Church leaders are thus responding to certain dynamics that were initiated ‘from below’, by migrants and religious actors on the ground, in order to serve their own broader religious project. But, in so doing, do they provide legitimacy to all the religious productions resulting from the will of migrants?

‘PRAYING FOR PAPERS’:18 REGULARISATION POLICY AND THE THEOLOGY OF MIGRATION IN MOROCCO Since the beginning of the 2000s, believers have told us that they ‘pray for papers’, both in house churches and at churches of the EEAM. Thus, the two waves of regularisation carried out by the Kingdom of Morocco were also perceived by migrants as a sign connected to the strength of their prayers. This migratory situation has also given rise to a renewed Christian religious scene that is never very far from the reality of migratory experience, in terms of its

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290  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance religious provision, both in the organisation of its worship and preaching, and in the religious paths that accompany believers’ journeys. For example, in March 2015, following the first wave of regularisation, Samuel Amedro, then President of the EEAM, organised a thanksgiving service at the Rabat temple. In my previous work I referred to this as a ‘regularisation service’. The theme of ‘Moses the migrant, Moses the immigrant’ in this service, accompanied by an assurance to believers that ‘you are not here by chance’, was the first visible landmark that I observed (through a critical reading of such religious markers) of the theological path taken by religious leaders in Morocco towards a ‘socio-theology of migration’. The European leaders of the official Churches, in dialogue with the African leaders of house churches, have responded to the migratory context by proposing, without necessarily having formulated it in theoretical or theological terms, a ‘theology of migration’ corresponding to three distinct stages: a theology of transit and support, a theology of anchoring, and finally a theology of settlement. This three-stage theology draws connections between the exile journeys of biblical figures, contemporary migration policies, and the accounts of migrants (Bava, 2016, 2018, 2019; Bava and Boissevain, 2020). This contextual theology19 takes on its full meaning in relation to the 2015 ‘regularisation service’, which represents what I call the ‘theology of anchoring’, which is especially manifested in the expression ‘you are not here by chance’, addressed to migrants in Morocco. What, then, is this three-stage theology? In the constructions that have been observed, religion in migration can be organised around three temporalities, which correspond to certain contextual and pragmatic theological transformations, which are themselves based on the daily events of migration and connected to migrants’ different regimes of mobility. I will therefore speak of a theology of transit, a theology anchorage and a theology of settlement. Of course, these three temporalities often co-exist (as people are constantly arriving and departing) rather than occurring sequentially, and correspond to migrants’ experiences of mobility. In the so-called ‘time of transit’, that of migrants who have apparently stopped in Morocco with a view to continuing their journey to Europe, mobility, immobility, and the invisibility linked to a clandestine existence can also be seen. However, although these protagonists are always on the point of departing, they are already considering the possibility of setting up their churches in a permanent manner by creating a religious community that will later become, as will be seen, the basis for thinking theologically about their presence in Morocco. The themes addressed in sermons that draw connections with stories in the Bible and characters (such as Abraham, Jacob and Moses) who are confronted with mobility and trials such as that of the Exodus, the departure from Egypt, and the crossing of the desert, provide metaphors for the lives of migrants. By mobilising such themes, pastors such as Pamphyl20 become coaches practising a theology of support for migrants in daily life. There are theological times of migration: times of migration that influence particular registers of mobilities and that relate to the ‘theological need’ that is felt at a given time of migration. In short, the rhythm of mobilities determines the rhythm of religious constructions, whether that is a time of urgency, anchorage or settlement. To understand this, let us consider an extract from an account given by Jean,21 a Congolese who has been living in Morocco for some 20 years, who expresses this matter perfectly in his account of the establishment of house churches in Morocco: It’s natural that Catholics have gathered in Catholic churches, Protestants in the large Protestant church in Rabat, and it’s to be expected that these revivalist churches have also created their

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Migration and religious institutions  291 movement here. There were also founding elements such as the ‘Temple de Rabat’ church, the first and only house church founded in 2003, because the brothers and sisters of the revivalist churches weren’t able to go and pray in the official churches in the city in the medina, for the simple reason that they didn’t have either papers or money to travel. At that time we were really living in hiding, so we managed to meet up and pray together. It was a combination of a lack of papers, a lack of religious sensitivity, a lack of money, and the situation in the neighbourhood that helped us to get our house churches built … I have very strong memories of that first church in Morocco, we prayed a lot, we were really sincere and authentic. We prayed with our words, we prayed in accordance with our difficulties. And then I believe that God answered us, because our prayers have now allowed us to have papers. It was utopian and completely unthinkable to pray in this way, but we soon realised that it would be impossible for us to live without papers in Morocco. At that time, it was vital to pray for papers, there were raids, we were regularly being taken back to Oujda. So the pastor’s message was also directed towards that and we started to have new readings of certain passages of the Bible. I remember that we used certain passages of the Bible to fight against a sense of fatality, we made a lot of use of the passage from Exodus that says: ‘These Egyptians that you see, you will never see them again.’ That is, the suffering you see today, you won’t see again. It’s a passage from Exodus when Moses is in front of the Red Sea, and behind him is the Pharaoh, and inside are the people who are afraid and insecure. This image and this passage gave us a lot of support in our faith, we knew that everything would be resolved eventually, both the lack of papers and the diseases would end up going away … All this preaching and spiritual preparation kept us going and lightened our lives as migrants. In the same way, the revivalist church used the figures of Joseph and Abraham much more, these were our tools for understanding that it’s possible to succeed outside one’s own country … For example, I find that prayers such as ‘God, help me to cross’ are absolutely legitimate. You can’t experience the desert without praying, just as you can’t prepare to cross the sea without taking time for prayer. First of all, as a spiritual leader who has come here and experienced the desert crossing, I can very easily feel what someone feels when they want to cross the sea to get to Europe … and prayer has its place in the face of the challenge and the preparation that this represents. If you like, the experience of the desert helps in understanding those who are going to attempt the journey by sea … It’s there that one needs God and to see his work. If, for example, tomorrow I pray for someone and he makes the crossing, that’s it, my spiritual capital increases and I’ll welcome many new believers! I’ve welcomed many people who have reached their goals, some who come back here, others whom I meet again on Facebook.

This story, reconstructed by Jean, helps us to understand this theology of transit, which collectively mobilises the strength of prayer, within small communities of circumstance, small churches in apartments, based on parallels found in passages in the Bible, which allow believers to find the strength together to continue their journeys. The time of anchoring, on the other hand, began in Morocco with the wave of regularisation of foreigners that started around 2013. I observed a structuring of Christianity linked to the historical churches through Protestant and Catholic actors who are aware of the new evangelical landscape of house churches in Morocco and the new desire of house church pastors to go beyond the role of spiritual support. In this period of anchoring, I observed both a calming of relations between Moroccans and African Christians living in migrant neighbourhoods, and a desire to coordinate the efforts of the pastors of house churches to spiritually support the departures and daily difficulties of migrants, as well as to highlight the place of Morocco in the construction of today’s Christian narrative. At this time, pastors announced to migrants: ‘You are not here by chance’,22 with the implication that they are here ‘to re-establish Christianity in Morocco’. The King is presented as a benefactor and as the guarantor of their legitimacy. A common factor between the time of transit and that of anchoring is a theology of psychological, spiritual and material support, which is exercised by pastor-coaches, such as Pamphyl in his Mahanaïm church, who urges believers not to accept poverty, to work, and to be strong.

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292  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The third time, which may correspond to the time of settlement, is a time when Christian migrants make their presence in Morocco more visible by considering it as a country where they can live and build their faith. It is a time when preaching can become a form of advocacy for supporting migration, as it is for faith-based NGOs. It is also a time when theological training can start to structure religious diversity in Morocco.23 The sermon delivered on International Migrants Day by Miora, President of the International Committee for Mutual Aid (Comité d’Entraide International, CEI) at the EEAM, offers a way to understand this position. In the face of this revitalisation of the Christian landscape, faith-based NGOs are flourishing, such as the CEI, in which can be observed that the principle of ‘safe and orderly’ migration management advocated by the IOM (International Organization for Migration) is applied to the theological support of Protestant Christians in Morocco. For Miora, worship becomes a form of advocacy in which a humanitarian vocation is combined with the work of Christians in the CEI in supporting migrants. One last time of migration can be added, relating in this case to situations of blockages. In an article on the situation in Benin, Carla Bertin (2021, p. 181) observes that ‘through religious practices, one can overcome these spirits that block the way’.

CONCLUSION: THE BIRTH OF A COSMOPOLITICO-RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS? This chapter, through a review of research on religions and migration focused on particularly revealing situations, indicates how we can move towards a religious anthropology of movement and/or mobility that combines the key problems of migratory and religious processes and that pays equal attention to the experiences of believers and to the religious texts, objects and figures of mobility, taking full account of pilgrimages, religious migrations, the circulation of religious objects, religious networks, religious institutions and theological constructions related to mobility. On the other hand, migrants are also, and above all, moral subjects who can thus take their place in societies of transit and settlement, societies where cultural and religious codes differ and where discrimination is often the norm. Through the religious creations produced by migrants, I have thus been able to observe in Morocco that this mobility calls into question contemporary religious constructions via their institutions, as well as the place of Christianity in Moroccan society. However, this development and renewal of a Christian religious marketplace on routes of migration, led by diverse and often fragile groups, is connected to religious leaders’ support for the creation of places that respond to a spiritual and material need, but also to a religious project on the part of the Churches present in Morocco, a project that goes beyond the idea of religion as a resource, and which was corroborated by the invitation of Pope Francis by the King of Morocco: that of re-establishing Christianity in Morocco, but this time as a minority Christianity arriving from the South.

NOTES 1. 2.

The subtitle alludes to Alain Tarrius (1989). I am referring here in particular to Jacques Ghys from the Pères Blancs Christian missionary group, who founded the journal Hommes et Migrations. After founding the association Amana, aimed at providing mutual aid and assistance to North Africans, with a particular focus on improving the lit-

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Migration and religious institutions  293 eracy of Algerian workers, he went on to set up the journals Études sociales nord-africaines (Esna) and Les Cahiers nord-africains. Also to mention here is the movement launched by Jean-Baptiste Scalabrini, an Italian priest who was mobilised by European migrations to the Americas, who, with his associates, established the Centre for the Study of International Migration (Centre d’Information et d’Études sur les Migrations Internationales, CIEMI), the journal Migrations Sociétés, ‘Los casas dos migrantes’ in South America, and a number of English-language journals (see Marin, 2017). 3. For more synthetic approaches to this question, see Bava and Capone (2010), Capone (2010) and Bava and Mossière (2021). 4. All translations into English, except where stated otherwise, are my own. 5. Capone (2010, pp. 249­–250) is here citing Appaduraï (2005, p. 76) and also referring to Anderson (1996). See also Geertz (1992). 6. See Aubourg (2021) on Creole worship in Lyon, Beaussant (2002) on pied noir rites in France, and Timera (1996) on Senegalese Islam in France and Morocco. 7. See Leblanc et al. (2013) on faith-based NGOs as new religious actors in Africa, Binaté (2019) on Turkish faith-based NGOs in Côte d’Ivoire. 8. See Bava (2006, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2019, 2021) on the religious constructions of Senegalese Mourides and African Christians on migratory routes in France, Egypt, Niger and Morocco; Picard (2016) on African Protestant churches in Cairo; on revivalist churches in Switzerland, Rey (2019); in Finland, Pons (2014); in Belgium, Maskens (2013); from Mexico, Hagan (2008); on Mourides and Tijānī in Morocco, Lanza (2014); on Congolese churches in Morocco, Coyault (2014, 2015); and Boissevain (2014) on Christian migrations in Tunisia. 9. See Laurent and Plaideau (2010) and Hagan (2008) on travelling spirits. 10. See Miran (2015) on Muslim leaders in Côte d’Ivoire; and Fancello and Mary (2010) on African churches in France and reverse missions. 11. See Geisser (2018) and Bava (2017) on how religion in migration or religion in circulation challenges public authorities in France. 12. Among many others, see the works of Mohamed Charef, Mehdi Alioua, Michel Péraldi, Nazarena Lanza, Nadia Khrouz, Delphine Perrin, Sophie Bava, Mahamet Timera, Pape Demba Fall, Mohamed Berriane, Mohamed Abderghal, Mehdi Lahlou, Anaik Pian, Johara Berriane and Bernard Coyault. 13. On the official Churches in Morocco and the history of the Christian presence, see Coyault (2016). 14. Preaching on Sunday 13 April 2014, on the occasion of the installation of Pastor Daniel Dushimimana from Rwanda. 15. Interview with Pastor Daniel Dushimimana, 22 March 2017. 16. www​.almowafaqa​.com. 17. Interview with Daniel Nourrissat, Casablanca, April 2019. 18. Interview with Jean, Rabat, April 2018. 19. Contextual theology assumes that theology is embedded in a given context: cultural, geographical, historical, economic, and so on. 20. Pamphyl arrived from Congo to Morocco more than 20 years ago, after crossing Cameroon, Nigeria, Libya and Algeria. His migration journey and experiences, along with his theological knowledge, led him to become the priest of the Mahanaïm church. He also followed theology classes at the Al Mowafaqa Institute. He has now left Morocco to settle down in Turkey. 21. Jean is a key figure in my research. After having tried to cross several times to Europe he settled and even got married in Morocco in 2018. He is the figure that Malik Nejmi (the photographer I work with) and I refer to as our ‘open-air pastor’. This interview, conducted by myself and Malik Nejmi, is from 2017 and already constitutes a ‘reconstructed narrative’. 22. This expression was first observed in Samuel Amedro’s ‘regularisation service’ in March 2015 (see above) and was later echoed by evangelical pastors. 23. I have observed many similarities in the relationship to Islam in France and the way Islam tries to structure itself in relation to the various times of migration and the constraints of the host country.

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REFERENCES Alioua, M. (2018). Les migrants subsahariens au Maroc sur la route d l’Europe: De l’altérité au cosmopolitisme? In S. Bava (ed.), Dieu, les migrants et l’Afrique (pp. 225–241). L’Harmattan. Anderson, B. (1996). L’imaginaire national, réflexions sur l’origine et l’essor du nationalisme (P.-E. Dauzat, Trans.). La Découverte. (Original work published 1983.) Andersson, R. (2017). Rescued and caught: The humanitarian‒security nexus at Europe’s frontiers. In N. De Genova (ed.), The borders of ‘Europe’: Autonomy of migration, tactics of bordering (pp. 64–94). Duke University Press. Appaduraï, A. (2005). Après le colonialisme, Payot-Rivages. (Originally published in 1996 as Modernity at large. Cultural dimension of globalization. University of Minnesota Press.) Argyriadis, K., and Capone, S. (2004). Cubanía et santería: Les enjeux politique de la transnationalisation religieuse (La Havane – Miami). Civilisations, (51), 81–137. Aubourg, V. (2021). Dieu Merci. Expressions catholiques africaines et créoles. Libel. Bava, S. (2006). Variations autour de trois sites mourides dans la migration. Autrepart, (36), 105–122. Bava, S. (2011). Migration‒religion studies in France: Evolving toward a religious anthropology of movement. Annual Review of Anthropology, (40), 493–507. Bava, S. (2014). Al Azhar, scène renouvelée de l’imaginaire religieux sur les routes de la migration africaine au Caire. L’Année du Maghreb, 11, 37–55. Bava, S. (2016). Migrations africaines et christianismes au Maroc: De la théologie de la migration à la théologie de la pluralité religieuse. Les cahiers d’outre mer, (274), 259–288. Bava, S. (2017). Routes migratoires et itinéraires religieux des Sénégalais mourides entre Touba et Marseille. Panafrika. Bava, S. (ed.). (2018). Dieu, les migrants et l’Afrique. L’Harmattan. Bava, S. (2019). ‘Vous n’êtes pas là par hasard’: La fabrication d’une théologie de la migration au Maroc. Afrique(s) en Mouvement, (1), 32–42. Bava, S. (2021). Cheminements théologiques et vocations religieuses de migrants chrétiens africains au Maroc. Cahiers d’études africaines, (241), 193–214. Bava S. and Boissevain K. (2020), Migrations africaines et variations religieuses: les églises chrétiennes du Maroc et de Tunisie, Migrations Société, (179), 115‒129. Bava, S., and Capone, S. (2010). Religions transnationales et migrations: Regards croisés sur un champ en mouvement. Autrepart, (56), 3–16. Bava, S., and Mossiere, G. (2021). Mobilites et parcours religieux dans l’islam et le christianisme: Variations, transformations et transgressions. In G. Mossiere and S. Bava (eds), Mobilites et religions: Experiences chretiennes et musulmanes. Special Issue. Migrations et sociétés, 33(184), 13‒24. Beaussant, M. (2002). Pieds Noir: Mémoires d’exil. Paris Stock. Bertin, C. (2021). Mobilités et enracinement des planteurs d’église: Implantations pentecôtistes dans les villages du sud-ouest du Bénin. Cahiers d’études africaines, (241), 169–192. Binaté, I. (2019). La présence turque en Côte d’Ivoire contemporaine: entreprise transnationale au service de l’éducation, de l’humanitaire et de l’islam en Afrique de l’Ouest. Canadian journal of african studies, 53(2), 215–233. Boissevain, K. (2014). Migrer et réveiller les Églises: Diversification des cultes chrétiens en Tunisie. L’Année du Maghreb, 11, 105–121. Bowen, J. (2005). Normative pluralism in Indonesia: Regions, religions, and ethnicities. In W. Kymlicka and B. He (eds), Multiculturalism in Asia: Theoretical perspectives (pp. 152–169). Oxford University Press. Bowen, J. (2015). Anthropology and Islamic Law. In R. Ahmed and A. Emon (eds), Oxford handbook on Islamic law (pp. 133–148). Oxford University Press. Brown, K. McCarthy (1991). Mama Lola, a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. University of California Press. Burguet, D., and Legrip-Randriambelo, O. (2021). Esprits mobiles, figures ancrées. Étudier les parcours migratoires des individus et leur rapport au sacré. Cahiers d’études africaines, (241), 115‒140. Capone, S. (2010). Religions ‘en migration’: De l’étude des migrations internationales à l’approche transnationale. Autrepart, (56), 235–259.

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Migration and religious institutions  295 Coyault, B. (2014). L’africanisation de l’Église évangélique au Maroc: Revitalisation d’une institution religieuse et dynamiques d’individualisation. In S. Bava and K. Boissevain (eds), Routes migratoires africaines et dynamiques religieuses. Special Issue L’Année du Maghreb, 11, 81–103. Coyault, B. (2015). Les Églises de maison congolaises de Rabat: La participation du secteur informel à la pluralisation religieuse au Maroc. In N. Khrouz and N. Lanza (eds), Migrants au Maroc: Cosmopolitisme, présence d’étrangers et transformations sociales (pp. 55–64). Centre Jacques-Berque, Fondation Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Coyault, B. (2016). Christianity in Northern Africa. In Isabel Apawo Phiri, Dietrich Werner, et al. (eds), Anthology of African Christianity (pp. 175‒204). Regnum Books. El Qadim (2015). Le gouvernement asymétrique des migrations. Maroc/Union européenne. Dalloz. Fancello, S., and Mary, A. (eds) (2010). Chrétiens africains en Europe, Prophétisme, pentecôtisme et politique des nations. Coll. Religions contemporaines. Karthala. Fanon, F. [1961] (2002). Les damnés de la terre. La Découverte. Geertz, C. (1992). Observer l’islam: Changements religieux au Maroc et en Indonésie. La Découverte. Geisser V. (2018). Un islam aux couleurs du drapeau? Confluences Méditerranée, 106(3), 147‒163. Glick Schiller, N., and Salazar, Noel B. (2013). Regimes of mobility across the globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migrations Studies, 39, 183–200. Hagan, J.-M. (2008). Migration miracle: Faith, hope and meaning on the undocumented journey. Harvard University Press. Khrouz N. (2019). L’étranger au Maroc: Droits et pratiques. Coll. Mobilités Africaines. l’Harmattan. Lamberts, S. (2019). Liberté religieuse et droit des migrants au Maroc: Le plaidoyer des évêques avant la visite du pape au Maroc. Tel Quel, 5 March. https://​telquel​.ma/​2019/​03/​05/​liberte​-religieuse​-et​-droit​ -des​-migrants​-le​-plaidoyer​-des​-eveques​-avant​-la​-visite​-du​-pape​_1630495. Lanza, N. (2014). Pèleriner, faire du commerce et visiter les lieux saints: Le tourisme religieux sénégalais au Maroc. L’Année du Maghreb, 11, 155–169. Laurent, P.-J., and Plaideau, C. (2010). Esprits sans patrie: une analyse de la ‘religion du voyage’ dans les îles du Cap-Vert. Autrepart 4(56), 39‒55. Leblanc, M.-N., Audet-Gosselin, L., and Gomez-Perez, M. (2013). Les ONG confessionnelles en Afrique de l’Ouest: un équilibre précaire entre prosélytisme et professionnalisme au Burkina Faso. Canadian Journal of Developement Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 34(2), 236‒256. Levitt, P. (2012). Religion on the move: Mapping global cultural production and consumption. In C. Bender, W. Cadge, P. Levitt and D. Smilde (eds), Religion on the edge, de-centering and re-centering the sociology of religion (pp. 159–176). Oxford University Press. Marin, L. (2017). Le CIEMI d’Antonio Perotti: Le chemin difficile d’une association militante forte des avancées de la recherché. Migrations Sociétés, (170), 21–32. Maskens, M. (2013). Cheminer avec Dieu: pentecôtisme et migrations à Bruxelles, Coll. Religion, laïcité et société. Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Mbembé, A. (2020). Brutalisme. La Découverte. Miran, M. (2015). Guerres mystiques en Côte d’Ivoire. Religion, patriotisme, violence (2002‒2013). Karthala. Neveu, N. (2017). Politiques officielles, pratiques locales: Pèlerinages et patrimoine religieux en partage en Jordanie. In M. Crivello and K. Dirèche (eds), Traversées des mémoires en Méditerranée (pp. 85–96). Presses universitaires de Provence. Pécoud, A. (2015a). Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives. Palgrave Macmillan. Pécoud, A. (2015b). Les organisations internationales dans la gouvernance mondiale des migrations. Mondi Migranti, 3, 7–30. Perrin, D. (2009). Immigration et création juridique au Maghreb.La fragmentation des mondes et des droits. In Ali Bensaâd (ed.), Le Maghreb à l’épreuve des migrations subsahariennes (pp. 245‒265). Karthala. Picard, J. (2016). Du lieu de passage au territoire d’ancrage: les Églises du Caire et les migrants africains chrétiens, Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer, 183‒160.‬ Pons, C. (2014). Les îles enthousiastes. Ethnographie des Évangélistes aux Îles Féroé et en Islande (XXème siècle). coll. α. CNRS Editions.

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296  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Rey, J. (2019). Migration africaine et pentecôtisme en Suisse: Dispositifs rituels, pouvoirs, mobilités. Karthala. Ruiz de Elvira, L., and Saeidnia, S.A. (eds) (2020). Les mondes de la bien-faisance: Les pratiques du bien au prisme des sciences sociales. CNRS Éditions. Said, E. [1978] (2003). L’orientalisme: L’Orient créé par l’Occident (C. Malamoud, trans.). Seuil. Schmoll, C., Thiollet, H., and Wihtol de Wenden, C. (2015). Migrations en Méditerranée. CNRS Éditions. Streiff-Fénart, J. (2020). Les mots de la mobilité: Les concepts des sciences sociales en regard des catégories politiques et des points de vue emiques. Cahiers de l’Urmis, 19. Tarrius, A. (1989). Anthropologie du mouvement. Paradigm. Timera, M. (1996). Les Soninké en France. D’une histoire à l’autre. Karthala.

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20. The role of Church organisations in global migration governance Mélodie Beaujeu

INTRODUCTION Christian organisations, particularly Catholic ones, played an important role in the early stages of the development of global migration governance. In the course of the nineteenth century, they were among the first institutions to try to make migration a central issue, and above all a global issue requiring multi-actor cooperation. This was a time when nation states – as another source of political and symbolic forces, some of which were then in the process of being formed – did not yet address migration issues as the subject of constructed discourses and specific practices. However, while studies on global migration governance have taken into account an increasingly diverse range of actors, such as state institutions, international organisations and, to a lesser extent, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions and private companies, these same studies, until recently, have tended to overlook the role of religious organisations (van Riemsdijk et al., 2021; see also Lebon-McGregor, 2021). Yet religious organisations are significant historical actors in transnational mobilisations on migration issues, particularly through their advocacy activities directed towards states and through their transnational support of migrants. As Johanna Siméant observes, the general literature on transnational networks of mobilisation around different issues, including migration, tends to focus on a single form of transnational activity, namely advocacy. This particular form of activity is centred on the promotion of norms by NGOs, whose existence is a relatively recent phenomenon, and is also highly visible (Siméant, 2010). In Siméant’s (2010, p. 125) view, this focus detracts attention from some other transnational mobilisation practices, which are sometimes less visible and/or less established, and which involve more long-standing dynamics, notably those carried out by religious organisations (but she also mentions other organisations, such as migrant organisations and trade unions). The ‘religious organisations’ in question are understood in a broad sense, and I have used this same approach in this chapter. They include NGOs with a religious identity, but also organisations that I will call ‘Church organisations’, in that they have very close connections to either Catholic or Protestant Churches. This is the case of the Scalabrinian Congregation, which is discussed more specifically in the empirical section of this chapter. Another major advantage of looking closely at these Church organisations is that their hybrid character leads us to move away from a rigid dichotomy between state actors on the one hand and non-state actors on the other, and to adopt a broader approach to the concept of institutions, which are then considered from the perspective of their relations not only to state powers, but also to other powers such as the power of Churches. We can then observe how the 297 Mélodie Beaujeu - 9781789908077 39:17AM

298  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance interactions between these various powers and institutions have shaped global mobilities, as well as the global governance of these mobilities, over time. In order to characterise the changes that have taken place in practices and discourses contributing to the governance of migration on a transnational/international scale, I will rely on a heuristic tool developed by Christian Topalov: the concept of a ‘weak field’. This concept is itself derived from the general Bourdieusian concept of the field, defined as ‘an autonomous system of objectified positions, agents, and institutions organised around specific issues and internal relations’ (Topalov, 1999, p. 461, citing Bourdieu, 1966, p. 26).1 The ‘weak field’, in Topalov’s sense, designates a system in which a multiplicity of actors whose social characteristics and positions are determined and validated in other fields which are, in contrast, viewed as ‘strong fields’, such as the political, legal, economic, media or academic fields. Consequently, ‘a weak field is immersed all around in fields that have been more thoroughly addressed by the social sciences’ (Topalov, 1999, p. 464). This concept was then adapted for application to the transnational level by Antoine Vauchez, in order to better apprehend the specialised transnational fields that form on the periphery of international politics and institutions. As Vauchez emphasises, this approach based on the concept of the weak field makes it possible to analyse ‘power relations beyond the political and administrative sites of command and to consider the wider set of competing institutions, professions, and resources in which power (forms of domination and types of legitimacy) is defined and actually operates’ (Vauchez, 2011, p. 340). With regard to empirical research, this draws attention to certain entrepreneurs occupying an interstitial position between established fields and to their role as the source of renewed cognitive coordination between actors in these fields and around given issues. In this case, these entrepreneurs are specifically individuals and religious organisations (such as institutions and congregations) operating between the ‘strong fields’ of Churches and states. Their role, in terms of international migration, is that of mobilising various resources to contribute to the production of renewed cognitive coordinations between actors in these fields around the migration issue, which is then constructed as a global cause. In this chapter I begin by presenting a review of the literature on the various actors involved in the ‘global governance of migration’, highlighting the virtual absence of research on organisations linked to Christian Churches. Next, I develop empirical analyses of the way in which certain organisations attached to these same Churches promoted the cause of ‘people on the move’ (personnes en mouvement or personnes en mobilité) – to use the term favoured by these actors – as a global cause. To this end, they produced an increasing number of practices of transnational support of ‘people on the move’. Finally, I conclude by saying that it would be useful to pursue the study of the actors at work in this field beyond the limits of the period covered in this chapter, in the course of their constant, multiple and changing interactions.

LITERATURE REVIEW: ACTORS IN GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE The religious actors I am concerned with here are addressed, in principle, in two areas of literature: on the one hand, they may be approached as historical actors in global migration governance, in studies devoted to this type of governance; on the other hand, they may be addressed by the literature on transnational social movements and networks. The way in

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  299 which particular actors have been addressed depends both on their critical position towards state institutions, and on their close links with NGOs that defend migrants’ rights or with trade union organisations. However, surprisingly, and with a few exceptions, these religious actors in fact constitute a kind of empirical blind spot within both these types of literature. The literature on global migration governance is primarily devoted to the institutional actors – in the sense of nation state actors and international organisations – that are involved in this governance (see Betts, 2011; Koslowski, 2011; Hansen et al., 2011; Kunz et al., 2011; Rother, 2013). Moreover, Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud have pointed out that the authors of some studies that focus essentially on international organisations and governmental administrations, to the exclusion of other types of organisations, work in close associations with the former type of institutions (Geiger and Pécoud, 2010, p. 1). On the other hand, several recent works have tried to take into account the diversity of the actors involved in migration governance, by pointing out the current and future challenges linked to their growing heterogeneity (van Riemsdijk et al., 2021). Some of these studies focus more specifically on the transnational mobilisation practices of NGO actors, particularly on the activities that take place upstream of these mobilisations and during world forums dedicated to migration.2 In order to characterise all these practices, they use the concept of governance from below, in contrast to that of governance from above, which is more the result of international and governmental organisations.3 This research sheds significant empirical light on the practices and strategies of certain NGO actors, notably at two particular levels: firstly, by revealing the logics of alliances deployed during these forums; and secondly, by deciphering the discursive and communicational strategies that are used to try to influence certain institutional frameworks and to shape the priority themes that are placed on the agenda of the intergovernmental forums (Piper and Rother, 2012). By taking into account the diversity of the actors involved, this research can draw a parallel between the governance of migration at the worldwide level and that which is exercised in other fields. A general definition of global governance can therefore be used, as ‘the overarching system of public and private institutions that are valid or active in a given issue area of world politics’, comprising ‘organisations, regimes, and other forms of principles, norms, regulations, and decision-making procedures’ (Biermann et al., 2009). However, in reality, the field of migration seems to be dominated by the interplay of state structures; or, in Vauchez’s terms, actors of a ‘field of state power’. For this reason, the application of theoretical approaches from the literature on transnational social movements and networks to the empirical field of migration is problematic. What, then, has happened to this field of study since the mid-1990s? In fact, there is a growing body of literature on transnational social movements and networks, which are treated in parallel with the dynamics of the actors in question. For example, there are studies on the emergence and deployment of the ‘altermondialiste’ movement, on human rights between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, as well as on migration issues. This research comes either from authors specialised in the study of transnational social movements (see Tarrow and Della Porta, 2005; Tarrow, 2005), or from those who focus on more specific actors such as NGOs operating within transnational advocacy networks (see Boli and Thomas, 1999; Khagram et al., 2002; O’Brien et al., 2000). Many of these studies focus on the fields of human rights, gender or the environment, and are strongly centred on one type of actor, namely NGOs, which

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300  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance are then analysed in terms of their positions and advocacy activities in relation to states (Keck and Sikkink, 2014). As far as the transnational space of mobilisation around migration is concerned, the predominant influence of the state in this field means that it has only a limited degree of autonomy compared with the other domains studied by this literature. This specificity makes the concept of limited statehood, as defined by Thomas Risse (2013) and more recently taken up by Antoine Vauchez (2011, p. 341), all the more relevant. According to Risse, ‘areas of limited statehood’ are territories, or areas of public policy, in which governments lack the capacity to implement their decisions. However, these areas do not escape their sovereignty, but rather involve a variety of actors, both state and non-state, local and transnational. In the field of migration, this variety of actors includes those from different, more clearly defined fields: actors from the economic field (companies, intermediaries, recruitment actors), but also private non-economic actors (associative actors), as well as transnational religious actors. Understanding the transnational field of migration as an area of limited statehood, or as a weak field, makes it possible to take into account all of these other actors – and no longer just NGOs4 – with their own logics and interactions, while taking into account their strong dependence on the fields of power of nation states. Even within the context of this (weak) field, however, religious organisations are still poorly taken into account. Even though, in recent years, there has been an increase in the number of studies on transnational mobilisations originating from or strongly involving migrants (see Eggert and Giugnu, 2015), supplementing older studies (see Malkki, 1999; Rajaram, 2002) and those on trade union organisations5 (which might have been expected to correct the previous oversights in the field), there is still an almost complete absence of research on the transnational dynamics driven by or involving religious organisations, especially around issues of migration governance. Yet these organisations play a central role in the field in question, owing to the long-standing nature of their transnational practices, and their strong links, particularly those of financial nature, with various national institutions and Churches. They therefore constitute a privileged entry-point for understanding the evolution of this hybrid field of mobilisation, which has been reconfigured over time, particularly as a result of the arrival of new actors. Religious organisations are also unique in two ways, compared with other institutions in the field: firstly, because of the close formal and informal links they have with these institutions (in particular with Churches and state actors); and secondly, because of the resources they can mobilise for migrants and other areas of activity (Bava and Picard, 2010), including both material resources (such as financial resources, human resources and support) and immaterial (spiritual) resources, through registers of beliefs and ideologies. In a rather unusual way, Sara Silvestri’s research on the role of the Catholic Church and its affiliated organisations in the migration governance today illustrates this specificity (Silvestri, 2018). Her work provides a historical overview of the Catholic Church’s involvement in migration issues, and highlights key ideas related to these issues, which are central to the Church’s social doctrine. She then examines the current context, exploring the discourses and practices deployed, as well as the material and immaterial resources that are mobilised by Catholic institutions and the main Catholic leaders (the Pope, the Bishops’ Conference, NGOs with a Catholic identity such as CARE) with a view to addressing the situation and responding to the needs of people on the move. Silvestri also analyses how these actors collaborate with networks of policy-makers and secular institutions involved in the management of migration,

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  301 while questioning the assumptions and logics of the policy-makers and institutions involved in this sector. The empirical analyses that follow complement the work described above, as they focus on the same types of discourses, practices and interactions; not in the present era, but instead between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what could be called the emergence of the first global governance of migration, after which its practitioners diversified and proliferated over the following decades.

MIGRATION AND CHURCH ORGANISATIONS IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES In the nineteenth century, Christian Churches – especially the Catholic Church but also the Protestant Church – played a major role in the institutional and ideological management of migratory movements. As I will discuss in the following sections, this investment by Churches in the migration issue was strongly motivated by certain important developments in the religious field in the nineteenth century; a field which was increasingly being challenged by nation states, some of which were then in the process of formation. These Churches therefore played a historical role in the construction of a global cause for people on the move. During this period of large-scale European migration to the New World, the European Catholic and Protestant Churches and their affiliated organisations were the main institutions that took a position in promoting the ‘cause’ of ‘emigrants’ (as they were usually termed).6 This work of promotion was carried out through transnational support practices, but also through the production of a growing volume of scholarly discourse.7 This scholarly work was intended to provide a greater understanding of migratory phenomena while legitimising the leading role of the Churches by making these phenomena intelligible to other actors, primarily governments; but it also aimed to help the Churches to act as effectively as possible in supporting the various waves of migration. This relative monopoly of the Churches in the production of scholarly discourses with a pretention to universal application was increasingly challenged in the following decades, particularly in the inter-war period, as nation states developed, which themselves became vectors of new ideals and partially renewed approaches to the migration issue. Furthermore, within the religious field, there were significant differences between the situations and issues addressed by the Catholic and Protestant Churches respectively: for example, the centralised and institutionalised commitment of the Catholic Church to the ‘cause’ of migration developed particularly strongly from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, whereas that of Protestant Churches did not become strongly pronounced until the beginning of the twentieth century. The Migrant Cause: An Opportunity for the Catholic Church In European countries, in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the power of the Catholic Church tended to be challenged by both old and new nation states, which were less and less willing to accept the interference of religious institutions. Now deprived of its fundamental prerogatives, particularly with regard to establishing the rules governing civil society, the Catholic Church had a general attitude of closure and opposition to ‘modernity’

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302  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century. It became necessary to identify a point of convergence between Church and state, in order to redefine the role of the Church in society and to strengthen its prerogative in spreading the faith. The Catholic Church’s interest in European emigration to the former British colonies was part of a wider project to conquer new territories, which culminated in a new wave of missionary activity from the beginning of the nineteenth century in France, and from 1850 onwards in other countries (see Rossi, 2012, p. 59). This wave of missionary activity was itself part of the territorial expansion carried out by the new nation states, with the former preceding the advance of the latter. Even after the end of the movements generated by the Atlantic trade triangle, the colonial empires and their metropolises continued to constitute very dense spaces of mobility. These movements were the result of economic and religious entrepreneurs (the successive waves of large numbers of missionaries) and colonial administrators, but also included the more or less forced migrations of residents of the colonial empires, which were aimed at meeting the very substantial demands for workers in the European colonies, and later for wars in Europe.8 Migratory phenomena were thus a constituent part of the formation and vitality of colonial powers. The relations between missionaries and colonists were complex, combining both complicity and competition, while pursuing their parallel goals of, on the one hand, the implementation of evangelisation and the construction of indigenous Churches, and on the other hand, the extension of political power and economic profitability.9 This period is also characterised by the shift, between the middle and end of the nineteenth century, from a network of transcontinental migratory flows (including that of the slave trade) to the emergence of a global system of mobility around North and South America, particularly as a result of the great waves of European emigration (Rosental, 2010). Between 1800 and 1850, the population of the European continent rose from 150 to 200 million inhabitants (Rossi, 2012, p. 59). This demographic increase, combined with the industrial revolution, led to the displacement of people from the countryside to cities and industrial centres, which were not yet, however, equipped to absorb so many new arrivals. During a third phase (1881–1914) migratory flows reached unprecedented levels, involving some 800 000 people per year, and reaching 2 million in 1910. The majority of migrants came from Eastern Europe (Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Russian Jews, Austro-Hungarians) and Southern Europe (mainly Italians, 6 million of whom emigrated elsewhere in Europe and 8 million to the Americas), but also from China and Japan. In total, during this third phase, 15 million Europeans reached the United States, 3 million went to Argentina, and 2 million to Brazil. In the countries of immigration, faced with the phenomenon of large-scale migration from Europe, branches of the Catholic Church were confronted with a double challenge. They had to balance the reception of new waves of migrants and their insertion into the local religious fabric with the assertion of a national faith adapted to these new states. This commitment to a national faith was necessary to ensure their place in society, as well as that of the immigrants for whom they were responsible. The success of the Churches established in the countries of immigration seems to be inseparable from that of Catholic immigrants, which helps to explain the growing interest and commitment of the Holy See towards immigration. This was first manifested in the position taken by Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), who, in defence of the Church against the modern world embodied by the state, encouraged the provision of aid to migrants through various congregations. His successor, Leo XIII (1810–1903), was more deliberate in his commitment to ‘international openness’ and a search for reconciliation with the ‘modern world’, in particular by setting up philanthropic societies to assist emigrants and by calling on

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  303 the congregations of Italian bishops to become involved in this project over the long term, with the support of the Church. Italian emigration was seen as a privileged area of observation and experimentation with a view to developing a specific pastoral approach to migration. This was justified, even in the writings of priests at the time, by the specificity of this emigration in terms of quantity (Italy had the highest rate of emigration of the European continent at the time) and quality (emigrants from Italy posed the greatest problems for host states) (Rossi, 2012, p. 60). A less explicit, but nonetheless central reason at the time was the need for the Holy See, in the context described above, to demonstrate to both the host state and the state of departure – especially the young Italian state – the leading role played by Catholic organisations in supporting or managing emigration and immigration that was potentially problematic for both these states. Religious congregations, such as the Scalabrinians, were to play a central role in the development of this pastoral care of migration and, more broadly, in the transnational support of people on the move, in response to the injunctions of Pope Leo XIII at the end of the nineteenth century. The Scalabrinians: A Transnational Migration Governance Organisation In response to the Pope’s appeal to congregations, several initiatives were implemented in parallel as experiments, particularly with regard to Italian emigration. Examples include the work of Monsignor Giuseppe Sarto, Bishop of Mantua, who published a pastoral letter on emigration in 1887; and that of Monsignor Geremia Bonomelli, Bishop of Cremona, who founded the Opera Bonomelli in 1900, which he directed until 1914, with the aim of assisting Italian workers in Europe and the Levant (the Middle East). However, among these experiments, it was the offer of the Scalabrinian Congregation that was considered by the Pope to be the most successful and that, as such, received his active support. In fact, as detailed below, the Scalabrinian Congregation not only developed a genuine transnational network of support for Italian emigrants, including various services for both emigrants and immigrants, but they also carried out, from very early on, a whole range of advocacy activities (although this term was not used at the time) with the host state and state of departure, as well as with the Catholic Church, thus contributing to supporting and legitimising in practice the development of a discourse with a general application, which was then being promoted by the central Catholic institution. Transnational support practices for Italian emigrants The name ‘Scalabrinians’ comes from the founder of this movement, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, an Italian bishop (1839–1905) who committed himself to the cause of Italian emigrants and obtained the support and confidence of the Catholic Church. The Congregation of the Missionaries of St Charles, also known as the Scalabrinians, was founded on 28 November 1887 in Piacenza, Italy, with the central objective of assisting the growing number of Italian emigrants who were leaving their native country for other European countries and the Americas. This objective was pursued by sending missions to the places that were receiving the largest numbers of Italian emigrants at the time ‒ namely New York, Boston, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires ‒ and later, between the two World Wars, to several European countries, at a time when Italian emigration reached a new peak. These missions carried out various activities, ranging from catechism lessons to assistance at the ports of departure, during the journey and upon arrival, through the provision of guidance, literacy education and medical

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304  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance assistance. Although the missions were autonomous in their day-to-day operations, they had close links with the headquarters of the congregation to which they reported, and they were financially supported by the Catholic Church (see Perotti, 1997, pp. 82–85). Jean-Baptiste Scalabrini, social Christian10 and missionary to Italian emigrants The founder of the movement, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, was born in the diocese of Como in Italy, as the third of eight children, and the son of a wine merchant. Scalabrini was ordained a priest at the age of 23 and dreamed of becoming a missionary. As his bishop prevented him from following this path (‘Your Indies are Italy’), he spent seven years at the minor seminary of Como, first as a teacher, then sub-director, and finally director.11 During the cholera epidemic of 1867, he distinguished himself by his dedication to caring for the sick, and was awarded the Medal of Civil Merit for this work. Before the foundation of the Congregation, he was appointed Bishop of Piacenza following a lecture given in a cathedral in Como. Scalabrini viewed the phenomenon of migration from Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century as an essential part of the ‘social and workers’ question’, and as being key to his ambition to improve the living conditions of the masses and to ensure their unity. Thus, on 11 May 1880, he described the social context of the time as follows: The shuddering of the working class can be heard everywhere, like the roar of a hungry beast, eager to pounce on its prey. We have seen them in recent days organising, demonstrating, threatening to loot and revolt. Labour has just launched its challenge to capital: the poor worker against the rich owner. This is the social question which today demands, strongly and urgently, the attention of the governments, parliaments, and courts of Europe … In the meantime, I invite you all to promote by all means the Catholic union of workers. (Scalabrini, 1887, cited by Perotti, 1997, p. 84)

In this passage, the Catholic Workers’ Union, which includes emigrant workers, is presented as a peaceful solution to a popular anger, which is destabilising both for the Church and for governments. The activities of the missions were based on the two types of action outlined by the founder ‒ on the one hand, teaching catechism to help people to reconnect with the Gospel; and on the other hand, carrying out social action to reconnect people with society ‒ both of which were thought to compensate for the situation of uprootedness experienced by the emigrants. Moreover, the transnational dimension was present from the creation of the Congregation, insofar as the work of the Scalabrinians covered the migratory journey from the departure of the emigrants to their integration into host societies, while cultivating links with the nation of departure and its religious context. The specificity of this Congregation lies in the fact that, far from being satisfied with contributing to the contemporary positions of the Italian state with regard to its emigrants and aligning themselves with these positions, the Scalabrinians demanded a global and universal approach to the cause of migrants on the part of the Church, starting from case of Italian emigration. The Scalabrinians’ field of intervention went beyond that of providing practical aid to Italian emigrants, even though this formed the basis of its legitimacy. As mentioned above, by affirming that the Church should assume a mission aimed at emigrants as a matter of priority, they were also involved in redefining, in the context of the young Italian nation state, the role of the Church in establishing a ‘transnational community of believers’ throughout the world, of which migration would be an essential vector, alongside colonial missionary actions.12 This ambition explains the importance given to the writings and production of knowledge

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  305 that accompanied their activities, as well as to their advocacy activities directed towards the Church, the Italian state, and beyond. Through these writings, the Scalabrinian movement tried very early on to construct international migration as a ‘global social fact’, which was irreducible to Italian emigration alone: As an expression of a natural law, [migration] is an inalienable right; considered from the individual and national point of view, it can be a good or an evil, depending on the way in which it is accomplished … It is undoubtedly a good, a source of well-being both for those who leave and for those who remain, a genuine social safety valve, relieving the nation of surplus population, opening up new avenues for trade and industry, extending the concept of the fatherland beyond its borders; but it is always a very serious evil, both individual and for the fatherland, when it is allowed to go unchecked, unrestrained, and without effective supervision. (Scalabrini, 1887, cited by Perotti, 1997, p. 62)

This type of statement echoes those of successive Popes of the time, showing the same oscillation in the presentation of migration, either as a problem threatening the emerging national security, or – possibly simultaneously – as an economic opportunity for migrants, as well as an opportunity for the expansion of faith and culture from the country of departure. This attitude was recurrent in the approach and was a driving force in the institutional organisation of the migration issue within the Church, notably under Pius X (1835–1914).13 Later, Pius XII referred to the European migration that had taken place a few decades earlier in terms of ‘the natural purpose of emigration over the land surface that is suitable for agricultural colonisation’. He highlighted the opportunity presented by migration, through the conquest of new agricultural terrain, for alleviating the severe shortages of agricultural land that were then being experiencd in the over-populated countryside of the countries of departure. These efforts to characterise migration in general reflect the efforts of Catholic leaders to generalise and universalise this new role for Catholic organisations. By referring to migratory phenomena in terms of ‘universal law’ and an ‘inalienable right’, the Scalabrinians took a further step in this direction. The practical consequences of this generalisation came much later, from the 1960s onwards, through the opening up of the work of the Scalabrinians to cover all migrants; through this extension to ‘all the most needy, regardless of their nationalities of origin’ (see Prencipe, 1998), they were thus partly responding to the diversification of the origins of migrants, which were no longer largely limited to European countries. This later period also saw the creation of several research centres devoted to further developing and disseminating a ‘Scalabrinian approach’ to migration, such as the Centre for Migration Studies in New York in 1964, the Centre for the Study of International Migration (Centre d’Information et d’Études sure les Migrations Internationales, CIEMI) in France in 1973, as well as other centres in the cities of Manila, Rome, Basel and Buenos Aires. Discourses on migration, initially based on contemporary practices, then evolved into scholarly discourses produced by research centres. While avoiding anachronisms or the effects of superimposing present issues onto past eras, we can observe the beginnings of a discourse of governance, aimed at pursuing benefits for the three main parties involved (for the states of departure, host states and migrants themselves), and centred around a challenge or problem to be managed in common. This discourse had a double function for those who used it: firstly, in terms of the legitimisation of their activities; and secondly, as a means of sublimating very real conflicts, as the situation of the Catholic Church at that time shows. The Scalabrinian Congregation went on to enjoy a particularly remarkable expansion and durability, since it still exists today in the form of an influential

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306  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance international platform at the United Nations, and since it has always benefited, albeit to varying degrees, from the political and financial support of the Vatican. However, this proliferation of discourses and practices must also be seen in the context of competition within the same religious field with the Protestant Churches and their satellite organisations, which then faced similar challenges. The Diversification of Organisations Protestant mobilisations around migration issues also have a long history: they have involved a variety of organisations and targets, ranging from the work of Quakers at the United Nations (UN) to that of the Churches’ Commission for Migration in Europe (CCME) at European institutions. The engagement practices of Protestant Churches are quite different from those of the Catholic Church, owing to the specific nature of their institutional organisation, which is characterised by a much lesser degree of centralisation. The growing competition from Protestant organisations Protestant Churches in Europe and the US were faced, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the challenge of seeking unity and increased cooperation among themselves, against the background of major disagreements over theological interpretations, and the proliferation of evangelistic missions in distant countries (see in particular Vanelderen, 1995, pp. 23–24). The creation of an organisation such as the World Council of Churches (WCC), between 1937 and 1948, was conceived by its founders as a partial response to this challenge of cooperation, a challenge that was further increased during the Second World War and around the issue of population displacement (which, from the 1950s onwards, with the creation of the the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNHCR, would come to be known as the ‘refugee issue’). Thus, at its first general assembly in 1948 in Amsterdam, the WCC was officially established by representatives of 147 Churches based in the countries of Europe and North America (Vanelderen, 1995, pp. 23–24). The history of the WCC is closely linked to the history of some of the associations that are now central to refugee work. This is the case of the association Cimade in France, created by groups of young Protestants in 1939, initially to help those expelled from Alsace Lorraine. Although Protestant Churches and organisations have long been involved in the support and reception of Protestant immigrants throughout the world, just as Catholic organisations supported Catholic immigrants, the construction of centralised practices and discourses only really began in the aftermath of the Second World War, centred around programmes specifically aimed at refugees.14 Thus, the establishment of the WCC was not only a response to the need for organisational coordination and institutional representation of Protestant organisations: it was also motivated by a need for centralised provision of legal advice, especially on the issue of displaced persons, which had become increasingly significant since the First World War. As the Protestant Churches and communities scattered throughout Europe and the colonies did not have the necessary legal expertise, the WCC set up a centralised legal aid service for refugees. The rise of legal registers and categories within and outside Christian organisations This increase in legal expertise among the Protestant Churches also contributed to a change in approach to migratory phenomena during the first half of the twentieth century, which was

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  307 also the case for the Catholic Church at the same time. In fact, until about the time of the Second World War, these approaches were very similar to those developed with the populations of the colonies: they were essentially characterised by a charitable register, supported by the mission of evangelisation, against a backdrop of interplay with national economic and political powers. Thus, during the first years after its creation, the evangelistic approach taken by the Protestant Ecumenical Council was centred on providing material and spiritual aid to the poor, particularly in the colonised countries, but these activities were also largely directed towards displaced persons (Vanelderen, 1995, p. 63). Thus, the early work of Catholic and Protestant Churches in addressing migratory phenomena would partly persist, although with a redefinition of the roles of the Churches and colonial conquests. They would go on to coexist with competing approaches to migration, which would also have a universal vocation, and with which the Churches would become partly integrated. After the Second World War in particular, the evolution of the Catholic Church’s doctrine and practice accelerated, notably incorporating new issues, such as those of ‘social rights / human rights’ (Vanelderen, 1995, p. 46).

CONCLUSION: GLOBAL MIGRATION GOVERNANCE: A ‘WEAK FIELD’? The preceding account of the role of Churches in migratory phenomena shows that: 1. Attempts to formulate a ‘cause’ for migrants, at a global level and based on transnational practices of advocacy and support, were already at work in the nineteenth century. 2. They were promoted mainly by different, mutually competing actors from the religious field (representatives of the Churches, religious congregations). 3. The discursive framing of migratory phenomena and the very forms of mobilisation reflect the dynamics of demarcation and alignment between these same actors in the religious field in relation to actors from different nation state fields. Later, particularly after each of the two World Wars, religious organisations adapted to the renewal of the international institutional context around migration issues. This renewal was marked in particular by the emergence of two major institutions for global migration governance, namely the International Labour Organization (ILO) from 1919 onwards, then the UNHCR from 1950 onwards. These developments are reflected in the evolution of terminology: the widespread use by religious organisations, both Protestant and Catholic, of broad terms such as ‘people on the move’ gradually gave way to a clearer discursive and normative terminology, differentiating between ‘refugees’ or ‘displaced persons’ on the one hand, and ‘migrant workers’ and later ‘economic migrants’ on the other. I have therefore provided an overview of a transnational field of mobilisation, in a permanent state of change due to the effect of the emergence of new actors, some of whom imported resources from other fields of mobilisation (such as religious, political or economic spaces). To characterise this reality, the concept of a weak field, constructed by Christian Topalov and taken up by Antoine Vauchez at the transnational level, seemed to me to be particularly useful (see Topalov, 1999, pp. 44–45). This concept allows certain facts of cognitive coordination to be highlighted – regarding the transnational cause of emigrants and immigrants – between

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308  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance different fields of power (economic, religious, and state). This cognitive coordination was generated, as discussed above, owing to the effect of transnational entrepreneurs, illustrated here by the work of the Congregation of Scalabrinians. We have also seen how, by posing as artisans and promoters of a universal cause for people on the move, these entrepreneurs took advantage of their interstitial position between more clearly defined fields. In fact, it was the religious field itself that was ultimately the main beneficiary of the mobilisation carried out by these entrepreneurs and of the varied resources produced by this religious field. These actors would later be challenged by other actors from other fields, both national and international, who renewed those cognitive coordinations – now centred around migrants’ rights and the issue of migration and development – without challenging the nature of this field of mobilisation as a weak field. In contemporary times, since the beginning of the 1990s (notably the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development), the various actors have been meeting in dedicated places, on the occasion of international forums, or in the course of joint campaigns and other transnational mobilisation activities, thus establishing more or less formalised networks between them, combining relationships of competition and cooperation. In these places and networks, which structure the transnational field in question, the actors invest various resources, derived from other fields of practice, including national political fields, but also fields of activist and professional practices, such as the religious field, and later the fields of development work and human rights (notably centred around NGOs). Since the early 2000s, the field of human rights has provided significant symbolic capital and legal resources aimed at legitimising the cause of migrants’ rights at the international level, and has formulated different uses of the law to defend this specific cause. However, despite the internationalisation strategies at work, this transnational field of discourses and practices concerning migrants remains deeply dependent on national political fields, and marked by their logics. This is precisely the dynamic that could be described as constrained autonomy, in contrast to the concept of limited statehood mentioned above, and the former term seems to capture the ongoing state of this weak field. In the more current context of a global health crisis, marked by a ‘return of the state’ and by a generalised shift within the European Union towards a more security-based approach to migration, could religious organisations once again be able to play their part in relation to other actors in the transnational field who have been weakened by recent developments? Among the latter, I am thinking in particular of the humanitarian associations involved in rescuing migrants, which have been in the media spotlight since 2014, but which have nonetheless appeared to be very vulnerable, owing both to the variability of support from public opinion and to the hostility shown to them by certain national governments within the EU. Some international organisations, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UNHCR and the ILO (in the area of their migration-related activities) have also been discredited, owing to their alleged inability to deal with successive health crises and ‘migration crises’. Faced with these different types of organisations, some of which are still young and fragile, while others are suffering from bureaucratic inertia, the constellation of Christian organisations could return to the centre of the transnational field of migration. They could do so by investing their material and spiritual resources in the field of supporting the increasingly dangerous trajectories of migrants (Bava and Picard, 2010), as well as in the field of reception, which has been largely neglected by states. They would be facilitated in this regard by the relative

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  309 autonomy of their operations due to the size of their own funds (this is the case, for example, of Caritas and the Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le Développement (CCFD), while benefiting from the support of central institutions (the Churches). In fact, Pope Francis was already calling for such a project at his first Mass, in December 2013, before the emergence of the so-called ‘migrant crisis’. At that time, he emphasised the continuity of the Church’s presence and action with regard to migrants, and stressed that ‘the Church is not an NGO’. This continuing presence, in his view, has two particular dimensions: firstly, he insisted that the Church and its affiliated organisations would always be there to provide for the basic needs of migrants present on the ground, a role that states have been fulfilling less and less; and secondly – and this is where Church organisations would claim to be different from NGOs and other actors in the field – they would also continue to be present in a spiritual sense,15 delivering a Christian message of welcome and hospitality, and thus filling the void left by the host states. Even more recently, these symbolic resources have been mobilised to counter negative representations of migrants and migration, with a view to producing narratives that are more inclusive. This last aspect will be the subject of future empirical research.

NOTES 1. All translations into English, except where stated otherwise, are my own. 2. See Rother (2020). In this Handbook, see Chapter 16 by Carl-Ulrik Chierup, Raúl Delgado Wise and Aleksandra Ålund. 3. The concept of ‘governance from below’ itself refers to work on the development of transnational social movements during the 1990s using the closely related term ‘globalisation from below’. See, in particular, Della Porta (2006). 4. Johanna Siméant criticises the literature on transnational social networks and movements, on the grounds that it focuses too much on NGOs alone, to the detriment of other organisations with other types of links to state institutions, and which also possess other transnational dynamics, such as migrant organisations, trade unions and religious organisations. In her view, paying attention to this broader range of organisations would lead to theoretical tools and approaches that would be better suited to the field of migration. She also notes the relative absence of the study of trade unions in this literature. See Siméant (2010, p. 125). 5. See, in this Handbook, Chapter 12 by Leo Lucassen. 6. The term ‘migrants’, which has become widespread more recently, was not used at that time, as the terms ‘emigrants’, ‘emigrées’ or ‘people on the move’ (émigrants, émigrés or personnes en mobilité) were generally preferred. Distinctions between the different causes giving rise to migration (mainly corresponding to either economic and political factors) were already being made at the level of nation states, but these categories were not yet very stable, in the absence of international jurisdiction in this field. On the issue of lexical and legal terminologies, see Aprile and Diaz (2016). 7. The creation of several research centres in different countries by priests in the Scalabrinian Congregation shows their concern for producing knowledge that would support their vision on the subject of migratory phenomena. A large part of the results of this scholarly production are gathered in the archives of the Centre d’Informations et d’Etudes sur les Migrations Internationales (CIEMI), which I consulted in January 2016. 8. As a result of the end of slavery and the increased need for labour, workers from Java, Japan, Tonkin, Africa, Madagascar, and above all China and India, left their native soil during the nineteenth century to work, in exchange for wages, in the colonies of the Americas and the Indian Ocean, but also in the territories newly conquered by the imperial powers in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. This new form of labour migration is referred to in historiography as ‘indentured labour’ (or engagisme in French). See in particular Flory (2015).

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310  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

See Borne and Falaize (2009). See also, on the complex and evolving relations between national and religious political fields, Lardinois (2008). Scalabrini’s career invites comparison with the movement of social Christianity and some of its most visible representatives in France, such as Robert de La Mennais. See, especially, Blaser (1999). Here is an illustration, at the individual level, of the parallel between colonial missionary work and work in support of emigrants. On the subject of migration as an essential vector of a ‘transnational community of believers’, see Perotti (1997). As an illustration of this institutional mobilisation, in 1908, parish and diocesan committees were created at the local level devoted to the support of emigrants, and at the central level, a special office was set up at the Sacred Consistorial Congregation, aimed at supporting all Catholic emigrants; Rossi (2012, p. 64). One of the first programmes involved providing assistance to the 600 000 Arabs who left Palestine following its partition. See Vanelderen (1995, p. 25). This spiritual dimension of hospitality, with reference to the ‘faith of Christ’, was also emphasised by the Pope at his first Mass. The link with the issues raised by the ‘refugee crisis’ was made explicit later on by various personalities from Catholic institutions or close to them, for example by Pierre Jova, a journalist of the Catholic press, on the occasion of the release of his investigation, which gave rise to a book, Les chrétiens face aux migrants: Accueillir ou rejeter (Jova, 2019a). See his interview by Atlantico (Jova, 2019b).

REFERENCES Aprile, S., and Diaz, D. (2016, 15 March). L’Europe et ses réfugiés politiques au XIXe siècle. La vie des idées. http://​www​.laviedesidees​.fr/​L​-Europe​-et​-ses​-refugies​-politiques​-au​-XIXe​-siecle​.html. Bava, S., and Picard, J. (2010). Les nouvelles figures religieuses de la migration africaine au Caire. Autrepart, 56(4), 153–170. Betts, A. (ed.) (2011). Global migration governance. Oxford University Press. Biermann, F., Davies, O., and Van Der Grijp, N. (2009). Environmental policy integration and the architecture of global environmental governance. International Environmental Agreements, (9), 351–369. Blaser, L. (1999). Le christianisme social avant le socialisme chrétien. Autres temps: Cahiers d’éthique sociale et politique, 61, 79–89. Boli, J., and Thomas, G.M. (1999). Constructing world culture: International nongovernmental organisations since 1875. Stanford University Press. Borne, D., and Falaize, B. (2009). Religions et colonisation: Afrique-Asie-Océanie-Amériques XVIe‒ XXe siècle. Éditions de l’Atelier. Bourdieu, P. (1966). Champ intellectuel et projet créateur. Temps modernes, (246), 865–906. Della Porta, D. (2006). Globalisation from below: Transnational activists and protest networks. University of Minnesota Press. Eggert, N., and Giugni, M. (2015). Migration and social movements. In D. Della Porta and M. Diani (eds), Oxford handbook of social movements. Oxford University Press, pp. 159‒172. Flory, C. (2015). De l’esclavage à la liberté forcée: Histoire des travailleurs africains engagés dans la caraïbe française au XIXe siècle. Karthala. Geiger, M., and Pécoud, A. (2010). The politics of international migration management. Palgrave Macmillan. Hansen, R., Koehler, J., and Money, J. (2011). Migration, nation states, and international cooperation. Routledge. Jova, P. (2019a). Les chrétiens face aux migrants: Accueillir ou rejeter. Tallandier. Jova, P. (2019b, 24 February). Que l’Europe soit submergée ou arrive à intégrer tous les migrants, l’Eglise sera toujours là puisqu’elle s’adressera à tout le monde. Atlantico. https://​www​.atlantico .fr/decryptage/3566783/pierre-jova--que-l-europe-soit-submergee-ou-arrive-a-integrer-tous-les-mi grants-l-eglise-sera-toujours-la-puisqu-elle-s-adressera-a-tout-le-monde-pierre-jova.

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The role of Church organisations in global migration governance  311 Khagram, S., Riker, J.V., and Sikkink, K. (2002). Restructuring world politics: Transnational social movements, networks and norms. University of Minnesota Press. Koslowski, R. (2011). Global mobility regimes. Palgrave Macmillan. Kunz, R., Lavenex, S., and Panizzon, M. (2011). Multilayered migration governance: The promise of partnership. Routledge. Lardinois, R. (2008). Entre monopole, marché et religion: L’émergence de l’État colonial en Inde, années 1760–1810. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, (171–172), 90–103. Lebon-McGregor, E. (ed.). (2021). Can we govern migration better? Dossier. Nederlandse Vereniging voor de Verenigde Naties. https://​nvvn​.nl/​category/​dossiers/​dossier​-can​-we​-govern​-migration​-better/​. Malkki, L.H. (1999). Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 377–404. O’Brien, R., Goetz, A.M., and Scholte, J.A. (2000). Contesting global governance: Multilateral economic institutions and global social movements. Cambridge University Press. Perotti, A. (1997). L’Eglise et les migrations: Un précurseur: Giovanni Battista Scalabrini. L’Harmattan. Piper, N., and Rother, S. (2012). Let’s argue about migration: Advancing a right(s) discourse via communicative opportunities. Third World Quarterly, 33(9), 1735–1750. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.721271. Fr. Prencipe, L. (1998). Giovanni Battista Scalabrini: un évêque appelé le ‘père des migrants’. Migrations Société, 10(55), 127‒144. Rajaram, P.K. (2002). Humanitarianism and representations of the refugee. Journal of Refugee Studies, 15(3), 247–264. van Riemsdijk, M., Marchand, M.H., and Heins, V.M. (2021). New actors and contested architectures in global migration governance: Continuity and change. Third World Quarterly, 42(1), 1–15. Risse, R. (2015). Limited statehood: A critical perspective. In S. Leibfried, E. Huber, M. Lange, J.D. Levy and J.D. Stephens (eds), The Oxford handbook of transformations of the state (pp. 1‒20). Oxford University Press. Risse, T. (ed.) (2013). Governance without a state? Policies and politics in areas of limited statehood. Columbia University Press. Rosental, P.-A. (2010). Une histoire longue des migrations. Regards croisés sur l’économie, (8), 74–80. Rossi, B. (2012). Les migrations: Un ‘signe des temps’ qui interpelle l’Église catholique. Migrations Société, 139(1), 57–100. Rother, S. (2013). A tale of two tactics: Civil society and competing visions of Global Migration Governance from below. In M. Geiger and A. Pécoud (eds), Disciplining the transnational mobility of people (pp. 41–62). Palgrave Macmillan. Rother, S. (2020). The Global Forum on Migration and Development as a venue of state socialisation: A stepping stone for multi-level migration governance? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(8), 1258–1274. Silvestri, S. (2018, 22 November). The role of the Catholic Church in the global governance of migration. Seminar paper, Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). Siméant, J. (2010). La transnationalisation de l’action collective. In E. Agrikoliansky, I. Sommier and O. Fillieule (eds), Penser les mouvements sociaux: Conflits sociaux et contestations dans les sociétés contemporaines (pp. 121–144). La Découverte. Tarrow, S. (2005). The new transnational activism. Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, S., and Della Porta, D. (2005). Transnational protest and global activism. Rowman & Littlefield. Topalov, C. (ed.) (1999). Laboratoires du nouveau siècle: La nébuleuse réformatrice et ses réseaux en France, 1880–1914. Éditions de l’EHESS. Vanelderen, M. (1995). Le Conseil Œcuménique des Églises: Aujourd’hui et demain. Olivetan. Vauchez, A. (2011). Interstitial power in fields of limited statehood: Introducing a ‘weak field’ approach to the study of transnational settings. International Political Sociology, 5(3), 340–345.

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21. The governance of transnational care chains Rianne Mahon

The concept of transnational care chains (Hochschild, 2000) has helped to make visible migration by women from poorer countries to fill growing care deficits in wealthier countries of destination, thus drawing attention to the exploitation to which such work exposes them and to the social reproduction gaps created by their absence in their countries of origin. Migrant domestic workers, the majority of whom are women (ILO, 2015a, p. 17), do much of the social reproduction work for wealthier, ‘adult earner’ families in destination countries, often for low pay and under harsh conditions. Although the remittances they send play a role in supporting those left behind, the latter – children, ageing parents, spouses and communities – struggle to deal with the resulting care gaps. Hochschild (2000) has described this process as the extraction of ‘surplus emotional value’ (p. 136). While this chapter is attuned to these important issues, it shifts the focus from care and work arrangements in sending and receiving countries to the multi-sited and multi-scaled transnational networks through which migrant domestic workers move, that is, the ‘mobility chains’ that make the care chains possible in the first instance. The chapter first provides a brief discussion of the concept of transnational care chains and outlines the debates to which it has given rise. It then examines the complex arrangements for moving women from their households in their home country, through a series of points, to the households in which they are employed in the receiving country, paying particular attention to Asia and the Middle East. In 2013, the Southeast Asian and Pacific region accounted for nearly one-quarter of all female migrant domestic workers in the world, while Arab states represented 19 per cent (ILO, 2015a, p. 20).1 These areas, especially Asian sending countries, have been key sites for the elaboration of an increasingly formalised ‘migration infrastructure’ for the movement of domestic workers. As Lindquist and Xiang (2017) note: Migration across Asia and the Middle East since the 1970s has become characterised by state intervention, bilateral agreements between sending and receiving countries, temporary contracts and return upon completion, increasingly multi-tiered visa systems, biometric technologies, the extensive use of private recruitment companies, medical certification, pre-departure training, and the rise of low-cost carrier airlines. (p. 7)

Having focused on the governance of migrant domestic workers, the chapter then turns to consider the governance for migrant domestic workers, that is, actions by rights-oriented international organisations (IOs) aiming to institutionalise migrants’ rights, and the governance by migrants, that is, ‘migrants’ or their representatives’ political agency’ to claim those rights (Rother, 2018, p. 109). In particular, the chapter looks at the ways in which the two have worked together to produce and implement International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 189 concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers, also known as the Domestic Workers Convention (ILO, 2011). This is not to suggest that there are no tensions between those actors working for migrant domestic workers and migrants’ organisations. Just as there are differences between the way in which trade unions and civil society organi312 Rianne Mahon - 9781789908077 39:22AM

The governance of transnational care chains  313 sations operate, so too are there disparities in resources and organisational cultures between organisations for and of migrant domestic workers.2 Yet both often collaborate to promote a rights-based governance structure.

TRANSNATIONAL CARE CHAINS: A BRIEF NOTE Building on Parreñas’s (2000) seminal research, Hochschild’s (2000) original formulation of the global care chain thesis has shown how the paucity of affordable childcare leads the time-pressed Northern adult-earner family to hire a migrant nanny from the South. In this context, the importation of workers from poorer countries appears as a cost-effective solution. Unemployment and underemployment, poverty and informality at home, all of which have been exacerbated by decades of structural adjustment programmes, make migration an attractive option. As Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) have argued: Women choose to migrate for domestic work. But they choose it because economic pressures all but coerce them to. That yawning gap between rich and poor countries is itself a form of coercion, pushing Third World mothers to seek work in the First for lack of options closer to home. (p. 27)

But while the migrant nanny might be better paid than back home, in the context of the host country her wages are relatively low, she is typically unprotected by labour or social legislation, and she is subordinate to her employer: a relationship of ‘mistress and maid’ (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003, p. 11). The migrant domestic worker, moreover, incurs the added emotional cost of leaving her family behind. In response, many resort to transnational mothering by sending remittances and by using technology to communicate with their families (Tungohan, 2013). Remittances may also make it possible to hire a domestic worker to ease the care burden on those left behind, thus raising the question of who looks after her children. Hochschild’s and Parreñas’s original work on global care chains has stimulated further research that has produced a more complex picture. Thus, the movement of migrant care workers does not just run from the South to the North: it also involves East–West flows within Europe (Triandafyllidou, 2013) as well as South–South flows in Latin America (Blofield, 2012) and in Asia (Elias, 2013). Nor are all migrant care workers recruited to work in private homes. Indeed, while in Southern European countries such as Italy, migrant care labour is mainly home-based, in European countries with a tradition of institutionalised care, migrant workers are more likely to be located in the expanding private market in residential and nursing homes, or to be working for home care agencies providing services to the elderly (Williams, 2012, p. 370). Finally, migrants are not hired solely to perform low-skilled care work (Yeates, 2004): there is also substantial recruitment of migrant nurses and other such medical professionals.3 This chapter, however, focuses on migrant domestic workers, as they are considered the most vulnerable. This literature overview has emphasised the inegalitarian ways in which the care needs of households in wealthier countries are being met, as well as the care deficits that are produced in countries of origin as a result. These are important issues indeed, but this chapter considers the following puzzle: how are these care chains constructed? How are women recruited from households in poorer regions and countries, and brought to countries of destination? And how are their pathways structured?

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TRANSNATIONAL CARE MOBILITY CHAINS The movements of migrant domestic workers are governed by a complex, multi-sited and multi-scaled set of networks. As Yeates (2004) has observed: Transnational labour networks comprise a variety of agencies (recruitment and placement agencies, overseas job promoters and job brokers) provided by for-profit and not-for-profit … agents. In addition to state and other institutional migration channels (for example, regulatory bodies), commercial recruitment and relocation agents, non-governmental organizations (for example, professional organizations, trade unions, religious institutions) and informal channels including ethnic-based ones are also central to these networks. Transnational care labour networks begin with the household … this being the unit that supplies the reproductive labour to be exported and provides care for the care worker’s dependants while she is working abroad. These networks mediate between migrant workers and international labour markets, form the infrastructure necessary for organized migration to occur and serve as organizational linkages between exporting and importing countries. (pp. 384–385)

Like the care chains they organise, these networks vary in length (from internal or cross-border to trans-continental), form (informal networks versus well-developed migration infrastructures) and character (permanent versus circular). For example, within much of Latin America, the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) Residence Agreement allows any citizen of the signatory states, here a female domestic worker, to obtain temporary residence for an initial two-year period, without requiring her to produce a work contract or proof of enrolment at a learning institution, after which she is eligible to apply for resident status.4 She is, moreover, allowed to bring family members with her. Such circumstances encourage the use of informal social networks comprised of relatives, friends, and the like, such as those organising the flow of domestic workers from Paraguay to Brazil (ILO, 2017; see also Ghosheh, 2009). This is in marked contrast to the situation of the migrant domestic workers that constitute the focus of this chapter: those moving within Asia (for example, from the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Nepal to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan) or between Asia and the Middle East. There, temporary or circular migration is the norm. Migrant domestic workers are tied to one employer, are often required to live in the latter’s residence, and are not allowed to bring family members with them or to marry in the destination country. In these migration corridors, the formalisation of migration arrangements for domestic workers as part of broader migration management initiatives has spurred the development of a complex migration infrastructure, which is particularly dense on the side of sending countries (Lindquist et al., 2012; Lindquist and Xiang, 2017). A case in point is the Philippines, perhaps the world’s leading ‘exporter’ of domestic workers: it has established a complex labour brokerage state apparatus, which is often held up (and promotes itself) as a model for other labour exporting countries (Rodriguez, 2010). The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and the International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB) have a key role in marketing overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). The POEA, moreover, regulates private recruiters, who in turn play a central part in planning the steps that prospective migrants are required to take. Asis et al. (2019) note, however, that ‘despite governments’ efforts to regulate placement fees and brokers’ service fees, the enforcement of allowable fees remains weak, leaving OFWs paying hefty fees that erode their earnings’ (p. 473). The Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) organises training programmes provided by private facilities. For domestic workers, such programmes involve training in the use of modern household appliances, the cuisine of host countries, and

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The governance of transnational care chains  315 language skills. However, as Rodriguez and Schwenken (2013) argue, these programmes ‘do not provide to-be migrants [sic] with an awareness of their labour and human rights but are conducive in [sic] contributing to producing “ideal migrant” subjects that are marketable and are able to adjust to (often harsh) working conditions’ (p. 382). The POEA, in turn, ensures that the migrant has secured all the required documents prior to departure, offers a one-day mandatory pre-departure programme, and negotiates arrangements with receiving countries, including the terms of a model contract specifying minimum wage levels and compliance with Philippine employment standards. The POEA also works with the ILAB’s system of Philippine Overseas Labor Offices (POLOs) to assist Filipinos in cases of abuse. Indonesia, another major Asian supplier of migrant domestic workers, has developed a system similar to that of the Philippines, based on the Centre of Overseas Employment and the National Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers (BNP2TKI), which works closely with the Indonesian Manpower Services Association, the main association for private companies licensed to recruit and deliver migrant workers abroad. Lindquist (2010) and Killias (2018) have documented the multiple links governing the mobilisation of Indonesia’s domestic workers through the country’s regulatory process. This process begins with the recruitment of migration candidates via a vast network of brokers (petugas lapangan) and sub-brokers, who draw on local connections to identify potential migrants for the national agencies licensed to recruit workers either for the Asia-Pacific region or for the Middle East. Before approaching the local office of a licensed recruitment agency, brokers make sure that the aspiring migrant has obtained her birth certificate, the requisite ‘family card’, and a letter of permission from either her husband or her father. While brokers play a critical role in making these connections, recruitment agencies ‘are key actors in transnational care chains’ (Killias, 2018, p. 109). Indeed, following interviews and registration which the brokers have arranged: The agency facilitates a medical examination at a clinic, a letter of recommendation from the Department of Manpower on the regency level (which allows for the right to issue a migrant passport), transportation and, prior to departure, a letter of exemption for the exit tax that citizens and residents must pay upon leaving Indonesia. (Lindquist, 2010, p. 125)

Once they have completed these steps, domestic workers are confined to camps run by the recruitment agencies, where they undergo training programmes for one to three months, with severely limited contact with the outside world (Killias, 2018, p. 108). While sending states such as the Philippines and Indonesia, and the recruitment agencies they license, have come to play an increasingly important role, the infrastructure in receiving countries tends to be less elaborate, relying as it does on the processing done beforehand on the sending side. For instance, as Elias (2018) explains: In Singapore, state oversight of employment placement agencies (regulated under the terms of the Employment Agencies Act) operates on the basis of a hands-off, minimalistic, approach to regulatory oversight which means that it is rare for agencies to lose their license. In Malaysia, foreign labour recruitment licenses are easily obtainable and the monitoring of agencies is virtually non-existent. (p. 286)

Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan require domestic workers to live in their employers’ homes. However, the reliance of Middle Eastern states on the kafala system, whereby the

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316  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance migrant is beholden to her sponsor/employer, has led to substantially worse conditions than those found in Asian destination countries. Not only are wages lower, but also the risks of abuse are higher (World Bank, 2017, p. 33). To provide some protection for their citizens, sending countries in Asia have turned to negotiating non-binding Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs), some of which focus specifically on domestic workers. In 2011, Indonesia signed an amendment to its 2006 MoU with neighbouring Malaysia, which ‘asserted the right of domestic workers to hold their passports and to communicate with their families’, ‘stipulated that the payment of monthly wages must be made into a bank account’, and ‘provided for one rest day per week (with the option to compensate with overtime payment)’ (Wickramasekara and Global Policy Associates, 2020, p. 12). Under the Malaysian Employment Act (1955), however, domestic workers continue to be excluded from the provisions regarding entitlement to maternity protection, rest days or holidays, and moreover, working hours and conditions of service are not protected (Wickramasekara and Global Policy Associates, 2020, p. 10). The 2019 Employment (Domestic Employee) Regulations, a bill that would at least partially remedy this situation, remains under review (P. Wickramasekara, personal communication, 25 August 2020). Some arrangements are struck between sending countries and employment agencies in the host country. For instance, as it was unable to conclude an MoU with Singapore, the Philippine government came to an arrangement with the country’s Association of Employment Agencies (Marti, 2019). Sending states have also signed MoUs with Middle Eastern countries.5 For instance: [t]he Memorandum between Indonesia and Kuwait … provides that workers receive three nutritious meals per day; that domestic workers are allowed to communicate with family and friends in Indonesia; that domestic workers are allowed a period of eight hours a day for rest; and that they shall have one day per week of rest. The contract … obliges employers to pay the wages of workers in cash at the end of each month and to provide accommodation with adequate ventilation, a lockable door, and access to proper facilities. (Ghosheh, 2009, pp. 318–319)

This MoU also specified that domestic workers retained their passport; a critical provision. It was only in 2015, however, that Kuwait’s National Assembly passed a law ‘granting domestic workers the right to a weekly day off, 30 days of annual paid leave, a 12-hour working day with rest, and an end-of-service benefit’, and it took another two years to pass implementing regulations for the law (Human Rights Watch, 2019, p. 338). In its report, Human Rights Watch (2019) goes on to note that the law does not set out sanctions against employers who fail to comply with these provisions, and that domestic workers can still be arrested for ‘absconding’ from an employer as the kafala system remains in place (p. 339). Moreover, domestic workers remain excluded from Kuwait’s labour legislation. Likewise, since the early 2010s, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have also introduced legislation improving the status of domestic workers while still not providing labour law protections to such workers (pp. 446, 475, 615). In summary, the infrastructure developed to move domestic workers within Asia, and between Asian sending countries and the Middle East, serves largely to institutionalise the temporary migration of domestic workers. For sending countries, the export of domestic workers brings remittances that make an important contribution to gross national product (GNP),6 while also providing a partial solution to unemployment and underemployment. The various steps that migrant domestic workers are required to take make them marketable and ‘protectable … but not necessarily protected’ (Xiang and Lindquist, 2018, p. 753). For the

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The governance of transnational care chains  317 most part, the aforementioned training programmes aim to produce the ‘ideal migrant’, that is, a highly marketable subject who is, moreover, prepared to maintain a steady flow of remittances (Xiang and Lindquist, 2018; Killias, 2018; Rodriguez and Schwenken, 2013). Contracts may offer some protection for migrant domestic workers, but ‘when migrant workers are denied mobility, their passports and identity cards are withheld, and they lack access to and knowledge of how to reach and use justice mechanisms, these contracts can be a very weak labour rights tool’ (Gammage and Stevanovic, 2019, p. 2610). As for MoUs, they have contributed to the construction of ethnic hierarchies among domestic workers, reflecting as they do the relative bargaining power of sending countries. More broadly, such MoUs ‘have only brought symbolic changes in migrants’ legal leverage and protection, but they have enhanced both sending and receiving states’ control over migration flows’, Thiollet (2019, p. 5) argues; a process she describes as ‘migrant rights-washing’ (p. 17). Stopping the analysis here, while possible, would mean missing an important part of the story of the construction of structures governing the transnational mobility of domestic workers. In other words, while this section has focused on the governance of migration (and of migrants), it is also necessary to examine the governance for and by migrant domestic workers: the focus of the next section.

TOWARDS RIGHTS-BASED GOVERNANCE: GOVERNANCE BY AND FOR MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS The ILO, especially through Convention No. 189, is important in terms of governance for migrant domestic workers, but the rights of migrant domestic workers have also been addressed in other global forums and through other international instruments. As Mundlak and Shamir (2014) write: ‘the vulnerability associated with gender was addressed by the UN [Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women; CEDAW Committee] in a 2008 General Recommendation on Women Migrant Workers’, while ‘the racial dimension of domestic workers’ vulnerability [was] addressed in a 2002 General Recommendation on Discrimination Against Non-Citizens, issued by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD)’ (p. 196).7 Even prior to the adoption of ILO Convention No. 189, the ILO and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women’s (UN Women) predecessor, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), were active in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2001, UNIFEM adopted the Asia-Pacific and Arab States Regional Programme on Empowering Migrant Women Workers in Asia. As part of this programme, it mobilised to get the CEDAW Committee to adopt General Recommendation No. 26 on migrant women (UNIFEM, 2008, p. 1; CEDAW Committee, 2008; D’Cunha, 2005; J. D’Cunha, personal communication, 14 May 2020). With the ILO, the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), and other regional and international actors, UNIFEM helped to organise the International Conference on Gender, Migration and Development (ICGMD): Seizing Opportunities and Upholding Rights, held in the Philippines in September 2008, as a prelude to the 2008 Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). The ICGMD resulted in the Manila Call for Action, advocating, among other things, the recognition of ‘domestic work as work in international and national laws’ and the ‘adoption of an international ILO convention on domestic workers’ (ICGMD, 2008, p. 7, para. 11).8

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318  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The ILO, too, was learning to see domestic workers as workers in their own right (see ILO, 2002, 2004). The adoption of ILO Convention No. 177 on home work (ILO, 1996) created an opening, and this was followed by the report of the ILO Committee of Experts on migration (ILO, 1999), which concluded that, as described in the previous section of this chapter, migration had changed in many ways: private recruitment and employment agencies were playing a greater role in organising migration for employment (para. 657); moreover, temporary migration was increasing in importance (para. 659); and finally, a ‘feminization of migration’ was occurring. According to the report: This ‘feminization’ is sometimes characterized by an over-representation of women migrants in extremely vulnerable positions, in so far as these positions are characterized by a strong bond of subordination between the employer and the employee and, above all, because those sectors are generally excluded from the scope of legal protection on employment, notably from the Labour Code. (para. 658)

For the Committee, this raised the question of the need for new measures to ‘ensure protection for this category of workers’, which clearly included domestic workers (paras 666–669). While the ILO Domestic Workers Convention and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW) treaty bodies play a critical role in asserting the rights of migrant domestic workers, governance by migrant domestic workers operates through networks of civil society organisations and migrant domestic workers’ organisations. Zajak et al. (2017) have termed these ‘networks of labour activism’ (NOLAs), which they define as ‘an interaction of different types of labour rights, social movements and community organizations, joining forces in complex forms of strategizing vis-à-vis multiples [sic] targets’ (p. 899). The network centred on the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) and its allies, which was established in the lead-up to the adoption of ILO Convention No. 189, is a typical example of a NOLA. The IDWF is a global organisation that, as of April 2022, comprises 84 affiliates working in 65 countries across the world, with officers responsible for coordinating action within each region. It is a member of the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF), and therefore of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Its support network includes important migrants’ organisations such as the MFA, as well as foundations such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Domestic worker organisations are rooted in a long and varied history of mobilisation (Ally, 2011). In South Africa, the end of the apartheid regime opened a window of opportunity for domestic workers to voice their claims, supported by the ILO (Ally, 2009). In Latin America, the ‘democratic opening’ of the 1980s created space for domestic workers to raise their demands, and at the turn of the millennium, the election of left-wing governments as part of the ‘pink tide’ gave them allies within the state apparatus (Blofield and Jokela, 2018).9 In 1988, domestic workers’ organisations in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica and Guatemala established a regional federation, the Confederation of Domestic Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (CONLACTRAHO), which in 2006 signed a declaration committing to promote the adoption of an ILO convention on domestic work (Acciari, 2019, p. 50).

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The governance of transnational care chains  319 Domestic workers were also organising in Asia, with Hong Kong constituting a critical site for migrant domestic worker mobilisation: in the 1990s, the Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body (AMCB) and the Asian Migrant Centre (AMC) brought together domestic workers from diverse countries of origin to press both the Hong Kong government and their countries of origin for reforms (Rother, 2012; see also Constable, 2007). The AMC, with strong connections with the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, encouraged the creation of domestic worker unions. The AMCB and the AMC, in turn, formed organisations to promote migrants’ rights in the region and beyond. Of particular importance is the MFA, which has become a major actor at the regional and global level. The Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility (CARAM Asia) also took up the cause of migrant domestic workers, organising the Regional Summit on Foreign Migrant Domestic Workers (2002) that produced the Colombo Declaration on the rights of foreign domestic workers. In 2006, representatives of many of these organisations gathered in Amsterdam for a conference hosted by the Federation of Dutch Trade Unions (FNV). The meeting also included women from the ITUC, the IUF, and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), as well as representatives from the ILO Regional Office for the Arab States (Bonner et al., 2018, p. 181). The IUF and WIEGO would go on to muster crucial support for the IDWF, which was formed in 2008 and grew out of the worldwide connections forged at that conference in Amsterdam (Boris and Fish, 2014, p. 432). The IDWF, in turn, would become a key protagonist in the campaign for a new ILO convention on domestic workers. Boris and Fish (2014) have described in detail the way in which, with the backing of key officials in the ILO Secretariat, the IDWF and its allies were able to win the support of the International Labour Council for ILO Convention No. 189, or the Convention concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers, in 2011 (see also Fish, 2017; Mahon, 2020). What matters here is that the adoption of ILO Convention No. 189 and the accompanying Recommendation No. 201 established ‘an important intergovernmental mechanism to push for legal reforms in national contexts, by contributing to visibility, by giving domestic regional advocates a goal to lobby for (ratification), and by engaging in government-level pressure to proceed with ratification and legislative reforms’ (Blofield and Jokela, 2018, p. 538). In other words, it created a horizon of legitimate expectations, thus encouraging mobilisation and rights claims by and for domestic workers, including migrants. The ability of ILO Convention No. 189 to stimulate domestic worker mobilisation was thus especially important, contributing as it did to the construction of governance for and by domestic workers, including migrant domestic workers. The ITUC was one of the first organisations to mobilise support for ILO Convention No. 189. In December 2011, the ITUC launched a campaign to get 12 countries to ratify ILO Convention No. 189 by the end of 2012; the ‘12 by 12’ campaign.10 As the guide Domestic workers unite, issued by the ITUC, the IDWF and the ILO’s Global Action Programme on Migrant Domestic Workers and their Families (2016), recounts: The key to what would become a highly successful campaign was alliance building, the close partnership between the ITUC and the IDWF and their consistent messages to encourage cooperation between domestic workers and national centres. In addition, the ITUC initiated 12 by 12 campaign activities in a number of targeted countries and asked its affiliates, domestic workers and allies to sign up to the campaign. This resulted in stronger or new national coalitions (national centres, domestic workers’ unions and associations, human rights, women’s and migrant organisations) and campaigns in around 90 countries. (p. 14)

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320  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The campaign gained the support of unions, migrants’ organisations such as the MFA, and civil society organisations such as Human Rights Watch. The second phase of the ITUC’s campaign was launched in 2014 at its Third World Congress, aiming at ‘12 plus 12’ ratifications, the effective implementation of ILO Convention No. 189, and the organisation of another 100 000 more domestic workers by 2018. As of early 2022, there were 35 state signatories to the Domestic Workers Convention, including 11 European countries, and IDWF’s affiliates represented over 600 000 members.11 The ITUC and UN Women collaborated in the production of a ‘briefing kit’, Domestic workers count too: Implementing protections for domestic workers (UN Women and ITUC, 2013).12 The document drew on the voices of domestic workers, government officials and employers from sites that were then leading examples – Bolivia, New York State (United States), South Africa and the Philippines – to illustrate how ILO Convention No. 189 and other global human rights treaties might be used to advance domestic workers’ rights (for another similar manual, see ILO, 2012). UN Women also played a key role in bringing the issue of migrant domestic workers to the GFMD.13 Thus in 2010, building on the breakthrough that had been achieved at the 2008 GFMD Summit meeting in Manila, UNIFEM worked with the government of Mexico, the host country of the 2010 meeting, to organise a two-day pre-conference session on gender, families, migration and development, which stressed the importance of the rights of migrant women workers (GFMD, 2010). The GFMD agreed to further pursue this issue, and in 2011, the then Chair-in-Office (Switzerland), UN Women and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) held two regional meetings on migrant domestic workers in partnership with the governments of Jamaica and Ghana.14 At the 2012 GFMD Summit meeting (Mauritius), the roundtable on ‘Protecting migrant domestic workers – enhancing their development potential’ (GFMD, 2012b) produced a checklist (GFMD, 2012a) combining the key principles and standards of ILO Convention No. 189 (2011), CEDAW General Recommendation No. 26 (CEDAW, 2008), and the General Comment No. 1 on migrant domestic workers adopted by the UN Committee on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (Committee on Migrant Workers, CMW, 2011).15 Furthermore, the ILO launched its Global Action Programme on Migrant Domestic Workers and their Families (2013–2016). The campaign, which brought together UN organisations (the ILO, UN Women and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which oversees the ICRMW), trade unions and the IDWF, pilot-tested a capacity-building approach to promote rights-based policies for domestic workers in ten countries along five main migration corridors: Ukraine–Poland, Zimbabwe–South Africa, Malaysia–Indonesia, Nepal–Lebanon and Paraguay–Argentina. To support this campaign, the ILO collaborated with the ITUC and the IDWF to produce the guide Domestic workers unite (ITUC et al., 2016). The project, moreover, included the publication of a newsletter, Migrant Domestic Workers in Focus (eight issues between 2013 and 2018), which reported on local activities to organise domestic workers in the aforementioned ten countries. In Malaysia, 23 organisations working with and representing domestic workers formed a coalition, Ke Arah 189, to coordinate action around decent work for domestic workers and to advocate the ratification of ILO Convention No. 189. In Indonesia, a similar coalition of migrants’ rights organisations and trade unions was created to promote the rights of migrant domestic workers (Wickramasekara and Global Migration Policy Associates, 2020, p. 27).

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The governance of transnational care chains  321 UN organisations and their NOLA partners also mobilised to raise awareness of the issue of migrant domestic workers at the regional level. For example, the Asia-Pacific regional offices of the ILO and UN Women were very active. In 2011, the ILO organised a regional Asia-Pacific conference on the theme of ‘Advocacy towards the ratification and implementation of ILO Convention No. 189 and Recommendation No. 201 on decent work for domestic workers’, which was attended by representatives of national trade unions, civil society organisations and domestic workers’ organisations, including the IDWF (ILO and International Domestic Workers Network, 2012, p. 76). Another regional space in which these IOs have worked with migrants’ organisations is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Forum on Migrant Labour (AFML). This annual forum provides a significant opportunity for civil society organisations and trade unions in the region to network and obtain useful information, which can then be disseminated among migrants’ networks on the ground (Rother, 2018). The situation of migrant domestic workers has been discussed several times at the annual AFML meetings, in particular at the tenth AFML (in 2017), which focused on ‘decent work for domestic workers in ASEAN’. According to Rother (2018), while the AFML is currently not a strong part of ASEAN regional migration governance, it nonetheless constitutes an important building block for NOLAs to advance their rights claims (pp. 116–117).

CONCLUSION The efforts of the ILO, UN Women and their NOLA allies to secure the rights of migrant domestic workers have not been without impact. Although ILO Convention No. 189 has been ratified by much less than half of ILO state parties, it has been ratified by 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Moreover, although it cannot be said to have instigated reforms, it has contributed to significant rights gains for domestic workers in Latin America, especially at the time when sympathetic left-wing governments were in office in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador (Acciari, 2019; Blofield and Jokela, 2018). Similarly, alliance-building around ILO Convention No. 189 helped to break resistance to the Magna Carta for Domestic Workers in the Philippines (Cherubini et al., 2018). Although the Philippines is the only Asian country to date to have ratified ILO Convention No. 189, its passage did help to strengthen the case of those fighting for the right to weekly days of rest for domestic workers in Singapore (Koh et al., 2017). Advocates can also point to the MoUs concluded between Saudi Arabia and the Philippines that regulate the terms of employment of Filipina migrant domestic workers, as well as to similar MoUs signed by Bangladesh with Jordan and Lebanon, respectively. In other words, efforts to organise and empower migrant domestic workers are, indeed, critical, but they confront the power embedded in the institutions constituting the governance of migrant domestic workers (Grugel and Piper, 2011). Thus far, the latter has clearly prevailed over the governance for and by migrant domestic workers. In this context, those championing the rights of migrant domestic workers and their families face a dilemma: On the one hand, they have made important moves to defend and define the human rights of migrant workers … But, on the other hand, the search for practical solutions to migration governance that uphold the labour brokerage model perpetuates a dehumanising model of migration in which the migrant worker is largely seen as ‘product.’ (Elias, 2018, p. 290)

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322  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Those practical solutions unquestionably offer some benefits. As Xiang and Lindquist (2018) note, ‘for individuals, infrastructuralization means enabling without empowering. But at the same time, the state becomes less extractive and controlling and more facilitating and caring. The public becomes more rights-conscious’ (p. 763). The dilemma is similar to that associated with the post-war reforms in the West, whereby trade union legislation both strengthened and contained unions. The gains are thus not insignificant, but they are clearly insufficient, and likely to remain so as long as migration is largely a matter for states – and their partners, the private sector recruitment and employment agencies – to determine. It is also important not to overlook the issues of care raised by the initial literature on transnational care chains. That is, a major part of the problem is the undervaluation of care work on the part of both receiving and sending countries. To tackle this ‘would require the redistribution of care work in sending and destination countries, and such measures as bolstering state-funded childcare, strengthening parental leave and challenging the devaluation of care work in both economic and social terms’ (Hennebry et al., 2019, p. 2631). Developing a care economy has the potential to generate decent work in both sending and receiving countries while also providing critical services to children, the elderly, and those with disabilities. This may seem a utopian prospect, but the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic across the world has exposed the costs of failure to value care and care workers.

NOTES 1. In 2013, Northern, Southern and Western Europe accounted for 22.1 per cent of all female migrant domestic workers in the world (ILO, 2015a, p. 20). 2. For example, see Phillips and Cole (2009), who distinguish between the ‘UN-orbit’ feminism of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the ‘another-world translations’ of local feminism (pp. 187–188). While the two may work together on specific campaigns, differences in ways of mobilising expertise and in visions of a better future can give rise to friction. 3. Yeates and Pillinger (2019) have published an impressive analysis of the governance of health worker migration. 4. The signatory states of the Mercosur Residence Agreement are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. 5. Saudi Arabia signed MoUs specific to domestic workers with the Philippines (in 2013) and Sri Lanka (in 2014), ‘which specifically address recruitment, migration costs, inclusion of a standard employment contract, a provision that workers retain their passports, specified rest and leave times; and the right to communicate with families’ (ILO, 2015b, p. 5). See also the World Bank (2017) for a discussion of the difficult negotiations that led to the first such MoU that Saudi Arabia entered into with the Philippines (pp. 34–35). Jordan has also concluded domestic worker agreements with Asian sending countries. 6. For the Philippines, remittances account for up to 10 per cent of GNP. In Indonesia, ‘domestic workers, mainly women, contribute about 51 percent of total remittances sent by current migrant workers annually, meaning that domestic workers remit more than the average Indonesian worker abroad’ (World Bank, 2017, p. 36). 7. Hennebry et al. (2016) argue that CEDAW addresses the rights of migrant women workers in a more gender-sensitive manner than the key ILO conventions governing migrant workers, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (ICRMW), and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, also known as one of the Palermo Protocols (pp. 68–69). 8. Migrant domestic workers were also organising in destination countries in the Global North. See, for example, Anderson (2010) on the United Kingdom; Stasiulis and Bakan (2003) on Canada; Boris and Klein (2006) on the United States.

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The governance of transnational care chains  323 9. The ‘pink tide’ included the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1998), Néstor Kirchner in Argentina (2003), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil (2003) and Evo Morales in Bolivia (2005). 10. Although only two countries, Uruguay and the Philippines, had signed the Domestic Workers Convention by the end of 2012, in 2013 seven more, including two European destination countries (Italy and Germany), had ratified it. 11. In 2013, the European Council authorised European Union member states to ratify ILO Convention No. 189. In addition to Italy and Germany, the European countries that have ratified the Convention are: Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Malta and Norway. 12. Jean D’Cunha, who had been so instrumental in the engagement of UNIFEM with domestic worker issues while she was Regional Director of the East and Southeast Asia Office, was one of the key actors behind the production of this briefing kit. By 2010, D’Cunha, now part of the New York office, was playing a central role in the involvement of the newly created UN Women with international migration. 13. Piper and Rother (2012) argue that civil society organisations, including the MFA, have successfully used an ‘inside-outside’ strategy to put migrants’ rights on the GFMD’s agenda. 14. The meeting held in Jamaica helped to launch a Caribbean-wide network of civil society organisations for domestic workers. 15. Among others, the MFA participated in the effort to get the UN Committee on Migrant Workers to adopt this General Comment No. 1 in 2011.

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326  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Rodriguez, R.M., and Schwenken, H. (2013). Becoming a migrant at home: Subjectivation processes in migrant-sending countries prior to departure. Population, Space and Place, 19(4), 375–388. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1002/​psp​.1779. Rother, S. (2012). Diffusion in transnational political spaces: political activism of Philippine labor migrants in Hong Kong. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Universität Freiburg. Rother, S. (2018). ASEAN Forum on Migrant Labour: A space for civil society in migration governance at the regional level?. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 59(1), 107–118. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​apv​.12181. Stasiulis, D.K., and Bakan, A.B. (2003). Negotiating citizenship: Migrant women in Canada and the global system. Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​9780230286924. Thiollet, H. (2019). Immigrants, markets, brokers, and states: The politics of illiberal migration governance in the Arab Gulf. IMI Working Paper Series 155. International Migration Institute. https://​www .migrationinstitute​.org/​publications/​immigrants​-markets​-brokers​-and​-states​-the​-politics​-of​-illiberal​migration-governance-in-the-arab-gulf. Triandafyllidou, A. (2013). Irregular migration and domestic work in Europe: Who cares? In A. Triandafyllidou (ed.), Irregular migrant domestic work in Europe: Who cares? (pp. 1–16). Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9781315589831. Tungohan, E. (2013). Reconceptualizing motherhood, reconceptualizing resistance. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15(1), 39–57. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14616742​.2012​.699781. United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (2008). General Recommendation No. 26 on women migrant workers (CEDAW/C/2009/WP.1/R). CEDAW. https://​www​.refworld​.org/​docid/​4a54bc33d​.html. United Nations Committee on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (CMW) (2011). General Comment No. 1 on migrant domestic workers (CMW/C/GC/1). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​709818. United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) (2008). Policy and programme work on international migration by the United Nations Development Fund for Women. https://​www​.un​.org/​ development/desa/pd/sites/www​.un​.org​.development​.desa​.pd/​files/​unpd​-cm7​-2008​-11​_p06​_unifem. pdf. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) (2013). Domestic workers count too: Implementing protections for domestic workers. United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. https://​www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​digital​-library/​publications/​2013/​3/​domestic​-workers​-count​ -too​-implementing​-protections​-for​-domestic​-workers. Wickramasekara, P., and Global Migration Policy Associates (2020). Malaysia: Review of admission and recruitment practices of Indonesian workers in the plantation and domestic work sectors and related recommendations (MYS/15/01/USA). International Labour Organization. https://​www​.ilo​ .org/​global/​ldtest/​WCMS​_749695/​lang​-​-en/​index​.htm. Williams, F. (2012). Converging variations in migrant care work in Europe. Journal of European Social Policy, 22(4), 363–376. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%2F0958928712449771. World Bank (2017). Indonesia’s global workers: Juggling opportunities and risks. World Bank. https://​ openknowledge​.worldbank​.org/​handle/​10986/​28937. Xiang, B., and Lindquist, J. (2018). Infrastructuralization: Evolving socio-political dynamics in labour migration from Asia. Pacific Affairs, 91(4), 759–773. https://​doi​.org/​10​.5509/​2018914759. Yeates, N. (2004). Global care chains: Critical reflections and lines of enquiry. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6(3), 369–391. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​1461674042000235573. Yeates, N., and Pillinger, J. (2019). International health worker migration and recruitment: Global governance, Politics and Policy. Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9781315678641. Zajak, S., Egels-Zandén, N., and Piper, N. (2017). Networks of labour activism: Collective action across Asia and beyond. An introduction to the debate. Development and Change, 48(5), 899–921. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1111/​dech​.12336.

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22. Promoting and restricting marriage migrations: when marriages are not such a private matter1 Hélène Le Bail

INTRODUCTION The link between dynamics of migration and marriage has been renewed since the 1980s owing to the opening of a large number of borders, particularly those of the former communist republics, and the increasing closure of certain other borders: those of the rich countries. The increase in marriages between people who are geographically, and often culturally, distant is therefore both an indication of greater freedom of movement, giving rise to an extension of the possibilities of matrimonial choices, and the result of alternative strategies in response to the difficulty of crossing some borders. Several terms exist to refer to this phenomenon: ‘cross-border marriages’, ‘transnational marriages’, ‘international marriages’ and ‘marriage migration’. In addition to these terms, aimed at capturing a category of migrants, there are also less academic terms which aim either to condemn the phenomenon by stressing the illegal nature of these migrations (‘sham marriage’, ‘green card marriage’, ‘marriage of convenience’) or to condemn the commodification of women’s bodies that they may entail (‘mail-order bride’). The migration‒marriage nexus is not a new phenomenon: the continuity between traditional practices of travel for marriage and today’s cross-border marriages has been addressed with regard to a number of geographical contexts (for India, see Palriwala and Uberoi, 2008; for China, see Davin, 2008; for Japan, see Nakamatsu, 2003). Traditions of exogamy (the injunction to find a spouse outside the village of the local group) and patri-virilocality (the injunction for couples to settle in the husband’s father’s village) in many countries mean that migration through marriage has long accounted for the majority of cases of women’s mobility. Furthermore, in contexts spanning from the colonisation of the American territories to the more recent flow of workers to rich countries, migrations, which are often initiated by men, have subsequently generated, with a time lag, the migration of women into the communities that have been created in the host countries. The main development in recent decades is that these long-distance marriages no longer take place mainly within migrant communities. On the other hand, these marriage migrations continue to involve mainly women. To give some telling examples, in the Philippines, 91 per cent of those leaving the country on a spousal or fiancé(e) visa are women. In Russia, surveys indicate that approximately 75 000 women migrated to the United States on fiancée visas during the 1990s (Patico, 2009). East Asia is probably the region of the world where the phenomenon is most visible: whereas bi-national marriages between Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese women and foreign men increased very slowly in the 1990s, marriages between local men and women from other Asian countries increased very rapidly over this period, reaching a peak in the 2000s (Chung, 2020). In these three countries, the rate of dual-national marriages as a proportion of all marriages reached 13.6 per cent in South Korea in 2005, 27.4 327 Hélène Le Bail - 9781789908077 39:26AM

328  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance per cent in Taiwan in 2004, and 5.8 per cent in Japan in 2005. These rates are surprisingly high, if one recalls that in Japan the resident foreign population is low, standing at around 2 per cent or less in the 2000s (Le Bail, 2017). The democratisation of long-distance travel and the emergence of the Internet have undeniably played a major role in the globalisation of this phenomenon and in the diversification of intermediaries, matchmaking services, and methods for meeting potential partners. Cross-border marriages, which involve a geographical distance between the future spouses, presuppose a certain degree of involvement from an intermediary. In the case of specialised tour operators (conducting so-called ‘romance tours’ or ‘marriage tours’), matches are entirely organised by mediators (Schaeffer, 2012; Wang and Chang, 2002). International marriage agencies, whether online or offline, offer a variety of services depending on the level of autonomy of the clients and the complexity of administrative procedures involved (Yamaura, 2015; Vartti, 2001; Nakamatsu, 2009). Similarly, on social networks, people sometimes act autonomously, and in other cases they are assisted by an intermediary who is familiar with the platforms in question and the intricacies of online communication (such as the ‘monitors’ assisting people in cybercafés in Yaoundé; Mfou’ou, 2005). Finally, mediation is sometimes provided simply by a relative or a person known by word of mouth who has followed the same route a few years earlier. Beyond these intermediaries who are directly involved in bringing people into contact, many other actors come into play in a less direct way in this globalised marriage scene, whether they are promoting and regulating these marriages, or alternatively condemning and restricting them. Central and local public authorities, administrative services, feminist, humanitarian, and even religious associations are all actors motivated by one of two main logics: on the one hand, the issue of depopulation and a concern to remedy a perceived dysfunction in the family unit and reproductive work, and on the other hand, the protection of women from poor countries who may be exploited via this matrimonial market, or the protection of the values attached to marriage and promoted by the country of arrival or departure. This chapter examines how the interests of the various actors respond to and confront each other around the issue of marriage, which is in principle a private matter, but which raises questions that go beyond the couple and the family, and lead many actors to shape these private and intimate relations.

DEPOPULATION, THE CARE CRISIS, AND THE PROMOTION OF CROSS-BORDER MARRIAGES In the field of research dealing with the process of globalisation of reproductive work, the feminisation of migration flows is explained by the need for labour in sectors of activity commonly viewed as women’s work. These needs are created by ageing populations, the increase in the proportion of women who work, the rapid increase in the number of people remaining unmarried, and the demographic imbalance between men and women in certain Asian countries, as well as the revival of paid domestic work (Milkman et al., 1998). Like migrant care assistants, nannies and domestic staff, migrant wives can be considered to contribute to the feminisation of migration. Indeed, even in migration, reproductive work is carried out, whether in a paid or an unpaid manner (Benería, 2007). Transnational marriages may thus correspond to the search for a source of labour in a context of restrictive migration policies.

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Promoting and restricting marriage migrations  329 In the following two subsections, I first highlight how, in the context of globalisation and demographic transition, the matrimonial choices of spouses (both migrants and those receiving migrants in host countries) and the advice of potential intermediaries are orientated by the choices of states in terms of family and migration policy; and secondly, I focus on the role of local authorities, whose measures in favour of cross-border marriages can position them as a sort of intermediary in these unions. A Tool for the Reorganisation of Reproductive Work On a worldwide scale, female migrants whose journeys are connected to marriage – not only as wives, but also as mothers and as daughters-in-law – are contributing to a change in the organisation of reproductive work in the context of a ‘care crisis’ (Ito, 1996). In migration studies, ‘marriage migration’ has become a field of study in its own right (among the large number of works published since the early 2000s, see Piper and Roces, 2003; Constable, 2005; Palriwala and Uberoi, 2008; Yang and Lu, 2010; Maskens, 2013; Charsley, 2013; Ishii, 2016; Fresnoza-Flot and Ricordeau, 2017; Groes and Fernandez, 2018). A number of studies analyse these marriages from the perspective of labour migration, specifically that of reproductive work (Piper and Roces, 2003; Lee, 2012). In the 1970s, the concept of the division of labour between men and women made it possible to explain the devaluation of highly feminised jobs, and this subject of study has been renewed over the last 20 years in order to analyse the feminisation of migration. With regard to domestic work, talking about ‘reproductive work’ was a way of recognising the value of unpaid tasks without which ‘productive work’ could not be done. It was also a way of deconstructing theories that viewed the division of labour as the result of a biological difference, arguing instead that it is a social construct (Benería, 1979). In the same way, the current use of the term ‘reproductive work’ in the context of migration marks a desire to emphasise that the same tasks continue to be assigned to women, and that the work carried out by migrant women continues, to varying degrees, to lack visibility, to be undervalued, and above all to be unpaid or poorly paid. The concept of reproductive work covers three main tasks: (1) that of renewing the productive labour force, that is, procreating, having children and carrying out daily domestic work, including cooking, cleaning, laundry and shopping, but also maintaining emotional and sexual relations; (2) that of caring for dependents (in the narrow sense of care work), especially children and elderly parents; and (3) that of social reproduction, that is, renewing the productive force at the qualitative level, which includes overseeing children’s education and socialisation, as well as the tasks related to the socialisation of the household in general and its participation in community life (Truong, 1996; Parreñas, 2012). The use of the term ‘reproductive work’ relates to all these aspects of reproduction. In migration studies, this term makes it possible to draw connections between analyses of migration routes that would otherwise be considered separately, from the perspectives of labour migration (domestic workers, care assistants, and so on) or of family migration (wives of nationals or foreign residents), respectively. It allows the case of unpaid work carried out in the private sphere to be reintroduced into the overall field of the globalisation of care work (Benería, 2007) and that of studies devoted to the new forms of international divisions of labour (Falquet et al., 2010), while highlighting the continuities to be found between migrant women workers and migrant wives (Kofman, 2012).

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330  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance The term ‘reproductive work’ also brings to light the fact that the choice of migration destination often depends on the immigration policies of the destination country (Yeoh et al., 2013). The concept of reproductive work, with its critical dimension, is preferred to that of ‘care work’ by researchers who wish to bring out the ethno-racial hierarchies that are combined with the male‒female or class divisions present in the organisation of these tasks. Thus, following on from work analysing the ‘racial division of reproductive labor’ within a society (Glenn, 1992) (for example, that of Black American women in the United States), some studies demonstrate the existence of an ‘international division of reproductive labour’, in which migrants of certain nationalities perform this work for people of other nationalities (Parreñas, 2012); such as Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong and the Gulf States, and North African nannies in France. Historically, as economic, social, political, moral or demographic transformations have taken place, reproductive work has been transferred to people of other classes or ethnic groups, or to other nationalities through immigration (Truong, 1996). Today, in many countries with very low fertility rates, it is above all demography that is driving the need to reshape the organisation of reproductive tasks. Researchers in migration studies are therefore interested in observing how these tasks are transferred to migrants, whether through targeted migration policies or more informally through local measures. Case studies from Asia are the most representative of this reality, for reasons described by Emiko Ochiai (2011), a family sociologist. Firstly, the destination countries have extremely low fertility levels and have experienced a ‘compressed’ demographic transition (a rapid change in the ageing of the population and in the decline in rates of marriage; see Chang, 2010). Secondly, these countries favour family-orientated social policies, that is, policies that encourage ‘self-help and mutual support within the family and the community’, which has the effect of favouring the maintenance of unpaid reproductive work (Ochiai, 2011, p. 231). As a result of these two factors, many Asian societies favour keeping reproductive work within the family unit. In 1997, Nicola Piper’s article on Japan was one of the first to approach marriage migration in terms of work. The author describes these marriages as a cheap way for men to obtain domestic and sexual services. Out of all the rich countries in East Asia, Japan is the one that has the most restrictive migration policies with regard to the care work sector and, even more so, the domestic work sector. However, cross-border marriages are also common in countries that have long since opened their doors to foreign workers. Researchers have thus pointed out that, in Taiwan and Singapore, migration through marriage is an alternative for families who cannot afford paid care services (Yeoh et al., 2013). Two studies from the case of Taiwan are worth considering in greater detail. Melody Lu (2012) studied the special case of veterans who were refugees from the mainland at the end of the Chinese civil war and had no family in Taiwan. At the time of the study, veterans represent about 10 per cent of all migrant husbands, and the average age of these veterans at the time of their marriage is particularly high (69 years). The motivations for these marriages are formulated clearly in terms of the services that are sought: ‘We need someone to care for us in old age. It is cheaper and easier to marry a mainland or a foreign wife than hire a maid’ (p. 240). The negotiation of exchanges between the spouses is sometimes very clearly contractualised: for example, it might be a question of caring for the elderly veteran in exchange for the financial support of the foreign wife’s children in China (their education and housing). Wako Asato (2010) has also studied the case of disabled spouses, who represent 9 per cent of cross-border marriages in Taiwan. Based on an analysis of statistics and reports from the

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Promoting and restricting marriage migrations  331 Taiwanese Interior Ministry, he shows that among disabled people were married in 2006, 10.2 per cent were married to a migrant wife, and the proportion rises to 34.1 per cent in the case of people with a mental disability. In both cases, the strategy of the elderly husband or of the Taiwanese family of people with disabilities is one of finding a solution to the care crisis, taking into account the country’s immigration and social policies, in order to provide care services within families. From the Sustainability of Family Units to that of Local Communities The reciprocal exchange concerns not only the migrant spouse and the husband, but also the family, and even a community that values or supports cross-border marriages. These migrations, aimed at supporting the sustainability of families, are also intended to support the maintenance of local businesses and communities. In some of the countries that have experienced the arrival of large numbers of foreign brides, the fertility rate is below replacement level. Within these countries, peripheral or rural areas, sometimes in a state of depopulation, have been prime areas for marriage migration. In Japan, for example, the increase in cross-border marriages is linked to anti-depopulation initiatives. As early as the 1970s, many rural localities started to use rural depopulation funds to finance programmes aimed at promoting marriages among their residents. This involved the recruitment of marriage counsellors, the provision of financial support for the wedding ceremony, the organisation of matchmaking at parties, sports outings, and trips to which women from neighbouring towns were invited (Yaguchi, 2004). In this context, some localities chose to favour cross-border marriages. As these initiatives were faced with criticisms related to the risk of human trafficking, local authorities stopped engaging directly in the promotion of international marriages, but such measures continued for a long time, such as in the village of Kamikoani (Akita prefecture) where, between 1987 and 2004, cross-border marriage couples received a settlement bonus of 300 000 yen. A few decades after the implementation of such schemes in Japan, the Korean authorities introduced marriage promotion programmes in the 2000s. The major difference between Japan and Korea is that the latter legislated at the national level (the International Marriage Support Law for Rural Singles). As in the case of Japan, this is a measure that aims to address the problem of men remaining unmarried in rural areas (whereas the proportion of unmarried women is a significant issue in cities). This law has been implemented in 26 municipalities (Lee, 2014). Field surveys highlight the role that migrant women play in sustaining local activity. In regions marked by ageing and depopulation, these migrant women, who settle in the long term, represent a cheap labour force for small factories and family-run agricultural or service businesses, which often face financial difficulties (Freeman, 2011; Le Bail, 2017). In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the phenomenon of migrant wives is most visible in rural areas concerned with the renewal of families and sustaining local activity. In this respect, research on marriage migration is illuminating in that it extends research on the links between the ‘care crisis’ and female migration (Ito, 1996; Constable, 2007; Huang et al., 2005; Parreñas, 2000; Ehrenreich and Russell Hochschild, 2004) beyond the domain of paid work, and also beyond the context of global cities (Sassen, 1998, 2004).

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332  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance

FIGHTING AGAINST THE COMMODIFICATION OF WOMEN’S BODIES AND CONTROLLING NATIONAL BORDERS This section deals with the actors who, faced with the rise in the number of transnational marriages, are involved in restricting this phenomenon. I will here speak mainly of the associative and humanitarian context, and of administrations that implement laws on marriage and rights of residence (both in countries of departure and arrival). These actors are involved for very different, even opposing, reasons – such as the protection of individuals or, conversely, the protection of morals or borders – but they all contribute in some way to controlling private relations. Condemning the Commodification of Marriage and Women’s Bodies Analyses in terms of care work or reproductive work offer a very utilitarian picture of migration through marriage. Indeed, since the 1980s, these marriages have generated debates on the question of the commodification of women in a globalised and unequal marriage market. A number of research studies, using an approach dominated by the radical feminist movement, describe the work provided by migrant women (wives, care workers or sex workers) as the equivalent of work carried out in the gold, ivory and rubber trades in the Third World in the nineteenth century: that is, as labour extracted from the South for the benefit of the North (Russell Hochschild, 2004). Thus, early research in the 1980s on migration through marriage was mostly linked to public debates on women’s rights and focused on the commodification of women. These works describe the methods of marriage agents, who tended to offer standardised images of women to men in wealthy countries by means of catalogues of ‘mail-order brides’ (Wilson, 1988) which, in the 1980s–1990s, took the form of newsletters to which men could subscribe, or classified advertisements in mainstream magazines, which would then lead to an exchange of letters (on mail-order brides, see Villapando, 1989). Other agents organised trips for groups of single men, during which there would be meetings with groups of single women (with female participants generally being more numerous). The study of these agents and ‘romance tours’ continues to the present day, taking account of the Internet revolution, but with approaches that better account for women’s agency and that are less condemnatory in their approach (Luehrmann, 2007; Johnson-Hanks, 2007; Schaeffer, 2012). Furthermore, critical analysis of the unequal nature of these marriages has focused on how these marriages are embedded in colonial histories and the construction of exotic and erotic imaginaries, centring their perspective less on gender and more on race (Piper, 1997; Suzuki, 2007; Tseng, 2016). Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are also important actors in promoting representations of these marriages that influence the treatment of migrant women. Although the work of most NGOs involves helping people, carrying out advocacy, raising public awareness or pursuing funding for these activities, the discourses that they disseminate tend to reinforce the negative stereotype of the passive, victimised migrant woman. This type of stereotype is negative because it contributes to representations and policy practices that are based on the idea that migration through marriage is in itself a social problem (Hsia, 2007; Bélanger and Flynn, 2018). The victim-based approach to migration through marriage, which is often favoured by the media, humanitarian organisations and feminist networks (some feminist researchers are

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Promoting and restricting marriage migrations  333 important actors in these debates), carries the risk of feeding into discourses that are more concerned with values and moral standards than with the reality of human trafficking. The underlying principle of such discourses is that ‘real marriage’ ‒ that is, ‘romantic marriage’ ‒ should not have anything to do with money. Drawing boundaries in this way between, on the one hand, the sphere of private relations and the home (viewed as the domain of more authentic and emotional social relationships), and on the other hand, the sphere of the market (viewed as a harsher and more impersonal domain), has long been questioned (Zelizer, 2005; Constable, 2009). In response to the tendency to speak in moralising terms about private relations and to deny the agency of migrant women, a number of studies (some of which explicitly adopt feminist analytical frameworks) have focused on migrant women’s capacity for agency and resistance, and have described in much greater depth the complex realities of power relations in these situations (Patico, 2009; Grillot, 2013; Constable, 2003). This work also helps to question the supposed undesirability of these marriages by highlighting the porosity between commodified forms of private relations and marital relationships (Brennan, 2004; Piper and Roces, 2003; Faier, 2009). However, radical feminist and humanitarian discourses are very influential in terms of policy choices and administrative practices (front-line practices or street-level bureaucracy). The main feature of such discourses is the condemnation of the commercial character of cross-border marriages as opposed to romantic marriages (those that would be motivated only by interactions and emotional bonds between individuals), where the latter are presented as a guarantee of equality between women and men, and as a constitutive value of democracies (for Taiwan, see Lan, 2008; for the Netherlands, see Bonjour and de Hart, 2013; for Denmark, see Fernandez, 2013). In the name of protecting the authenticity of marriage, monitoring techniques for identifying ‘real’ marriage have proliferated and given rise to numerous field studies. Research has focused on how agents of consulates and prefectures, in order to combat forced marriages and marriages of convenience, participate in the control of people’s bodies and private lives (Maskens, 2015; Block and Bonjour, 2013; Lavanchy, 2014; Geoffrion, 2018). They require women and men to demonstrate affection and both physical and emotional intimacy as proof of consent, and to prove that their motives are amorous rather than financial (Lan, 2008). These discourses maintain that, in the host countries, migrant women endanger the values and norms of gender equality; whereas in the countries of departure, the emigration of women through marriage is evidence of a society where women are not emancipated, where romantic (‘real’) marriage has not yet become the norm, and thus evidence that this society has not yet modernised (for Vietnam, see Lee, 2014). Countries have therefore put in place regulations to control cross-border marriages, with the aim of meeting international standards for the protection of women, and based on a rationale of combating human trafficking: Cambodia has passed laws restricting foreign marriages since 2010, and Vietnam passed similar laws in 2002 and 2006 (Lee, 2014). In the Philippines, the law has prohibited mail-order marriages since 1990 (Ricordeau, 2017). Furthermore, since the stigma of prostitution is attached to migrant women through marriage, they are seen as eroding national morality (for Thailand, see Suksomboon, 2011; for Vietnam, see Lee, 2014). The monitoring of private relationships is thus also carried out by the countries of departure. However, just as in the host countries, controversies about emigration through marriage revolve more around national identity than they do around the protection of women’s rights. The approach of conceiving of borders as administrative practices makes it possible to bring to light state agents’ representations regarding the ideal marriage and, implicitly, the

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334  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance founding imaginaries of the nation. Indeed, representations of gender roles structure national ideals (Yuval-Davis, 1997), and the positive or negative characteristics associated with foreign partners, whether male or female, also reveal the characteristics that, in the eyes of agents of the state, should be possessed by people in order to be capable of embodying the nation (Wray, 2011). Protecting National Borders and Values Cross-border marriages are subject to tensions between political priorities and individuals’ plans for their private lives (Maskens, 2013). The assessment of matrimonial intentions is the responsibility of state representatives, who have the dual injunction of respecting an individual freedom enshrined in the Constitution or the law and defending the value of the institution of marriage and the country’s borders. However, the proliferation of measures that have been implemented in many countries calls into question the respect for individual freedoms. Administrative practices in consulates, prefectures and other places where borders are negotiated on a daily basis, and where, in particular, the authenticity of marriages is assessed, are based not only on considerations of norms and values (such as those of romantic marriage and gender equality), but also on the objective of limiting immigration and combating the circumvention of restrictive immigration policies. A number of countries, wishing to control immigration, have strengthened their laws with a view to combating marriages of convenience. Public debates present it as both an obvious fact and a threating reality that there is an increase in marriages of convenience for the purpose of migration. Research highlights some discrepancies between the dominant discourses in Western and Asian countries. In the West, discourses constructing migration through marriage as a threat are strongly centred around endogamous marriages, and it is the couple or citizen of immigrant background who is stigmatised, whereas in Asian countries it is migrant women who are represented as a threat. In the West, work on the link between migration and marriage has long focused on the marital choices of single migrants and their descendants, on the assumption that this choice is indicative of their level of integration into the host society (Qian and Lichter, 2007; Safi, 2008). Cross-border marriages with a person from the country of origin are thus analysed as the result of immigrants’ lack of access to the marriage market, or of their refusal to integrate, or of the imposition of so-called ‘traditional’ or even ‘undemocratic’ matrimonial practices by continuing sociability networks in their cultural community. Some studies deconstruct the assumed link between spousal choice and cultural integration (Casier et al., 2013; Sterckx, 2015). Others describe how arranged marriages are sometimes no more than a façade behind which young people from immigrant families are exercising increasing autonomy in their choices, and where parents themselves privilege feelings over social obligations (Qureshi et al., 2012). Despite this, public opinion continues to be dominated by the imagined risks, which include: the creation of ethnic enclaves that escape social control and threaten the country’s political stability; the rise of forced marriages that threaten the lives of young people; the undermining of an already fragile welfare state; and a deligitimisation of the whole migration control system (D’Aoust, 2013). The issue of ethnic enclaves and forced marriages are clearly connected to the alleged practices of migrants. The problem is not presented in these terms in those Asian countries where cross-border marriages do not largely involve migrants. Immigration through marriage is a much more visible reality in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore than elsewhere in the world.

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Promoting and restricting marriage migrations  335 It is understandable that the discourse has become more extreme in Taiwan, for example, given the scale of the phenomenon in this country: out of those who acquire Taiwanese citizenship, currently 97 per cent do so through marriage to a Taiwanese person, and out of that 97 per cent, 99 per cent are women (Cheng, 2013). In Taiwan and Hong Kong, foreign wives are perceived by the host society as poor and uneducated. Yet migrant women are at the heart of the family unit through marriage, and take on part of the work of social reproduction. They are considered to be poorly qualified in their role as mothers, and there is concern that the next generation, being less well educated, could undermine the country’s competitiveness. The media in Hong Kong portrays migrant women by marriage as lazy, irresponsible and opportunistic (Newendorp, 2010). They are therefore viewed as representing a risk for nations such as Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong that owe their recent success to the ‘quality’ of their population, and identify themselves as elite centres with successful societies (Hsia, 2007; Cheng, 2013; Newendorp, 2008, p. 33), as well as for nations that are in the process of redefining their position on the international stage, such as China (Barabantseva and Grillot, 2019). The boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is thus based more on considerations related to the level of education, and to the ability to carry out social and cultural reproduction, than on progressive considerations (gender relations in the couple, romantic marriage, and so on), as is the case in European countries. Consequently, many works describe the linguistic and cultural training that is put in place to make these women into good mothers capable of managing the education of future citizens (for Hong Kong, see Newendorp, 2008; for Japan, see Faier, 2009) and reveal the façade of multicultural policies that are actually designed to limit these women’s cultural influence (for South Korea, see Kim, 2013). In Taiwan, discourses on foreign brides have even developed around considerations of biological heredity, health and morality (Lan, 2008). Among the Asian countries that receive large numbers of foreign brides, South Korea stands out for the direction that official identity discourses have taken. Under pressure from NGOs, South Korea legislated for the regulation of marriage agents in 2008 (as did other countries that are net recipients of women migrants by marriage, such as the United States in 2005; see Jehle and Miller, 2010), yet debates on the commodification of these unions have been overshadowed by mobilisation against the discrimination and stigmatisation of migrant women and their families. Accordingly, the first measure taken by the government in 2007 was to ban discriminatory expressions in marriage agency advertisements, and then the framework for reflection on future laws in this area came to be centred around the concept of the ‘multicultural family’. Representations of migration by marriage have benefited from the context of the promotion of a new multicultural Korean national identity, but also from the numerous measures aimed at promoting cross-border marriage with a view to supporting a familialist regime (Lee, 2012). The particular orientation of South Korea can be explained by the need to maintain this familialist regime while responding to extremely rapid demographic and social changes, and without having made the choice, as in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, to favour the outsourcing of domestic tasks (partly through immigration). However, in Korea, these official discourses and legislative choices should not blind us to the fact that there remain pressures on foreign wives, who are asked to ‘reproduce Koreans’ (Kim, 2013).

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CONCLUSION The field of research on the link between migration and marriage has been productive over the past two decades, and has highlighted the many actors involved, including migrants and their networks, the private sector (such as marriage agencies), states and local authorities (whose interests may differ), feminist associations and humanitarian organisations. The interactions between these actors with their different objectives – the provision of productive labour, the protection of women and migrants, and the protection of national borders and values – seem to converge overall on a strong state interventionism in the private domain of marriage.

NOTE 1. I would like to express my gratitude to Marylène Lieber and Gwenola Ricordeau. Discussions we had around the publication of the special issue on ‘Migrations par le marriage et intimités transationales’, Cahier du Genre, 2018(1), were very important for the writing of this chapter.

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340  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and nation. SAGE Publications. Zelizer, V. (2005). The purchase of intimacy. Princeton University Press.

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23. Migration intermediation: revisiting the kafala (sponsorship system) in the Gulf Claire Beaugrand and Hélène Thiollet

In recent decades, policy discourses and media representations have emphasised the illegal and exploitative dimension of migration brokerage. The figure of the ‘migrant smuggler’ has emerged as an ideal culprit for the loss of lives in migration, thus obscuring part of the broader phenomenon. Recognising this complexity, research in the social sciences has emphasised the variety of forms of migration intermediation and the importance of regulatory contexts in determining the diverse outcomes of such intermediation. In this chapter, we argue that the broad spectrum of intermediation institutions needs to be understood not so much in terms of individual or collective economic transaction relations, but rather as being a constitutive part of the global governance of migration itself. To do so, we posit the concept of ‘intermediation institutions’, understood here as a broad framework of rules and norms that governs the mobility and integration of human beings across societies. These intermediation institutions operate both within and between countries and societies. They are inherently transnational, connecting places and individuals, and structuring their relations across space and time. They are composed of formal and informal institutions – in the sense adopted by Douglas North of ‘informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights)’, which ‘create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange’ (North, 1991, p. 97) – but they also form a system of representations and values attached to these institutions that variously facilitate, hinder or prevent the mobility, settlement and integration of people across origin and host societies. Values attached to mobility, citizenship and integration are often tied to political authorities and states, especially in the context of the increasing politicisation of migration issues that currently characterises Western contexts (van der Brug et al., 2015) and the Middle East and Gulf region (Thiollet, 2021). These values, representations and hierarchies attached to migration and mobility by state institutions are also appropriated by non-state actors, who either reinforce or subvert them (Azoulay and Beaugrand, 2015). Our understanding of intermediation institutions borrows heavily from the broad definition of migration regimes as ‘a constellation of political principles, norms and practices, which fall outside the scope of terms like “state” and “policy”’ (Cvajner et al., 2018). The concept of ‘migration regime’ provides a middle ground between two irreconcilable approaches: on the one hand, an exclusively statist one; and on the other hand, an exclusively postmodern approach that challenges the role of states. Like irregular migration, intermediation is often defined as a set of social processes facilitating mobility that takes place outside the scope of state control: as such, intermediation involves a nexus of actors, including sponsors and sponsored migrants, employers and state agents. They operate within a web of social constraints and values, as well as each individual actor’s own system of beliefs and interpretations of norms. However, intermediation is often conflated with irregular, criminal practices such as smuggling or trafficking, despite the fact 341 Claire Beaugrand and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 39:28AM

342  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance that intermediaries of all sorts are sometimes directly mandated by states for the purposes of both importing labour and controlling migration. The error consists in mistaking the part for the whole, as intermediation encompasses a large spectrum of actors and practices, including both the United States (US) system of ‘sponsors’ and the often exoticised sponsorship system used in the Middle East, known as the kafala. This chapter focuses on the latter, which is a well-studied system of migration regulation in receiving states of the Gulf region and countries of the Levant (Jordan and Lebanon). While studies on intermediation often focus on mobility and smuggling in the context of sending or transit countries, the kafala provides a vantage point for analysing the role of intermediation institutions in the host societies. The role of the kafala is of particular interest in the exclusionary contexts of the Gulf societies, where the formal non-integration of immigrants is prescribed by public policy. The kafala is an intermediation regime that makes it compulsory for every foreigner wishing to reside and work or invest in the host territory to be ‘sponsored’ by a national (the sponsor or kafil, with the plural kufala’). The kafala ties the work visa and residency of foreigners to a local intermediary, the kafil, who can be a person or a company. The kafala is generally portrayed in migration studies as a sort of exotic institution peculiar to Middle Eastern societies, and in particular as the cornerstone of migration policies in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In this context, it is seen as the central vector of the exploitation of migrants. Human rights activists have long condemned it as one of the main sources of abuses and exploitative practices in the GCC countries (Human Rights Watch, 2010). Scholars have also generally analysed the kafala as an institution that ‘keep[s] migrants in check’ (Longva, 1999) and forms the legal foundation of their exclusion (Dito, 2015). Yet, while true, these analyses offer only a partial understanding of the kafala, as this involves not only public and state actors, but also private, non-state actors, and leads to contradictory outcomes, as shown by Noora Lori (2019): the private sponsors involved in the kafala system both reproduce the state’s hierarchical policy of labour import, but also subvert the state’s objective of labour rotation through the repeated renewal of ‘short-term’ work contracts. The social relations at work in the kafala are embedded in deep socioeconomic and political histories in the region, which have been challenged by labour market reforms in the 1990s and 2010s (Thiollet, 2021). Our chapter thus seeks to unpack the contradictory, multifaceted social dynamics embedded in the sponsorship system. We first define what intermediation institutions are, and locate the kafala in the context of the latest theory regarding intermediation and brokers in migration. Secondly, we examine the changing role of the kafala in mediating mobility to host societies and integration within those societies. Our focus on the kafala helps us to address several key questions regarding the private institutions of migration governance, in connection to states (domestic politics) and to inter-state relations (migration control, reforms, anti-integration policies), in connection to (labour) markets at the international level, and in connection to the relations between foreigners and locals, and dynamics of social interactions beyond the state’s remit. Ultimately, this approach nuances our understanding of public‒private dynamics in migration governance, challenging the assumption that there is a clear-cut dichotomy between these two types of actors.

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Migration intermediation  343

LOCATING THE KAFALA WITHIN THE LITERATURE ON MIGRATION INTERMEDIATION REGIMES Intermediation is central to the understanding of formal and informal institutions that enable mobility and shape social integration in migration contexts. By institutions we mean, following Douglas North (1991), man-made constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. Intermediation institutions ensure that social and economic interactions happen in an orderly and expected fashion between the societies of origin and arrival of migrants. Intermediaries come in all shapes and sizes, and facilitate mobility via formal recruitment processes and businesses, labour brokerage, and family-led or community-based chain migration. On the receiving end of the migration process, brokers and intermediaries, such as placement schemes or, more traditionally, settled family networks, organise the settlement (for various durations) and integration of newcomers in host contexts, with a spectrum of rights and constraints that vary considerably depending on contexts and types of intermediations. They ease the local integration – or adaptation – of newcomers in host communities, often within ethnic neighbourhoods, mediating access to local labour or housing markets, and help to maintain links with the societies of origin. It is generally considered that migration intermediation manifested in the institutions of money transfer amounts to no more than an economic transaction, yet recent research has highlighted the broad spectrum of symbolic ties and institutional ramifications that intermediation entails, often referring to this poorly understood phenomenon as a ‘black box’ (Axelsson et al., 2022; Lindquist et al., 2012; McKeown, 2012). In fact, intermediaries may be corporate or individual actors, locals or migrants themselves, whether legal or illegal; while they may operate criminal smuggling or trafficking networks (which is the focus of the popular imaginary), they may also belong to tax-paying recruitment companies. They are often found within (extended) family, personal and community networks (Boyd, 1989). The various formal and informal practices of intermediation offer a wide spectrum of social, economic and political institutions, ranging from mafia-like bondage to legal sponsorship, and involve a variety of actors, including migrants themselves, employers, recruiters, state agencies, and various social actors in host contexts. Migration intermediation thus blurs the boundaries between the roles of state and non-state interventions and actors in migration governance. In other words, intermediation is a Janus-faced migration institution that operates not only at every step of the migratory process, but also across time and space: it is deployed transnationally, and it affects different generations of migrant communities, connecting them with local and origin societies. Intermediation institutions have long been located geographically or culturally in specific contexts. For instance, policy or research discourses often use vernacular terms such as ‘taikongs’ and ‘calos’ for middlemen and brokers in Javanese migration (Spaan, 1994), ‘coyotes’ for smugglers moving migrants from Mexico and Central America to the US (Singer and Massey, 1998), ‘saloceiro’ for Paraguayan immigrants in Brazil serving as ‘recruitment intermediaries’ for their employers in order to find additional migrant employees, and so on. Terminological exoticism tends to present these intermediation regimes as locally specific and barely generalisable. Using the term ‘kafala’ rather than ‘sponsorship system’ or even ‘brokerage’ also tends to exoticise the institution under scrutiny in this chapter. Noora Lori (2012) notes that the kafala could be analysed alongside intermediation regimes in the Global North, such as the Italian law of 1998 establishing a direct sponsorship role for individuals, firms or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in granting migrants’ entry and residence, although

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344  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance this law was soon reformed in 2002. More broadly, any migration regulation that makes the granting of entry and residence conditional upon access to work permits effectively establishes a form of sponsorship by the employer in relation to the migrant. In fact, rather than being exotic, ad hoc, or local practices or institutions, regimes of intermediation are globally connected and embedded in global migration governance. They help us to understand dynamics of regulation involving states and non-state actors as being mutually interdependent. Intermediaries may align with or complement state-led regulations (policies), as in the case of large recruitment companies that operate worldwide. They may also bypass them, as migrants smugglers do, or operate at the margin of laws while helping migrants at sea, as search-and-rescue NGOs do in the Mediterranean. They may operate in exchange for financial or symbolic resources, and rely upon sources of legitimacy and efficacy that may be social, cultural or economic. To a large extent, intermediaries are part of a ‘migration industry’ operating differently depending on the region, but especially depending on the classes of migrant workers in question, and contributing to the commercialisation of migration (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen, 2013). Yet intermediaries are also sometimes ‘not-for-profit’ and involved in networks of solidarity, as shown in the case of Italy (Ambrosini, 2017); or they may facilitate chain migration in migrant networks, as shown in a classical work on India (Banerjee, 1983). More generally, intermediation has sometimes been framed as part of the neoliberal evolution of migration governance (Adamson and Tsourapas, 2019; Ong, 2006; Osella and Bristol-Rhys, 2017), not only serving migrants’ mobility and incorporation, but also sometimes supporting their deportation (Collyer, 2012; De Genova and Peutz, 2010; Thiollet, 2019; Walters, 2016), through the use of subsidiaries to accomplish migrant-related tasks that used to be conceived as belonging to the purview of the state. Migration studies have until recently mostly focused either on state actors (their concern with border control and incorporation, as well as the policies and legal frameworks they produce, especially in Western countries desperate to maintain the fiction that the state is in perfect control of migration), or on migrants themselves (their networks, aspirations and agency). Yet, this binary focus has left the role of private intermediating actors in the background, despite its importance. Since the 2010s, against the backdrop of the growth of circular migration schemes regulated by South Asian states, research on the region has cast critical light on the role of brokers and intermediaries, who have thus suddenly been recognised as an essential part of the broader infrastructure of migration that makes mobility possible and ‘move[s] migrants from one place to another’ (Lindquist et al., 2012, p. 9). Lindquist et al. (2012) emphasise the heuristic value of studying the brokers themselves, noting the complexity of the image that such an approach leads to. They argue that ‘paying ethnographic attention to brokers illuminates the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible while revealing that distinctions between state and market, between formal and informal, and between altruistic and profit-oriented networks are impossible to sustain in practice’ (Lindquist et al., 2012, p. 12). Overall, intermediation institutions have performed several functions within migration governance, including the regulation of flows and individuals, and the definition, development and protection of migrants’ rights. A value-loaded distinction is generally made between social intermediaries and the intermediaries that work as corporate partners to state policies. The latter are involved in the delegation or externalisation of migration control, both in support of labour import and in the implementation of deportation and anti-immigration policies (Andersson, 2014). This privatisation of migration and border control has been much studied as a form of public delegation or

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Migration intermediation  345 public‒private partnership, which therefore belongs to a neoliberal turn in migration governance. While this public‒private governance has often been praised for its efficacy, it has also been criticised as undemocratic, notably when private security companies end up controlling borders (Pedersen, 2013), running detention centres and carrying out deportations (De Genova and Peutz, 2010). Conversely, social intermediaries, be they legal or illegal, are more often than not vilified, as they are conflated with the highly mediatised figures of smugglers, who are generally presented as bearing sole responsibility for migrant fatalities: ‘smugglers have been consistently portrayed in political discourse as the main culprits in the abuse and exploitation that migrants suffer and, moreover, as the driving force behind unwanted immigration flows’ (Thiollet, 2022b). However, various social actors are also increasingly being formally recognised and used as formal partners in policies aimed at integrating foreigners in Western democracies, as states come to rely heavily upon civil society organisations and migrant networks (European Economic and Social Committee, 2020; Salamońska and Unterreiner, 2017). With regard to the kafala more specifically, political scientists, economists and anthropologists in the past two decades have shed light on the ‘structural dependence’ that characterises the relation between employer/kafil and employee (Longva, 1999). This sponsorship is often framed as the enabling condition for ‘unfree labour’ (Frantz, 2013) in Jordan, Lebanon or in the Gulf. In 2021, two anthropologists working on female migrant domestic workers offered another radical assessment of the kafala, as ‘the legal mechanisms that discipline migrant domestic workers into servitude in the UAE [United Arab Emirates]’ (Parreñas and Silvey, 2021). As a result of this asymmetric power relation, the system has become almost synonymous with exploitation, abuse and authoritarian control over the lives and bodies of migrants, as found, for example, in research conducted about low-skilled migrants in Qatar (Gardner et al., 2013), or about migrant women’s motherhood and sexuality (Mahdavi, 2014). This approach has been picked up by the increasing activism of human rights organisations and advocacy networks working in favour of migrants’ rights (Human Rights Watch, 2010), at a time when the governments of Gulf states have been seeking to expand their soft power and international visibility (Thiollet, 2019, p. 17), particularly through the construction of iconic buildings and infrastructures: firstly the construction of branches of the Guggenheim and Louvre museums and of foreign universities in Abu Dhabi, and later the construction of football stadiums in Qatar. Media groups, such as The Guardian, have devoted specific investigative journalism resources to following the issue of migrants’ human rights. Interestingly, in the 1980s, anthropologists working on Gulf societies offered a nuanced approach to the sponsorship system. Longuenesse (1988) explained that the kafala could work as a relationship of ‘protection/collaboration’, particularly for long-term residents (Longuenesse, 1988, p. 3), and demonstrated that it allows migrants to be shielded from state control, notably in times of anti-immigrant policies or harsher labour market control. This chapter, in an attempt to synthesise different perspectives, recognises the contribution of the two approaches mentioned here, by viewing one of them (the overall effect of the kafala) as encompassing the other (its role in enabling abuse). We contend that the kafala has had discretionary and holistic effects besides those that are most visible and that have justifiably been the object of considerable critical attention, such as the power asymmetry and rights abuses. We wish to extend our understanding of the kafala by exploring how outcomes of sponsorship relations differ starkly, not only according to periods or countries across the Middle East, but also according to migrants’ origins, duration of stay, gender, age, and so on, and according to social relations between migrants and brokers/sponsors. The next section of this chapter presents the broad outlines

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346  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance of the kafala as an overarching intermediation institution in Middle Eastern migration, then the following section examines this institution in greater depth, particularly with regard to the multifaceted consequences of its adaptation to an ‘exclusionary context’ (Thiollet and Assaf, 2021) in societies characterised by public policy officially aimed at the ‘non-integration’ of migrants (Beaugrand, 2010).

THE KAFALA, MOBILITY AND RESIDENCE: EMPIRICAL DESCRIPTION The kafala is a cornerstone of the regulation of migration flows to the Gulf countries and, to a lesser extent, other Middle Eastern countries, as well as the regulation of migrants’ lives in those countries. It ties the legal presence of foreigners and their access to the labour market to a local sponsor. This type of institution is not peculiar to the Gulf, and has been found in other societies across history (Bosma et al., 2013; Harney, 1979). Yet the very nature of this institution is contentious. The kafala could be defined most simply as: an institutionalised intermediation between locals and foreigners, establishing a relation of protection, dependence, exploitation and hierarchy within and beyond that established by the labour market. Origins and Evolution of the Institution The legal origins of the kafala have been extensively discussed among scholars, including some from the Gulf, who have tried to identify a link between religious and civil law (Ahmed ’Abdel Khaleq, 1986; Jureidini and Hassan, 2019), or with tribal law and the customary status of hospitality, which are hard to locate precisely (Beaugé, 1986, p. 110). The uncertain origins of the kafala are often hypothesised to be found in a lack of administrative capacity on the part of nascent states; a view that reinforces the private‒public dichotomy. Although the migrant sponsorship system is often referred to as a typically vernacular institution and as being ‘exoticised’ to some extent, it in fact emerged in the colonial context for the purposes of migration management and investment. Seccombe, Birks and Sinclair (Birks et al., 1988; Seccombe, 1983) and Thiollet (2022a) trace the institution to the structuring of a colonial and imperial migration system connecting British territories through indentured labour import, notably from India and from neighbouring Arab and African colonies or mandates. Finally, Rycx (2005) ties the emergence of the institution to the beginning of mass labour import and the formation of modern states. In his seminal article of 1986, Beaugé noted that the kafala was best described as an inherited set of practices or a ‘social relation’ (Beaugé, 1986, p. 111) that, through complacency, has been left largely unregulated. Although the kafala constitutes a loosely defined legal framework, inscribed in migration legislation, and treated as such (Ali, 2010; Jaber and Métral, 2005), it has effectively remained loosely regulated: within the kafala framework, the precise form of the sponsor‒migrant relationship is established on a case-by-case basis and dictated, within this asymmetrical power relation, by inter-personal idiosyncrasies, which differ according to, on the one hand, the national background, level of education and occupation of the foreigner; and on the other hand, the needs, values and beliefs of the sponsor. Firstly, the relationship between the employee and employer/kafil is regulated by labour law (with domestic workers falling under a separate dedicated law which, in Kuwait, was non-existent until

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Migration intermediation  347 2015), which defines workers’ entitlements and rights. Secondly, the relationship between foreigner and sponsor/kafil is governed by laws on alien residency, which define the grounds for deportation, including moral grounds (Longva, 1999). However, these two areas of law do not speak to one another, despite the fact that the employer and the sponsor are one and the same person (who can derail any attempt on the part of their employee at suing them). Since the relation between the foreigner and the employer-sponsor is not effectively regulated by law, abuse can flourish in legal loopholes or grey areas. Within the framework of what Longva (1999, p. 22) calls ‘structural dependency’, the absence of clear legal provisions also enables individual sponsors to apply their own principles. Indeed, Beaugé shows how the personalisation of the relation between a kafil and the person that they sponsor (the makful), which is a specific feature of the kafala, makes the relation negotiable. The law is not absent from their relationship, but recourse to the law lies entirely at the sponsors’ discretion, leaving little room for the legal frameworks of labour relations and external regulation. Employers and employees make ‘arrangements’ between themselves in order to establish their own labour relations.1 The situation changed in the late 1980s. Transnational recruitment organised by large firms became dominant in certain sectors, thus changing the social configuration of the kafala. This scaling up of the intermediation regime in the 1980s, from individual employers to large recruitment companies, increased the dependence of workers, and also reinforced the differences between different categories of foreign workers. As sponsorship started to be handled through large recruitment agencies, the general meaning of the institution changed. Domestic workers, for instance, while bound to the kafala, remained excluded from the protection of the law (Shah, 2011, p. 353). It was not until the 2010s, and the 2011 International Labour Organization (ILO) convention on ‘decent work’ for domestic workers – which provided a regulatory framework setting a minimum wage, limiting working hours and requiring rest days – that domestic workers started to be included within national labour laws or specific legislation devoted to them, as was the case in the Gulf (such as Law No. 68 of 2015 on the Employment of Domestic Workers in Kuwait). Since then, domestic work within the private sphere has gradually gained social and legal recognition, and the employer‒employee relationship is gradually coming to be covered by the rule of law everywhere (Delpierre and Malarmey, 2021). The social configuration of the institution was also modified by the change in the origin of immigrants. While Arab migrants represented the majority of foreigners in the 1970s, workers from South and Southeast Asia became more numerous and eventually formed the majority of immigrants in all Gulf countries except Saudi Arabia (Birks et al., 1986). Unlike Arab migrants, Asian workers did not speak Arabic and social ties were more difficult or slower to establish. There was an increase in the number of intermediaries between foreign residents and their kafil, with the result that most workers never meet their sponsor, and only interacted with other foreigners who oversaw their recruitment. The complexity of this intermediation has often allowed the state or international NGOs involved in defending migrants’ rights to blame these intermediaries, and notably foreign recruitment companies or foreign sponsors employing migrants, whenever a scandal over working conditions emerges, effectively leaving the system itself unquestioned.

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348  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Ethnographic Observations into the Diversity of Situations Instead of considering the kafala as a strictly enforced boundary between migrants and non-migrants, new ethnographies suggest that it offers a contact point and a vector of domination, both between migrants and non-migrants, and within migrant communities. The kafala is not only an asymmetric social relation between foreigners and citizens, but also a principle of distinction between these two categories. It forces citizens and foreigners to interact, while ensuring that they remain separated. Lori sums up the paradoxical consequences of the kafala in the UAE context: it reinforces ‘the informal hierarchy of the labor force, determined by the national origin, ethnicity, class, education and/or skill of noncitizens’ (Lori, 2019, p. 152); a situation that is not defined explicitly in the text of the law, but keeps on being reproduced. At the same time, the kafala explains the mysterious presence of second and third generations who are born and raised in countries where the presence of foreigners is officially not meant to exceed the duration of their work contracts. Inter-personal relationships of trust between kafil and employee lead to the continuous renewal of work contracts or even of residence permits, even after the employee has unofficially retired. The kafala also explains the reunification of family members who would otherwise not reach the required financial threshold: when a kafil wishes to hire a new domestic employee, they can go through an agency or alternatively ask an existing employee to draw on their kin networks or bring in their spouses. Lori further highlights these ‘emotional attachments’, ‘when people live together for so many years and partake in the intimacy of raising children and sharing a home’ (Lori, 2019, p. 156) – an element that is often overlooked – in contrast to the rightly studied reports of abuses. She also underlines that these emotional attachments are not the only reason for a kafil continuing to renew a worker’s contract: reducing the turnover of guest workers also makes economic sense. It reduces the entry cost of having new employees to train, and provides an additional form of security for both employers and employees. Stories of domestic workers or business partners overstaying after the legal age of retirement thanks to the help of their kafil or partners, renewing contracts so as to pursue an uninterrupted career in one place, and bringing over dependents, are common throughout the Gulf: Assaf (2017) relates that, in Abu Dhabi, the father of an interviewee, a Yemeni man, managed to stay in the country after retirement age thanks to an Emirati friend who agreed to set up a grocery shop with him, thus allowing him to keep his residence visa. Thiollet (2010) observed similar processes in the case of Eritrean migrants in Saudi Arabia: she explains that Eritrean families of low-skilled migrants settled in Saudi Arabia have been able to bring relatives and have children grow up in Riyadh or Jeddah even without formal work permits thanks to the intermediation of their kafil, thus allowing an informal means for the family to gather together. Eritrean immigrants related how their personal relations with their kafil allowed them to circumvent labour market regulations, and particularly to change jobs without leaving the country or without the formal agreement of their employer. Beaugé (1986) mentions how the institution of the kafala, particularly early on, created personal relationships – including friendships and sustainable relations of solidarity – between Gulf citizens and their foreign partners or business associates. This is particularly true of Arab expatriates who settled in the 1970s and started joint businesses with Emirati, Saudi or Kuwaiti citizens. But this inclusion of migrants in social networks can also be observed for non-Arab long-term residents, including Pakistanis and Eritreans, as shown in ethnographic research (Thiollet and Assaf, 2021).

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Migration intermediation  349 The status of foreigners is partly dependent on their inclusion in social networks, which involve power relations of domination and autonomy between local citizens as well as between nationals and foreigners. Being sponsored by someone important, such as a member of a ruling family, may confer a certain prestige that qualifies the inferior status attributed to foreigners, and can constitute a wasta: a connection that serves as a guarantee or recommendation and can grant certain privileges. However, powerful sponsors from important local families may, just like other kufala’, turn against their makful on a whim: inter-personal relationships are precarious at all levels of occupations and can always backfire. The fact that an employee can be dismissed summarily at all levels of qualification and salary shows that the relationship depends less on social level or prestige than it does on a personal understanding of one’s place and of the law. Le Renard (2017), in her ethnography of French workers in Dubai, shows that even high-status employees can become unemployed overnight. The outcomes of the intermediation relation depend upon the interpretation of the regulation of inter-personal relations. Interestingly, in certain cases, foreign entities such as embassies and wealthy foreign entrepreneurs can bring in and employ their own countrymen or other foreign nationals. For example, Neha Vora (2013) shows, in the case of the Indian diaspora, how long-standing residents who are part of historical merchant communities rely on the infrastructures of intermediation to exploit their compatriots. States and Brokers As mentioned above, the kafala was partly created and used by colonial and modern states to delegate to citizens their power of surveillance over foreigners and responsibility for controlling the temporariness of their stay in the country. This regulation by delegation is then carried out by private actors, be they employers or recruiters, firms or private citizens (Thiollet, 2021, p. 5). As a result of the state-centred approach to countries of the Gulf region that was initially adopted by academics specialised in migratory phenomena, the features of non-state intermediation at first went unnoticed. Yet the concepts of social authority and responsibility are entrenched in the kafala, as in other intermediation institutions. In the Bahraini Aliens Immigration and Residence Act of 1965, for instance, the ‘work owner’ (the term ‘kafil’ is never used) is expected to be able to cover the cost of deportation, should the need arise. The obligation for the sponsor to repatriate the worker at the end of the temporary contract is a pillar of the kafala; only an order of deportation releases the employer from this obligation. How has the state used or positioned itself towards the kafala in order to further its goals? Political scientists have favoured the state and inter-state level of analysis of the Middle Eastern sponsorship system, comparing it with European guest worker schemes in the period after the Second World War, thus overlooking the specificity of the kafala. To quote Lori (2019, p. 141), ‘the kafala is an extensive and institutionalised inter-Asian guest worker scheme that moves millions of people and generates billions of dollars for sending and receiving countries annually’. This is because the sovereign state, and in particular the Interior Ministry, retains authority for issuing residence permits and is the ultimate authority that legally allows the migrant worker to remain. However, while enforcement of migration control (the granting of residence permits) is ultimately maintained by states’ interior ministries, the role of regulating immigration and the lives of foreign residents is distributed across the whole range of kufala’. This asymmetry between a unified state authority and an extremely diverse range of intermediations is striking:

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350  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance sponsors can be formal employers, in large firms or in small businesses, but also recruiters, who may be distinct from the employers, or just individuals lending their names. The configurations of intermediation vary across contexts, sectors of activity, and across skill levels. Under the label of kafil one can find international recruitment companies with offices in the Gulf and subsidiaries in immigrants’ countries of origin, but also individuals with transnational ties, and sometimes migrants themselves. Overall, the primacy of the state in the work of the Gulf migration intermediation regime is challenged by the variety of social configurations embedded in the kafala. It can thus be more accurately described as a private institution based on market mechanisms and social ties. It serves as an instrument of state policies towards migration, and as such it is embedded in the changing regulations produced by the state, but at the same time it offers the potential to work around state control, since social actors ‘do not simply … execute norms … [they] are also in a position to carve out room for maneuver’ (Bierschenk et al., 2002, p. 10). As a result, the kafala sometimes serves, but also sometimes contradicts, the state’s policy objectives. One can say that it has a life of its own, with its own economic rationale. When the kafala was first identified as an institution, it was shown to act in shaping both the relations between state and citizens (delegating legitimacy from the former to the latter), and those between citizens and foreigners (giving precedence to the former). In short, it shapes the overall pattern of social relations in the Gulf. At the domestic level, political scientists and political economists have framed the kafala as being foundational to the rentier social contract and a source of legitimacy for the Gulf regimes: by privatising their prerogative to regulate foreign workers’ entry, they ensure segregation between nationals and expatriates, co-opting the former by turning them into the privileged recipients of material advantages, and maintaining tight control over the residency and labour mobility of the latter (Longva, 1999). In addition to shaping social relations, the kafala shapes the composition of immigration through transnational connections between recruiters (and future sponsors) and potential migrants, as well as within migrant networks themselves. Thiollet and Assaf also note that migrants who are well connected can sometimes serve as sponsors for fellow nationals (Thiollet and Assaf, 2021, p. 6), thus facilitating chain migration. It creates constraints with which states (trying to control immigration) and migrants alike have to contend. Moreover, the kafala has an impact on the sheer size of flows, in spite of states’ targets (particular those that aim to reduce the level of foreign labour, as in Kuwait or Bahrain). It both contributes to and mitigates the regulation of the mass influx of foreigners, as well as the presence of immigrants on national soil, in terms of both security and economics. The Egyptian scholar SaadEddin (1982) also proposed the idea of the kafala serving as a ‘secondary rent’ for Gulf citizens, and thus acting as a pillar of a Middle Eastern social order. This resonates with the political economy of rentier states, and Thiollet accordingly introduced the idea of a ‘migration rent’, on the model of ‘oil rent’, in the sense of a revenue extracted from a commodity that has no production cost (Thiollet, 2021). The economic logic of importing foreign labour to offset the shortage of national workers is now indistinguishable from a widespread practice of brokerage and trade in work permits. Such parasitic brokerage is economically unproductive and fosters the image of a ‘society of intermediaries’ (Hertog, 2010b). Gulf citizens have also been conceptualised as ‘migration rentiers’ (Thiollet, 2021) or ‘citizen sponsors’ (Lori, 2019). The benefits received by citizens because of their privileged situation as nationals, which amounts to several billion dollars across the entire Gulf region (Dito, 2007, p. 8), seems to make it difficult for Gulf states to withdraw this privilege. The

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Migration intermediation  351 state’s difficulty in regulating at the level of individuals was expressed as follows by one of the members of the agency in charge of reforming the kafala in Bahrain: ‘We need to bring the relationship [dictated by the kafala] into regulation. There is a gap between this issue and institutional capacity.’2 The next section explores the contemporary dynamics of reforms that have targeted the intermediation regime at work in the Gulf monarchies, and that are trying to challenge the existing power relations between states and brokers.

STATES’ ATTEMPTS TO REFORM INTERMEDIATION The Gulf states have recently been taking back the initiative regarding the use of sponsorship in both capital and labour flows, thus moving towards the management of foreign workers through direct administration (Rycx, 2005), within their strategy of further integrating into the world economy. There are various reasons for these migration reforms: they are connected to the reputational costs incurred by an institution that has gained a certain notoriety, to the inefficiency of labour markets, and to state strategies for consolidation and regime survival. In the 2000s, the kafala became politically costly for the ruling regimes of the Gulf in their quest for soft power. As Gulf states strived to be involved in large-scale events such as art fairs, sporting competitions and international exhibitions, they became increasingly sensitive to criticism of their labour laws and exploitative practices. Repeated campaigns from NGOs and migrants’ advocacy networks directly targeted the sponsorship system as the greatest source of abuses and exploitation of migrant workers.3 Such reputational costs certainly created incentives for reforms, but there were also political and economic motivations related to the domestic power relations between states and migration brokers. In countries such as Bahrain where the level of unemployment of nationals had been a problem since the 1990s, the kafala was identified as one of the practices that had introduced a strong bias into the free interplay of offer and demand on the labour market, and in particular maintained a salary gap between foreigners and Bahrainis, as well as leading to an inefficient allocation of foreign labour. Firstly, the recruitment of workers from the cheapest labour markets available worldwide contributed to maintaining a segmentation of the labour market between citizens and foreigners, thus standing in the way of the much talked-about objective of a ‘nationalisation’ of manpower (in the sense of increasing the proportion of nationals in the workforce). Secondly, the privatisation of the regulation of foreign labourers on fixed-term contracts also led to a non-optimal equilibrium: although cheap labour could be found, there was a mismatch between workers’ skills and occupations, and coercion gave rise to inefficiencies. The reform launched by the Bahraini authorities in 2006, aiming to ‘cancel the kafala’, was meant to target the economic deficiencies and contradictions of this system that reduced the territory’s attractiveness to foreign companies, and to remove the salary gap between nationals and foreigners so that the former would become more competitive on the labour market. This ambition to liberalise the labour market was expressed by interviewees at the Labour and Market Reform Authority in Bahrain: ‘Now [foreign workers] will compete on the basis of their skills, not because they are cheap labour’; ‘What must be done is to apply labour law provisions that do not differentiate between the status of nationals and non-nationals’ (thus leaving the question of entering and exiting the territory as a disconnected issue). Yet in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, the reform met with fierce opposition from the Bahraini busi-

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352  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance ness community, and was subsequently emptied of most of its ambitious substance. A similar situation can be observed in other cases. In the 1990s and 2000s, Gulf states launched structural labour market reforms in order to increase the proportion of nationals employed in the private sector and reduce immigration numbers, under broad frameworks of a ‘nationalisation’ of the labour force. Yet the various phases of nationalisation in all six Gulf countries, coupled with ambitions to reform the kafala, alongside other migration reforms, led to mixed results. According to Thiollet (2021), labour market and migration reforms after the 1991 war in Kuwait and the 2011 Arab Spring – and notably reforms of the kafala – were tied to regime survival strategies in times of political crisis. Gulf states sought to better control not only immigration and immigrants, but also nationals and entities in the private sector, with a view to disarming economic counter-power (when they did not need their political support, as was the case in Bahrain), and thus avoiding social unrest. Stripping intermediaries of their prerogatives formed part of the overall strategy of social and economic control. This was particularly true in Saudi Arabia: there, overseas recruitment was reformed through a decree in 2012 that introduced licenses for ‘Mega Recruitment Companies’. Only ten companies were initially licensed, thus concentrating the business of intermediation, especially for low-skilled immigration, in the hands of a very small number of intermediaries acting under state surveillance (Thiollet, 2021, pp. 13–14). In parallel, the state organised a crackdown on small firms (Arab News, 2014). Thiollet (2021) explains that the foreclosures mainly affected ‘fake’ businesses that in fact served as intermediaries for other businesses, since the allowed number of migrants that a firm could sponsor had been dramatically reduced by the nationalisation policies. The efficacy of nationalisation schemes, in terms of the increased integration of locals into private sector employment (Hertog, 2010a, 2014), remains unclear. Societies and citizens of the Gulf reacted negatively to successive attempts to remove the kafala across the region. In the case of Qatar, Diop et al. (2015) show, on the basis of a survey experiment, that Qataris strongly support the kafala and oppose reform, forming a powerful coalition of economic interests (uniting business owners, workers and the wealthy). Even more counter-intuitively, Khalaf notes that, while nationals have been increasingly encouraged by state reforms to open their own private businesses and have, as a result, gradually turned into private entrepreneurs, this tendency has maintained the need for foreign labour import, since the new ‘citizen-entrepreneurs’ resort to the kafala in order to keep on hiring foreign workers for their newly created businesses (Khalaf et al., 2015, p. 35). Overall, reforms have been extremely hard to pass and even harder to implement. Several attempts have failed to entirely dismantle the institution, while progressively tying migration control to state agencies. High immigration numbers have persisted, the dependence of labour markets upon foreign labour has continued, supported by the entrenched interests of sponsors and employers, and immigrant communities have continued to settle in the region.

CONCLUSION Despite political ambitions to reduce or eliminate it, the kafala as an intermediation regime has shaped Gulf societies as much as it has enabled economic development and kept labour markets ‒ albeit segmented ones ‒ afloat. Recent attempts to dismantle this intermediation regime have revealed that it has allowed not only the exploitation and stigmatisation of

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Migration intermediation  353 migrant workers, but also the long-term settlement and ultimately the long-term presence of migrants in host societies. As Noora Lori notes, ‘[p]rofit-seeking and trust networks can transform the kafil from an enforcer of restricted residency into a conduit for extending noncitizen residency’ (Lori, 2019, p. 257). Contrary to the idea that the kafala is by design an instrument of public policy, the institution has proved to be both ancillary and adverse to state politics; over decades, by shaping social relations and the behaviour of economic actors and cementing powerful interests, it has created effects that go beyond the reach of policies. Moreover, while human rights organisations rightly point to the cases of abuse that the kafala system has enabled by placing the migrant into a structurally unequal relationship, a broader vision of this pervasive institution shows that, among the power relations entailed by the kafala system, there are as many outcomes of intermediation as there are kufala’ and configurations; which of course leaves a large arbitrary dimension in this unregulated relationship, far from the rule of law. Overall, this chapter has advanced the idea that transnational intermediation regimes are central to understanding migration governance, and that a focus on the ever-ambivalent role of intermediaries offers a nuanced and situated vantage point for understanding the complex role of private institutions of migration governance in relation to states and public authorities.

NOTES 1.

By way of comparison, see the analysis of the use of the law by actors in the little-regulated field of domestic work in France (Delpierre and Malarmey, 2021, p. 105). 2. Interview conducted by Claire Beaugrand, 3 October 2011. 3. See, for example, the numerous reports on this subject produced by Human Rights Watch (2010, 2014, 2015).

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24. The global ordering of remittance flows: formalisation, facilitation, funnelling and financialisation1 Anna Lindley

Around the world, people use diverse mechanisms to relay income across borders, supporting family members, personal economic projects and community initiatives in their countries of birth, heritage or dispersal. In turn, many origin-country governments attempt to shape these flows in some way or another. But a wide range of other actors also have a stake in the way in which remittances flow around the world. Businesses seek profit through money transfer and other financial services; international financial bodies aim to police remittance channels in order to combat criminality and terrorism; and international organisations, development banks, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and migrant associations try to leverage remittances to promote their visions of development. While these actors vary in their perceptions of problems and progress, considerable networking and cooperation have emerged among them. As a counterpart of the Global Compact for Migration (United Nations General Assembly, 2019), a global migration management agenda designed to ‘facilitate and ensure safe, orderly and regular migration for the benefit of all’ (para. 13), then, there is also a busy arena of ‘remittance management’ policies and practices, governed by a multiplicity of global actors and agendas. The global governance of migration as a whole has been described as ‘a complex and fragmented tapestry of overlapping, parallel, and nested institutions’ (Betts, 2011b, p. 2). How are global remittance flows governed? To explore this question, I have reviewed landmark reports published by international organisations, relevant academic research, and the 133 ‘policies and practices’ relating to remittances that have been logged in the database of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD).2 I examine how the governance of remittance flows unfolds through particular ways of understanding and framing issues, different kinds of concrete interventions, and their (un)intended outcomes, all the while paying attention to the power dynamics underpinning the formulation and implementation of remittance policies, as well as remaining attuned to the role of various stakeholders in these processes (Foucault, 1991; Ferguson, 1990; Dean, 2009). This chapter identifies four distinct, albeit intersecting, agendas that have emerged around remittances in the last two decades. This analysis focuses on material resource transfers rather than on the transmission of ideas, practices, social capital and identities between migrants and origin communities, all of which is often described as ‘social remittances’ (Levitt, 1998). Firstly, following the attacks of 11 September 2001 (hereafter 9/11), remittances were targeted by financial regulators as part of counterterrorist financing efforts, with a global push by the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to formalise remittance flows. Secondly, in the context of a global search for new forms of development finance, the World Bank has led attempts to facilitate remittance flows and reduce transfer fees. Thirdly, a range 357 Anna Lindley - 9781789908077 39:29AM

358  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance of actors have sought to funnel remittances into origin communities by developing income generation and infrastructure initiatives. Fourthly, the trend toward global financialisation has also embraced remittances, seen as an entry point into financial inclusion and deepening. The analysis reveals a global policy assemblage of logics and practices that display some elements of coordination and coherence alongside points of difference and friction. Some impacts can be traced in migrants’ life experiences, remittance processes and origin communities. Policy efforts directed at the movement of migrants’ money seem to have generated less contestation and more fluid cooperation between actors than policies targeting the movement of migrants themselves. This has been made possible by abstracting remittances, as a policy object, from the complex and contested migration dynamics in which they are embedded, and by accepting a selection and hierarchy of priorities regarding remittances that reflect, or at least do not work against, the interests of richer destination states.

FORMALISATION Efforts at the global level to police remittances have emerged against a particular historical backdrop. States have long imposed regulations on financial activity, determining the types of business that are allowed as well as the parameters of their dealings, as a matter of economic policy and in an effort to prevent criminal activity and maintain public confidence in the financial sector. The neoliberal reforms carried out since the 1970s have deregulated financial markets, the argument being that the free flow of capital would lead to the efficient, welfare-maximising allocation of resources within and between societies (Mader, 2018). However, as markets opened up, concerns about the criminal use of financial services increased, and the United States (US) called for international cooperation in the war on drug money laundering, leading to the creation of the FATF in 1989. This intergovernmental body became ‘the focal institution of a powerful financial governance regime’ (Nance, 2018, p. 131), concerned with international standard setting, the development of anti-crime measures, and implementation monitoring. But the focus was on anti-money laundering (AML) measures targeting large international transfers, rather than on smaller-scale forms of money transmission such as remittances (de Goede, 2018). In the early 2000s, there was a variegated global landscape of financial intermediaries involved in facilitating the transfer of remittances to migrants’ countries of origin (Pieke et al., 2007). For centuries, business people with ties to specific geographical regions or ethnic communities had arranged for the transfer and receipt of funds, settling debts between agents later on, often via reverse transactions or trade import finance; in many parts of the world, they were known as hawala operators (FATF, 2013). Other actors included couriers and taxi or bus drivers, commercial retail banks, specialised large-scale corporate money transmitters, post offices, microfinance institutions, and pre-paid card companies, while more recently, mobile or digital financial services had also become an important element. National regulatory frameworks around the world varied in the extent to which and the ways in which they sought to govern the activities of remittance intermediaries, with some countries having a very large informal financial sphere. In the past two decades, this landscape has been reshaped in important ways. Following 9/11, then US President George W. Bush declared a ‘financial war on terror’: a Somali money transfer operator, Al-Barakaat, alleged to have links with the 9/11 attacks was shut down,

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The global ordering of remittance flows  359 domestic financial surveillance increased, and other states and global financial institutions were urged to cooperate (White House, 2001). The FATF (2001) stepped up its efforts, issuing its Special recommendations on terrorist financing, which included recommendations relevant to ‘alternative’ (that is, non-bank) remittance service providers. These providers were seen as open to abuse because they were handling a lot of cash, not necessarily in the context of a long-term relationship with their clients, with varying degrees of regulatory supervision, and with some using non-bank settlement methods that were harder for the police to track. In particular, hawala-type service providers connected with Muslim communities were presented in the media and in the financial and law enforcement milieus as at best especially vulnerable to use for illegitimate purposes, and at worst, expressly designed for such purposes (de Goede, 2003; Passas, 2006a). Concretely, the FATF’s Special recommendations required that ‘alternative’ remittance intermediaries be either licensed by or registered with the state; that they follow particular practices as regards customer identification in order to allow such customers to be checked against extremist watch lists and any suspicious transfer pattern to be screened; and that these practices be monitored and enforced by regulators. While prior interest had been primarily in monitoring large transfers used for money laundering, terrorist operations did not require large amounts of finance, so countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) efforts focused on smaller transactions, thus governing ‘mundane money flows and the transactions of everyday life in new ways’ (de Goede, 2018, p. 760). The FATF’s recommendations, although soft law, have considerable clout. FATF membership criteria emphasise the strategic importance of the member country, as indicated by the size of its gross domestic product and financial sector, as well as that of its population, the AML/ CFT risks that it faces, and its commitment and efforts to combat such risks (FATF, n.d.). Most of the current 37 member states are high-income countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and in the 2000s, FATF membership expanded to include several other major countries, such as Brazil, China, India and Mexico; there is therefore significant political and economic muscle behind the FATF’s agenda. The FATF also operates as a wider transnational public policy network via ‘FATF-style regional bodies’ comprising non-member states, which ‘effectively extend FATF’s purview to over 180 jurisdictions including almost every country in the world’ (CGD Working Group, 2015, p. 3; see also Nance, 2018, p. 137). The FATF has developed processes for monitoring compliance and grey- or blacklisting non-compliant jurisdictions, that is, signalling to market actors that transactions involving institutions in those countries are subject to heightened scrutiny by regulators. While it is undeniable that ‘a securitization process initiated in the United States has been reproduced globally’ (Vlcek, 2015, p. 413), some argue that basically the US and the European Union (EU) call the shots, and other countries act out of fear of economic punishment (Passas, 2006b); whereas others suggest that the compliance process is less hierarchical, more reflexive, and shaped by social learning (Nance, 2018). It is hard to evaluate how effective these measures have been in achieving their stated objective of preventing criminal and terrorist use of non-bank remittance service providers. The FATF has enjoyed considerable success in encouraging harmonisation, with many countries taking on board the new international standards: for instance, many now require hawala-type providers to complete a registration or licensing process, or stipulate that these forms of money transmission are illegal (FATF, 2013; Nance, 2018). The current peer review system and grey- and blacklisting process are thought to work rather effectively (CGD Working Group,

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360  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 2015, pp. 6–7). The rapid growth in recorded remittance volumes (see next section) in part reflects this successful formalisation. Yet at the same time, informal mechanisms remain very significant in some remittance corridors (Datta, 2012). However, this formalisation effort has arguably not been the most effective use of resources. In the context of a wider securitisation and criminalisation of migration, smaller ethnic niche remittance intermediaries were easily framed as a finance ‘folk devil’ (Cohen, 2002). Criminologist Nikos Passas (2006b), indeed, characterised the FATF’s response to 9/11 as a hurried and ‘fact-free policy making process’ (p. 315). Later analyses of hawala-type operators found that while some operated in ways that infringed regulations in particular jurisdictions, there was little concrete evidence linking them to terrorist activity (Passas, 2006a; 2006b, pp. 330–334; FATF, 2013). In many developing countries, then, ‘the money could [have been] better used … for something advancing local welfare as opposed to being used to satisfy the fears of Americans and Europeans about criminal money and terrorist finance’ (Vlcek, 2015, p. 417). Meanwhile, concerns were raised about the counterproductive effects of the new regulatory framework. In many corridors, niche transmitters with varying degrees of formality offered the cheapest service, with fees of less than 5 per cent on small transfers. The costs of compliance with new AML/CFT measures could be passed on to customers, thus increasing fees and potentially driving transactions underground (FATF, 2013; CGD Working Group, 2015, pp. 24–25; Passas, 2006b, pp. 323–329). Moreover, while most money transmitters required the cooperation of a bank in the course of their operations, banks became increasingly cautious about providing accounts to money services businesses (MSBs), seen as ‘risky clients’. By the mid-2000s, it was clear that ‘banks, MSBs, immigrant workers, traders, regulators, law enforcement, the wider public and the international community [were] unhappy about the current regulatory regime’ (Passas, 2006b, p. 335). There was also considerable scope for collateral damage as a result of the introduction of new AML/CFT regulations. In some countries, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, ‘alternative’ money transfer systems were in fact mainstream practice, and interference could have significant economic consequences (Passas, 2006a). Targeting popular financial mechanisms would risk fomenting mistrust between affected minority communities and governments (Passas, 2006a; de Goede, 2003). Furthermore, tensions emerged between stiffer financial regulation and financial inclusion: for example, in South Africa, a newly introduced legislation adhering to international standards on customer identification initially made it impossible for a third of the population, living in informal settlements and therefore lacking a formal residential address, to get a bank account (de Koker, 2006, pp. 42–43). In light of concerns about overzealous, blunt, one-size-fits-all regulatory approaches, the FATF (2007) issued guidance on its ‘risk-based approach’, stating that the level of regulatory attention paid to FATF recommendations should be commensurate to the risks posed by particular jurisdictions, market sectors and products, and moreover, that sometimes simplified measures might be adequate (see also Nance, 2018, pp. 146–148). Yet regulators would still send mixed signals to banks and other providers, thus generating concerns about what constituted appropriately rigorous risk assessment. Combined with the chilling effect of hefty fines, as well as substantial discretion often given to banks on the way to address risk, this led banks to ‘de-risk’ entire client groups, including many ethnic niche money transmitters, whose accounts were ‘denied, downgraded, or made more expensive’ (CGD Working Group, 2015, p. viii), thus forcing them to close, join bigger networks, disguise their business or use

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The global ordering of remittance flows  361 non-electronic transfer methods that were harder to track (Passas, 2006b, pp. 328–329; CGD Working Group, 2015, pp. 15–27; de Goede, 2018; FATF, 2017). The history of the Somali money transfer sector illustrates several issues with the AML/ CFT agenda. Following the collapse of the Somali state, and therefore of the country’s limited formal banking system, so-called ‘alternative’ money transfer operators in fact served as the mainstream financial sector, facilitating domestic and international trade, aid and investment, as well as remittances (Lindley, 2009, pp. 523–525). However, this system was periodically brought into crisis by regulatory intervention. Days after 9/11, the US government claimed that the largest Somali money transmitter, Al-Barakaat, was used to finance terrorism: key countries in which Al-Barakaat operated froze its bank accounts, and it was added to various lists of terror-supporting organisations. Yet no solid evidence emerged to substantiate the claim, and the 9/11 Commission concluded that the designation had been driven by the need ‘to show the world community and our allies that the United States was serious about pursuing the financial targets’ (Roth et al., 2004, p. 79). Recognising the importance of these money services to the Somali economy, and fearing disruption to the remittance ‘lifeline’, the United Nations Development Programme began a project supporting the development of the remittance sector and promoting regulatory compliance. After a period of turmoil, the sector adapted: some companies floundered, while others consolidated, expanded and professionalised (Lindley, 2009, pp. 532–536). However, AML/CFT regulation continued to cause issues. Money transfer operators needed bank accounts to aggregate and relay settlement funds to their international clearing houses in the United Arab Emirates, but increasingly, banks were withdrawing their services (Lindley and Mosley, 2014; Orozco and Yansura, 2013, pp. 17–21). In the United Kingdom (UK), Barclays Bank announced the closure of many money transfer businesses in 2013, a decision affecting four large Somali operators in particular, because of the perceived costs of due diligence rather than actual compliance failures; indeed, Dahabshiil, one of the largest providers, was described as a model customer (Dahabshiil Transfer Services Ltd v. Barclays Bank Plc, 2013, para. 36). Public outrage, an advocacy campaign by the Somali community, and the successful legal challenge mounted by Dahabshiil resulted in a postponement of the closure of its account, thus allowing alternative mechanisms to be put in place (Lindley and Mosley, 2014, pp. 6–7; Datta, 2017, pp. 554–556). In recent years, other actors such as the World Bank have stepped in to work with the re-established Somali Central Bank on strengthening financial regulation in Somalia, but de-risking remains a major challenge (Majid et al., 2020; World Bank, 2016). Besides the aforementioned issues with AML/CFT regulation, the Somali example shows how remittances have increasingly attracted the attention of civil society actors and the international development industry. The next sections explore their roles in the global ordering of remittance flows.

FACILITATION Remittances had long been seen as an economic irrelevance or a symptom of underdevelopment, but by the 1990s, research and political attitudes began to shift. International policy interest gradually increased following the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo (Egypt) in 1994, and in the early 2000s, remittances assumed a central position in the growing debate about the ways in which migration might be a ‘tool

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362  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance for development’. Statistical work by the World Bank emphasised notable growth in recorded remittances to developing countries, their relative stability, and their significance compared with other financial flows, as remittances outstripped official development assistance in particular (Ratha, 2003; World Bank, 2005, pp. 85–89). These findings were heavily cited in a mounting body of academic work and landmark publications by international organisations, and they resonated particularly strongly in the wake of the 2002 Monterrey Consensus, which highlighted shortfalls in progress towards the Millennium Development Goals and fuelled a search for alternative sources of development finance (Pécoud, 2015, pp. 26–46; Carling, 2008; Hudson, 2008). The image of hard-working migrants supporting families and communities back home appealed to policy-makers of different political leanings. International financial institutions (IFIs) tended to view remittances through a neoliberal economic lens, conceptualising them as a transfer of resources to poorer economies in the spirit of comparative advantage, which could foster self-reliance and risk management. At the same time, other segments of the international community welcomed the contribution that remittances made to human development (welfare, education, healthcare, housing, and so on). For advocates of autonomous, grassroots-driven development, remittances represented economies of solidarity and served as a way of coping with the upheavals wreaked by structural adjustment programmes. Suddenly, private sector actors also found that their remittance transfer business gave them a stake in wider development policy discussions. Remittances were catapulted to the status of a ‘new development mantra’ (Kapur, 2005, p. 331) and became a ‘buzzword’ (Cornwall, 2007, p. 471) with sufficiently ambiguous conceptual resonances to allow very diverse actors to converge around a broad consensus that such flows mattered. And converge they did, in a proliferation of policy conferences over the course of the 2000s (Kunz, 2011, pp. 34–69). Remittance research, policies and practices were shared in global-level platforms for migration and development, such as the GFMD, as well as in a number of forums focusing specifically on remittances (for example, the Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development held biannually since 2007, and the Global Remittances Working Group created in 2009). Much of this activity ‘originated in the work of remittances experts and policy entrepreneurs within a handful of international institutions dedicated to the design, application, and spread of a market-based model of development’, who as such ‘had little trouble finding partners within other international organizations, national government agencies, think tanks, and the like. The confluence of these various actors generated a relatively cohesive policy consensus’ (Bakker, 2015, p. 201; see also Pécoud, 2015, pp. 13–25; Kunz, 2011, pp. 34–69). The major themes in the resulting international policy commitments have been facilitating remittance flows, funnelling remittances into local development and leveraging remittances for financial inclusion (G8, 2004; BIS and World Bank, 2007; World Bank, 2014b; UN General Assembly, 2019, para. 36). The term ‘facilitation’ here refers broadly to efforts to smooth the (formal) passage of remittances and increase their volume. This agenda was vigorously embraced by the World Bank, albeit in a particular way: it focused on reducing ‘wastage’ via transfer fees, especially on small amounts, in order to allow more money to reach migrants’ families in developing countries (World Bank, 2005, pp. 135–157; CGD Working Group, 2015, pp. 20–27). Development aid donors, regional development banks and migrant organisations also supported this approach (Kunz, 2011). A review of the ‘policies and practices’ relating to remittances that have been logged to date in the GFMD’s information-sharing database shows clearly that cost reduction

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The global ordering of remittance flows  363 measures have been a very popular focus for intervention.3 A prominent example of relevant cooperation was the work of the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS and World Bank, 2007), along with other IFIs and central banks, to formulate the General principles for international remittance services, setting out the roles of remittance service providers and public authorities, which was endorsed by the Group of Eight (G8), the Group of Twenty (G20) and the Financial Stability Forum (Datta, 2017, p. 543). Furthermore, lack of market transparency was, and remains, a major issue, prompting calls for industry actors to provide migrants with clear information on the amount to be received, fees and exchange rates, and the time and location of delivery, thus leading to a whole raft of donor-sponsored price comparison websites. Other ways of fostering cost reduction included tackling weaknesses in the payment system infrastructure and encouraging ‘sound, predictable, non-discriminatory and proportionate’ regulation (BIS and World Bank, 2007, p. 4) that not only complied with AML/CFT requirements, but also reduced barriers to entry and countered monopolistic business practices in some corridors. In 2009, the G8 (later joined by the G20) committed to the ‘5x5 objective’, that is, to decrease the global average cost of remittances from 10 per cent to 5 per cent by 2014. In 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goals included the target of lowering the global average cost of remittances to less than 3 per cent and eliminating corridors with average costs higher than 5 per cent by 2030, which later would also feature as one of the Global Compact for Migration’s 23 objectives (UN General Assembly, 2019, para. 36). How effective have these interventions been? Costs have come down significantly: in 2008, the global average cost for migrant remittances was estimated at nearly 10 per cent (World Bank, 2010, p. 2); whereas by 2019, it had dropped to around 7 per cent (World Bank, 2019, p. 5). However, progress has fallen short of the 5 per cent target, and there is considerable variation between regions – hitting 5 per cent in South Asia, but over 9 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa – and provider types, with banks remaining the costliest channel for sending remittances at nearly 10 per cent (World Bank, 2019, pp. 5–7). The World Bank (2019) has, indeed, observed that de-risking and regulators’ failure to address competition issues are obstacles to cost reduction (p. 6). It should be noted that action to facilitate remittances has taken a very particular form. The focus has been on market-based encouragements to reduce costs: price controls have been eschewed in favour of voluntary targets and transparency initiatives. Moreover, efforts have been directed at decreasing only formal transfer costs: despite the fact that informal mechanisms are sometimes cheaper and that facilitators have often criticised AML/CFT measures, the goal of the formalisation agenda has not been contested, and cost reduction through market competition has, indeed, been described as a way to ‘reduce dependence on the shadier world of informal remittances services’ (World Bank, 2006, p. 7; see also Cross, 2015). Finally, particular emphasis has also been placed on making the most of existing remittances: while an obvious way to increase remittances would be to promote migration opportunities, in the face of political sensitivities about migration, initially the World Bank strategically doubled down on knowledge production and cost reduction in order to avoid potentially antagonising state sponsors, although it would later become more involved in promoting circular migration programmes (Boucher, 2008; Geiger and Pécoud, 2010). Calls to facilitate remittances have framed them as a growing, stable form of ‘new development finance’ (Wimaladharma et al., 2004, p. 12), a notion that deserves closer scrutiny. The statistical growth in recorded remittances is somewhat misleading: indeed, one study has argued that changes in the migration fundamentals (migrant stocks and incomes) only

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364  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance accounted for 20 per cent of the remarkable growth registered in remittances between 2000 and 2010, thus suggesting that most of this rise was due to formalisation and data collection improvements (Clemens and McKenzie, 2014, pp. 9–21). The much vaunted ‘resilience’ of remittances is premised on stability in destination countries, something that the COVID-19 pandemic has put to the test: defying predictions of a 20 per cent contraction in 2020 (World Bank, 2020), officially recorded remittance flows declined only slightly in 2020 (Ratha, 2021), and increased markedly in 2021, albeit with considerable regional variation (World Bank, 2022). Furthermore, any countercyclical dynamic has a human cost, which presumably is sustained by either a greater number of people migrating, or migrants tightening their belts further to increase support to dependent families (Kunz, 2011; Lindley, 2010). Framed as ‘development finance’ through discursive and accounting practices, ‘remittances also appear to be the least controversial aspect of the overheated debate on international migration’ (Maimbo and Ratha, 2005, p. 2). But this misleadingly abstracts remittances from the contested migration landscapes and complex socioeconomic rationalities in which they are embedded and which shape their susceptibility to policy intervention. Moreover, it tends to optimistically imply intrinsic development benefits, but in the absence of convincing evidence for this, the international discourse has moderated over time, using more circumspect language that emphasises significant potential benefits, that is, calls on actors not only to facilitate remittances, but also to optimise their onward journey after they reach recipients (Kunz, 2011; Datta, 2017; Guermond, 2019; Lindley, 2011). The final two sections turn to the policy agendas that have developed around this onward journey: funnelling and financialisation.

FUNNELLING Prior to the 1990s, ‘migration optimists’ emphasised the idea that the free movement of labour would eventually lead to balanced growth, paying limited attention to remittances, while ‘migration sceptics’ pointed out the ways in which migration compounded uneven development, raising concerns that remittances ‘[fuelled] wasteful consumption, [exacerbated] inequalities, [funded] violent conflict, and [diminished] over time’ (Gamlen, 2014, p. 585). During the 1990s, new research led to a growing recognition of the human development value of remittances as well as of the multiplier effect of a large proportion of remittances being spent on consumption. It also showed that ‘remittances [contributed] to savings and asset accumulation more, and [decayed] over time less, than previously thought’ (Gamlen, 2014, p. 585). But there was still a perception that opportunities were being missed to funnel these flows in ways that would promote greater self-reliance in individuals and communities. Thus, part of the international policy discussion moved beyond the issue of facilitating flows to examine how remittances could be funnelled into sustainable local development. The term ‘funnelling’ here refers to efforts to enhance the impact of remittances in home communities by providing incentives to mobilise individual or collective transfers and channel them into ‘productive activity’ and infrastructure improvement, often with the explicit or implicit aim that people should not feel the need to migrate in future. Intervention can take a variety of forms (Carling, 2008, pp. 51–52; Orozco and Rouse, 2007). Examples of the ways in which political authorities may try to extract value from the diaspora include: foreign currency controls, requirements to repatriate earnings, taxation of repatriated earnings, removal of tax requirements or red tape for would-be individual migrant investors, and issuing diaspora

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The global ordering of remittance flows  365 bonds to fund infrastructure development. Development agencies have also sought to connect migrants or returnees and their communities with asset-enhancing project support programmes (training, technical assistance for small and medium-sized enterprises, and credit) to encourage entrepreneurship. The matched funding programme, whereby migrants’ contributions to specific improvement projects are matched by other development actors, has therefore become a prominent model. The mode of action underpinning these funnelling initiatives is to offer incentives, education and support to nudge behaviours. A range of actors have been active in this field. For origin-country governments, funnelling remittances offers possibilities of supplementing state budgets and increasing service provision and development activity in emigration areas. For migrant associations, funnelling projects allow them to secure additional backing for the improvements that they seek in their home communities and, moreover, to enjoy a modicum of political clout. For donor governments and international organisations, funnelling initiatives provide opportunities to experiment with new civil society partners and engage constructively with migrant associations on their doorstep, and also give them a potential model to replicate in other regions. For example, UKAid, the British government development agency, and Comic Relief fund the Diaspora Finance Initiative, which is coordinated by the African Foundation for Development and aims to stimulate diaspora investment in job creation by holding a social enterprise accelerator grant competition and providing business development information and support (African Foundation for Development, n.d.). Likewise, since 2010 the Danish International Development Agency has funded the Diaspora Project Support (DiPS) under the Danish Refugee Council’s Diaspora Programme. DiPS offers project support for diaspora-led relief and recovery activities in Somalia and Afghanistan, with a cash contribution of minimum 5 per cent of the total project budget required from the diaspora organisation, and in-kind donations strongly encouraged, for the bigger grants (Danish Refugee Council, n.d.). Some actors, however, have been less keen on this mode of intervention. The World Bank has chosen to focus on cost reduction and access to financial services, sceptical as it is of planning particular incentives for diaspora engagement ‘because they pose clear risks … [and] may also encourage tax evasion … [or] divert funds from other local funding priorities’, and arguing that ‘efforts to increase savings and improve the allocation of expenditures should be accomplished through improvements in the overall investment climate, rather than by targeting remittances’ (World Bank, 2005, p. xvi). Others have raised social justice issues, questioning the equality implications of directing additional government funding to organised emigration communities, which may or may not be the poorest, and moreover asking whether it is appropriate to target migrants, who often endure in-work poverty and hostile immigration regimes, with requests to remedy basic service and infrastructure deficits in their home country, which are arguably the responsibility of the origin state (Carling, 2008, p. 58; Datta, 2012). Mexico is not only a case in point, but also a key case study in this respect: in the late twentieth century, in the context of domestic political upheaval, the Mexican state’s discourse shifted towards a national narrative depicting the migrant as a development hero, and Mexico has led the way on funnelling initiatives since then, thus generating a wealth of research that has explored the benefits and pitfalls of such interventions (Iskander, 2010). The Programa 3x1 para migrantes (3x1 Programme for migrants, hereafter Programa 3x1) has been the centrepiece of this policy: collective donations made by Mexican hometown associations (HTAs) in the US to infrastructure, sociocultural and employment-generating projects are matched by contributions from municipal, state and federal governments in Mexico. It was developed

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366  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance piecemeal in high-emigration states seeking to mobilise migrant support to offset budget cuts and placate rural discontent, and in the early 2000s it took shape as a major national programme, which until recently has continued on a significant scale and has been much emulated around the world (Iskander, 2010, pp. 274–304; Bada, 2016). These interventions have made a difference in the communities in question by providing financial and social incentives to mobilise migrants to support wider community projects in collaboration with local government authorities. In terms of impact, they have helped the incubation of a multitude of small businesses in emigration communities around the world and, moreover, funded wide-ranging infrastructure improvements, from drainage, schools and market facilities to town beautification. Such funnelling has been carried out on a massive scale: in 2014, for instance, the Programa 3x1 supported no fewer than 2901 projects in 611 municipalities (Delgado Wise and Gaspar Olvera, 2018, p. 250). There have also been less direct, albeit significant, benefits: for example, the Programa 3x1 has been credited with fuelling a culture of accountability among the actors involved; giving migrants, a long-neglected constituency, greater political voice and creating ‘a transnational forum for participatory community development planning’ (Iskander, 2010, p. 297); giving impetus to US-based community organisations that support immigrants as well as home communities; and bestowing prestige on Mexico, as it has become a much-cited and emulated source of ‘best practice’ in this area (Iskander, 2010, pp. 297–304; Bada, 2016, pp. 344–347; García Zamora, 2007, p. 167). At the same time, the Mexican experience also typifies some of the problems that can arise with these kinds of programmes. Funnelling projects have often been accompanied by a ‘public relations blitz’ (Iskander, 2010, p. 281) and have contributed to the production of problematic gendered neoliberal subjectivities, opposing the active, heroic and economically rational male migrant to the passive, dependent female recipient who needs to be made more productive (Kunz, 2011, pp. 108–150). Yet there are limits to how much project support programmes can nudge recipients into adopting a more ‘entrepreneurial’ behaviour in real-life contexts where remittances may be unreliable, recipients are shouldering reproductive labour and community responsibilities as well as existing income-generating activities, and home-based actors face a challenging investment climate (Kunz, 2011, pp. 108–150; Bada, 2016, pp. 348–352). HTA leaders estimated that over half of the projects funded through the Programa 3x1 between 2002 and 2010 failed after a few years (Bada, 2016, p. 351). Income generation initiatives have often focused on export agriculture, maquila production, or nostalgia markets; while bringing improvements for some, this has not transformed rural livelihoods made precarious by trade liberalisation, created new domestic markets or promoted local food sovereignty (Bada, 2016, pp. 350–352; Iskander, 2010, pp. 274–304; Delgado Wise and Gaspar Olvera, 2018). While Mexican migration to the US has dropped to a near-zero net migration rate since 2010, it is not clear whether this has been caused by remittances improving development in poor emigrant communities (there are still striking levels of dependency on remittances among poor families) or driven by factors on the US side (Alba, 2013; Delgado Wise and Gaspar Olvera, 2018). Furthermore, funnelling initiatives have been fraught with problems of political and economic bias: strongholds of the ruling party were rewarded with Programa 3x1 projects at the expense of more competitive districts, and the poorest municipalities had fewer such projects than the wealthier ones with similar levels of migration (García Zamora, 2007, p. 168; Aparicio and Meseguer, 2012; Bada, 2016, p. 350–351). Finally, the idea of making migrants responsible for hometown development, including often basic infrastructure needs, while

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The global ordering of remittance flows  367 the state relinquishes responsibility for the provision of services and care under neoliberal reforms, has made many uncomfortable (Smyth, 2017; Kunz, 2011, pp. 170–176; Bada, 2016, pp. 348–353). The Mexican experience thus exemplifies the possibilities and challenges of remittance funnelling efforts and, moreover, shows the relevance of the wider development context for the success, or lack thereof, of such projects (de Haas, 2010). An account of remittance policy development would not be complete, however, without an examination of the financialisation of remittances, which, rather than funnelling remittances directly into developmental activities, seeks to secure development benefits by way of the increasingly complex financial intermediation of these funds.

FINANCIALISATION Since the 1970s, global economic policy has been heavily shaped by the neoliberal claim that markets are the foundation for a stable social order and economic progress, with finance – the management of money, its accumulation and its flow – central to this agenda. Financialisation denotes ‘the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of domestic and international economies’ (Epstein, 2005, p. 3). Financial inclusion, that is, increasing people’s access to and use of financial services – the latter encompassing a wider range of actors, practices and products, including banks, mobile finance, credit cards, cashless payment cards, payday lenders and microfinance providers (Mader, 2018, pp. 463–464) – has been widely touted as a pro-poor, pro-growth development strategy (World Bank, 2014a). This is premised on the perceived benefits of financial service access for individuals – financial inclusion, it is claimed, allows ‘intertemporal intermediation’ (Mader, 2018, p. 465) and fosters individual responsibilisation through self-reliance and risk management – and for society at large: the assumption being that finance drives growth by lowering transaction costs and distributing capital and risk across space and class (Mader, 2018; Cross, 2015). As remittance statistics hit the headlines in the 2000s, financial commentators took note, remarking that these flows – small amounts, often sent via informal mechanisms by workers on the margins of society – had been ‘hidden in plain sight for decades’ (Multilateral Investment Fund, quoted by Kunz, 2011, p. 50). Remittances were thus framed as an untapped opportunity for financial inclusion which, in turn, was a way to support the formalisation, facilitation and funnelling of flows. The thinking behind the promotion of the financialisation of remittances is as follows: rather than going under recipients’ beds or using an informal savings mechanism, the remittance transaction can create a moment of contact with the formal financial system, which is of particular significance for people in poor rural communities who may have little access to formal financial services. This moment increases awareness of financial services and may induce recipients to open a savings account and build up a financial history, thus enabling them to take out loans and insurance; what Brown et al. (2013) have termed the ‘induced financial literacy hypothesis’. All this can help migrants’ families to accumulate wealth, invest funds and manage risks more effectively. Meanwhile, remittance transfers and migrants’ savings may encourage banks and other financial service providers to expand their networks and extend more credit, thereby stimulating entrepreneurship, and to offer insurance, thus fostering resilience (Brown et al., 2013). The business case for banks and microfinance institutions goes beyond the objective of capturing a share of the remittance payment market

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368  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance itself: developing formal remittance channels provides opportunities to cross- and up-sell other products to migrants and their (upwardly mobile) families (Toxopeus and Lensink, 2007, pp. 7–8). Most prominent in this area are the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and private sector financial services companies, including the fintech industry. Financial inclusion is, indeed, an arena of extensive private sector innovation, public‒private partnerships, global cooperation, and networking. For example, IFAD, a major IFI and a UN specialised agency that focuses on investing in rural people, poverty reduction, food security and resilience, hosts the $35 million Financing Facility for Remittances (FFR) (ACCESS Advisory, 2019, p. 13). The FFR is financed mainly by the European Commission, the Luxembourg and Spanish governments, and the United Nations Capital Development Fund, and its strategic partners include the World Bank, CGAP and the Inter-American Development Bank. The aim of the FFR is ‘to increase economic opportunities for poor rural people by supporting and developing innovative, scalable, cost-effective, and easily accessible remittance services that promote financial inclusion and productive investment in rural areas’ (ACCESS Advisory, 2019, p. 13). It currently supports over 60 projects in more than 40 countries around the world. Furthermore, greater financial inclusion of remitters and recipients, the argument goes, could also pave the way for remittance securitisation.4 Developing-country entities often find it difficult to access low-cost, long-term loans, especially in turbulent economic and political times. To borrow against future remittance flows, a bank pledges its future remittance receivables to an offshore entity, known as a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which issues a loan to the bank; thereafter, remittance flows destined for the bank are channelled into an offshore collection account from which SPV investors are paid, and any remainder is then sent to the bank (Ketkar and Ratha, 2009). Due to the offshore nature of the process, rating agencies are less concerned about sovereign risk, and the securities issued typically obtain an investment grade rating, allowing banks in developing countries to access credit at lower interest rates for a longer duration, and to lend these on to their client base (Hudson, 2008, p. 327). First used in the wake of the Mexican currency crisis in 1994–1995, by 2008 this mechanism had enabled developing-country banks to raise over $20 billion, notably in Mexico, Brazil and Turkey (Ketkar and Ratha, 2009; World Bank, 2015, p. 16). According to the World Bank, which has promoted future-flow securitisation of remittances, regulatory frameworks and concerns about securitisation in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis have slowed take-up of this technique (World Bank, 2015, p. 16). Meanwhile, international actors are also increasingly moving beyond remittances to explore the potential of diaspora bonds and investment funds, although there is still a considerable gap between enthusiastic discussion and actual implementation (World Bank, 2015, pp. 12–14; Faal, 2019). However, the financialisation of remittances raises some questions and concerns. Firstly, does financial inclusion really transform lives? Where recipients are encouraged to use formal financial services, this may provide ‘improved money management, a diffuse sense of inclusion, and expanded financial choices’ (Mader, 2018, p. 478), but there is limited evidence that financial inclusion has transformative effects on poor people’s living standards or clearly drives economic growth, thus belying some of the grander claims that have been made about it. Secondly, these processes have potential downsides. Research on financial inclusion efforts pursued by banks, microfinance actors and fintech companies has highlighted the following

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The global ordering of remittance flows  369 issues: the regressive fees charged for some services and punitive blacklisting for defaults on tiny debts; a lending focus on unsustainable, quick-turnover, and informal service or retail microenterprises that suit short-term, high-interest loans; the nudging of poor clients into behaviours, such as borrowing or gambling, that may compound poverty with a spiral of indebtedness; indebtedness functioning as labour discipline, with workers afraid to strike or change job; and complex gendered effects, which disprove simplistic pro-women claims (Bateman, 2019, pp. 63–65; Storm, 2018, pp. 310–313; Ghosh, 2013; Kabeer, 2005; Bateman et al., 2019; Guermond, 2019). As yet there has been little research on these questions in relation to transnational communities. The securitisation of an ever-increasing range of things means that financial markets now deeply penetrate social space, and miscalculations can have very real and damaging consequences, as demonstrated by the global financial crisis of 2008: while remittance securitisation originally emerged as a response to the liquidity crisis in Mexico, in some senses, ‘issuing remittance-backed securities is generating and putting new risk into the financial system’ (Hudson, 2008, p. 328; see also Storm, 2018). Thirdly, neoliberal financialisation increasingly seems to transform the role of finance from a tool serving and intermediating economic activity, to one designed to ‘restructure economies to the advantage of financial investors’ (Cross, 2015, p. 309; see also Hudson, 2008, pp. 317–319; Storm, 2018, pp. 308–314). Despite the rhetoric on financial inclusion, democracy and citizenship, since finance is more and more globally connected and governed by international norms and expectations, the latter often strongly shaped by the US, there is limited democratic accountability (World Bank, 2014a; Datta, 2012; Storm, 2018). Furthermore, it was hoped that banks would see a ‘business case’ for offering attractive remittance services, but as we have seen, in many contexts they have not stepped up to the plate; indeed, financially literate remitters may actually avoid banks because of high costs and inconvenience, as well as fear of scrutiny, corruption or collapse: for example, one study on migrants in the UK (Datta, 2012) showed that only 5 per cent of remitters used banks, the majority preferring smaller niche money transfer operators (see also Brown et al., 2013). As in the broader financial inclusion arena (Mader, 2018), philanthropic, donor and public sector support is often sought to ‘make inclusive remittances work’ (ACCESS Advisory, 2019, p. 44). Arguably, this gives financial capital more influence on remittance policies and practices and, to borrow from scholars of microfinance, risks promoting ‘mission drift from poverty alleviation to profit maximization’ (Schwittay, 2011, p. 386; see also Armendáriz and Szafarz, 2011; Roy, 2010; Cross, 2015; Bateman et al., 2019). Meanwhile, critical voices have pointed out that while banking finance is not automatically socially efficient, as market aficionados might suggest, it can be governed in ways that channel accumulation and distribution in socially useful directions so as to contribute to equitable development. This, in turn, would imply greater democratic control and public or community ownership of finance, as well as a greater role for local development banks, credit cooperatives and public banks with a focus on investment in productive, formal, technology-driven, scalable enterprises that need patient capital (Mader, 2018, pp. 479–480; Bateman, 2019; Marois, 2019; Ghosh, 2013, pp. 1215–1218).

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION This chapter has reviewed the four major policy approaches to remittances in the last two decades, looking at the ways in which the issue has been represented and acted upon, as

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370  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance well as the outcomes and power dynamics of such interventions. The first approach frames remittances as potentially dirty money to be policed, which has resulted in the growing harmonisation of AML/CFT regulation of remittances, thus leading to greater formalisation, but also causing collateral damage in poorer countries forced to impose requirements that are ill-suited to their financial systems and their population’s needs. The second approach consists in framing remittances as a beneficial financial flow to be facilitated, which has prompted a flurry of initiatives bearing down on formal transfer costs, with considerable success in some corridors, but also a tendency to overemphasise the volume of recorded remittance flows, thus obscuring both the contested migration processes underpinning these flows and the onward journey of remittances in the home economy. The third approach involves framing remittances as potential investment capital to be funnelled into development, which has produced a variety of programmes and projects that have contributed to income generation and infrastructure in many target communities, albeit with varying degrees of success and sustainability, but have also raised concerns about the responsibilisation of migrants in the context of the repeated failure of the state and other development actors to deliver services and care. The fourth approach entails framing remittances as a transaction to leverage for financial inclusion, sparking a proliferation of private sector activity, often backed by philanthropists, international organisations and public sector actors, which in some contexts has succeeded in expanding the financial inclusion of migrants and their families and provided opportunities, but at the same time has opened people and countries to risks, all the while bolstering the profits and influence of private businesses. Two key points stand out. Firstly, remittance-related policies do not constitute a single coherent regime in the classic international relations sense of ‘sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner, 1983, p. 2). In the case of the formalisation agenda, there is something that resembles a coherent regime as well as hard power mechanisms in the form of standard-setting, supervision and sanctions. By contrast, efforts to facilitate, funnel and financialise remittances for development are characterised by ‘facilitative multilateralism’ (Betts, 2011b, p. 12), that is, informal, non-binding forms of multilateral cooperation involving a range of actors and focusing on information-sharing, technical assistance, voluntary standards, transparency initiatives, development programming and sponsoring private sector initiatives. A lack of obvious enforcement measures, however, does not mean a lack of impact: considerable resources have been invested in policies to facilitate, funnel and financialise remittances over the past two decades. The global policy landscape of remittances resonates with the concept of global ‘assemblages’, that is, institutional arrangements in which power is exercised in various sites and through a multiplicity of actors and elements, that are made up of diverse logics and practices, and yet that ‘more or less hold together’ (Allen, 2011, p. 154). Such assemblages have a certain degree of provisional unity and strategic functionality in terms of constituting or constraining the behaviour of states, while also featuring differences and tensions (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011; de Goede, 2018). Secondly, it is notable that policy efforts directed at the movement of migrants’ money seem to have generated less contestation and more ready and fluid cooperation between actors than policies targeting the movement of migrants themselves. The popularity of remittance-focused forums seems to be in part the result of stakeholders engaging in issue- or venue-shopping (Betts, 2011a, p. 321). Destination states jealously guard their ability to control immigration

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The global ordering of remittance flows  371 and thus approach multilateral forums on migration matters with some caution. For origin countries, too, promoting emigration opportunities and emigrants’ rights can be a politically loaded affair both at home and abroad. International organisations tread a delicate path between their universal mission and the need to retain the cooperation of donor states (Geiger and Pécoud, 2010). Hence a tendency to abstract global policy discussions of remittances from the migration situations in which they are embedded, which raises difficult questions about the problematic drivers of migration, its opportunity costs, and the challenges around legal pathways and status, exploitation and rights (Pécoud, 2015; Boucher, 2008; Kunz, 2011; Lindley, 2010). While nested within a wider arena of more politically thorny migration policy discussions, the remittance debate revolves around ‘improving’ existing remittance practices, a more money-focused than rights-focused agenda that generates interventions consistent with the wider ‘hegemony of market-based solutions’ to development problems (Bakker, 2015, p. 213; see also Kunz, 2011, pp. 34–69; Pécoud, 2015, pp. 95–123). This strategic focus also chimes with the wider observation that global migration‒development platforms have tended to eschew ‘vigorous and frontal criticism of today’s politics’ in favour of ‘a catalogue of seemingly technical, simple, or common-sense recommendations’ (Pécoud, 2015, p. 96), presented ‘as if minor changes in policymaking could bring solutions to the deep imbalances that underlie the cross-border mobility of people’ (p. 125).

NOTES 1.

I am grateful to Femi Bolaji, Kavita Datta, Thomas Marois and Araby Smyth for their comments on a draft version of this chapter. 2. See the Policy and Practice Database on the GFMD’s website (https://​www​.gfmd​.org/​pfp/​ppd​ -search). 3. There are 133 ‘policies and practices’ logged in the database that relate to remittances, with cost reduction featuring as part of the goal in more than half: see the Policy and Practice Database on the GFMD’s website (https://​www​.gfmd​.org/​pfp/​ppd​-search). 4. Securitisation emerged as a means of anchoring the global cash pools of speculative investors, and it is the process by which new financial assets are generated from ‘passive’ illiquid assets with a cash flow attached (the best-known example being mortgages secured on residential properties) by pooling and commodifying them into tradeable securities (Storm, 2018, pp. 312, 324–326).

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374  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Iskander, N. (2010). Creative state: Forty years of migration and development policy in Morocco and Mexico. Cornell University Press. https://​muse​.jhu​.edu/​book/​27492. Kabeer, N. (2005). Is microfinance a ‘magic bullet’ for women’s empowerment? Analysis of findings from South Asia. Economic and Political Weekly, 40(44–45), 4709–4718. http://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​ 4417357. Kapur, D. (2005). Remittances: The new development mantra? In S.M. Maimbo and D. Ratha (Eds.), Remittances: Development impact and future prospects (pp. 331–360). World Bank. https://​open knowledge​.worldbank​.org/​handle/​10986/​7339. Ketkar, S., and Ratha, D. (2009). New paths to funding. Finance and Development, 46(2), 43–45. https://​ www​.elibrary​.imf​.org/​view/​journals/​022/​0046/​002/​article​-A015​-en​.xml. de Koker, L. (2006). Money laundering control and suppression of financing of terrorism: Some thoughts on the impact of customer due diligence measures on financial exclusion. Journal of Financial Crime, 13(1), 26–50. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1108/​13590790610641206. Krasner, S.D. (1983). Structural causes and regime consequences: regimes as intervening variables. In S.D. Krasner (Ed.), International regimes (pp. 1–21). Cornell University Press. Kunz, R. (2011). The political economy of global remittances: Gender, governmentality and neoliberalism. Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9780203816714. Levitt, P. (1998). Social remittances: migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion. International Migration Review, 32(4), 926–948. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177​%​2F01979183​9803200404. Lindley, A. (2009). Between ‘dirty money’ and ‘development capital: Somali money transfer infrastructure under global scrutiny. African Affairs, 108(433), 519–539. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​afraf/​adp046. Lindley, A. (2010). The early morning phone call: Somali refugees’ remittances. Berghahn Books. Lindley, A. (2011). Remittances. In A. Betts (Ed.), Global migration governance (pp. 242–265). Oxford University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​acprof:​oso/​9780199600458​.003​.0011. Lindley, A., and Mosley, J. (2014). Challenges for the Somali money transfer sector (Rift Valley riftvalley​ .net/​ publication/​ challenges​ -somali​ Institute Briefing Paper). Rift Valley Institute. https://​ -money​-transfer​-sector. Mader, P. (2018). Contesting financial inclusion. Development and Change, 49(2), 461–483. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1111/​dech​.12368. Maimbo, S.M., and Ratha, D. (2005). Remittances: An overview. In S.M. Maimbo and D. Ratha (Eds.), Remittances: Development impact and future prospects (pp. 1–16). World Bank. https://​ openknowledge​.worldbank​.org/​handle/​10986/​7339. Majid, N., Hammond, L., Abdirahman, K., Adan, G., and Kleist, N. (2020, April 7). How will remittances affect the Somali COVID-19 response? Conflict Research Programme Blog. https://​blogs​.lse​ .ac​.uk/​crp/​2020/​04/​07/​remittances​-affect​-the​-somali​-covid​-19​-response/​. Marois, T. (2019). Public banking on the future we want. In L. Steinfort and S. Kishimoto (Eds.), Public finance for the future we want (pp. 150–164). Transnational Institute. https://​www​.tni​.org/​en/​ publicfinance. Nance, M.T. (2018). Re-thinking FATF: An experimentalist interpretation of the Financial Action Task Force. Crime, Law and Social Change, 69(2), 131–152. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s10611​-017​-9748​-5. Orozco, M., and Rouse, R. (2007, February 1). Migrant hometown associations and opportunities for development: A global perspective. Migration Information Source. https://​www​.migrationpolicy​.org/​ article/​migrant​-hometown​-associations​-and​-opportunities​-development​-global​-perspective. Orozco, M., and Yansura, J. (2013). Keeping the lifeline open: Remittances and markets in Somalia. Oxfam America/Adeso/Inter-American Dialogue. https://​policy​-practice​.oxfam​.org/​resources/​keep ing-the-lifeline-open-remittances-and-markets-in-somalia-297149/. Passas, N. (2006a). Demystifying hawala: A look into its social organization and mechanics. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 7(S1), 46–62. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14043850601029083. Passas, N. (2006b). Fighting terror with error: The counter-productive regulation of informal value transfers. Crime, Law and Social Change, 45(4–5), 315–336. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s10611​-006​-9041​-5. Pécoud, A. (2015). Depoliticising migration: Global governance and international migration narratives. Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​9781137445933.

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The global ordering of remittance flows  375 Pieke, F.N., Van Hear, N., and Lindley, A. (2007). Beyond control? The mechanics and dynamics of ‘informal’ remittances between Europe and Africa. Global Networks, 7(3), 348–366. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1111/​j​.1471​-0374​.2007​.00173​.x. Ratha, D. (2003). Workers’ remittances: An important and stable source of external development finance. In World Bank (Ed.), Global development finance 2003: Striving for stability in development finance (Vol. 1, pp.  157–175). World Bank. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1596/​0​-8213​-5429​-9. Ratha, D. (2021, May 13). Remittances during the COVID-19 crisis: Resilient and no longer small change. World Bank Blogs. https://​blogs​.worldbank​.org/​peoplemove/​remittances​-during​-covid​-19​ -crisis​-resilient​-and​-no​-longer​-small​-change. Roth, J., Greenburg, D., and Wille, S. (2004). Monograph on terrorist financing (Staff report to the Commission). National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. https://​govinfo​ .library​.unt​.edu/​911/​staff​_statements/​911​_TerrFin​_Monograph​.pdf. Roy, A. (2010). Poverty capital: Microfinance and the making of development. Routledge. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.4324/​9780203854716. Schwittay, A.F. (2011). The financial inclusion assemblage: Subjects, technics, rationalities. Critique of Anthropology, 31(4), 381–401. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0308275X11420117. Smyth, A. (2017). Re-reading remittances through solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in New York City. Geoforum, (85), 12–19. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.geoforum​.2017​.06​.025. Storm, S. (2018). Financialization and economic development: A debate on the social efficiency of modern finance. Development and Change, 49(2), 302–329. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​dech​.12385. Toxopeus, H.S., and Lensink, R. (2007). Remittances and financial inclusion in development (Research Paper no. 2007/49). United Nations University–World Institute for Development Economics Research. https://​www​.wider​.unu​.edu/​publication/​remittances​-and​-financial​-inclusion​-development. United Nations General Assembly (2019). Global Compact for safe, orderly and regular migration (A/ RES/73/195). United Nations. https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​1660537​?ln​=​en. Vlcek, W. (2015). Securitizing money to counter terrorist finance: Some unintended consequences for developing economies. International Studies Perspectives, 16(4), 406–422. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​ insp​.12068. White House (2001, November 7). President announces crackdown on terrorist financial network: Remarks by the President in announcement on financial aspects of terrorism [Press release]. Office of the Press Secretary. https://​georgewbush​-whitehouse​.archives​.gov/​news/​releases/​2001/​11/​20011107​ -4​.html. Wimaladharma, J., Pearce, D., and Stanton, D. (2004). Remittances: The new development finance? Enterprise Development and Microfinance, 15(1), 12–19. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3362/​0957​-1329​.2004​ .005. World Bank (2005). Global economic prospects 2006: Economic implications of remittances and migration. World Bank. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1596/​978​-0​-8213​-6344​-7. World Bank (2006). The international migration agenda and the World Bank: Managing risks and enhancing benefits. World Bank. https://​documents1​.worldbank​.org/​curated/​en/​265071468155131253/​pdf/​ 45521​0WP0Inter1​0Box338857​B01PUBLIC1​.pdf. World Bank (2010). An analysis of trends in the average total cost of migrant remittance services (Remittance Prices Worldwide Report no. 1). World Bank. https://​remittanceprices​.worldbank​.org/​ sites/​default/​files/​Remi​ttancePric​eWorldwide​-Analysis​-April2010​.pdf. World Bank (2014a). Global financial development report 2014: Financial inclusion. World Bank. https://​openknowledge​.worldbank​.org/​handle/​10986/​16238. World Bank (2014b). Report on the Remittance Agenda of the G20. World Bank. https://​ www. findevgateway​.org/​paper/​2014/​07/​report​-remittance​-agenda​-g20. World Bank (2015). Migration and remittances: Recent developments and outlook (Migration and Development Brief no. 24). World Bank. https://​www​.knomad​.org/​publication/​migration​-and​development-brief-24. World Bank (2016, June 10). World Bank makes progress to support remittance flows to Somalia [Press release]. https://​www​.worldbank​.org/​en/​news/​press​-release/​2016/​06/​10/​world​-bank​-makes​-progress​to-support-remittance-flows-to-somalia.

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376  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance World Bank (2019). Migration and remittances: Recent developments and outlook (Migration and Development Brief no. 31). World Bank Group/KNOMAD. https://​www​.knomad​.org/​publication/​ migration​-and​-development​-brief​-31. World Bank (2020, April 22). World Bank predicts sharpest decline of remittances in recent history [Press release]. https://​www​.worldbank​.org/​en/​news/​press​-release/​2020/​04/​22/​world​-bank​-predicts​sharpest-decline-of-remittances-in-recent-history. World Bank (2022, May 11). Remittances to reach $630 billion in 2022 with record flows into Ukraine. Press release. https://​www​.worldbank​.org/​en/​news/​press​-release/​2022/​05/​11/​remittances​-to​-reach​630-billion-in-2022-with-record-flows-into-ukraine.

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25. From a de facto to a de jure role of local authorities in the governance of international migration Thomas Lacroix

In November 2018, the 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development took place in Marrakesh. The event went relatively unheeded, as it was overshadowed by the signing of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration by United Nations (UN) member states, which took place at the same time. Yet the Mayoral Forum set in stone the presence of local authorities in the general framework of governance of international migration, just as the place of states was set out by the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and that of civil society by the World Social Forum on Migration. It represents the outcome of a long-standing process through which cities have gained recognition as key actors in the international management of migration flows. Immigration has always been an issue for local authorities, but their role had so far been confined to the management of the communities settled in their constituencies. The creation of the Mayoral Forum is the outcome of a double movement: by allowing local authorities to take part in a conversation taking place at the global level, it signals a move beyond a focus on local issues, and at the same time a move beyond the questions of immigrant settlement and integration. This chapter addresses the mobilisation of cities that led to the creation of the Mayoral Forum. This process belongs to the development of a form of urban diplomacy, which has benefited from the impasses of intergovernmental cooperation on certain issues, including migration and climate change. The chapter first presents an overview of these mobilisations. The proliferation of city networks, with or without the support of the European Union or international organisations, has given rise to a prominent voice from cities on migration issues. Drawing on a number of declarations, manifestos and other statements delivered by selected networks, the chapter then examines the different aspects of this ‘city voice’. Finally, the chapter explains the process that led to the insertion of the Mayoral Forum in the institutional framework of migration governance and the Global Compact for Migration (GCM), demonstrating how long-standing demands from local authorities have filtered into the text of the GCM.

THE EMERGENCE AND PROLIFERATION OF MIGRATION-RELATED CITY NETWORKS The commitment of localities to issues of migration and settlement is nothing new. In many regards, the sanctuary city movement prefigured current mobilisations. This movement started in 1985, when the city of San Francisco declared itself a ‘sanctuary city’ for refugees coming from Latin America. This stand was taken in reaction to the decision of Ronald Reagan not to 377 Thomas Lacroix - 9781789908077 39:31AM

378  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance grant the status of refugee to Central American exiles fleeing the conflicts ravaging the area (Ridgley, 2008). The municipality refused to assist in the deportation of asylum seekers. Other United States (US) cities subsequently took a similar attitude, turning a local political stand into a nationwide movement. In Europe, the involvement of local authorities was initially far less confrontational. The integration of migrants started to become part of the municipal portfolio from the 1980s onward. This was the case in France, with the so-called politique de la ville (city policy), but also in the United Kingdom (UK) and other European countries. In 1989, a group of six cities endorsed the demand of the municipality of Barcelona for greater participation of cities in European affairs on a number of issues, including that of immigrant integration. The group later formed the core of Eurocities, a European-wide city association that now boasts 140 members. The organisation is one of the many institutions that emerged in the 1990s in order to make municipal voices heard in the newly formed European political space. The Council of European Municipalities and Regions, the Assembly of Regions, and the Permanent Congress of Local and Regional Authorities (Council of Europe) are other examples. These institutions, which are active on integration issues alongside many others, are largely supported by the European Union and other international organisations. They serve as communication channels and implementation partners for city-level policies. The involvement of cities in migration issues emerged in Europe in collaboration with (rather than in opposition to) state authorities. This landscape started to change in the early 2000s, in a context of growing securitisation of migration policies. In the UK, in the wake of the instigation of the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the country, a number of civil society organisations and municipalities joined forces to launch a ‘sanctuary approach’ to asylum. Sheffield became the first ‘city of sanctuary’ in 2007. The movement gradually spread, and was fuelled by the ‘hostile environment policy’ towards illegal immigrants undertaken by the Cameron government from 2012 onward. In 2015, the ‘migration crisis’ and its (mis-)handling – combining welcoming, dispersal and forced repatriation – exacerbated the tension between the need for migration management and the capacity of cities to host immigrants. Other city networks sprung up over Europe with a more militant positioning. In Italy, the anti-immigration policy implemented by the populist Conte government elicited a nationwide municipal reaction, with over 100 mayors claiming they would not implement the Salvini decree passed in 2018 (Del Biaggio et al., 2019). In France, the Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants1 (National Association of Welcoming Cities and Territories, ANVITA) was created in 2018 by nine municipalities, for the promotion of an inclusive approach to immigrant reception, in contrast with the Calais model. At the same time, migration became a high priority for more institutionalised networks as well (Oomen, 2019). From the mid-2000s onward, the European Union acknowledged cities as partners for the implementation of integration policies (Caponio and Borkert, 2010). This new stance resulted in the implementation of a series of programmes: the Cities for Local Integration Policies for Migrants programme (CLIP, 2006–2009), the European Regional and Local Authorities for the Integration of Migrants project (ERLAIM, 2008), Benchmarking Integration Governance in European Cities (INTI-Cities, 2007–2009), and projects for the integration of migrants through economic activity in cities (such as City-GROW, 2017–2019), to name but a few. This involvement was facilitated by the Pact of Amsterdam (2016), which enlarged the capacities of cities to participate in the production of European Union (EU) legislation. This gave rise to the Urban Agenda Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees.

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From a de facto to a de jure role of local authorities  379 This dual (institutional and militant) dynamic characterises current municipal activism around migration in Western Europe. However, this dynamic is not limited to Western Europe. In Latin America, Asia, Oceania and Africa, a growing number of cities and city networks have developed policies and projects geared towards the welcoming of immigrants and refugees, even in the absence of any national framework for the integration of foreign nationals (Lacroix, 2020). In Sao Paulo, the local authorities have established a consultative council representing immigrants. In Japan, 25 cities have formed a Committee for Cities with Concentrated Foreign Population (Tarumoto, 2018). In South Africa, the South African Local Government Association lobbies the government to improve capacities of localities in integration management, and so on. However, in contrast with the situation in North America and Europe, spontaneous involvement is relatively rare. Most city initiatives are sponsored by international organisations. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)-funded ICCAR network2 (International Coalition of Cities Against Racism, later renamed as the International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities) is a case in point. The project was launched in 2004 in the wake of the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which took place in Durban. It now includes nearly 500 members, grouped into seven chapters around the world. Another example is that of Metropolis (the World Association of the Major Metropolises),3 which was created in 1984 and gathers 141 large cities from across the world. Being part of the UN urban framework as the representative body of metropolises, it is now fully embedded in the networks of urban diplomacy. This organisation has been particularly vocal in the global discussions on migration governance: its board of directors includes mayors such as Michael Müller (Berlin), Ada Colau (Barcelona), and Valérie Plante (Montreal), who are long-standing advocates for city-led migration governance. This support for migration-related city networks by international organisations should be viewed against the background of the reform of international cooperation. This reform has involved urging development actors to partner with sub-national governments. In 2000, the World Bank devoted a large part of its annual development report to the role of local authorities (World Bank, 2000). In 2008, the European Commission published its first communication on local authorities, followed by a framework document in 2013: ‘Empowering local authorities in partner countries for enhanced governance and more effective development outcomes’, which was followed by the Thematic Programme for Local Authorities and Civil Society (2014–2020). The EU strategy is coordinated with that of the UN Millennium Development Goals (2015), in which local governments are acknowledged as a key driver of territorial development. In this context, the link between cities and international organisations has reached a new level. The creation of the umbrella organisation United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) within the UN framework in 2004 heralded this change.4 Among other migration-related initiatives, UCLG provided significant support for the Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development. UNHCR also added a city component to its strategy. This particularly concerned South America, which was becoming an area of growing refugee flows that were mostly settling in cities rather than in camps. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) supports the Ciudad Solidaria network, a group of cities in Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Mexico, which have been granted the label of refugee-friendly cities. It also supports a national network of Chilean cities, Sello Migrante.5

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THE FORM AND CONTENT OF A CITY VOICE ON MIGRATION ISSUES In short, the commitment of local actors to migration issues has rapidly intensified around the world over the last two decades. This surge was triggered by a number of different factors: the endorsement by cities of the integration agenda, militant activism against restrictive immigration policies, and the broader evolution of the governance of international cooperation. This flurry of networks, forums, institutions and international conferences related to migration and cities has formed a crucible in which a distinct city voice has taken shape. This section outlines the variety of demands and attitudes of local authorities that took shape over the course of this debate. It draws on analysis of a series of statements published by cities and city networks in various contexts: the Mechelen Declaration on Cities and Migration6 was adopted during the consultation process of the Global Compact (December 2017); the UCLG Africa Charter of Local and Subnational Governments of Africa on Migration7 was an outcome of the Africities summit held in November 2018; the Sello Migrante (Migrant Seal) charter is a shared commitment by Chilean cities to engage in inclusive policies; the Manifeste pour un accueil digne des personnes migrantes vulnérables8 (Manifesto for a Dignified Welcome of Vulnerable Migrant Persons) details the policy guidelines of the city of Strasbourg for welcoming migrants (2019); the charter of the Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants9 (ANVITA) is the agreement signed by the members of this French association (2019); the Marrakech Mayors’ Declaration Cities Working Together for Migrants and Refugees10 is a collective statement delivered during the 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development (2018); and the International Human Mobility Charter of Palermo11 is a policy document endorsed by Italian cities with regard to European and Italian migration policies (2015). A comparative reading of these texts highlights the specific attitudes that have been adopted in different parts of the world. In Latin America, the issue of the arrival of refugees is a recent one, triggered by the surge of migrants exiled from Haiti, Central America and Venezuela, and by the closure of US borders leading to a reconfiguration of migratory routes. In contrast to other regions, the migration regime in Latin America has been fairly liberal. The aim is for civil society organisations, local authorities and national governments to create an institutional and policy framework that does not yet exist. The Sello Migrante charter reflects this. It calls for the establishment of dedicated services and pro-integration measures in Chile. The sello (seal, or label) is attributed by the Department of Immigration and Integration of the Chile Interior Ministry. Likewise, in France, a country with a long migration history and a more established administrative framework, changes in migration trends have forced municipalities to adapt. Inflows of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa have brought more vulnerable immigrants. This is reflected in Strasbourg’s Manifeste pour un accueil digne des personnes migrantes vulnérables, which advocates for a policy that tackles not only the integration of settled populations but also the transient migration of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. These statements calling for policy adjustment in collaboration with national authorities contrast sharply with the attitude adopted in some other documents, which advocate instead for a radical reform of existing migration policies. One example of such an attitude is the charter launched by the mayor of Palermo in the midst of the ‘migration crisis’ in 2015. It demands the abolition of residence permits and the creation of a right to mobility: ‘mobility must be recognised as an inalienable human right’. This confrontational stance is a common

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From a de facto to a de jure role of local authorities  381 one in militant city networks. In France, the ANVITA charter asserts that restrictive European and national policies have generated a ‘crisis of values’. In contrast, this language is seldom found in more institutionalised organisations. One exception to this is the Charter of Local and Subnational Governments of Africa on Migration, which explicitly opposes the European migration policy, including ‘the construction on its territory of detention camps to accommodate African migrant populations expelled from other parts of the world’ and ‘the development of assistance policies which condition the benefit of aid programmes on the implementation of … return and readmission [policies]’. It might be surprising to find this type of stance within the realm of international organisations, but it echoes the growing mobilisation of African civil society organisations for the support of migrants expelled from Europe (Lecadet, 2011). The public statements delivered within the framework of negotiations for the Global Compact for Migration were a synthesis of these two attitudes. Their primary aim was to legitimate the role of local authorities in the management of migrant populations. The Marrakech Mayors’ Declaration framed migration as an urban phenomenon, pointing to ‘the increasing role we, Cities and other local authorities, play … in providing support to migrants and refugees’. On this basis, it called for a role for cities in the construction of a multi-level governance framework, alongside that of states and international and civil society organisations. In principle, the content of the declaration was reformist rather than critical, calling for an adjustment of existing policy frameworks rather than a radical change. Yet the declaration repeated a claim that is common to most of the policy statements produced by local authorities, namely the need to tackle the difficulties that are faced by immigrants, whatever their legal status. The Marrakech Mayors’ Declaration called for provisions to ‘provide migrants with safe access to essential services: guaranteeing residents’ equal access to City services regardless of migration or legal status’. The question of service provision is a central concern for sanctuary cities in the US and those in the City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (C-MISE) network, which is part of the Eurocities network (Spencer and Delvino, 2019). City representatives repeatedly asserted that it was not possible for them, in their daily work, to distinguish between migrants according to their status, as these populations share the same humanitarian and welfare needs. This is especially the case for undocumented migrants, who, despite the irregularity of their situation, are nevertheless human beings with immediate needs. We will see, in the next section, how this claim filtered into Objective 15 of the Global Compact for Migration.

CITIES AND THE GLOBAL COMPACT FOR MIGRATION The search of an international framework for the regulation of migration flows has a 40-year-long history of failure. These decades were marked by an opposition between, on the one hand, sending states, which wished to see the creation of a multilateral framework; and on the other hand, receiving states, which favoured the use of bilateral arrangements in which they could impose their views over weaker partners (Betts and Kainz, 2017). After the failed attempt to give life to the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, inaugurated in the early 2000s a new strategy by appointing a Special Representative on Migration and organising a High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development in 2006. The event led to the establishment of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD),

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382  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance a forum where state representatives would meet annually to discuss migration issues, but without delivering binding agreements. The GFMD was initially focused on migration and development rather than rights, but the agenda was gradually enlarged by incorporating a human rights-based approach to migration (Crépeau and Atak, 2016; see also Chapter 9 by Crépeau and Purkey in this Handbook). The GFMD became a magnet for public and private actors from around the world who wished to discuss migration issues. This was particularly the case for civil society actors, who convened a parallel forum (the Civil Society Days) in Manila in 2008 (Rother, 2019). The event changed its name and became the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA). It was acknowledged as an official event during the 2010 GFMD in Mexico. The connection enlarged the audience and remit of the Forum, with delegates circulating between both gatherings. The second High-Level Dialogue (HLD) on Migration and Development took place in 2013. During the event, the mayors of Barcelona and Athens called for recognition and support for the role of cities in migration management. One of the outcomes of the HLD was the decision to launch the Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development. The following year, in June 2014, 30 mayors gathered during the first Mayoral Forum, an event supported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), UCLG, the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development of the World Bank, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The meeting resulted in the ‘Call of Barcelona’, a statement formalising the mayors’ demands with regard to the process of constructing a system of migration governance: a role in decision-making (and not only in the implementation process); a more realistic approach to migration management; and financial and technical support for the implementation of local integration policies. From 2014 onward, the Mayoral Forum took place on an annual basis: Quito in 2015, Quezon City in 2016, Berlin in 2017, Marrakesh in 2018, and Quito in 2020. The year 2015 was a turning point in the development of urban diplomacy. Against the background of three simultaneous migration crises (the arrival of Middle Eastern refugees in Europe and the Mediterranean, of Central American refugees in the US, and of Rohingyas in South-East Asia), four international agreements were adopted, granting an unprecedented role to cities in the domain of development, climate change and migration. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (July 2015) confirmed the role of cities as partners for international cooperation. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in September 2015, included a specific goal (number 11) related to cities, aiming to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change (December 2015) was supported by the mobilisation of cities for the reduction of their carbon footprints. Finally, the New Urban Agenda, adopted in Quito in October 2016 during the international conference Habitat III, set out a roadmap for the implementation of a city-level sustainable development agenda. It included several goals relating to the welcoming of immigrants. This series of agreements lent support to the position of local authorities in the international arena. At the same time, the ‘migration crises’ applied pressure to states and international authorities to take action in this domain. Following the New York Declaration adopted by the UN General Assembly on 19 September 2015, a round of negotiations was initiated for the establishment of a global framework for the management of large migration movements. In October 2015, the IOM held a conference on the theme of ‘Migrants and Cities’, during which the interim head of the IOM, William Swing, reasserted the importance of cities as the most appropriate actors for

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From a de facto to a de jure role of local authorities  383 the management of immigrant populations: ‘Mayors understand probably more than national politicians and parliamentarians. They understand migrants, this is where reality comes face-to-face with policy. Mayors understand, they are closer to ground reality than most other officials’ (quoted by Ahouga, 2017, p. 11). In July 2016, the IOM became the UN agency in charge of migration management. In 2017, two events consolidated the presence of local authorities in the framework of migration governance. The first of these was the Mayoral Forum taking place in Berlin on 26–27 June. Following the same strategy as that used by the volunteer sector a decade earlier, the Forum was deliberately organised to take place at the same time as the GFMD summit. A delegation of the Mayoral Forum, headed by the Mayor of Ouagadougou, presented the mayors’ priorities at the GFMD. For the first time, local authorities attended the GFMD on their own behalf (and not as sub-representatives of their respective states). The ensuing discussions led to the establishment of a mayors’ mechanism, formalising relations between the GFMD and the Mayoral Forum. The second event took place in Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) during the stock-taking phase of the Global Compact negotiations (4–6 December 2017). Cities were latecomers to this process. Despite their active diplomacy on migration-related matters, as discussed above, cities were not formally represented during the consultation with stakeholders (see Chapter 11 by Guild and Allinson in this Handbook). Prior to the Puerto Vallarta conference, representatives of 50 cities gathered in Mechelen (Belgium) to endorse a common position on the Global Compact. The event was supported by the IOM, the Belgian Foreign Office, UCLG and the UN Habitat programme. The resulting Declaration of Mechelen was sent to the UN representative on migration, Louise Arbour. The Puerto Vallarta Conference was marked by three events in which local authorities played a crucial part. On 2 December, two days before the meeting, the US mission to the UN announced that the US was pulling out from the negotiations and would not adopt the Global Compact. On 4 December, 12 US cities (including New York, Atlanta, Providence, Dallas and the District of Columbia) announced that they would continue to participate in the Global Compact process. On 5 December, Valérie Plante, Mayor of Montreal, gave a keynote speech to the audience. It was the first official appearance of a mayor in this process. The Puerto Vallarta conference paved the way for a greater presence of local authorities in the discussions. With the support of the Open Society Foundations, cities were able to advance their demands during the writing phase of the Compact. They did so collectively, when a delegation of 41 cities sent their recommendations on a number GCM aims. A task force convened by the municipality of New York wrote a preparatory document, much of which found its way into the Mechelen Declaration. They also participated in the writing process itself. Since the municipality of New York holds a liaison office at the UN, the group used this opportunity to obtain an accreditation and a seat in the negotiation room. Even though the writing of the Compact was a state-led process, ‘consultation segments’ allowed stakeholders to add language to the document. Cities added their voice to those of some sending states on two contentious issues: that of maintaining a distinction between migrants and refugees/asylum seekers, and that of providing services to undocumented migrants. As discussed above, both these issues are connected to the repeated demands of local authorities. The final text mentioned local authorities 14 times, which was the highest number for any type of public authority, apart from states themselves. The role of local authorities was most decisive in Goal 15 (Thouez, 2020), which introduces the principle of ‘non-discriminatory access’ (that is, regardless of the legal status of the person in question) to health services and

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384  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance education. This goal involves (Objective 15e) ‘incorporat[ing] the health needs of migrants into national and local health-care policies and plans, such as by strengthening capacities for service provision, [and] facilitating affordable and non-discriminatory access’, and (Objective 15f) ‘provid[ing] inclusive and equitable quality education to migrant children and youth, as well as facilitat[ing] access to lifelong learning opportunities, including by strengthening the capacities of education systems and by facilitating non-discriminatory access to early childhood development.’ Cities also managed to negotiate a role for themselves in the reviewing process of the implementation of the GCM. As part of this effort to institutionalise the presence of cities in the framework of migration governance, the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) was created, as a task force aimed at organising the participation of local authorities in this reviewing process and stimulating new initiatives. The MMC was created during the 5th Mayoral Forum in Marrakesh (December 2018), with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Open Society Foundations, and the climate change-orientated C40 network. The advisory board of MMC has included the mayors of Athens (Georgio Kaminis), Montreal (Virginie Plante), Bristol (Marvin Rees), Kampala (Erias Lukwago), Milan (Giuseppe Sala), Los Angeles (Eric Garcetti) and Sao Paulo (Bruno Covas), all of whom played a central role in the consultations surrounding the Global Compact for Migration and/or the Global Compact on Refugees.

CONCLUSION The negotiations surrounding the Global Compact for Migration established the position of local authorities in the landscape of international cooperation. Cities not only managed to make their own contributions to the text of a major international agreement, but also institutionalised their presence among decision-level actors. The Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development provided them with a platform enabling their participation, and the Mayors Mechanism of the GFMD enabled them to do so alongside states, rather than on behalf of them. During the consultation process taking place around the GCM, we can thus observe a shift from a de facto involvement of cities in the management of migrant populations to a de jure presence, inscribed in the international framework of migration governance. This chapter has highlighted two factors underpinning this change: firstly, a networking dynamic occurring across the world and giving rise to a distinct city voice on migration issues; and secondly, the deadlock of intergovernmental cooperation, which left a void that city actors came to fill. As we have shown, the networking dynamic is complex, multi-level and situated. And yet, beyond the differences in their specific standpoints, city networks converge on a number of issues, including the need to address a lack of financial and technical capacity, their recognition as legitimate actors in the field of welcoming and integrating migrants, and the need to deal with migrants whatever their profile and legal status. The presence of these points in the discussions surrounding the Global Compact shows that, despite their apparent diversity, these interconnected networks share and circulate a number of common ideas and standpoints. The role of some municipalities and civil society actors that link different levels and types of groupings is here key. The Mayor of Montreal, Virginie Plante, who delivered the Marrakech Mayors’ Declaration in a speech at the 2018 GFMD, is active in various city networks, including the Canadian chapter of the sanctuary city movement, Intercultural Cities,

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From a de facto to a de jure role of local authorities  385 and she is now a board member of the Mayors Migration Council. The question that remains to be answered is: how will these networks stratify in the future, in the wake of their inscription into the framework of migration governance? Will their respective positionings polarise into reformist versus radical agendas? Or will they coalesce around a common cause? And what role will these ‘hubs’ play in this process? The second factor noted above for the increased role of cities in migration governance – that is, the inefficiency of intergovernmental cooperation – raises the question of a fading role for states in migration governance, and even for governance in general. Indeed, following the decision of US cities to stay in the Global Compact process after the withdrawal of their national authorities, a similar phenomenon occurred in the case of cities from other countries that decided to pull out or not to legally endorse the GCM. A similar decoupling between the local and governmental levels had already been noticed in the domain of climate change, with US cities abiding by the prescriptions of the Paris Agreement despite President Trump’s withdrawal. Some neoliberal pundits, such as Benjamin Barber, argue that states are not fit for the management of global challenges such as trafficking, terrorism and climate change, and that cities should take the lead. However, despite the evidence, this is not what is happening in the domain of migration. Rather than taking a leading role, cities are supporting the establishment of a multi-level form of governance with shared responsibilities. In a keynote speech at the 2020 GFMD, Tori Zanosu, the executive director of the Mayors Migration Council, presented her vision of a division of labour between states and cities: ‘Immigration policy is the prerogative of states, but integration policies need to be responsive to realities on the ground.’ In other words, local authorities are striving to establish their legitimacy in the domain of the management of migrant stocks, while states would continue to be in charge of migrant flows. However, a decoupling of the management of migration from the management of integration seems unlikely. It goes against the grain of current policy developments that are tending to undermine the integration process of immigrant populations. The politicisation of municipal networks on migration issues is an outcome of the unwanted consequences of migration management on integration. Cities’ demands for the provision of unconditional access to welfare services are, in themselves, an infringement on the domain of the management of migration flows. They effectively constitute a demand for less pervasive immigration control. It remains to be seen whether states are ready to make such concessions.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

https://​villes​-territoires​-accueillants​.fr/​. https://​en​.unesco​.org/​themes/​fostering​-rights​-inclusion/​iccar. https://​www​.metropolis​.org. https://​www​.uclg​.org/​en. https://​serviciomigraciones​.cl/​sellomigrante/​. https://​refugeesmigrants​.un​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​mechelendeclaration​.pdf. https://​knowledge​.uclga​.org/​IMG/​pdf/​charter​_of​_local​_and​_subnational​_governments​_of​_africa​ _on​_migration​.pdf. 8. https://www.anvita.fr/assets/CommunityNews/Documents/WEB-Manifeste-ville-hospitaliere-2019 -12.pdf. 9. https://​www​.anvita​.fr/​assets/​Uploads/​CHARTE​-DE​-LANVITA​-2021​.pdf. 10. https://​m​igration4d​evelopment​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​media/​news/​en​_mf​_declaration​.pdf. 11. https://​www​.gold​.ac​.uk/​media/​documents​-by​-section/​about​-us/​news/​palermo​-charter​.pdf.

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REFERENCES Ahouga, Y. (2017). The local turn in migration management: The IOM and the engagement of local authorities. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(9), 1–18. Betts, A., and Kainz, L. (2017). The history of global migration governance. RSC Working Paper Series (122). Refugee Studies Centre. Caponio, T., and Borkert, M. (2010). The local dimension of migration policymaking. Amsterdam University Press. Crépeau, F., and Atak, I. (2016). Global migration governance: Avoiding commitments on human rights, yet tracing a course for cooperation. Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 34(2), 113–146. Del Biaggio, C., Rossetto, T., and Boria, E. (2019). Mapping local resistance to anti-immigration national law: A carto-essay. J-Reading – Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography, 1, 89–98. Lacroix, T. (2020). Réseaux des villes hospitalières: Un panorama global. E-migrinter, (20). http://​ journals​.openedition​.org/​e​-migrinter/​2281. Lecadet, C. (2011). Le front mouvant des expulsés: Lieux et enjeux des regroupements et des mobilisations collectives des migrants expulsés au Mali. Doctoral thesis, EHESS. Oomen, B. (2019). Decoupling and teaming up: The rise and proliferation of transnational municipal networks in the field of migration. International Migration Review, 54(3), 913–939. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1177/​0197918319881118. Ridgley, J. (2008). Cities of refuge: Immigration enforcement, police, and the insurgent genealogies of citizenship in U.S. sanctuary cities. Urban Geography, 29(1), 53–77. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2747/​0272​ -3638​.29​.1​.53. Rother, S. (2019). The Global Forum on Migration and Development as a venue of state socialisation: A stepping stone for multi-level migration governance? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(8), 1258–1274. Spencer, S., and Delvino, N. (2019). Municipal activism on irregular migrants: The framing of inclusive approaches at the local level. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 17(1), 27–43. Tarumoto, H. (2018). The limits of local citizenship policies in Japan. In T. Lacroix and A. Desille (eds), International migrations and local governance (pp. 191–213). Palgrave Macmillan. Thouez, C. (2020). Cities as emergent international actors in the field of migration: Evidence from the lead-up and adoption of the United Nations Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees. Global Governance, 26(4), 650–672. World Bank (2000). World development report 1999/2000: Entering the 21st century. World Bank.

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26. ‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’: the role of information in migration decision-making and irregular migration governance Julia Van Dessel

INTRODUCTION The aim of this chapter is to provide a literature review that explores how the concept of information contributes to shaping and governing migration decision-making and trajectories. Firstly, it assesses the state of knowledge on the role that information plays in different theories of international migration, focusing on the information practices and resources that are specific to irregular migration. It shows that irregular migrants’ reliance on information to navigate hostile migration and border regimes depends on their perception of opportunities and risks, the mobilisation of their social network, and their level of trust in the source of the message. Secondly, it describes and analyses how information has come to assume a central place in contemporary practices of migration management. On the one hand, migration management actors increasingly act as information managers through the systematised collection and exploitation of data relating to migration flows and migrants’ individual characteristics. On the other hand, these same actors seek to fulfil the role of information providers to migrants through the implementation of migration information campaigns (MICs) in countries of origin, transit and destination. The chapter concludes with an examination of the fundamental complementarity between strategies of information gathering and sharing as part of a wider strategy to increase global control over unwanted migration.

INFORMATION AS A RESOURCE FOR MIGRANTS Since the end of the Cold War, the process of globalisation has given rise to an inherent contradiction. While the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people implied the progressive disappearance of interstate borders, the number of international borders has actually increased as a result of the creation of new states and the reaffirmed importance of state sovereignty (Rea, 2017, pp. 33–37). Arguing that freedom of movement had therefore become the main stratifying factor of our times, Bauman (1998a, p. 2), Bauman (1998b) popularised the term ‘glocalization’, originally coined by Robertson (1992, p. 173), to capture the ways in which what appeared as globalisation for a small elite of the world’s population meant localisation or a state of ‘involuntary immobility’ (Carling, 2002) for the vast majority. Yet a wide gap remains between the stated goals of migration control policies and their actual results (Cornelius et al., 1994), to the extent that contemporary borders may appear ‘beyond control’ (Bhagwati, 2003). In order to explain this discrepancy, migration studies have shown that human mobility is not only governed by states, but also shaped by a series of macro-level 387 Julia Van Dessel - 9781789908077 39:32AM

388  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance factors (for example, political, socio-economic or environmental changes), meso-level factors (for example, social networks) and micro-level factors (for example, culture, religion and education). The fact that there is such a great variety of factors impacting upon migration shows the fictitious nature of the fixed policy labels used to categorise human mobility. In particular, the prevailing distinction between regular migrants, irregular migrants and refugees is in reality tenuous: not only are the initial reasons for leaving often mixed and intertwined, but also the obstacles encountered along the way partly determine the path taken. As Triandafyllidou (2017) points out, ‘a person who decides to migrate pushed by a combination of economic and sometimes political factors crosses a slippery slope, sliding from the regular to the irregular options depending on what option is available and affordable’ (p. 4). While these categories indeed need to be critically re-examined, focusing our investigation on ‘irregular migration’ – or the various forms of cross-border mobility taking place outside national or international regulatory frameworks – is relevant for at least two reasons. Firstly, in high-income countries, immigrants coming through irregular routes are generally considered a threat to state sovereignty, and even to state security (Koser, 2010, pp. 189–191). Consequently, the last two decades have seen a growing political interest in influencing their decision-making and their behaviour specifically. As we shall see, this is partly done through the collection and provision of specific ‘information’, a concept that has come to play a fundamental role in recent trends in migration governance. Secondly, it should be stressed that the issue of access to information shapes the projects and trajectories of all categories of migrants (Ros et al., 2007). Yet political discourses and the media often portray irregular migrants as suffering from a lack of accurate information about the obstacles that they may face en route, thus making them susceptible to lies, as well as easy prey for ‘ill-intentioned’ smugglers. Such an image is largely stereotypical: while individuals who are forced to travel through irregular channels are particularly likely to experience violence and precariousness along the way, many appear to have developed their own information strategies in response. Based on an extensive literature review, this chapter thus first examines the different roles assigned to information in theories of international migration, focusing especially on the information resources and practices that irregular migrants rely on. The Role of Information in Theories of International Migration In migration studies, the issue of access to information has mainly been discussed within the framework of individual decision-making, as a factor likely to influence emigration intention and destination choice. Strongly inspired by behavioural economics (Simon, 1957), research on migration determinants has long been dominated by neo-classical models, in particular the so-called ‘push‒pull theory’ (Lee, 1966). Predicated on the idea that migrants rationally opt for the behaviour that maximises their utility on the basis of a cost‒benefit calculation, this theory has been criticised for being static and individualist, overstating the economic drivers of migration, and dismissing the agentive power of migrants (de Haas, 2011, pp. 8–9). In a variant of this theory called ‘the new economics of labour migration’ (Stark, 1991; Stark and Bloom, 1985), the unit of reference is no longer the rational individual, but the household. The decision to migrate reflects a choice made by the family to send some members abroad with a view to diversifying resource accumulation strategies. Neo-classical economic models entail five problematic assumptions about the role of information in migration decision-making:

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‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’  389 ‘(1) that individuals have all the available information for decision making; (2) that obtaining information involves no costs to the individual; (3) that individuals have unlimited processing capacity; (4) that migration attribute values and decision weights are known; and (5) that individuals use optimal analytical methods to make decisions’ (Baláž et al., 2016, p. 38). Today, such idealised conditions and, in particular, the assumptions of perfect knowledge underpinning neo-classical economic models, are widely viewed as chimerical, since ample scholarship has demonstrated that obtaining information can in fact be costly (DaVanzo, 1981; Stigler, 1961). Within the extensive literature about choice behaviour, a specific branch has therefore developed to investigate the dynamics of migration decision-making procedures carried out with imperfect and costly information (Berninghaus and Seifert-Vogt, 1987). Notably, Allen and Eaton (2005) have shown that when agents are risk-neutral, providing less information about a specific location does not deter migration to that place, but rather may encourage it owing to the idea that ‘the grass is greener across the higher fence’ (p. 1). Furthermore, alongside the work done by economists to explain why international migration occurs in the first place, some social science authors, above all concerned with the reason that it persists over time, have highlighted the self-sustaining nature of migration through the transnational networks that it creates (Boyd, 1989; Massey, 1999). Research on social networks has shed light on the key role played by family and community ties in gathering resources that facilitate cross-border mobility, including when borders are legally closed (Böcker, 1994). According to this approach, social networks are therefore not just a means but also a reason for migration, as they give answers to the fundamental questions of how to migrate, where to go, and how to obtain assistance upon arrival (Boyd, 1989; Fawcett, 1989; Faist, 1998; Faist, 2010, pp. 71–85). With respect to the role of information, the main hypothesis of social network theory is that the more one has social relations in another country, the more such relationships provide information channels (for example, about the living conditions or job opportunities), which in turn increases one’s propensity to migrate to that location (Coombs, 1978; Jedlicka, 1978). For prospective migrants attempting to acquire new information resources, weak social ties may thus appear more valuable than strong ones, since they connect social groups that possess different ‘pools’ of information (Granovetter, 1973). While it has long been argued that information circulating through transnational social networks mainly acts as a ‘pull factor’ for migrants (van Dalen et al., 2005), scholars now consider that its impact is more complex, shaping as it does individual migration trajectories before, during and after the journey (Caarls et al., 2021). Finally, over the past decades, the rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has radically altered previous notions of spatial and temporal distance, generating what has been referred to as a ‘shrinking world’ (Abler, 1975) or a process of ‘time–space compression’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 240). The rapid evolution of ICTs is thus considered to have affected social life in all its aspects, including – and most importantly – the issue of human mobility (Vertovec, 2009, pp. 53–84). The development of new transport and communication technologies has enabled migrants to travel long distances back and forth more regularly and, moreover, to remain in touch with their relatives in origin countries (Castles et al., 2014, p. 5). Mobile phones can also help migrants and refugees cope with ‘information precarity’, that is, ‘the condition of instability that [they] experience in accessing news and personal information’ (Wall et al., 2017, p. 240), which may expose them to further violence during their journey. Regarding the impact of these technologies and devices on international migration, the main hypothesis is that access to information has grown hand in hand with access to ICTs, thus

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390  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance making people globally more aware of prospects of a better life elsewhere (Wood and King, 2001, pp. 1–3; Triandafyllidou, 2018, p. 7). Combined with improved levels of education, widespread access to information flows circulating through telecommunications is therefore understood as having increased people’s aspirations to migrate (de Haas, 2011, pp. 21–22). More recently, scholars have argued that the growing access to ICTs has also enhanced people’s capabilities to migrate, providing evidence of a positive relationship between the adoption of ICTs and international mobility (Iqbal et al., 2020). Social media, in particular, have been described as creating new communication channels, which actively transform the nature of migrants’ networks and thereby facilitate the migration process (Dekker and Engbersen, 2014). Two aspects, however, should temper the enthusiasm for the potential of ICTs to facilitate migration. Firstly, strong differences in technology literacy and Internet access remain between prospective migrants, mainly depending on their country of origin, ethnicity, gender and age group (Guillén and Suárez, 2005). Such discrepancies have resulted in a ‘digital divide’, which produces substantial inequalities in access to the resources required to move across borders in the ‘information society’ (Ros et al., 2007, p. 16). Secondly, migrants’ and refugees’ greater reliance on ICTs for information and communication may also make their journey more precarious if they find themselves deprived of their devices and/or connectivity, whether deliberately or not. Furthermore, this situation has greatly increased opportunities for online surveillance by governments in countries of origin and destination, as European authorities, for instance, may ask asylum applicants for access to their Facebook profile information (Gillespie et al., 2018, p. 6). A Focus on Irregular Migrants’ Information Resources and Practices As shown earlier, theories of migration have long considered the issue of access to information to be a key factor in determining not only whether or not to migrate, but also how, when and where to go. While it is now recognised that information represents a vital resource at all stages of the migration process, the role that it plays in relation to irregular migration more specifically remains to be clarified. This section therefore explores the following questions: (1) What kind of information shapes irregular migration? (2) How does such information circulate? and (3) How is it interpreted by migrants? In the existing literature, two main categories of information can be singled out for their conflicting influence on irregular migration. The first category concerns information about the opportunities supposedly available abroad, and the other one consists of information about the potential dangers of irregular migration routes. In the first case, sociologists have stressed the significance of images and narratives about places of destination as an important source of (mis)information for prospective migrants. Recent scholarship on this subject has focused, for instance, on the representations of Europe conveyed by rap music in North Africa (Souiah et al., 2018) and West Africa (Navarro, 2019), as well as on the images of the ‘American dream’ disseminated by transnational migrant networks from Latin America (Carballo, 2019).‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ It has often been argued in this regard that irregular migrants’ imaginaries tend to associate their destination countries with unqualified economic prosperity, thus leading them to have unrealistic expectations of the income they could earn abroad (McKenzie et al., 2013). Scholars have pointed out the role of social media and word-of-mouth information in generating such distorted images and hopes of a better future that could only be found outside one’s country of origin (Koikkalainen et al., 2020), and similarly, they have demonstrated the effect of regular

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‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’  391 exposure to foreign media in this process (Mai, 2004). Moreover, migrants who have already settled in third countries may also contribute to the dissemination of idealised stories of life abroad, as the performance of success is an important strategy of self-representation towards relatives ‘at home’ (Schapendonk and van Moppes, 2007, pp. 10–13). It is nonetheless much too simplistic to assume that irregular migrants’ aspirations to improve their condition are mainly the product of misinformation, illusions and dreams about the economic opportunities supposedly available elsewhere. In the case of Anglophone Cameroon, for instance, Alpes (2014) has shown that the desire of prospective migrants to succeed abroad primarily denotes a quest for global belonging and inclusion, which is why their ambitions are generally not affected by the failure of previous migrants. According to McMahon and Sigona (2018), the second category of information shaping irregular migrants’ plans and trajectories over time is the level of violence that they may encounter along the way. First of all, before departure, individuals decide whether or not to migrate, and choose their itinerary in response to the potential dangers that they may face. Secondly, during the migration journey, the experience of being exposed to the death of others or of having their own lives put at risk directly impacts upon the way in which irregular migrants interpret risks and make decisions, in particular regarding whether or not to go further (McMahon and Sigona, 2018, pp. 507–510). Although most migrants are thus well aware of the violence resulting from the enforcement of contemporary border regimes, media and political discourse often assumes as a matter of course that they are ignorant, in order to explain why they adopt risky behaviours. As will be seen in the next section, this assumption forms the basis for the development of propaganda campaigns, which are funded by destination states to ‘inform’ potential migrants about the unequivocally bleak reality of irregular migration. Yet irregular migrants generally demonstrate their ability to develop alternative information practices, especially when they harbour suspicions about the information provided by official authorities (Gillespie et al., 2018, p. 8). In this regard, rumours are a common feature of information sharing in displacement situations, reflecting the need for individuals to retain some agency over their own fate in highly uncertain contexts (Jack, 2018). In the last decade, a new branch of qualitative research has shed light on the influence of the migration journey itself on irregular migrants’ decision-making and behaviour (McMahon and Sigona, 2018; Schapendonk et al., 2020). In particular, scholars have shown that migrants’ trajectories are constrained not only by information limitations, but also by other factors, such as their limited access to funds, the few travel routes available to them, and the fact that their final destination may be determined by others (Crawley and Hagen-Zanker, 2019, p. 24) like smugglers (Gilbert and Koser, 2006, pp. 1215–1216). As a result, migration itineraries almost never follow migrants’ initial aspirations or well-thought-out plans: instead, it is the ‘in-between phase of migration’ (Schapendonk, 2012, p. 30), or the trajectory itself, and the relatively long periods of (forced) immobility, that shape destination choices along the way (pp. 36–38). As irregular migrants are forced to spend longer and longer stretches of time in so-called transit countries, practices of information sharing among peers and fellow travellers have therefore become part of an essential survival strategy (Collyer, 2005). In the case of sub-Saharan African migrants heading to Europe, temporary collectives are generally formed along ethnic lines to share information about security issues or job opportunities (Schapendonk, 2012, pp. 34–36). Information regarding details of the final crossing to Europe, however, is most often kept secret, since it is the object of fierce competition between migrants (Schapendonk and van Moppes, 2007, p. 17). Last but not least, information sharing through

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392  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance peer networks remains vitally important after arrival at the destination: real-time communication through mobile phones can help undocumented migrants to avoid police roundups, for instance (Harney, 2013). Finally, according to the literature, the key variable explaining migrants’ interpretation of the information that they receive through different channels is their level of trust in the source of the message (Hagen-Zanker and Mallett, 2016, pp. 29–32; Horst and Grabska, 2015, pp. 4–6). In this respect, several studies have shown that for a majority of migrants, the most trusted source of information is their close social network, especially family and friends in their home country and in the diaspora (Pickering et al., 2016; Rossi, 1955). These findings are consistent with the results produced by research on the broader issue of the dynamics of trust creation, which indicate that forms of trust based on ‘macro’ sources such as governments are usually ‘thinner’ than those built on ‘micro’ sources or interpersonal relations (Nooteboom, 2006, pp. 4–5). According to Tilly (2007), reliance on interpersonal ‘trust networks’ forms part of a strategy aiming to mitigate the risks associated with long-distance migration, both prior to and during the journey (pp. 6–9). With regard to irregular migration, scholars have noted that the concept of trust also plays a pivotal, albeit often overlooked, role in the relationship between migrants and smugglers, as smuggling rings and irregular migrants’ networks tend to be closely entwined (Achilli, 2018; Alpes, 2017; van Liempt, 2007). However, irregular migrants’ reliance on their close social networks for information and advice should not obscure the fact that these can also be vectors of manipulated, unrealistic or false information. As Flore Gubert mentions in Chapter 27 in this Handbook, on network embeddedness as a source of opportunities and constraints for migrants, diaspora networks can convey inaccurate information in at least three cases. Firstly, they can do so unintentionally, due to their poor integration in the host country, for instance (Elsner et al., 2018). Secondly, biased reporting can happen deliberately, as individuals facing strong demands to send remittances may choose to report lower earnings to their relatives in order to mitigate this pressure (McKenzie et al., 2013, pp. 125–126). Thirdly, and conversely, migrants can also claim to earn a higher income than they actually do in order to preserve or increase their pre-migratory social status. Because of this, as discussed above, settled migrants are often accused of encouraging irregular migration by ‘maximizing successes while minimizing their failures and frustrations, thus inducing others to leave with excessive optimism’ (Massey, 2006, p. 114).

INFORMATION AS A RESOURCE FOR MIGRATION MANAGEMENT ACTORS The purpose of this chapter is to explore how the concept of information has been analysed in the extensive literature on migration and migration governance, and how these two levels interact. In a working paper published in 2007, Ros and her co-authors attempted to establish ‘a new field of research at the crossroads of migration and information and communication flows’ (Ros et al., 2007, p. 4), arguing that information control represented one of the greatest challenges facing migration management globally. Interestingly, they pointed out that ‘immigration policies, however, [did] not consider information and communication flows as an area for action’ (p. 5). More than ten years later, this statement is worth reconsidering. In this section I therefore seek to show how practices of information gathering and sharing have come to occupy a central place in contemporary migration governance. More specifically, I argue

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‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’  393 that a range of actors are increasingly trying to position themselves as both ‘information managers and providers’ (Garvin, 2011, p. 113) in the field of international migration management. To do so, I first review the existing literature on the growing role of data management in migration policies. I then examine the emerging body of scholarship devoted to MICs, which aim to govern migration through the dissemination of information. Controlling Migration through Data Collection and Analysis In relation to migration, the concept of information has several meanings that can be strategically mobilised or disregarded depending on the interests at stake. In information science, information is understood to relate primarily to the concepts of knowledge and data. While there is no consensus on the final definition of these three concepts, scholars generally agree that they are part of a sequential order: ‘data are the raw material for information, and information is the raw material for knowledge’, the latter being commonly viewed as the product of a synthesis taking place in a person’s mind (Zins, 2007, p. 479). The type of information that is produced by the observation of migration flows or extracted from migrant individuals themselves is usually referred to as mere ‘data’. Yet, through systematised practices of data collection and analysis, migration management actors and intergovernmental organisations in particular have greatly contributed to the production of a certain type of ‘knowledge’ about contemporary migration. Indeed, according to Barnett and Finnemore (1999), the very act of classifying and categorising social objects – that is, the ability to generate and structure social knowledge – is not neutral, being as it is a source of power that can be deployed to ‘define shared international tasks (like “development”), create and define new categories of actors (like “refugees”), create new interests for actors (like “promoting human rights”), and transfer models of political organization around the world (like markets and democracy)’ (p. 699, see also pp. 710–715). The International Organization for Migration (IOM) undoubtedly plays a major role in this regard. IOM increasingly claims and exercises a prerogative to statistically enumerate its populations of concern and to label their mobility, thereby mirroring the way in which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) makes use of its power to categorise those who qualify as refugees and those who do not, which conditions a person’s access to international recognition, protection and rights (Bettati, 2013; Pasic and Weiss, 1997, pp. 116–121). First, IOM is able to quantify and categorise population flows wherever needed through the implementation of the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), a system that has been developed to track and monitor population displacement in times of crisis (see IOM, 2018). More than a simple data collection and recording system, the DTM is a tool that allows IOM to decree ‘who is who’ (for example, transit migrants, internally displaced persons, returnees, and so on), bearing in mind that as part of the promotion of ‘orderly migration’, each category calls for a different type of policy intervention (Brachet, 2016). The fact that states rely more and more on the information provided by such systems, and therefore on IOM, has significantly contributed to increasing the organisation’s influence on the global stage (Bradley, 2017, p. 104). IOM, moreover, is exploring new promising avenues to improve the tracking of migration flows, including through the collection of mobile phone data (Lai et al., 2019). Finally, IOM has also started to invest in scientific research on ‘agent-based modelling’ (Klabunde and Willekens, 2016) in order to refine its understanding of migration decision-making and inform future migration policies. As part of the MIGCHOICE project

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394  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance conducted by IOM in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, for instance, researchers have built a computer simulation model that is designed to predict the likeliness of emigration decisions in West and Central Africa based on the evolution of external factors such as investments in development policies (IOM, n.d.). Today, policymakers depend heavily on the knowledge produced by a range of external information managers to act upon complex migration flows. At the European level, information gathering and the identification of movements considered to pose a ‘risk’ are some of the main tasks that have been delegated to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) (Carrera, 2007; Neal, 2009; Pollak and Slominski, 2009). Through the production of specific knowledge about migration, Frontex’s risk analysis unit exerts considerable influence on the European Union (EU) decision-making process by specifying ‘what is happening and what will happen’ at external border crossings (Horii, 2016, p. 243). Some have also argued that Frontex’s risk assessment activities have been strategically exploited by EU actors hoping to further the harmonisation of European border control (Paul, 2017). Since 2017, the EU has taken a further step in expanding the role of Frontex: Frontex agents and European Migration Liaison Officers have been detached to priority third countries in order to gather information about migration and identify potential ‘threats’ before they reach EU borders (Council of the European Union, 2015a). In addition to the programmes carried out by Frontex to control immigration, the EU and its member states also act as information managers in their own right. According to the literature, this has been made possible by the development of large-scale databases and data-mining technologies (Lyon, 2001, 2003) with a view to ‘monitoring everyone and controlling some’ (Rea, 2017, p. 41). Moreover, the gradual transformation of international borders into ‘augmented borders’ (Ajana, 2015) or ‘iBorders’ (Pötzsch, 2015) has opened up new opportunities for mass ‘dataveillance’ (Amoore and De Goede, 2005), that is, ‘the proactive surveillance of what effectively become suspect populations, using new technologies to identify “risky groups”’ (Levi and Wall, 2004, p. 200). Such surveillance has been achieved in great part through the transfer of security technologies originally designed for crime control to the field of migration management, in a move reminiscent of the reframing of freedom and security in the context of the post-9/11 ‘global war on terror’ (Amoore, 2006). In this regard, the transatlantic Passenger Name Records Agreement, signed by the Council of the European Union in 2011, is considered an important milestone in EU risk management policies as it led the EU to internalise United States (US) border security norms (Argomaniz, 2009). That same year, the European Commission also endorsed a set of proposals aiming to establish a ‘smart borders’ system, whereby border control authorities would be able to create and store electronic records of all non-EU travellers entering the Schengen Area, thus illustrating the prevalence of the logic of ‘dataveillance’ in the EU (Jeandesboz, 2016). Finally, the collection of personal data through biometric technologies also plays a key role in the EU ‘migration apparatus’ (Feldman, 2012), with the EU Visa Information System constituting one of the largest biometric databases in the world. This trend is not limited to Europe, however, as the last two decades have witnessed a rapid expansion in the storage and use of biometric data, including fingerprints, facial images and DNA data, for migration management purposes. The deployment of biometric technologies to strengthen state control over migrants has raised several ethical and legal concerns, in particular regarding privacy and data protection issues (Díaz, 2014; Brouwer, 2008; Kindt, 2013; Thomas, 2006). Furthermore, communication studies scholars have described biometrics as ‘semiotic technologies’ that are

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‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’  395 used for the purpose of identification and social sorting rather than for their traditional communicative role (Kosnick, 2014, p. 9). As such, the systematic collection and storage of asylum seekers’ fingerprints in the European Dactyloscopy (Eurodac) database, better known as the Eurodac information system, has been criticised for creating ‘machine-readable bodies’ (van der Ploeg and Sprenkels, 2011), in that once their fingerprints have been taken and registered in Eurodac, asylum seekers’ bodies are, as it were, marked with ‘signs on the flesh’ testifying to their status as refugees or irregular migrants, which can be read by the appropriate equipment anywhere and thus follow these bodies wherever they go (van der Ploeg, 1999, p. 301). This increased reliance on qualitative, quantitative and biometric data on migration flows and migrants themselves demonstrates that information gathering has become a crucial source of power for migration management actors by way of the ‘datafication’ of migrants and borders (Metcalfe and Dencik, 2019). Controlling Migration through the Provision of Deterrent Information In comparison with the large and growing body of literature devoted to the media coverage of international migration, and the ways in which the resulting representations of migrants play a key part in framing public opinion, there have been fewer studies looking at the communication practices that are directed toward migrants themselves. Yet migrants are the target of various information providers seeking to influence their attitudes and behaviour, notably intergovernmental organisations, non-governmental organisations and governments (Ros et al., 2007). In addition to the increasingly important strategies of information gathering to control irregular migration, migration management actors have developed practices of information sharing directed at migrants through so-called ‘migration information campaigns’ (MICs). The use of this phrase in official discourse allows policy actors to euphemise the propaganda behind such operations: indeed, MICs convey ‘information’ only insofar as it helps to construct a specific representation of irregular migration. According to Weiss and Tschirhart (1994), ‘public information campaigns’ originally refer to ‘government-directed and sponsored efforts to communicate to the mass public or a segment of the public in order to achieve a policy result’ (p. 82). As such, they are generally devised by the state to target its own citizens and communicate ideas or information about issues related to public health or road safety, for instance. By contrast, MICs are usually funded by the governments of receiving states and are designed to discourage prospective migrants from leaving their country of origin irregularly and/or to urge migrants in transit countries to return voluntarily. A distinctive feature of these campaigns, then, is that they are addressed to citizens of and in foreign countries (Schans and Optekamp, 2016, p. 5). In the 1990s, IOM began implementing MICs in post-communist Europe. Based on billboards, leaflets, radio and TV advertisements, these first campaigns aimed to raise awareness about the risks of trafficking in women for the purpose of sexual exploitation. These campaigns were criticised by scholars for perpetuating stereotypical representations of women and for depicting them as passive victims in the hands of men (Andrijasevic, 2007; Andrijasevic and Anderson, 2009). Twenty years later, most EU member states were using MICs to prevent irregular immigration, inform prospective migrants about legal migration channels, and/or encourage them to stay in their home country (European Commission, 2016, p. 2). In the midst of the EU ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015, the Council of the European Union (2015b) called for the urgent development of a ‘common information strategy addressing asylum seekers,

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396  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance migrants, smugglers and traffickers’ in order to reduce irregular arrivals through the Central Mediterranean route (p. 5, para. 17). The following year, the European Commission launched the first large-scale EU-sponsored MICs under the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa and the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund. ‘Awareness raising’, moreover, became a recurring component of migration-related projects supported by the EU in third countries, especially on the African continent. Since then, political support for MICs has grown steadily in the EU, based on the assumption that lowering irregular migrants’ aspirations to leave would ‘[reduce] corresponding costs of border control, voluntary/forced return, welfare services, and asylum processing’ (Optimity Advisors and SEEFAR, 2018, p. 6). Today, MICs form an integral part of the EU border externalisation strategy towards migrants’ origin and transit countries. Although they have gained political salience, MICs are still little known to the wider European public and, to a certain extent, even to migration studies scholars. In contrast, the deterrence campaigns funded by the Australian authorities have received considerable scholarly and media attention (Fleay et al., 2016; Schloenhardt and Philipson, 2013; Watkins, 2020). Scholars have characterised the campaigns led by the Australian government as ‘dissuasion through advertising’ (Crock et al., 2006, p. 50) and as ‘transnational marketing campaigns’ (Watkins, 2017, p. 282), thus highlighting their use of marketing communication techniques for migration control purposes. Hightower (2013) has argued that besides their explicit deterrence objective, these campaigns serve a political purpose: uniting Australian citizens against so-called ‘boat people’ by portraying them as ‘uninvited’ and therefore ‘unwelcome’ (p. 15). This is especially true of the communication campaign with the slogan ‘No way: you will not make Australia home’, which was launched in 2013 as part of Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders and was heavily criticised by legal experts and academics alike for disregarding the right to seek asylum. As part of this campaign, a video speech from the Australian military as well as a graphic novel depicting the conditions faced by refugees in offshore detention centres were issued (Laughland, 2014), demonstrating clear hostility towards those identified as ‘crimmigrant others’ (van Berlo, 2015, p. 81). According to Nieuwenhuys and Pécoud (2007), such strategies of information dissemination through MICs rest on three main assumptions, wherein migration is still viewed as a strictly individual and rational process: ‘first, that migrants lack information on migration; second, that their behavior is based on available information; and third, that information on migration is dark enough to discourage them from leaving’ (p. 1683). These assumptions have been called into question in the academic literature, in particular the foundational idea that migrants lack accurate information about the risks of the journey and, therefore, that they would choose not to leave if they knew better. Several studies have, indeed, emphasised that contrary to this narrative, most prospective migrants are well aware of the dangers awaiting them (Alpes, 2014; Kirwin and Anderson, 2018; Mbaye, 2014; van Bemmel, 2020). Furthermore, scholars have argued that awareness of the risks does not necessarily prevent departures: for instance, in the case of migrants trying to cross the US–Mexico border, the moral dimension of risk-taking has been shown to play a critical role in their course of action, a response related to the concept of the ‘morality of risk’ (Núñez and Heyman, 2007, p. 357). Similar observations have been made about West African migrants, whose risky behaviour stems from a variety of factors, such as economic obstacles to reaching social adulthood, specific conceptions of masculinity, pride and honour, as well as religious influences (Hernández-Carretero and Carling, 2012, pp. 410–412). Moreover, another argument advanced to explain aspiring migrants’ propensity to take risks concerns the observed tendency to deny all negative information and to focus

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‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’  397 exclusively on the success stories of community members who ‘made it’ (Schapendonk and van Moppes, 2007, pp. 2–3), a classic psychological defence mechanism known as ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Festinger, 1957). Migrants, it seems, are thus much less ignorant than MICs would lead us to believe: indeed, they appear to make carefully weighed decisions in a particularly precarious socio-economic context in which they are constrained above all by the lack of safe and legal migration channels (van Bemmel, 2020). Furthermore, many scholars have noted the dearth of knowledge about the effects that MICs may have on migrants’ behaviour (Brekke and Thorbjørnsrud, 2020, p. 46; Musarò, 2016). Following the observation that the number of MICs had peaked in recent years, IOM commissioned an important review of the existing evaluations of past MICs (those being rarely made available to the public), which concluded that ‘the evidence base available for programming and policymaking in this area [was] strikingly limited’ (Tjaden et al., 2018, p. 6). One of the reasons put forward in this report to justify the lack of evidence about the impact of MICs is that conducting a rigorous impact analysis can be very costly, often more so than implementing the campaign itself (p. 8). However, even when such impact evaluations are carried out, establishing a causal connection between a specific campaign and a decrease in departures that would, moreover, unequivocally exclude the influence of external factors, seems almost impossible (Schans and Optekamp, 2016, p. 21). As a result, scholars have repeatedly expressed their scepticism about the rationale behind MICs and their supposedly deterrent effect on irregular migration. For instance, Oeppen’s (2016) ethnographic work on Afghan migrants clearly shows that the messages disseminated by EU member states to discourage them from leaving are unlikely to be believed by their target audience (pp. 61–64). She suggests that these campaigns actually serve a symbolic purpose instead, which is to allow policymakers to be seen as ‘doing something’ to fight irregular migration (pp. 65–66). In the same vein, drawing on ethnographic research carried out in Senegal, Rodriguez (2019) argues that MICs are ‘no more disciplining than policing measures’ (p. 747), since their deterrence objective can be subverted and reappropriated by the local actors in charge of the implementation of such campaigns. Finally, in order to deter potential migrants from leaving their country of origin, EU-sponsored MICs usually convey messages about the dangers of the journey or the difficulties encountered by undocumented migrants in Europe. Through their visuals and narratives, these campaigns thus tend to conflate irregular migration with human trafficking by portraying all migrants as potential victims in need of rescue (Kosnick, 2014, pp. 6–7). According to Sharma (2003, 2005), suggesting that irregular migrants are systematically moved and exploited against their will provides a consensual ideological framing, which can be mobilised to legitimise the repressive measures that states take against them. Heller (2014) similarly describes the MICs implemented by IOM in Cameroon as exploiting the suffering of migrants in a way that reinforces the unequal border regime that caused it in the first place (pp. 306–308). By presenting a politically oriented vision of migrants’ reality, MICs thus serve to conceal the political motives forcing people to move outside regular migration channels. As such, they allow states and intergovernmental organisations to shift responsibility for the violence experienced by migrants along the way onto criminalised smugglers (Brachet, 2018) or irregular migrants themselves (Oeppen, 2016, pp. 65–66).

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CONCLUSION Irregular migration is a complex phenomenon that is influenced by a wide range of factors, from migrants’ individual characteristics and their social networks to macro-level variables, such as economic inequalities and environmental changes. This brief literature review does not purport to address them all. Rather, this chapter has described how access to various forms of information contributes to shaping irregular migrants’ decision-making and trajectories and, moreover, how this issue has been seized on by states, thus becoming a field of intervention. The chapter has first shown that information is considered a key resource for all categories of migrants, prior to departure, en route and after arrival in a destination country. More specifically, given the potential violence to which individuals are exposed in the process, irregular migration in particular appears influenced by conflicting information about the opportunities and risks of the journey. However, irregular migrants are anything but passive recipients of externally supplied information on this subject: they access and select relevant information by mobilising their social networks, and they interpret any information that they may receive according to their level of trust in the source of the message. Next, I have shown that practices of information gathering and sharing have become front and centre in contemporary migration management. On the one hand, states and intergovernmental organisations act as information managers through the collection and exploitation of data relating to migration flows and migrants’ individual characteristics. On the other hand, these actors also try to fulfil the role of information providers to deter potential irregular migrants through the implementation of MICs. Two concluding remarks can be made about the development of these two strategies of migration control, which are advancing hand in hand. Firstly, as Kosnick (2014) has pointed out, the fact that most destination states are involved in the dissemination of deterrence messages aimed at migrants is indicative of the limited capabilities of the technological tools deployed to monitor and govern migrants’ behaviour (p. 12). Secondly, it can also be argued that information collection and provision are complementary practices, as the prospect of ‘profiling’ potential irregular migrants demonstrates. Indeed, improving their knowledge of incoming migrants – their place of origin, their average age, or the main communication channels that they use – would potentially allow governments to refine their deterrence strategy by tailoring it to the target audience or by personalising the messages that they wish to spread. This is already made possible through the advertisement of paid content on social media, which targets only specific subgroups. In the past few years, several European countries have implemented MICs designed using migrant profiling through social media, based on age, nationality and geographic parameters. Such, indeed, was the case of the campaign called ‘Stricter asylum regulations in Norway’, which was launched by the Norwegian government on Facebook in 2015 (Brekke and Thorbjørnsrud, 2020). If this trend continues in the coming years, then it will definitely mark a turning point in the control of human mobility in the ‘information age’.

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404  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Schloenhardt, A., and Philipson, E. (2013). ‘No to people smuggling’: A review of Australia’s anti-migrant smuggling awareness campaigns. Research paper. University of Queensland. https://​law​ .uq​.edu​.au/​files/​6729/​Schloenhardt​-Philipson​-SoM​-Awareness​-Campaigns​-2013​.pdf. Sharma, N. (2003). Travel agency: A critique of anti-trafficking campaigns. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 21(3), 53–65. https://​doi​.org/​10​.25071/​1920​-7336​.21302. Sharma, N. (2005). Anti-trafficking rhetoric and the making of a global apartheid. NWSA Journal, 17(3), 88–111. http://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​4317159. Simon, H.A. (1957). Models of man: Social and rational. Mathematical essays on rational human behavior in a social setting. John Wiley & Sons. Souiah, F., Salzbrunn, M., and Mastrangelo, S. (2018). Hope and disillusion: The representations of Europe in Algerian and Tunisian cultural productions about undocumented migration. In M. Haleh Davis and T. Serres (eds), North Africa and the making of Europe: Governance, institutions and culture (pp.  155–178). Bloomsbury Academic. http://​dx​.doi​.org/​10​.5040/​9781350021853​.ch​-007. Stark, O. (1991). The migration of labor. Basil Blackwell. Stark, O., and Bloom, D.E. (1985). The new economics of labor migration. American Economic Review, 75(2), 173–178. http://​www​.jstor​.org/​stable/​1805591. Stigler, G.J. (1961). The economics of information. Journal of Political Economy, 69(3), 213–225. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1086/​258464. Thomas, R. (2006). Biometrics, international migrants and human rights. European Journal of Migration and Law, 7(4), 377–411. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1163/​157181605776293255. Tilly, C. (2007). Trust networks in transnational migration. Sociological Forum, 22(1), 3–24. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1111/​j​.1573​-7861​.2006​.00002​.x. Tjaden, J., Morgenstern, S., and Laczko, F. (2018). Evaluating the impact of information campaigns in the field of migration: A systematic review of evidence and practical guidance. Central Mediterranean Route Thematic Report Series. International Organization for Migration. https://​ gmdac​ .iom​ .int/​ evaluating​-impact​-information​-campaigns​-field​-migration. Triandafyllidou, A. (2017). Beyond irregular migration governance: Zooming in on migrants’ agency. European Journal of Migration and Law, 19(1), 1–11. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1163/​15718166​-12342112. Triandafyllidou, A. (2018). Globalisation and migration: An introduction. In A. Triandafyllidou (ed.), Handbook of migration and globalisation (pp. 1–13). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .4337/​9781785367519​.00006. van Bemmel, S. (2020). The perception of risk among unauthorized migrants in Ghana. Journal of Risk Research, 23(1), 47–61. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13669877​.2018​.1517376. van Berlo, P. (2015). Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders: Discourse, power, and policy from a crimmigration perspective. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 34(4), 75–104. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​rsq/​ hdv011. van Dalen, H., Groenewold, G., and Schoorl, J.J. (2005). Out of Africa: What drives the pressure to emigrate? Journal of Population Economics, 18(4), 741–778. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s00148​-005​ -0003​-5. van der Ploeg, I. (1999). The illegal body: ‘Eurodac’ and the politics of biometric identification. Ethics and Information Technology, 1(4), 295–302. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1023/​A:​1010064613240. van der Ploeg, I., and Sprenkels, I. (2011). Migration and the machine-readable body: Identification and biometrics. In H. Dijstelbloem and A. Meijer (eds), Migration and the new technological borders of Europe (pp.  68–104). Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​9780230299382​_4. van Liempt, I. (2007). Navigating borders: Inside perspectives on the process of human smuggling into the Netherlands. Amsterdam University Press. http://​library​.oapen​.org/​handle/​20​.500​.12657/​35195. Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​10​.4324/​9780203927083. Wall, M., Campbell, M.O., and Janbek, D. (2017). Syrian refugees and information precarity. New Media and Society, 19(2), 240–254. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​1461444815591967. Watkins, J. (2017). Australia’s irregular migration information campaigns: Border externalization, spatial imaginaries, and extraterritorial subjugation. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5(3), 282–303. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​21622671​.2017​.1284692. Watkins, J. (2020). Irregular migration, borders, and the moral geographies of migration management. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(6), 1108–1127. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 2399654420915607.

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‘I know, therefore I (don’t) go’  405 Weiss, J.A., and Tschirhart, M. (1994). Public information campaigns as policy instruments. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 13(1), 82–119. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​3325092. Wood, N., and King, R. (2001). Media and migration: An overview. In R. King and N. Wood (eds), Media and migration: Constructions of mobility and difference (pp. 1–22). Routledge. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.4324/​9780203458549​-6. Zins, C. (2007). Conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(4), 479–493. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​ asi​.20508.

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27. Is network embeddedness really worth it? Migrant networks as structures of both opportunities and constraints Flore Gubert

INTRODUCTION A large amount of research has investigated the drivers of migration and its perpetuation (for reviews, see Massey et al., 1993, 1998). At the macro level, existing analyses have identified the main factors predisposing people to migrate, including: a lack of economic opportunities, high rates of unemployment, land pressure or land degradation, overpopulation, poor governance, weak social structures, conflict and poverty. They have also highlighted the existence of structural disparities to explain migration flows between countries, including economic and demographic disparities (differences in earnings, livelihoods and living standards), political disparities (the relative prevalence of conflict, persecution, and other dimensions of human rights), environmental disparities (the presence or absence of resources, the relative fertility of the soil), and geographical factors (such as proximity to borders) (Van Hear et al., 2018). Aside from studies at the macro level, the literature also contains an abundance of contributions investigating, both theoretically and empirically, individual and household migration motives, as well as the meso-level factors that facilitate or, on the contrary, constrain mobility. Among those factors, migration scholars have highlighted the migration-facilitating role of migrant networks. In particular, they have widely acknowledged the importance of such networks for reducing economic, social and psychological costs for migrant candidates in the country of origin, and for newly arrived migrants in destination countries, and their role in reducing selectivity and perpetuating migration. They have also identified certain downsides associated with migratory social capital. Ethnically dominated networks may, for example, confine immigrants to low-prestige occupations in which the opportunities for occupational mobility are limited, or undermine individual economic initiatives by imposing social obligations and excessive demands to support family and community members at home. Based on the recent literature, this chapter examines the mechanisms of influence that explain why and to what extent migrant networks can be structures of both constraints and opportunities at the different stages of the migration process. It also draws attention to the implications this can have for migrants’ emancipation and empowerment, with a special emphasis on women migrants.

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Is network embeddedness really worth it?  407

MIGRANT NETWORKS AS CONVEYORS OF INFORMATION AND IMAGES IN THE PRE-MIGRATION PHASE Neoclassical models explain the decision to migrate as the outcome of a cost‒benefit calculation where the prospects of higher wages or returns are contrasted with the monetary and psychological costs of moving and settling in a new country (Sjaastad, 1962; Todaro, 1969). Net returns are estimated based on the difference between the income that an individual is expected to get in an international location, given their skills, multiplied by the probability of obtaining a job there, and expected income in the country of origin. The estimated migration costs are then subtracted from this difference to yield the expected net return to migration. Rational individuals are then assumed to move if the expected net return to migration is positive, and to choose the country in which the expected net return to migration is the greatest. One of the key elements lacking in this theoretical framework is a recognition of the role of migrant networks. Defined as ‘sets of interpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants, and non-migrants in origin and destination areas through ties of kinship, friendship and shared community origin’ (Massey et al., 1993), migrant networks have been clearly recognised in literature in the fields of sociology, demography and economics, and extensively analysed over the last 30 years. In the first instance, networks provide information or images about potential destination countries that play a role in the migration decision-making process, through their influence on migration aspirations. People learn from the migratory experience and achievements of fellow citizens, come to see migration as a realistic prospect and even as a normal part of one’s life course, and develop an aspiration to move abroad. This mechanism is sometimes referred to as a ‘culture of migration’ (Kandel and Massey, 2002). Networks may also provide detailed information on job opportunities, as well as monetary help to cover the costs of migration and financial shortfalls upon arrival. In so doing, they lower the costs and risks of movement and increase the expected net returns to migration, thereby encouraging international movement.1 According to Massey et al. (1993), this is what makes migration a self-perpetuating process and leads to chain migration: Every new migrant reduces the costs of subsequent migration for a set of friends and relatives, and some of these people are thereby induced to migrate, which further expands the set of people with ties abroad, which, in turn, reduces costs for a new set of people, causing some of them to migrate, and so on.

This translates into migration patterns being strongly shaped by networks, as migrating members tend to be attracted to the same geographic area.2 At a micro level, many quantitative studies have documented the influence of migrant networks on migration decisions, with a large proportion of them focusing on the Mexico‒United States (US) corridor.3 Among the most cited are Massey and España (1987) and Massey and Espinosa (1997), who estimate statistical models in which the probability of US migration among individuals and households is expressed as a function of network ties and a set of social and economic characteristics. They find that the probability of migration to the US is higher for households with prior migration experience, and for households living in communities with a relatively large number of migrants. In a similar vein, Winters et al. (2001) compare the relative importance of both family migrant networks and community migrant networks in the migration decisions of rural Mexican workers. They show the importance of networks in both the decision to migrate and the number of household members sent abroad. They also find

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408  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance that community and family networks can be substituted for one another in assisting migration, suggesting that, once migration is well established in a community, family networks become less important. Dolfin and Genicot (2010) extend this analysis further, by investigating the mechanisms by which networks exert such effects. More specifically, they assess the relative importance of three potential benefits provided by networks: information on the migration process itself and on border crossing in particular; information on jobs at the destination; and help to finance the costs of migration. Using a dataset of undocumented Mexican migrants to the US taken from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), they find evidence that community networks provide information about the migration process and border crossing so that migrants are better able to travel alone, without the help of border smugglers. By contrast, family networks are found to provide credit assistance to finance migration as well as job information and help at the destination.4 Another key role played by migrant stocks is that of formally sponsoring relatives for legal, permanent immigration, which contributes to significantly reducing the individual-level costs of migration. This in turn affects individuals’ migratory responses to deteriorating conditions in countries of origin. Mahajan and Yang (2017), for example, examine migration responses to hurricanes. They find that hurricanes cause immediate increases in US immigration on average, and that this effect is exacerbated among countries of origin with larger pre-existing stocks of US immigrants thanks to the facilitated access to legal immigration channels. In the same line of reasoning, Clemens (2017) finds that high rates of violence in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala significantly increase child migration to the US. Moreover, due to the diffusion of migration experience and assistance through social networks, violence causes waves of migration that snowball over time, and which continue to rise even when violence levels do not.5 The role of networks in alleviating migration costs has some implications for the relationship between migration and inequality. As shown by McKenzie and Rapoport (2007), in localities where migration networks are not well developed, migrants from Mexico to the US are mainly found to come from the middle of the wealth distribution. In these cases, migration is too costly and too risky for poorer people to attempt such a move. However, as community migration networks grow, wealth becomes less of a constraint on individual migration, and the poor become more likely to migrate. This means that the size and structure of migration flows gradually change over time, and that at high levels of migration prevalence, migration leads to a reduction in inequality. Other studies have similarly demonstrated that the cost-reducing effect of an increase in the size of migration networks shapes migrants’ self-selection with respect to education, with a stronger effect of networks on low-skill migration than on high-skill migration (Bertoli, 2010; McKenzie and Rapoport, 2010; Beine et al., 2011). Of course, migrant networks composed of kin, friends and acquaintances originating from the same origin community are not the only facilitators of migration. As emphasised by Van Meeteren and Pereira (2018), one should not neglect the role played by other actors in the migration process (employers, government officials, recruitment agents, traffickers, other migration brokers, and so on), who make up the so-called ‘migration industry’ (Castles, 2004). Krissman (2005), for example, emphasises the role of labour demand in destination countries in initiating and perpetuating migration flows. In his view, employers and their recruitment agents are key actors in fostering international migration by actively recruiting foreign labourers on both formal and informal bases. International migration networks are therefore much more varied than is generally recognised in the literature, and in particular, the participants engaged in such networks sometimes act because of motives that have nothing to

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Is network embeddedness really worth it?  409 do with altruism. With the rise of the Internet, migrant candidates also have access to much more diverse sources of information and assistance than in the past, and may be less dependent on traditional migrant networks for organising their journey and integrating in the destination country (Dekker and Engbersen, 2014). By increasing the amount of information available, the Internet may provide incentives to move to ‘new’ (or unfamiliar) places and environments, leading to changes in actual mobility patterns (Thulin and Vilhelmson, 2014).6 The tightening of migration restrictions may also change the functioning of informal networks and contribute to this geographical diversification (see Collyer, 2005). The strong reliance of migrant candidates on information conveyed by networks and social media raises the question of the accuracy of the information they receive (see Chapter 26 by Van Dessel in this Handbook for an in-depth analysis of the role of information in shaping migration and the importance of trust in the source of information). While it is generally assumed that migrant networks relay accurate and helpful information, there is evidence that misinformation, non-truths and inaccurate information may also flow through these networks (Schapendonk and Van Moppes, 2007; McKenzie et al., 2013; Elsner et al., 2018; Somerville, 2015). In order to preserve or increase their pre-migratory social status, migrants who have already settled in a country may, for example, be tempted to contribute significantly to the construction of biased images of life in their new place of residence, emphasising the positive aspects while downplaying the negative ones (see Schapendonk and Van Moppes, 2007). Conversely, migrants may report low earnings and negative employment experiences to their families at home in order to mitigate the pressure to send remittances (McKenzie et al., 2013). While these two examples provide illustrations of deliberate or strategic biased reporting, migrant networks may also convey distorted facts or vague and inadequate information unintentionally, due to their lack of integration in the host society and hence their poor knowledge of local labour markets (Elsner et al., 2018; Somerville, 2015).7 In any case, this suggests that migrants may embark on a misinformed journey, which is likely to have an impact on their economic outcomes after migration. The potential for migrant networks to provide assistance to migrant candidates may also differ depending on the latter’s characteristics or on migrant types. While, in many of the aforementioned studies, networks have been assumed to influence male and female mobility in similar ways, evidence actually suggests that the importance of networks varies for men’s and women’s migration, and that the assistance provided varies according to the gender of the previous migrants (Curran et al., 2005; Curran and Rivero-Fuentes, 2003; Toma and Vause, 2014). Toma and Vause (2014), for example, find that networks’ gender composition matters in the case of Senegalese migration flows to Europe: male networks are found to increase the propensity to migrate of Senegalese men, presumably reflecting the gender segmentation of the destination labour markets, while female and male networks are both influential in Senegalese women’s mobility. As explained by Davis and Winters (2001), differentiated network effects may be due to a number of reasons: women may be more risk averse, or households (particularly male-dominated households) may be more risk averse on their behalf. As a result, women may be less likely to migrate if uncertainty remains high, suggesting that they will only migrate if risk can be averted, or will wait until a network is more established before migrating. Women may also be more constrained from doing certain types of work and have more limited employment options. This lowers expected returns and increases the value of specific information provided by female-centred networks, and so on. Along the same line of reasoning, different types of migrants (labour migrants, family migrants, students, politi-

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410  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance cal migrants or asylum seekers, legal versus undocumented migrants, and so on) may value migrant networks differently (see Bauer et al., 2002, for Mexican migrants to the US; and Vam Meeteren and Pereira, 2018, for Brazilian migrants to Portugal and the Netherlands).

MIGRANT NETWORKS AS GO-BETWEENS FOR JOB ACCESS IN THE POST-MIGRATION PHASE In addition to the role of migrant networks in migration decision-making, there exists a large literature on network externalities after migration, on dimensions as diverse as job access, housing access, the availability of ethnic goods, the provision of insurance, and welfare use (Bertrand et al., 2000). Many studies have emphasised in particular the impact of social capital embedded in migrant networks on immigrants’ labour force participation, earnings and occupational attainment at the destination, especially for newcomers. While using friends and relatives to find a job is an efficient and cheap job search method for any job seeker, this applies even more to individuals who have just arrived in a country, since they generally have very little knowledge about the way the host-country labour market functions (and sometimes limited knowledge of the host-country language). In addition to providing information to newly arrived immigrants on job market opportunities, network members can also act as a go-between for recruiting agents, who thus save time and money in hiring workers who have been recommended to them.8 Referrals not only reduce uncertainty about applicant match quality, but may also induce diligent work from the referred workers, given their concerns about their reputation with their referrer. Migrant networks are thus expected to reduce information and commitment problems and increase efficiency (Montgomery, 1991). Much evidence supports this view (Munshi, 2003; Amuedo-Dorantes and Mundra, 2007; Chiswick and Miller, 2002; Beaman, 2012). Using data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), Munshi (2003), for example, first reports that, when asked how they obtained employment on their last visit to the US, 35 per cent of the Mexican respondents said they got it through relatives, and another 35 per cent through friends or hometown acquaintances. In order to assess the role of networks on job access, he then defines the network as the proportion of individuals in the MMP living in one’s neighbourhood and originating from the same community in Mexico. He finds that, all other things being equal, immigrants with exogenously larger networks have a higher likelihood of being employed and of holding a higher-paying non-agricultural job.9 He also finds that it is the more established members (those who have been located continuously at the destination for three or more years) who contribute disproportionately to the network, and that it is the disadvantaged members – women, the elderly and the less educated – who benefit the most. Other studies find a positive impact from networks on earnings (Edin et al., 2003; Amuedo-Dorantes and Mundra, 2007; Damm, 2009; Patel and Vella, 2013). Amuedo-Dorantes and Mundra (2007), once again studying the case of Mexican migrants in the US, find that familial ties increase unauthorised and legal migrants’ hourly wages by an average of 2.6 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively; whereas friendship ties increase their wages by 5.4 per cent and 3.6 per cent. A wage premium is also found by Patel and Vella (2013), especially for recent immigrants who find work in the occupations with the highest proportion of individuals from their home country. Although the authors do not have the appropriate data to identify the underlying factors driving this result, they consider several potential explanations. A first possibility, which they consider as not being very plausible, is

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Is network embeddedness really worth it?  411 that the wage premium reflects the market power of the network. Another one is that referrals lead to a reduction in hiring and search costs for employers, which is passed on to the new employees, thereby generating a wage premium. Chort (2017) also focuses on occupational choice in the case of Senegalese migrants in various host countries. She nevertheless adopts a different perspective by investigating the impact of migrant networks on immigrants’ occupational mismatch. She finds that migrants who obtained their job through their network are less likely to experience a negative mismatch, that is, to have a job requiring a lower skill level than that of the occupation in which they have a comparative productive advantage. Even though the aforementioned papers all come to the conclusion that networks have some positive externalities, there are also reported cases where their impact on labour market outcomes is much more nuanced or even negative (Lancee, 2010, 2012; Fuller and Martin, 2012; Kalter and Kogan, 2014; Ahmad, 2015; Toma, 2016a). As extensively discussed in the sociological literature, the nature and degree of assistance provided by networks is actually strongly dependent on their size, structure and the strength of ties between their members. Many authors have in particular built upon Putnam’s bonding/bridging distinction to analyse the differentiated returns to migrant social capital. Because migrant networks generally connect people of similar background and interests, and are usually made up of family members, friends and coethnics, they are best conceptualised in terms of bonding social capital. This contrasts with bridging social capital, which, in the migration literature, usually refers to contacts and ties with natives of the host society. While bridging social capital is expected to be beneficial to immigrants because it provides access to host-country-specific resources and information about labour market opportunities, the returns from bonding social capital are less straightforward. On the one hand, bonding social capital may result in better labour market outcomes because the strength of family and coethnic ties results in a high degree of solidarity and cooperation, and translates into the sharing and exchange of resources. On the other hand, bonding social capital is characterised as occurring in isolation. Individuals embedded in migrant networks may therefore be cut off in the long run from opportunities for better employment opportunities within the labour market, and be trapped in low-quality jobs. Lancee (2012) analyses the effect of bonding and bridging social capital on the likelihood of employment and occupational status of first-generation male immigrants in Germany. He finds that having contacts with natives positively affects both outcomes. By contrast, he finds that coethnic and family-based social capital has no effect on occupational status, which, in his view, supports the isolation argument. These findings echo those produced by the same author in the case of the Netherlands, where only structural bridging social capital can be associated positively with the likelihood of being employed and with income (Lancee, 2010). Fuller and Martin (2012) use data from a longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada to analyse new immigrants’ month-by-month employment trajectories over their first four years of settlement. Alongside key factors such as human capital, bias and discrimination, and household context, they investigate the role of social ties in shaping these trajectories. Overall, they find little evidence that connections to Canadian organisations, to friends already in Canada, or to ethnic communities, improve new immigrants’ employment trajectories. They consider that this lack of significant effects may reflect the particularities of the Canadian immigration context. Most of Canada’s immigrants are university educated, and social ties are typically more valuable where informal hiring procedures predominate, usually at the bottom of the labour market. Closely related to these studies are those that assess the impact of ethnic enclaves on the economic success of immigrants (Borjas, 2000; Edin et al., 2003; Damm, 2009; Beaman,

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412  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance 2012; Martén et al., 2019). As pointed out in Edin et al. (2003), the fact of living in an enclave may affect economic outcomes in four main ways. Firstly, by providing less interaction with natives and reducing the incentives for acquiring the language skills that are necessary to succeed in the national labour market, ethnic enclaves may decrease the rate of host country skill acquisition, and therefore hinder the move to better jobs. Secondly, ethnic enclaves represent networks that may improve labour market outcomes, especially for recent immigrants and individuals who have difficulty integrating into the labour market. Thirdly, ethnic enclaves may reflect discrimination in the housing market. In other words, immigrants may live in segregated neighbourhoods not because they prefer to live in those areas, but because natives restrict immigrant location choices to specific (and often distant) areas. This in turn hampers immigrants’ assimilation to the host country and restricts their access to employment opportunities and local public services. Fourthly, there may be some human capital externalities associated with residential segregation if the stock of human capital in the enclave is high. The net effect on economic outcomes of living in an enclave is therefore ambiguous. In order to see which effect dominates, the authors make use of an immigrant policy initiative in Sweden, in which government authorities distributed refugee immigrants across localities in a way that may be considered as exogenous. This policy initiative provides a natural experiment, allowing researchers to address the endogeneity problem that is due to individuals’ choice of residence.10 The authors find that an increase in ethnic concentration gives rise to an improvement in labour market outcomes, and in earnings in particular. They additionally find that these gains primarily benefit the least skilled. This suggests that the positive effects of living in an ethnic enclave more than outweigh the potential negative ones. Damm (2009) exploits a similar policy initiative in Denmark and finds that residence in an ethnic enclave increases the annual earnings of refugees seven years after immigration, irrespective of their educational group. She then investigates possible mechanisms and reaches the conclusion that the effect is due to the dissemination of job information through ethnic networks, which increases the job‒worker match quality and thereby the hourly wage rate. Beaman (2012) also uses the refugee resettlement policy implemented in the US to examine the dynamic relationship between social networks and labour market outcomes. He finds that the relationship is heterogeneous and depends on the vintage of network members. More specifically, he shows that the existence of a larger number of network members who have arrived in the current and prior years strongly decreases the probability of employment for any new entrant, because of short-run within-network competition among unemployed members for job information. By contrast, the existence of a larger number of refugees with two to four years of experience of living in the US prior to a new refugee’s arrival has a positive and statistically significant effect on employment. In sum, the relationship between the size of a social network and labour market outcomes is heterogeneous and contingent on the institutional context of the receiving country, the specific immigrant groups involved, and the types of jobs that immigrants are looking for (Paul, 2013; Kalter and Kogan, 2014; Toma, 2016a). Network externalities may also be much less beneficial for women than for men (Menjívar, 2000; Hellermann, 2006; Toma, 2016b). As argued by Toma (2016b), this could be due to two main factors. Firstly, there may be a negative perception of independent or autonomous female migration: in such a situation, immigrant men may refuse to share their resources with women. Toma uses as an illustration a study by Hellermann (2006) which documents the suspicious and exclusionary attitudes with which women migrating on their own from Central and Eastern Europe to Portugal are confronted in their coethnic communities. Secondly, female

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Is network embeddedness really worth it?  413 networks may provide fewer resources and therefore facilitate access to lower-quality jobs. In a similar vein to this, the literature on ethnic enclaves or coethnic-owned firms provides many examples where female immigrants are found to be disadvantaged in comparison to their male counterparts, and to be more vulnerable to exploitation by their coethnic employers, especially when they do not possess legal documentation (Gilbertson, 1995; Menjívar, 2000).

MIGRANT NETWORKS AS GUARANTORS OF COMPLIANCE WITH NORMS AND OBLIGATIONS While the previous discussion has mainly focused on the effects of migrant networks and the social capital that flows through them on labour market outcomes, some authors also acknowledge the burden that migrant networks may place on individual members (Portes and Sensenbrenner, 1993; Portes and Landolt, 1996; Portes, 1998; Hellermann, 2006; Menjívar, 2000; Somerville, 2015). As argued by Hellermann (2006), the provision of different types of ‘services’ in the pre-migration phase and upon arrival may create power relations, hierarchies and dependencies among migrants, particularly between longer-established migrants and newcomers, with the latter finding themselves indebted to their protectors or mentors. This dependency can be particularly costly for migrant women, who may be solicited for sexual favours by unscrupulous fellow countrymen in return for providing basic goods and temporary accommodation (Menjívar, 2000; Pannetier et al., 2018). Using original data from a retrospective life-event survey conducted in France in 2012–2013, Pannetier et al. (2018) show that sub-Saharan African migrant women who are hosted by family or friends and do not have stable housing after migration are regularly exposed to forced sex, and are therefore much more exposed to the risk of HIV infection. As a result, social hardship after arriving in the destination country is found to be a strong determinant of post-migration acquisition of HIV. Without referring to such extreme misconduct, Portes (1998) identifies four negative consequences or downsides of social capital. The first one is its exclusionary nature: social capital within a group is generally built by excluding those outside that group, and part of the value of being a member of a group involves laying claim to resources to which non-members do not have access. The second negative consequence of social capital is that it may exert excessive demands on some network members. Successful migrants may, for example, be overwhelmed by requests from job-seeking fellow countrymen and overburdened with material and financial demands that they have no choice but to satisfy, given the strong solidarity norms inherent in networks. These obligations expose them to the danger of free-riding by other members on their resources. This might explain why settled migrants are not always willing to act as bridgeheads for prospective migrants (see Böcker, 1994, for the case of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands). The last two negative consequences are the restrictions that networks may impose on individual freedom and the downward-levelling norms that they may enforce. High-solidarity communities may exert a strong control over individual behaviours in order to guarantee the cohesion of the group. This may translate into pressures for conformity (Portes and Landolt, 1996) and result in lock-in effects and path dependency. The case of women migrating alone from Central and Eastern Europe to Portugal, documented by Hellermann (2006), is a good illustration of the high level of control exerted by social networks: as explained by the author, social networks offer support and access to the receiving society, but also exercise control over women migrants’ behaviour and agency. As a result,

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414  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance many women choose to distance themselves from existing networks, even if it means being left on their own. The same tendency of protection and control is reported by Toma (2016b) in the case of sub-Saharan women migrants. Because they are strongly attached to traditional gender roles and the gender division of labour existing in their country of origin, male network members may restrict women’s individual freedom by preventing them from engaging in economic activities at the point of destination, for fear of seeing them becoming emancipated and gaining what they consider to be an ‘excessive’ degree of autonomy. Migrant networks, as links between communities in countries of origin and destination countries, also ensure that each network member fulfils their obligations towards the communities and families of origin through regular visits, gifts, remittances, and contributions to collective projects (Philpott, 1968; Roberts and Morris, 2003; Chort et al., 2012). According to Roberts and Morris (2003), remittance obligations are part of the costs that can be considered as the price to be paid by migrants for having access to the resources provided by the network. The same line of reasoning is followed by Chort et al. (2012). Drawing on the anthropological literature, they put forward the idea that the continuing interpersonal relationships established by Senegalese migrants with kinship members or other coethnics in countries of destination act as a constant reminder of their commitment to their family and relatives back home. One specific consequence is that migrants are expected to remain closely connected with their country of origin, which induces the obligation to send monetary transfers to those left behind. Given the large amount of services that networks can provide to them, the fear of punishment through ostracism and being left without support can be effective in preventing individuals from reneging on their remittance obligations. The network embeddedness of migrants and the resulting set of obligations raise the question of whether migration really promotes emancipation and individual autonomy among migrants, especially for female and young migrants. While this topic remains relatively under-researched, there exist a few contributions in the literature focusing on the specific case of West African migrants in Europe (see Timera, 2001; Feldman, 2018), which are mainly based on ethnographic fieldwork. As explained by Feldman (2018), for example, the experience of women migrants originating from Mali and residing in France shows a significant gap between their position in France and their position in Mali. When in Mali for short-term visits, their migrant status entitles them to a set of benefits and privileges that allow them not to fully conform to their socially assigned role as women. However, this social advancement and the advantages that come with it are limited in time and space. Back in France, they generally find themselves at the bottom of the social-economic ladder, and under the strict control of their husband and coethnics. Surveillance by husbands over their wives is even found to be stronger in France than in Mali. There are therefore persistent obstacles to renegotiating the social position of migrant women, at least for those whose partners are also abroad. In the case of young male Sahelian migrants, Timera (2001) emphasises the potential of migration to Europe as an emancipating and empowering tool. He nevertheless recognises that the individuation and social differentiation that migration allows are tempered by the significant burden of solidarity that weighs on migrants.

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CONCLUSION This chapter has analysed the mechanisms of influence of migrant networks on individual outcomes at different stages of the migration process. Embeddedness in migration networks has been found to shape aspirations, intentions and decisions to migrate, and to play a role in newcomers’ social and economic integration at the destination. The influence of networks has also been found to be heterogeneous and dependent on their composition, the institutional context in which they operate, the characteristics of the beneficiaries, and so on. A major contribution of migrant networks is that they convey insightful information pre-departure, en route and upon arrival at the destination. In so doing, they not only facilitate migration, but also shape the preferences and choices that migrants make about where to go, producing what the literature has referred to as path-dependent migration systems. There are nevertheless reasons to believe that the role of migrant networks in shaping migration patterns has been decreasing in recent years. In particular, there is evidence of migrants reorientating away from places where fellow countrymen have historically settled, and choosing much more diversified destinations. Several explanations for this have been suggested in the literature. One of these, mentioned above, is migrants’ increased access to alternative sources of information with the emergence of online social media (Dekker and Engbersen, 2014). Another possible explanation is the role of immigration policy (Collyer, 2005; Simon, 2019). As acknowledged by Collyer (2005), migration restrictions have several consequences on the way networks operate. Firstly, they limit the role of social networks in attracting new migrants, since it is made more difficult for them to join their family, friends and acquaintances. Secondly, post-entry restrictions (such as limiting or preventing access to social and health services for undocumented migrants) increase the dependence of new migrants on social networks, and may result in less willingness from established communities to sponsor the travel of new migrants. Thirdly, restrictions may encourage potential migrants to turn to paid agents in order to overcome migration restrictions in traditional destinations, which in turn affects the geography of migration flows. Another potential explanation is the relative increase in the number of asylum seekers among new migrants. Over the recent period, among those who have had to leave their homes rapidly due to security concerns, a significant proportion did not have a specific destination in mind when they left their country of origin. They had, at best, some preferences for certain destinations, which either solidified or were undermined during their journey (see Crawley and Hagen-Zanker, 2019, in the case of Syrians, Eritreans and Nigerians; and Gilbert and Koser, 2006, for asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Colombia, Kosovo and Somalia in the United Kingdom). In some cases, it is actually travel agents or smugglers who made the decision regarding a migrant’s destination. In others, arrival in the country of asylum was rather accidental, due to unexpected circumstances or opportunities, or to some transitory social interactions during the journey that had a significant impact on its trajectory. This is not to say that refugees use social networks in a way that is different to other migrants. But those forced to move quickly and unexpectedly have sometimes ended up in a country that was not necessarily on their pre-departure list of intended destinations, or in a country where they have no acquaintances (see Havinga and Böcker, 1999, in the case of asylum seekers in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom). Moreover, it is not uncommon for host countries to administratively enforce refugees’ regional dispersal. This is generally done through the random assignment of asylum seekers to reception centres which are widespread over the whole territory. Such a dispersal may have harmful effects on newly

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416  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance arrived individuals by isolating them from networks of individuals originating from the same country. The extent to which this could explain why refugees are generally found to start off behind other immigrants in employment and wages (see Brell et al., 2020, for a recent review on the topic) is nevertheless an open question that calls for further investigation.

NOTES 1. See Carrington et al. (1996) for the formal presentation of a dynamic model of migration in which moving costs decline as the stock of migrants increases. 2. According to some recent studies using panel data on bilateral migration stocks between countries and structural gravity models, the elasticity of migration flows with respect to the size of the networks ranges from 0.4 to 0.5. This means that an increase of 10 per cent in the size of a diaspora abroad leads to an increase of about 4–5 per cent in the rate of new migrants over the next ten years (Beine et al., 2011; Bertoli and Moraga, 2015; Beine and Parsons, 2015). 3. The role of networks on migration intentions has also been investigated in a few recent contributions. For example, Bertoli and Ruyssen (2018) use individual-level data from 419 surveys conducted by Gallup in 147 countries of the world between 2007 and 2011, and show that direct connections to individuals residing in other countries of the world influence the choice of preferred destination for the respondents who intend to move abroad. 4. The question of the respective importance of household and community migrant networks in migration decisions echoes the sociology literature on the strength of ties in social networks, and in particular Granovetter’s work on strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1973, 1983). This literature developed outside the international migration field, but is highly relevant to understanding the role of networks in the migration process (see Giulietti et al., 2018, for a recent assessment of the role of weak and strong ties in migration decisions). 5. Recent work by some economic historians suggests that migrant networks were not only a factor facilitating migration, but also a necessary condition for migration during the Age of Mass Migration at the end of the nineteenth century (see Spitzer, 2015; Spitzer and Zimran, 2019). 6. While information is mainly depicted in this chapter as facilitating migration, migration information campaigns have increasingly been used by state actors in recent years to deter migrant candidates from migrating through irregular channels (see Chapter 26 by Van Dessel in this Handbook). 7. This relates to the literature on the aggregation and propagation of information in social networks, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. 8. In a recent paper on the labour market integration of refugees in the US, it is shown that entrepreneurs in the network of refugees – from the same country of origin – help refugees to enter the labour market not only by informing them of employment opportunities, but also by hiring them (Dagnelie et al., 2019). 9. Estimating the impact of the size of migrant networks on labour market outcomes is empirically challenging, as social networks may be endogenous with respect to employment and earnings. This potential endogeneity emerges from two sources. Firstly, some unobserved individual characteristics and other omitted variables possibly affecting migrants’ earnings are likely to be correlated with social networks and other regressors in the earnings equations. Estimates of the effect of networks on migrants’ earnings are therefore likely to be affected by omitted variable biases. Secondly, migrant networks and earnings may be jointly determined, leading to reverse causality. Addressing these two issues involves finding an exogenous source of variation in the size of migrant networks at the destination. Munshi (2003), for example, uses rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination. 10. This problem arises when individuals sort into cities and neighborhoods on the basis of unobserved personal characteristics that also affect their labour market outcomes. From this perspective, the existence of a policy initiative by which refugee immigrants are randomly distributed across localities may help to solve the problem.

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Is network embeddedness really worth it?  419 Menjívar, C. (2000). Fragmented ties: Salvadoran immigrant networks in America. University of California Press. Montgomery, J.D. (1991). Social networks and labor-market outcomes: Toward an economic analysis. American Economic Review, 81(5), 1408–1418. Munshi, K. (2003). Networks in the modern economy: Mexican migrants in the US labor market. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(2), 549–599. Pannetier, J., Ravalihasy, A., Lydié, N., Lert, F., du Loû, A.D., and Parcours Study Group. (2018). Prevalence and circumstances of forced sex and post-migration HIV acquisition in Sub-Saharan African migrant women in France: An analysis of the ANRS-PARCOURS retrospective population-based study. The Lancet Public Health, 3(1), e16-e23. Patel, K., and Vella, F. (2013). Immigrant networks and their implications for occupational choice and wages. Review of Economics and Statistics, 95(4), 1249–1277. Paul, A.M. (2013). Good help is hard to find: The differentiated mobilisation of migrant social capital among Filipino domestic workers. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(5), 719–739. Philpott, S.B. (1968). Remittance obligations, social networks and choice among Montserratian migrants in Britain. Man, 3(3), 465–476. Portes, A. (1998). Social capital: Its origins and applications in modern sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 24(1), 1–24. Portes, A., and Landolt, P. (1996). The downside of social capital. American Prospect, 26, 18–22. Portes, A., and Sensenbrenner, J. (1993). Embeddedness and immigration: Notes on the social determinants of economic action. American Journal of Sociology, 98(6), 1320–1350. Putnam, R.D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster. Roberts, K.D., and Morris, M.D. (2003). Fortune, risk, and remittances: An application of option theory to participation in village-based migration networks. International Migration Review, 37(4), 1252–1281. Schapendonk, J., and Van Moppes, D. (2007). Migration and information: Images of Europe, migration encouraging factors and en route information sharing. Working Papers Migration and Development Series, Report 16. University of Nijmegen. Simon, M. (2019). Path dependency and adaptation: The effects of policy on migration systems. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 22(2), 1‒2. Sjaastad, L.A. (1962). The costs and returns of human migration. Journal of Political Economy, 70(5, Part 2), 80–93. Somerville, K. (2015). Strategic migrant network building and information sharing: Understanding ‘migrant pioneers’ in Canada. International Migration, 53(4), 135–154. Spitzer, Y. (2015). Pogroms, networks, and migration: The Jewish migration from the Russian Empire to the United States, 1881–1914. Discussion Paper no. 21.03. Brown University. Spitzer, Y., and Zimran, A. (2019). Like an ink blot on paper: Testing the diffusion hypothesis of mass migration, Italy 1876–1920. Working paper. Vanderbilt University. Thulin, E., and Vilhelmson, B. (2014). Virtual practices and migration plans: A qualitative study of urban young adults. Population, Space and Place, 20(5), 389–401. Timera, M. (2001). Les migrations des jeunes Sahéliens: Affirmation de soi et émancipation. Autrepart, (18), 37–49. Todaro, M.P. (1969). A model of labor migration and urban unemployment in less developed countries. American Economic Review, 59(1), 138–148. Toma, S. (2016a). The role of migrant networks in the labour market outcomes of Senegalese men: How destination contexts matter. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(4), 593–613. Toma, S. (2016b). Putting social capital in (a family) perspective: Determinants of labour market outcomes among Senegalese women in Europe. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 57(3), 127–150. Toma, S., and Vause, S. (2014). Gender differences in the role of migrant networks: Comparing Congolese and Senegalese migration flows. International Migration Review, 48(4), 972–997. Van Hear, N., Bakewell, O., and Long, K. (2018). Push-pull plus: Reconsidering the drivers of migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(6), 927–944.

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420  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Van Meeteren, M., and Pereira, S. (2018). Beyond the ‘migrant network’? Exploring assistance received in the migration of Brazilians to Portugal and the Netherlands. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 19(4), 925–944. Winters, P., De Janvry, A., and Sadoulet, E. (2001). Family and community networks in Mexico-US migration. Journal of Human Resources, 36, 159–184.

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Index

9/11 and aftermath 357, 358–9, 360, 361 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development 150, 382 academics, and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 159–60 accountability 57 adaptation (climate change) 189–90 African Union, and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 158–9 agency, migrant women 332, 333 Algeria 255–6 AML/CFT regulation of remittances 360–61, 363 Annan, Kofi 23, 122, 134, 136 Arbour, Louise 153, 156 articulation 229 Asato, Wako 330–31 ASEAN Forum on Migrant Labour (AFML) 321 asylum regime, climate in 190–92 asylum seekers 120–21, 250 see also refugees Australia migration information campaigns (MICs) 396 unions and migration 171–2 Bahrain, and kafala system 349, 351–2 Beaman, L.A. 412 Beaugé, G. 346, 347, 348 Belgium 254, 255 biometric data 394–5 Black, Richard 188–9 border control 113, 220–23, 256–8 technology, border and migration control 271–2, 393, 394–5 see also European Union (EU) border and migration control, private actors in Brexit 266 Brown, K. McCarthy 282 ‘business of migration’ 71 Camacho, J. 154 camps, detention 250–54, 255, 256, 257–8 Canada, resettlement 54 Cancun Adaptation Framework 190 Capone, Stefania 282 care chains, see transnational care chains Cartagena Declaration 191–2

Castells, M. 36 Castles, S. 189 Catholic Church/Scalabrinians 9, 13, 288, 289, 300–301, 301–6, 307 chain migration 407 Chort, I. 414 church organisations, role of 11, 297–8 Catholic Church/Scalabrinians 300–301, 301–6, 307 conclusion 307–9 literature review (actors in global migration governance) 298–301 nineteenth and twentieth centuries 301–7 Protestant Churches 301, 306–7 churches, Morocco 288–92 cities 11, 242, 384–5 form and content of city voice 380–81 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 381–4 networks 377–9 citizenship, regional 110 civil society 8–9 civil society organisations (CSOs) 69–70, 200, 229–30, 240 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 160–61, 238–40, 241 and Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) 140–41, 233–5, 236 climate-induced migration 127, 186 climate in the asylum and migration regime 190–92 conclusion 193–4 early developments 187–9 migration in the climate regime 189–90 Nansen Initiative and Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) 192–3 Co-Facilitators of Global Compact for Migration (GCM) development 154–5 commodification of labour 231 of women 332–4 Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese Refugees (CPA) 53 concentration camps 251, 252 Convention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) 191 cooperation need for 2–3

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422  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance trans-border 265 corruption 57 Council of the European Union 158 counterhegemonic movements 228–30 COVID-19 pandemic 58, 242, 364 Crépeau, François 25–6 cross-border marriages, see marriage migration data

collection and analysis, controlling migration through 393–5, 398 use in policy 38 dead migrants 93–4, 94–5 decent work 69 decision to migrate, role of information, see information decolonisation 255–6 defence industry 272 detention 95–7, 125, 127, 269–70 camps 250–54, 255, 256, 257–8 deterrent information, controlling migration through 395–7, 398 diaspora 364–7, 392 disabled spouses (marriage migration) 330–31 discrimination, gender 197–8 displaced persons, post-war 251–4 Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) 393 Dolfin, S. 408 domestic workers, see migrant domestic workers (MDWs); transnational care chains economic and political shifts shaping global regulation of labour migration 66–70 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 109 economic globalisation 67 Edin, P.A. 412 Ehrenreich, B. 313 Elias, J. 315, 321 Engels, Friedrich 170 environmental migration, see climate-induced migration equivalence 229 ethnic enclaves 411–12, 413 Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) 109 Eurocities 378 Eurodac information system 395 European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) 272–3 European Commission 80–81, 125–6, 158 European Council 125–6 European Migrant Smuggling Centre (EMSC) 218–19 European Union (EU) 104–5, 108, 109, 111–12, 113, 179–80

and cities 378–9 data collection, and migration control 394–5 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 158 migrant smuggling and human trafficking 216–17, 218–19, 220–22 migration and development 78 migration information campaigns (MICs) 395–6, 397 migration policy 124–6, 256–8 Schengen Agreement 121–2, 256 European Union (EU) border and migration control, private actors in 263 background and definitions 264–5 conclusion 273–4 facilitation and constraint of economic activity 265–7 opportunities for economic profits 268–70 profitable market in the making 271–3 Europol 218 evidence-based policy 38 exclusion of workers by segregation 175–6, 178 families and marriage migration 331 of missing migrants, and family tracing 90, 94–5 Feldman, N. 414 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 357, 358, 359–61 financial inclusion 367–9 financialisation, and remittances 367–9 Financing Facility for Remittances (FFR) 368 forced migration 188, 190–91, 230–32, 242 France detention camps 251, 253, 255, 256 ‘Trente Glorieuses’ 254–6 unions and migration 176–7 Frontex 220–21, 257, 394 Fuller, S. 411 G4S 269, 270 Gamlen, A. 364 Gaventa, J. 230 gender discrimination 197–8 mainstreaming 201–2 and networks 409 gender, and labour migration 196–8 androcentric migration policy outputs 202–3 barriers to accessing rights 205–7 conclusion 207–8 gender-biased institutions and organisations 200–202 gendered migration governance 198–200

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Index  423 migrant women as trafficking victims 203–5 Geneva Convention 135, 190–91 Genicot, G. 408 Georgi, F. 237–8 Germany 250 and post-war displacement 251–4 unions and migration 177 Ghosheh, N. 316 Glick Schiller, N. 286 Global Coalition on Migration 235, 236, 239, 241–2 Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) 122, 134 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (Global Compact for Migration) (GCM) 1, 29, 44, 55, 106, 129, 146–8, 161–2, 227–8 and cities 381–4 and civil society organisations (CSOs) 160–61, 238–40, 241 and climate-induced migration 192 founded on human rights, in pursuit of development 148–52 and GFMD 142 and ICRC 95, 96, 97, 98 key actors and institutions in development of 10, 152–61 possibility of another compact 240–43 preparing and negotiating 151–2 and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants 127–8 Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) 55, 56, 57–8, 148–9, 151 Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) 9–10, 78, 123, 133, 137, 139–42, 143, 233–5, 236, 238, 320, 381–2, 383 global governance, definition of 299 ‘global migration crisis’ 2 Global Migration Group (GMG) 25, 134 global migration policy debates, and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants 119–29 globalisation 67, 230–31, 232, 387 governance, definitions of 36, 299 Greece 250 Gulf states, kafala system, see kafala system, Gulf states hegemony in migration governance hybrid 237–8 neo-Gramscian analytical approach (counterhegemonic movements between invited and invented spaces) 228–30 Heinz, F. 253

Hellermann, C. 413–14 High-Level Dialogues (HLDs) 9–10, 25, 123, 132–3, 136–9, 233, 235–6, 382 Hochschild, A.R. 313 Hong Kong domestic workers in 319 marriage migration 335 Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers (UNDP) 78–9 human rights 3, 67–8, 69, 70, 149–50, 232 and Frontex 221 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 147, 151–2, 154–5, 157, 159–60, 161, 227–8 and Gulf states 345 and International Organization for Migration (IOM) 26 Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 157–8 and state sovereignty 37–8 see also United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants human trafficking, see migrant smuggling and human trafficking hybrid movements 229 immigration detention, see detention immigration through marriage 334–5 Indonesia, domestic workers from 315, 316, 320 inequality 150, 408 information 13, 387, 398 migrant networks as conveyors of (pre-migration) 407–10 as resource for migrants 387–92 as resource for migration management actors 392–7 information and communication technologies (ICTs) 389–90 institutional frameworks 8–10 institutionalising private interactions 13–14 institutions 4–6 and meaning of migration 12–13 migration-specific and migration-unspecific 14–15 non-state, and the state 10–12 organisations as 7–8 and time 15–16 Inter-Regional Forums on Migration (IRFs) 121 Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) 20, 51 Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM) 20 intermediation, see kafala system, Gulf states internal migrants 170–71, 174 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 54

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424  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) 236–7 International Coalition of Cities Against Racism (ICCAR) 379 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 89–90 conclusion 99 immigration detention 95–7 migration in historical work of 90–92 missing migrants and their families 93–5 non-refoulement 97–9 prioritising migration 92–3 International Conference on Gender, Migration and Development (ICGMD) 317 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990) 122, 149–50, 232, 240 International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) 318, 319, 320 International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) 368 international humanitarian law (IHL) 89–90, 93, 97 International Labour Organization (ILO) 7–8, 19, 200, 205 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 156–7 institutional continuity 15–16 marginalisation of 237 and migrant domestic workers 317–21 roles and structure of 68 and UNDP 80 and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants 127 International Labour Organization (ILO), and labour mobility 63–4 conclusion 72–3 economic and political shifts shaping global regulation 66–70 institutionalising global migration governance through 64–6 near-eclipsing of ILO 70–72 International Migrants Alliance (IMA) 234 International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) 143, 161 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 7, 238 and cities 382–3 data collection and analysis 393–4 gender-related activity 204 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 155–6, 159 and ILO 72

and second High-Level Dialogue (HLD) 137–9 and UNDP 80 and UNHCR 55, 56 see also Migration Governance Framework (MiGOF) International Organization for Migration (IOM), history of 1990s 21–2 2000s 22–5 conclusion 29 early history 19–21 entry into the UN 19, 23, 27–9, 55, 106, 240–41 ‘road to’ entry into the UN 25–7 International Refugee Organization (IRO) 51 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) 319–20 Internet 409 intra-regional migration and mobility, see regional migration governance (RMG) ‘invented spaces’ 230, 242 ‘invited spaces’ 230, 240 irregular migration systems 219 Israel, unions and migration 175 Italy, emigration 254–5, 303–5 Japan, and marriage migration 330, 331 job access, and migrant networks 410–13 Joint Migration and Development Initiative (JMDI) (UNDP) 76–7, 79–81, 82–6 kafala system, Gulf states 11–12, 14, 126, 341–2 attempts at reform 351–2 conclusion 352–3 ethnographic observations into diversity of situations 348–9 locating within literature on migration intermediation regimes 343–6 origins and evolution of 346–7 states and brokers 349–51 Kibreab, Gaim 188 Killias, O. 315 knowledge management strategy (KMS) and knowledge transfer, JMDI/UNDP 82–5, 86 Kuschminder, K. 217–18 Kuwait, domestic workers in 316 labour migration growth, post-war 254–5 labour mobility, see International Labour Organization (ILO), and labour mobility; regional migration governance (RMG) Lancee, B. 411 Lauber, J. 154 Le Bihan, S. 93, 94–5

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Index  425 liberal approach to migration governance 237–8 Libya 221–2, 223, 258 ‘limited statehood’ 300 Lindquist, J. 312, 315, 344 local authorities 377, 384–5 form and content of city voice 380–81 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 381–4 migration-related city networks 377–9 Lori, Noora 343–4, 348, 349, 353 Lu, Melody 330 Malaysia domestic workers in 316, 320 temporary labour migration in 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202–3, 205–7 Malmström, Cecilia 125 ‘managed migration’ 232 Marrakesh Compact, see Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (Global Compact for Migration) (GCM) marriage migration 327–8 commodification of marriage and women’s bodies 332–4 conclusion 336 depopulation, care crisis and promotion of cross-border marriages 328–31 protecting national borders and values 334–5 Martin, T.F. 411 Marx, Karl 170 Massey, D.S. 407 Mayoral Forums 377, 380, 381, 382, 383 Mayors Mechanism 233–4 Mayors Migration Council (MMC) 384 McKenzie, D. 408 McKinley, Brunson 22, 23, 24 McMahon, S. 391 Mediterranean, transnational governance networks in 220–23 Mediterranean-Sub-Saharan Migration Trade Union Network (RSMMS) 239 Metropolis 379 Mexico migration from 407–8, 410–11 and remittances 365–7 migrant detention, see detention migrant domestic workers (MDWs) 198, 200, 202–3, 205–6, 207, 347 see also transnational care chains migrant networks 13, 406, 415–16 and compliance with norms and obligations 413–14 as conveyors of information and images in pre-migration phase 407–10 as go-betweens for job access 410–13

social networks 348–9, 389, 392, 412, 413–14, 415 migrant smuggling and human trafficking 11, 214–15, 222–3, 333, 345, 395 distinction between 215–18 institutions and networks for governance of 218–20 migrant women as victims 203–5 transnational governance networks in Mediterranean 220–22 migration scale of 120 use of term 146 migration–development nexus 135, 150–51 see also Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Migration Governance Framework (MiGOF) 34–5 conclusion 45–6 establishing networked migration management (NMM) 42–4 hurdle of state sovereignty 40–42 principles and objectives 35–7 principles for networked migration management (NMM) 37–40 Migration Governance Index (MGI) 43–4 ‘migration industry’ 199, 271, 344, 408 migration information campaigns (MICs) 395–7, 398 migration intermediation, see kafala system, Gulf states migration journey 391 migration management 3, 68–9, 232, 236, 237–8, 241 information as resource for migration management actors 392–7 positioning of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 77–80 see also Migration Governance Framework (MiGOF) migration regimes 341 ‘migration rent’ 350 Miraftab, F. 230 missing migrants 93–5 Morocco, and religion 284, 285, 286–92 multilateral politics of migration governance, see political foundations of global migration governance multilateralism 21 Mundlak, G. 317 Munshi, K. 410 Nansen Principles and Nansen Initiative 192–3

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426  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance Napier-Moore, R. 205 National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) 190 neo-classical models 388–9, 407 neo-Gramscian analytical approach (counterhegemonic movements between invited and invented spaces) 228–30 neoliberal globalisation 230–31, 232 neoliberalism 42, 69, 237–8, 242, 274, 344, 345, 358, 367, 369 Netherlands, unions and migration 179 networked migration management (NMM), see Migration Governance Framework (MiGOF) networks cities 377–9 religious 284 transnational, irregular migration 219–23 see also migrant networks ‘networks of equivalence’ 229 networks of labour activism (NOLAs) 318 New Public Management (NPM) 39, 268 new regionalism 103–4 New York Declaration 55–6, 123, 148, 151, 240–41 non-refoulement 97–9, 154–5, 157 norms and obligations, compliance with 413–14 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 108–9, 114 obligations and norms, compliance with 413–14 Ochiai, Emiko 330 Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 157–8 organisations 5 as institutions 7–8 outsourcing 268–9, 270 Overcoming Barriers (UNDP) 78–9 Paris Agreement 190, 382 partnerships 39–40, 58 Passas, N. 360 Peoples’ Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) 141, 229, 234–5, 236, 237, 241–2 Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) 242–3 Philippines, domestic workers from 314–15, 316, 321 Piper, Nicola 330 Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) 193 political and economic shifts shaping global regulation of labour migration 66–70 political foundations of global migration governance 132–3 conclusion 142–3

Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) 139–42 High-Level Dialogues (HLDs) 136–9 premises 133–6 political space 230 politicisation of migration 37–8 populism 146, 147–8, 161 Portes, A. 413 Portugal 255 power imbalances 57 prisoners of war 253–4 private actors 13–14 global refugee governance 55, 56 migration and border control 344–5 see also European Union (EU) border and migration control, private actors in privatisation 268, 270 Protestants 288–9, 290–91, 301, 306–7 Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME) 19–20, 65 public information campaigns 395 public policy, sociology of 81 public–private partnerships, see European Union (EU) border and migration control, private actors in Purcell, M. 229 Purcell Jr., James N. 21–2 Qatar, and kafala system 126, 352 racism 170–72, 173–4, 178, 179 Rainer, M. 253 Rapoport, H. 408 recruitment agencies 179, 180, 199, 206, 314, 315, 347, 410 Refugee Convention 50, 51, 52, 149 Refugee Response Framework (RRF) 157 refugees 132 Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) 55, 56, 57–8, 148–9, 151 and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 90–92, 93, 98 and networks 415–16 non-refoulement 97–9, 154–5, 157 see also climate-induced migration; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and refugee resettlement regional bodies, and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 158–9 Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs) 112–14, 121, 138 regional migration governance (RMG) 15, 102

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Index  427 conceptual framework 103–5 conclusion 114–15 nature of 110–14 where implemented 108–10 why needed 105–8 regionalism 103–4 religion circulation of religious knowledge, norms and objects 285–6 conclusion 292 Morocco (changing religious landscape in response to migration policies) 286–92 religious anthropology of movement 279–80 religious productions connected with mobility 283–5 and transnational migrations 280–83 see also church organisations, role of ‘religioscapes’ 282 remittances 13–14, 313, 357–8, 369–71, 414 facilitation 361–4 financialisation 367–9 formalisation 358–61 funnelling 364–7 repatriation 52–3 reproductive work 328, 329–31 rights and rights-based approach 3, 63, 69–70, 72–3, 135, 141, 147, 156–7, 176, 204, 205–7, 234–6, 237, 239 see also human rights rights-based governance, transnational care chains 317–21 risk 396–7 Rother, S. 160–61, 238 Salazar, Noel B. 286 sanctuary cities 377–8, 381 Saudi Arabia, and kafala system 352 Scalabrini, Giovanni Battista 303, 304, 305 Scalabrinians 303–6 Schapendonk, J. 391 Schengen Agreement 121–2, 256 search and rescue (SAR) operations, Mediterranean 220, 221–2 securitisation of migration policy in Global North 120–22 of remittances 368, 369 security 39, 111, 187, 232, 265 security market 271–3 segregation of workers 175–6, 178 self-reliance 57–8 sexual exploitation 203, 413 Shamir, H. 317 Sigona, N. 391 Silvestri, Sara 300–301

Siméant, Johanna 297 ‘smart borders’ 271–2, 394 smuggling, see migrant smuggling and human trafficking social capital 410, 411, 413 social media 390, 409 social movements 229 social networks 348–9, 389, 392, 412, 413–14, 415 social reproduction 312, 329, 335 social rules 6 solidarity cities 242 Somali money transfer sector 361 South Africa, unions, migration and racism 174, 176 South Korea, and marriage migration 331, 335 Southern African Development Community (SADC) 108 Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) 109, 314 Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights (SIGTUR) 181 Spain 255 sponsorship, see kafala system, Gulf states state centrality of 36 gendered 200–201 and non-state institutions 10–12 sovereignty 3, 10, 36–8, 40–42, 67, 114, 119–20, 237 Steinhilper, E. 160–61 ‘strong fields’ 298 Suhrke, A. 186 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 79, 150–51 Sutherland, Peter 25, 28, 122–3, 153 Swing, William Lacy 25, 26, 27, 155, 382–3 Taiwan, and marriage migration 330–31, 335 technology border and migration control 271–2, 393, 394–5 information and communication technologies (ICTs) 389–90 terrorist financing, measures against 358–9, 360–61 Thiollet, H. 348, 350, 352 Thomas, Albert 2 Topalov, Christian 298 trade unions, see unions trafficking, see migrant smuggling and human trafficking trans-border cooperation 265 transnational care chains 312–13 conclusion 321–2

Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 39:35AM

428  Research handbook on the institutions of global migration governance rights-based governance 317–21 transnational care mobility chains 314–17 transnational (care) labour networks 314 Transnational Migrant Platform – Europe (TMP-E) 239, 242 transnational networks, irregular migration 219–23 transport companies 269 ‘transversal politics’ 228–9 transversal solidarity 242–3 Trente Glorieuses 254–6 Triandafyllidou, A. 217–18 Trump, Donald 29 trust 392 UN Women 317, 320 undocumented migrants 127 ‘unfree labour’ 231 unions 9, 67, 170–71, 180–81, 235–6, 239, 319–20 era of nationalism and imperialism 171–4 post-First World War 175–80 United Kingdom (UK) privatisation of migration detention 270 unions and migration 170, 177, 178, 179–80 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (and Protocol against Smuggling) 215–16 United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) 317, 320 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 8, 12, 76–7 conclusion 85–6 mediation role 80–82 positioning in international migration management field 77–80 power relations and knowledge transfer within JMDI 82–5 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 7, 91, 148 and cities 379 and climate-induced migration 192 and Global Compact for Migration (GCM) 157–8 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and refugee resettlement 50–51 conclusion 58–9

continuing marginalisation of refugee agency 57–8 establishment of UNHCR and expansion of mandate 51–2 inter-organisational politics and framing of resettlement 55–6 reframing of refugee resettlement 52–5 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) 124 United Nations Migrant Worker Convention 70–71 United Nations Network on Migration 29, 156 United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants 25–6 global migration policy debates 119–29 United Nations Special Representative for Migration 25, 122–3, 153 United Nations (UN), and International Labour Organization (ILO) 71–2 United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) 108–9 United States (US) and International Labour Organization (ILO) 65 resettlement 54, 56 unions and migration 172, 174, 178–9 Vauchez, Antoine 298 violence 391, 408 visa issuing, outsourcing of 270 vulnerability and vulnerable migrants 37–8, 57, 70, 92–3, 94, 155, 157–8, 231 wages 410–11 ‘weak field’ 15, 298, 300, 307–8 women and networks 409, 412–13, 413–14 see also gender, and labour migration; marriage migration; transnational care chains World Bank 362–3, 365, 368 World Council of Churches (WCC) 306 World Social Forum on Migration (WSFM) 242 xenophobia 170, 176 Xiang, B. 312 Yeates, N. 314

Antoine Pécoud and Hélène Thiollet - 9781789908077 39:35AM