Why helping ‘economic migrants’ may help stop others becoming
‘refugees’ October 6, 2015 12.07am EDT
Georgia Cole
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Georgia Cole
Researcher in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford
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Why helping ‘economic migrants’ may help stop others becoming ‘refugees’
Georgia Cole
October 6, 2015 12.07am EDT
With the prevalence of reports documenting the worrying conditions
faced by individuals within Eritrea, and the huge numbers leaving the
country, one might ask: who remains in the country and why?
Conversations with colleagues and friends within Eritrea last year
often turned to people discussing why they had decided not to leave.
For many, their rationale was simple: because somebody they knew
already had. Those who had left constituted the “lungs” whose
remittances kept those within the country alive. The question then is
what would happen if that flow dried up.
All of their dependants, whether brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers,
children, friends and wider relatives, would have to rethink the
feasibility of remaining in Eritrea. Many reasoned that the only
solution would be to themselves cross the border and leave their
country. The country of 6.7 million is located in the Horn of Africa.
For many reasons, leaving Eritrea is an intimidating prospect. Every
stage of the onward journey carries danger, and no certainty of
employment. Those who leave Eritrea forfeit their automatic right to
return and their rights to assets within the country. It potentially
places their relatives and friends at risk of being accused by the
government of assisting their escape.
For others, love for their country runs deep and they do not wish to
abandon it after its hard-fought struggle for independence. Their
desire to stay put is nonetheless linked to the ability of others
around them to move.
Beyond the contribution that gold and mining make to the Eritrean
economy, the World Bank says that “economic conditions remain
challenging”. Government policies have impoverished those surviving in
Eritrea without external support. These include:
indefinite national service;
restrictions on citizens' domestic and international movements; and
reports of harsh punishments for those transgressing some of the
state’s more repressive policies.
Many of the those individuals that are stopped from entering Europe,
barricaded in camps in Calais, or ping-ponged between European member
states on an increasingly frequent basis, are therefore part of
complex transnational coping strategies.
Futility of ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’ debate
A distraction from understanding the problems faced by individuals in
Europe and at its frontiers right now has been the obsession with how
to categorise them. This is done purely according to their status in
the immediate “here and now”.
Why people move is always a mixture of voluntary and involuntary
factors. The compartmentalisation of people into economic migrants or
refugees therefore obscures the fundamental ways in which these two
groups are intimately related.
As is so clear in Eritrea, to mitigate against the worst effects of
the state and its market, those individuals who can leave become
“economic migrants”. What is important is that they do so precisely to
protect their families and friends from becoming refugees themselves.
Plans by the EU to reduce the numbers of individuals leaving Eritrea
through development aid thus epitomises the inability of policymakers
to join up the dots between those leaving the country and those
staying behind. Proposals such as these are weak for at least two
reasons:
when it is the violence perpetrated by a state which forces citizens
to leave, channelling aid through those very same institutions may
well fail to address any of the original problems; and
a few million pounds of development aid, as was the case in Eritrea,
is often nothing compared to the scale of remittances that many states
receive through their diaspora.
Role of remittances
Policies that deny people the opportunity to provide financial support
to friends and relatives outside of Europe, by seeing “migrants” and
“refugees” as discrete groups of individuals, are self-defeating. We
should rather support individuals to work in Europe, thus enabling
them to send remittances to those who may not wish to undertake that
journey themselves.
Allowing certain individuals to stay in Europe for work prevents whole
families having to cross militarised borders, board ramshackle boats
or pay huge fares to be smuggled in appalling conditions overland.
Remittances provide a lifeline, both to individuals who remain within
countries that are experiencing high degrees of violence, persecution
and state failure, and for those who wish to remain in refugee camps
near their country of origin.
Evidence abounds about the importance of remittances and the value of
facilitating these global flows of money. The celebration of
remittance economies nonetheless seems to have remained detached in
the popular media from the broader debates on migration and asylum.
Remittances are not only quantitatively greater, but also
qualitatively more effective at assisting local populations and
catalysing their development.
Linking the importance of remittances to the debate about whether
people are economic migrants or refugees is critical. Images of young
women or men sitting on fences at Melilla or boarding trains in Europe
often invoke the label “economic migrant”, as if to dismiss the
critical importance of their journeys.
On the contrary, and alongside the fact that on too many occasions
this label is wrongly applied instead of granting asylum, in certain
situations it is entirely because of these “migrants” that other
individuals in their families are not forced to become “refugees”.
Allowing people to come, work and send back remittances preempts the
need for more people to leave their homes to escape the devastating
effects of war, violence and economic collapse. In building fences,
bombing boats and blocking borders, however, we undermine these
strategies and contribute towards forcing certain people to leave
their countries and claim asylum elsewhere.
Regardless of the labels used, it seems naive and counterproductive
not to join these debates and movements together.
Received on Wed Oct 07 2015 - 11:40:16 EDT