Statement by Jonas Widgren, Director of ICMPD, at the session on "Migrant Smuggling and Criminal Corporatism" of the Metropolis Conference in Vancouver, 13-17 November 2000
Mr. Chairman,
Why has this item now moved into the Metropolis agenda? Was Metropolis not to deal with the harmonious integration of ethnic groups into the big Northern cities, magnets as they are for further immigrants, but also potential laboratories for social justice and ethnic peace? Should this very process really deal with law enforcement and police issues? Should Metropolis turn from Metropol to Interpol? Of course not. There are numerous fora fighting people smuggling and organized crime and taking care of the repressive response so urgently needed.
But Metropolis can, on the other hand, not afford to disneglect the need for repressive action. You deal with urban growth, ethnic relations and equality in affluent conglomerates of half a million to 5-10. At the other end, over the oceans, you find mega-cities of 20, soon becoming 30 million, divided between small controlling groups of exceedingly rich, and the swelling masses of exceedingly poor. Hundreds of millions of redundant farmers, labour-hungry youth and women turn to these volatile urban swamps in the non-affluent world this year, next year. This has created an eldorado-situation for the people-smugglers. They will ensure that the megapoles of the South will not only reach out to those of the North, but will confront the Northern leaders with a host of ethical challenges, far more divisive than any of the immigration policy challenges of the last decades. That is, I understand, why also you have decided to deal with the cruel reality of the need for action against illegal movements.
Six years have now passed since the issue of how to combat migrant smuggling started to bother politicians in the North, when the asylum crisis had been resolved and related inflows abated.
Time for next item: smuggling/trafficking of humans.
Simply speaking, in a European perspective, border control and anti-smuggling issues have dominated the migration policy agenda from 1994 until this very spring, when there seems to be a shift to a new debate. There has as far as I am concerned been nothing wrong about that domination, as we in Europe are far ahead in creating a singe whole European space without borders, an enterprise with historic dimensions, and as the external borders will have to function without interference of organized crime. What is bad, however, is that States do not work more efficiently together towards more comprehensive concepts for regulating flows.
Let's have a quick look at the present immigration reality of the Northern Hemisphere. Canada and USA have a combined annual regular intake at the level of , say, one million. Both countries are since long operating sophisticated but differing slot-programmes, with preferences for one or the other category, and endorsed by Parliaments as global planning or ceiling instruments. On the top of these slots come unforeseen arrivals of asylum-seekers and illegals. If our estimates are correct, presuming also some emigration, Canada/USA presently experience a total factual annual net intake of 1,2 million aliens per year, representing half a per cent of the total combined population. Of this annual intake, 65 per cent is pre-planned and 35 per cent would be non-pre-planned by Parliaments.
How does this contrast to Europe? If we define Europe as EU plus Norway/Switzerland, the total annual regular intake is 1,3 million, but with the difference that this size of the national intake has not been processed with national Parliaments or the EU Parliament ex ante, only ex post. So the following year come on the top of this ex post planning indicator some 350,000 spontaneous asylum-seekers and an estimated annual inflow of 400,000 illegals. But in Europe we seek by tradition to meticulously count also the emigrants, leaving us with a total estimated annual net intake of 800,000 third country nationals. This annual net intake with regard to the total population of 385 million in these 17 countries would only represent 0,2 per cent, as compared to half a per cent in North America. But of the total net intake as much as 65 per cent would be irregular or unplanned in Europe in contrast to 35 per cent in North America. Now you Canadians and Americans probably better understand why we worry so much about irregular migration in Europe as these contrasts reveal our own lack of policy focus on pre-planned immigration.
Why do I at all bother you with these dull statistical extrapolations? Because they touch upon one of the most explosive ethical issues confronting the economically developed part of the globe for the coming decades. They touch upon the issue of with whom the industrialized democratic North wants to share its richness, how it wants to share its richness and who is in control of the sharing mechanism. Or to be more precise: if the sharing does not take place in the shape of massive capital flows from North to South it will take the shape of people flows from South to North. As the former progresses too slowly, the latter process has already begun, as earnings of world trade and private investments of the poorest countries have stagnated and been cut half the last years. And out of this process emerge two different but related and immensely grave ethical questions: do the traditionally all-embracing egalitarian social systems of Northern democracies at all allow for exceptions for the newcomers? By way of illustration: the fresh draft EU Charter on fundamental rights, shortly to be adopted at the EU summit in Nice, provides in its article 34 legal resident aliens with social policy guarantees, but not the illegals as this indeed would be risky from a magnet point of view. This is leading to the second fundamental ethical question: what if the present trends in people smuggling prevails, by way of which the smugglers in reality decide on immigrant intake levels, and not national Parliaments?
These will be some of the most burning political issues in the decades to come in the democratic North, also over here. It is indeed incomprehensible that national destiny issues like these are not dealt with in the same serious manner as other long-term destiny issues, like environment and global warming, or disarmament and nuclear control. But we all know why. There are no votes for politicians, elected for some 4 years, in highlighting the immigration challenge. The votes are usually only there if you opt for restrictions. Only in some rare cases the opposite happens, as in my own country Sweden in 1985, when Olof Palme whom I served, lost votes for being too restrictive. But generally, you don't earn votes in arguing for rational long-term immigration policies, as voters at least get embarrassed or more often irritated. Immigration policy is a no way out job: either you are perceived of letting too many in, which is wrong, or as keeping too many out, which is also wrong.
Therefore no long-term debate. The Dover tragedy this summer was illustrative. Some 3,000 illegal migrants have already died in recent years on snowy mountains, in deserts, rivers and the open sea, unsuccessfully seeking to reach the wealthy promised land. Thus, to all of us dealing with irregular migration, Dover was rather a routine incident. But the public and media reaction was strange. It emerged as a curious bipolar but nevertheless unified flashpoint: "beware of China when she fully opens her gates and why did these poor people not gain proper entry into UK". Likewise, Dover did not result in a firm reaction of the EU leaders saying: "we are soon loosing control over immigration if the people smugglers are allowed to continue like this, we want to dictate our immigration goals, maybe heading for much bigger intake levels as we today need IT-specialists and nurses and tomorrow will have to take in some 5 million a year to maintain reproduction levels, economic growth and competitiveness against USA, why not India. So we will first have to eradicate the smugglers and their organized crime, as we then want to discuss with you, our constituencies, on whom to take in and how to do it. Better to discuss this now than later." They did not say such a thing, they remurmured a bit about "greencards". And they will not say such a thing, until it is very late in the day, maybe too late.
To say that illegal migration is growing is to play the card of the far right, you say. And it is also said: "better raise intake levels radically already now, because then the smugglers will have no market." With all due respect, this is completely wrong. Much more immigration which might be a very fresh and boosting experience for the archaic and zoo-like conglomerate of Liechtensteins and Andorras that the 40 States in the wider Europe represent, but more immigration brings definitely more people smuggling, not less. This is a fundamental migration law. So increasing immigration does not remove the smugglers. The smugglers are primarily removed in the way other crooks are removed, i.e. through consistent and severe enforcement action.
Which entry restrictions? "If immigration volumes are expanded fivefold, restrictions are not of relevance," you say. Nonsense. Which developed State today would not establish precise rules on what family reunification implies, on which labour is needed and who is a refugee? If Canada decides to head for 5 million a year to come, instead of the present couple of hundred thousands, rules would be even more complicated than today. And for the smugglers, the rules are fine as they are there to be violated, as long as the supply side of the market is there.
And again, is smuggling and trafficking in migrants really on the rise and is its linkage to organized crime in general really growing? The answer to both questions seems to have to be a strong yes, but the answer has to be qualified. Finally the trans-Atlantic academics have entered into a serious measurement exercise. Let me just bring to you a recent European example, a very serious one. I spend much time on the Balkans. Bosnia and Herzegovina/ Croatia and Slovenia have this year experienced a 40% increase in apprehensions of Iranians/Turks/Romanians and Chinese at their borders, brought in by smugglers. Slovenia has 2 million inhabitants and is to become an EU Member State soon. But the impact of these transit flows, bound for EU are such that they will in the long run hamper the EU accession. The actual sudden entry into Slovenia of 12,000 Iranians is equal to the sudden potential entry into Canada of 200,000 Chinese. But the people of Canada scream when a boat of 200 is approaching. Through Albania a quarter of a million third country nationals have already transited and have arrived illegally into Italy. Tens of thousands of young girls have been lured by the traffickers from Moldova (presently the biggest emigration country in Europe next to Albania) into the prostitution business. Is this not serious?
But people smuggling is not yet as lucrative as drug-production and smuggling. We are not yet there. The good news are that organized crime (i.e. those organizing the drug-business, large-scale car thefts, weapon sales, money laundering and sex business are bad demographers: they have not yet fully grasped the economic potentials. But the bad news is that the previously small and isolated groups of people-smugglers now have developed a sophisticated branche of organized crime of their own, with super-state-of-the-art-communication devices. And in five years or so, we have said in one of our ICMPD reports, the vertical crimes necessary to succeed in trafficking and smuggling (counterfeiting documents, bribing of border officials) will create such a forceful whole, that the people smuggling business will decide to marry the much stronger horizontal chain of organized crime with all their diversified branches. Today, total earnings of people smuggling/ trafficking are probably equal to the total annual earnings of the global rubber trade. Tomorrow, they will be equal to the coffee trade. They may once rise to the level of OAD, or of direct private investments in the Third World or to the level of remittances. After all, you pay your 5000 dollars to the smuggler to be able to send 10,000 dollars home.
Mr. Chairman, I am at the end. If this general reasoning is accepted by you all, which should be the four general policy implications:
- The first one is obvious, and already stressed. There is no alternative to repressive action against organized crime and its growing appetite for the transport of humans. This involves intelligence, police, judicial co-operation, bilaterally and in Interpol, Europol, EU at large, transatlantically, in WCO and in the UN through CICP. The new UN Convention against organized crime and its people smuggling and trafficking protocols, to be signed in Palermo in one month, and committing all States to prosecute and penalize the smugglers/traffickers, are wonderful news. And in regional fora like IGC, ICMPD and the Budapest process, we try to mobilize co-ordinated action. So repression against the instigators is number one.
- The second one is equally obvious, and deals so to say with the other extreme: why has the debate on the real factors behind these movements evaporated, as it were? When will leaders again address the growth of irregular immigration as arising from the lack of global richness-sharing mechanisms? Free trade would be the globally most significant factor in making it possible for the South to take advantage of globalization.
- The third implication is more tricky and relates to immigration levels. Of course we have in Europe to raise the present intake level from one to some five million a year. Our inward-biased attitude to all this is detrimental to all concerned. But we cannot, and this has been my advice to EU Commissioner Vitorino as member of the "wise men" group, head for this goal immediately. First, there are the 15 million unemployed in the present EU area. Then there are the women (you may not know that I was women-equality State Secretary in Sweden for four years), who would like to ensure that their labour participation rate grows from 50 to 60 per cent. Then we have all the Moroccans in France and all the Turks in Germany who by way of the Amsterdam Treaty finally would gain their right to move all over the EU labour markets from 2005. And finally we have the EU enlargement to the East, which will bring some 4 million extra immigrants to the present EU area as a result of labour market transition. But then, in 2006-2010, please dear EU leaders, following an in-depth democratic debate in the five-doubling of immigration levels in our own interest, do really raise the levels, on the basis of a North-American-like slot system;
- And finally, when will the real work start on the establishment of WAMP? What is WAMP? It is the World Architecture on the Movements of People. And what is that creature? Simply speaking, there is already a patchwork of global instruments and regimes on how to deal with the movements of people, partly obsolete as they were created in the 50's, but supplemented by the UN migrant workers Convention (which I actually was much involved in negotiating in the mid-1970's), and the heritage of the 1994 Cairo Conference. But where is the global obligation of States to readmit own citizens and other permanent residents? Where is the encouragement to migrants to direct their savings into productive investments? And where is the global settlement between North and South on how to deal with irregular movements and how to accommodate for regular movements. There is Deng for IDPs and there is Lubbers for refugees. But there is no WAMP.
Dear friends, could and should Metropolis generate WAMP? Integration of newcomers is key, but the regulation of the intake of newcomers is even more key. Why not a little bit of WAMP in Vancouver, Rotterdam and Oslo? This is my final question to you all. Thank you.
