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Poverty, Migration and Asylum

by Jeff Crisp

Afghans making their way in ramshackle boats to the territorial waters of Australia; Iraqis crossing the desert into Jordan, on the first stage of a journey which will — if they are lucky — end in Europe or North America; young men of many different nationalities, gathered at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, trying to stowaway on a train that will take them from France to the United Kingdom… 

​In recent years, our newspapers have been full of stories such as these, involving people who are trying to escape from poorer and less stable parts of the world, so that they can begin a new life in a region which offers them more security and better opportunities. Most of these migrants move illegally and then seek asylum when they have reached a country where they are willing to settle. For unlike business executives, IT professionals or United Nations officials, unskilled migrants from the world’s poorer countries have very limited access to regular migration opportunities.

The debate surrounding the phenomenon of illegal and irregular migration has become a highly polarized one. According to human rights organizations, many of these asylum seekers have a genuine fear of persecution in their own country, and they should therefore be regarded as bona fide refugees.

But according to the governments of many industrialized states, most of the people who move in this way are really economic migrants, ‘bogus refugees’ who use the asylum procedure to circumvent established immigration controls. And it is on this basis that those governments have introduced a barrage of restrictive migration measures: visa requirements, passport controls, carrier sanctions, the interdiction of boats at sea, and draconian laws against human smuggling and trafficking.

The Present System Doesn’t Work

Whether the people concerned are refugees, economic migrants or a mixture of the two, it has become increasingly evident that current asylum and migration management practices are to a large extent dysfunctional. 

First, they are dysfunctional in the sense that they do not address the root causes of movement or provide any additional security to those people who are in greatest need of it. For every Afghan, Iraqi or Somali who manages to make their way to Europe or North America, there are many thousands more back at home who face similar (if not more serious) threats to their welfare, but who are unable to escape from the danger in which they find themselves.

Second, and as a corollary of the preceding point, current practices are discriminatory. With the introduction of restrictive asylum and migration measures throughout the industrialized world, and with the resultant growth of human smuggling, only those people with access to considerable resources (perhaps $15,000 in the case of an Afghan who wishes to reach Australia) can hope to leave their country of origin and seek asylum in a more prosperous state.

Third, current practices in relation to the refugee and asylum issue entail a degree (and many people would argue that it is a high degree) of hypocrisy. Representatives of governments in the industrialized world are quite happy to address international fora where they express their firm support for the rights of refugees, as enshrined in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. But once they walk out of the conference room, they resume their usual practice of making it as difficult and as dangerous as possible for asylum seekers to gain access to their territory.

Fourth, the current asylum and migration management system can be described as dysfunctional because of the massive amounts of money (no-one knows exactly how much, but it may run into billions of dollars) that are spent on dealing with the relatively small numbers of asylum seekers who manage to arrive in the industrialized states.

Meanwhile, refugees and displaced people in other parts of the world, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa, are receiving progressively lower levels of assistance from the international community.

Finally, despite all of their efforts to demonstrate that they are ‘doing something’ about the arrivals of asylum seekers and irregular migrants, the industrialized states appear to have lost the confidence of their citizens in this area of public policy.

And this disaffection cannot be blamed entirely on unscrupulous politicians or xenophobic newspapers. For there are some fundamental flaws in current practices, not least the inability of many states to ensure that asylum seekers who fail to obtain refugee status are returned to their country of origin. Why spend so much money on asylum systems if unsuccessful applicants are nevertheless able to remain in the country?

Towards a More Humane System

How, then, can the dysfunctionalities of the current system be addressed — and to what extent can that be done in a way that is consistent with refugee protection and human rights principles?

According to some commentators, the problem lies essentially with the industrialized states. If they were to live up to their obligations and were to remove the visa requirements, carrier sanctions and other restrictive measures that they have introduced over the past two decades, then the rights of asylum seekers and refugees would be guaranteed. 

But does anyone really believe that this will happen? For even if those states need to import additional labour and replace their ageing population, they seem highly unlikely to relax current restrictions on the arrival of illegal or irregular migrants.

Some people have quite rightly suggested that action must be taken in countries of origin so as to remove the causes of refugee and migratory3 movements: persecution, armed conflict, poverty and inequality. Others have suggested that if asylum seekers and refugees could find adequate protection and assistance in their own region, then they would be less prone to move on to the industrialized states, and less inclined to use the services of professional smugglers.

​What such arguments tend to ignore is that the instability, violence and poverty that is to be found in less developed countries has deep historical and structural roots. The desire and ability of people to escape such conditions is unlikely to be reduced by the small-scale development projects and conflict resolution initiatives proposed when politicians and humanitarian agencies talk of the need to avert refugee and migratory movements.

A third school of thought—to which UNHCR has subscribed—suggests that irregular movements of people could be averted, and the international refugee protection system reinforced, if regular channels of migration were to be opened up to people who wish to leave their country of origin.

But this argument is not a wholly convincing one. The people who currently migrate to and seek asylum in the industrialized states are not necessarily the people who would be given the highest priority by organized immigration programmes. And even if such programmes were to be established, they would evidently not be able to satisfy the actual and latent migration demand that exists in the less-developed regions.

Finally, and at a more technical level, a number of mechanisms have been proposed as a means of addressing the issue of asylum and migration: the introduction of measures such as ‘humanitarian visas’, which would allow people to seek refugee status before they leave their own country; the expansion of resettlement quotas, allowing refugees to arrive in the Unskilled people from the world’s poorer countries have very limited access to regular migration opportunities Current asylum and migration management practices are often dysfunctional and discriminatory Measures that are simply designed to obstruct the movement of people from one part of the world to another are almost certain to fail The most effective and humane way of addressing the migration issue is to provide people with greater security and opportunities in their own country industrialized states in a planned, predictable and organized manner; and the introduction of migration information programmes in lessdeveloped countries, providing an antidote to the rosy images of life abroad that are disseminated by the mass communications industry and by human smugglers.

No Easy Solutions

It is not possible to assess the feasibility or impact of such proposals in this brief article. Suffice it to say that while they may have some potential, such innovations also have a number of constraints and limitations. Not least the fact that they address symptoms (the desire and ability of people to migrate) rather than causes (the poverty and insecurity which prompt people to migrate).

In this situation, the options are relatively few and unoriginal. We must continue to hold the industrialized states accountable for their actions, urging them to respect the principles and standards which they themselves formulated when they established the UN Refugee Convention. We must be prepared to examine new approaches to the issue of asylum and migration and determine whether those approaches function in a more fair and effective manner than is currently the case. And we must continue to point out that people will always try to migrate when there are such vast discrepancies in the level of human security to be found from one country and region to another.

Jeff Crisp is Head of UNHCR’s Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit, and a co-director (with George Borjas of Harvard University) of the WIDER project on ‘Poverty, International Migration and Asylum’. The WIDER conference on this issue will take place in Helsinki 27-28 September 2002. Further details available at: www.wider.unu.edu