Exchanging Knowledge,Enhancing Capacities,Developing Mechanisms: IOM's Role in the Implementation of the EU–Russia Readmission Agreement

Research on European Union (EU)–Russia cooperation in migration issues often neglects important actors involved in these seemingly bilateral arrangements. This paper questions the role that the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been playing in the EU–Russia cooperation in migration management. The analysis is situated in the theoretical framework describing international organisations (IOs) as bureaucracies and within the discussions about international migration governance and migration management. The paper describes the context of the EU–Russia migration management cooperation and identifies the major activities of IOM in Russia. Treating IOs as bureaucracies that pursue their own interests, the paper argues that, far from being a mere implementing body, IOM is an actor that, to a significant extent, has shaped the outcome of EU–Russia migration dialogue. At the same time, it is the context of this bilateral cooperation that has allowed IOM to strengthen its position vis-à-vis both Russia and the EU and to be successful in the competition with other IOs.     

Multilevelling EU external governance: the role of international organizations in the diffusion of EU migration policies

ABSTRACT

The thematic and geographical expansion of EU migration policies has gone along with an increasing mobilisation of pertinent international organisations such as the IOM and UNHCR. Combining insights from the external governance approach with IR debates on international institutional complexity, this article examines the dynamics behind this ‘multilevelling’ of EU external policies. Three strategies of institutional interplay are distinguished: counterweight, whereby international organisations act as independent complement or corrector to EU policy; subcontracting, referring to the outsourcing of EU project implementation to international organisations; and rule transmission, a process in which international organisations engage in transferring EU rules to third countries. Whereas greater organisational authority and autonomy have allowed the UNHCR to keep an independent voice as counterweight to EU action, both the UNHCR and IOM have become increasingly involved in the implementation of the EU's ‘global approach’ to migration via subcontracting and rule transmission. In sum, these processes shed a new light on the role of the EU within the international migration regime complex.     

International Migration: Virtue or Vice? Perspectives from Cameroon

This article argues that both global and national power differences play a crucial role in shaping local imaginaries of international migration among youths in two Cameroonian cities—Bamenda and Yaoundé. While Yaoundé is the national capital, Bamenda is the headquarters of the Anglophone north-west, an area generally opposed to the ruling regime and claiming historical as well as contemporary political marginalisation. Physical mobility has long been associated with social mobility and viewed rather positively. In both areas more critical perspectives on international migration are emerging. This is reflected in differences in envisioned destinations as well as in terminologies and concepts. Thus, in Yaoundé ‘the dangers of illegal migration’ have become the topic of the day—a theme publicised by international organisations in collaboration with local NGOs. Conversely, youths in Bamenda consciously compare their conceptualisations of the advantages and disadvantages of life abroad on the basis of imparted experiences of migrant family members and friends. These discourses influence not only youths' perception of different forms of migrancy but also their assessment of their future in Cameroon. International migration is thus viewed in a broad discursive spectrum from virtue to vice, and perceptions are shaped by regional, national and international political discourse.     

Speaking with one voice? The European Union's global approach to migration and mobility and the limits of international migration cooperation

ABSTRACT

Migration is comparatively weakly regulated at the international level. States are reluctant to cede sovereignty over international migration and negotiations between rich destination countries in the north and sending countries in the south must overcome asymmetries of interests. For this reason, issue-linkage is typically required to achieve north–south cooperation. This paper examines the European Union's (EU) Global Approach to Migration and Mobility as a framework for international migration cooperation. The paper argues that institutional complexity and political dynamics internal to the EU limit its capacity to reach agreement with third countries. Three internal factors are examined: contrasting approaches of the Commission and Council to the external dimension; diversity of member states’ interests in migration policy; and the different policy agendas of the European agencies. These factors result in an approach to external migration relations that is limited in scope and characterised by variable participation. Despite its apparent potential to leverage agreements from third countries, the EU emerges as an unpromising vehicle for international migration cooperation.     

Strengthening migration governance: the UN as ‘wingman’*

ABSTRACT

The plight of desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean reached an inflection point in 2015 when an estimated 800 migrants drowned in a single day, painfully exposing dysfunctions in how States, regions, and the international community as a whole seek to govern a world with increased mobility of persons. By examining the response to the migration and refugee crises of recent years through the lens of the United Nations (UN), this article describes how States and the UN system are challenged to reconsider traditional hierarchies of power and influence since unilateral State action will not solve the migration problem. Migration solutions, particularly those providing greater protections for migrants in vulnerable situations, will require ‘coalitions of the willing’ between States, inter-governmental organisations, local governments and non-state actors. Still emerging, such coalitions are interdependent; and their objectives will be the result of negotiating and bargaining amongst their members. They reflect multi-level governance in the collective handling of migration, revealing a more complex interaction, one in which local authorities and non-state actors are in some instances bypassing State-led interventions. For its part, the UN – armed with recent institutional changes that provide it with more centralised ‘orchestration’ capacities – is best suited to serve in a ‘wingman’ function, buttressing rather than leading such coalitions.     

Trans-regional institutional cooperation as multilevel governance: ECOWAS migration policy and the EU*

ABSTRACT

Regional economic integration in West Africa establishes the framework for the movement of persons within the highly mobile region. Eighty-four per cent of the migratory movements is directed towards another country within the region. This article analyses the role of trans-regional institutional cooperation on intra-regional migration policymaking, exploring the role of the European Union (EU) in the formulation of regional migration policies in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) specifically in labour migration, refugee protection, and return/readmission. It examines the normative role of the EU in influencing policies of third countries and argues that in the case of ECOWAS, networks are increasingly important in enabling formal and informal diffusion. The article uses multilevel governance as the lens to examine migration governance between the EU and ECOWAS, concluding that power relations equally play a key role in trans-regional institutional cooperation. Included in this mix are bilateral agreements which stand between trans-regional and intra-regional institutional cooperation, exerting a strong influence on inter-institutional EU- ECOWAS relations.     

The (surprising?) nonchalance of migration control agents

ABSTRACT

This paper sheds light onto the processes of controlling irregular migration in Germany, based on ethnographic fieldwork with immigration officials, police forces, home office bureaucrats and non-state actors. Several studies have examined the policies and tools of migration control available to state officials and contracted third parties and generally found a trend towards greater restrictiveness and securitisation with regard to irregular migration. However, relatively few analyse their actual implementation. This paper seeks to fill this gap, and to act as slight corrective by highlighting the relatively limited nature by which migration control was exercised. In fact, the practice of detecting, identifying, detaining and deporting irregular immigrants was far removed from the politicised discourse that surrounds it in the public sphere and academia, and instead influenced by pragmatism and nonchalance. However, in contrast to explanations that see lenience towards irregular migrants as motivated by economic factors, here the limits of migration control were directly related to officials’ sense of duty, as well as working conditions and a lack of institutional oversight. In this sense, the enhanced possibilities of control through new means of surveillance and data collection are in fact restricted because officials might just not be bothered to use them.     

The unseen protagonists. Ecuadorians’ daughters between Ecuador and Southern Europe

Scholars consider Latin American migration toward Europe to be a case study in the feminization of international migration. However, these studies have not focused on second-generation girls. Beginning from a gender and intergenerational approach, this paper stresses the agency role played by the reunified teenage daughters of Ecuadorian migrants both in Ecuador as well as in Southern Europe. The discussion is based on two transnational ethnographic studies conducted with Ecuadorian children aged 13–18 and their families in two medium-sized Southern European cities, Genoa and Seville, and in Ecuador between 2008 and 2011. First, the paper shows that girls carry out an essential task as caretakers in the transnational household, both in the point of origin and destination. Despite these responsibilities, they show a higher commitment to school, both in terms of time spent in school and their results. Secondly, it analyses how girls negotiate their role both inside and outside of the family, challenging the parents’ moral and sexual control strategies. The results disclose an identity struggle in the everyday lives of these girls: they participate in the migration project of the transnational family, but simultaneously they implement practices of resistance and renegotiation addressing the traditional division of gender roles.     

The Politics and Discourse of Migrant Return: The Role of UNHCR and IOM in the Governance of Return

This article proposes that there is added value in moving beyond isolated studies of return-related migration policies in order to consider both deportations and so-called assisted voluntary returns under the common heading of ‘state-induced returns’. Based on official documents and interviews with staff members of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organisation for Migration, it argues that international actors working in the field of migrant return engage in a type of task-sharing that goes beyond functional complementariness. With regard to the return of rejected asylum seekers, for instance, they legitimise each other's engagement as well as the overarching return objectives of governments, and are, therefore, involved in norm-building regarding the acceptability of state-induced returns. In addition to setting certain minimum standards regarding states' treatment of their immigrant population, international actors assist states in upholding control over them. Rather than merely replacing state-led regulation, international actors thus support domestic governments in reaching their migration control objectives, and thereby contribute to a stabilisation of state sovereignty in the governance of migration.     

Gendered mobilities and vulnerabilities: refugee journeys to and in Europe

ABSTRACT

Recent refugee flows across the Mediterranean have been heterogeneous despite often being represented as predominantly male. However, there exist relatively little disaggregated data for adults and children which would enable us to achieve a better understanding of gendered mobilities in refugee journeys and settlement. Furthermore, such mobilities are affected by notions of vulnerability applied to those in need of protection, which prioritise the mobility of some categories. These include single parents, pregnant women, the elderly and unaccompanied minors. Drawing on data collected by international organisations and national sources (Greece, Italy) as well as a project EVI-MED (Constructing an evidence base of contemporary Mediterranean migration) (2015–2107), this article argues for the need to generate more disaggregated data (gender, age, family status) reflecting complex gendered mobilities and experiences of vulnerability.     

The Global Forum on Migration and Development as a venue of state socialisation: a stepping stone for multi-level migration governance?

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) which has become one of the major global spaces for deliberations on migration but remains informal and non-binding. Drawing from literature on norm diffusion and state socialisation, it debates the role of the GFMD as a stepping stone for a more robust, multi-level and networked global migration governance by bringing together governments, global institutions, civil society and to a lesser degree the private sector. It is argued that the GFMD has the potential to socialise states in two ways that are conducive to establishing a multi-level global migration governance: First, states are exposed to discourses on migration as a truly global issue. The second way in which the GFMD process can socialise states is in the interaction with migrant civil society, thus potentially ‘blurring’ previously distant if not openly antagonistic relations. Since most states regard migration as one of their last ‘bastions of sovereignty’, the GFMD could provide a necessary first step as a trust-building measure. Providing participatory spaces and allowing agency for migrants and their organisations is not a mere optional feature but a crucial component for a truly multi-level and thus multi-stakeholder global migration governance.     

Activism of immigrants in vulnerable conditions and radical-left allies: a case study of Italy’s Struggle of the Crane

As interest in immigrant mobilisations in hostile national environments grows among migration scholars, the reasons why immigrants in vulnerable conditions engage in radicalised mobilisation at the local level and why they make alliances with controversial non-institutional radical-left actors need to be further explained. This study examines the conditions of mobilisation and radicalisation by undocumented immigrants in Brescia (a mid-sized city in Northern Italy) through the lens of a contentious moment that took place for two months in 2010, known as the Struggle of the Crane (Lotta della gru). It addresses two questions: why have undocumented immigrants in Brescia been mobilised to contentious political activism? And, why have they created partnerships with non-institutional radical-left organisations, rather than institutional non-state organisations, such as the Church and traditional trade unions? In addition to the hostile national context, discrimination and repression by local authorities triggered the motivation for mobilisation and nourished the radicalisation of the struggle and its endurance. Additionally, competing discourses and practices over immigrants’ access to rights and deservingness by multiple non-state actors played a key role in shaping alliances. The long-lasting alliance with the radical left since the 1990s was renewed and reinforced in 2010 by immigrants’ growing distrust towards institutional non-state actors.     

Imagining mobility: the prospective cognition question in migration research

Most migration research is focused on migrant experiences after mobility and settlement. We argue that empirical researchers would benefit from studying how cognitive migration, the narrative imagining of oneself inhabiting a foreign destination prior to the actual physical move, influences migration behaviour. This article notes a gap in our current understanding of the process by which individuals decide to cross international borders and offers an agenda for remedying this. The interdisciplinarity of migration research has not fully extended to social psychology or cognitive social sciences, where a dynamic research agenda has examined human decision-making processes, including prospection and the connections between culture and cognition. The study of socio-cognitive processes in migration decision-making has been largely overlooked because of the after-the-fact nature of data collection and analysis rather than an aversion to these approaches per se. We highlight a number of strategic findings from this diverse field, provide examples of migration scholarship that has benefited from these insights, and raise questions about the sides of migration process that have received insufficient attention. A more nuanced understanding of prospective thinking—imagining potential futures—can shed light on the classic puzzle of why some people move while others in comparable situations do not.     

Adapting to change in the higher education system: international student mobility as a migration industry

ABSTRACT

Of late there has been considerable interest in understanding international student mobility, and this has tended to focus on the perspective of the students who take part in this mobility. However, international students are part of a considerable migration industry comprised of international student recruitment teams, international education agents and other institutions selling an education overseas (such as the British Council in a UK context) and as yet there is little research which analyses these relationships. This paper investigates a series of interviews with international office staff to examine the methods they use to recruit international students, and in particular the relationship that they have with international education agents who work with them on a commission basis. It focuses on recent changes to the UK visa system which have led to a decline in the numbers of Indian students choosing to study towards a UK higher education. However, it also reveals that some universities have managed to avoid this trend. This paper investigates why this is the case, demonstrating that there is a need to think about the intersections between migration industries, visa regulations and international student mobility.     

Common agenda or Europe’s agenda? International protection,human rights and migration from the Horn of Africa

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between international protection, human rights and migration in the context of the EU Agenda on Migration which aims to ‘tackle migration upstream’ and reduce arrivals to Europe from the Horn of Africa (HoA) (Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Sudan). This initiative is underpinned by assumptions about the factors associated with migration from the region, including the idea that poverty, rather than political oppression and human rights abuse, is the principal cause. The article draws on interview and survey data with 128 people originating from HoA countries and arriving in Europe between March 2011 and October 2016 to show that conflict, insecurity and human rights abuse in countries of origin and neighbouring countries often drives decisions to move and/or move on. This evidence challenges the underlying premise of the EU Agenda. Moreover, a lack of coherence between Europe’s ambitions to control irregular migration and co-operation with rights-violating States threatens to create further political destabilisation which may ultimately increase, rather than decrease, outward migration from the region. Agreements between the EU and HoA countries should be re-centred to focus on compliance with international human rights standards rather than States’ willingness to prevent irregular migration to Europe.     

Regional migration governance – building block of global initiatives?

ABSTRACT

Regional institutions addressing mobility, asylum, migrant rights or migration control have proliferated all over the world and occupy an important space in recent UN initiatives to boost global cooperation on migration and refugees. Unlike Europe, where these different aspects of migration policy have come under the ambit of one institution, the European Union, regional initiatives in other parts of the world tend to emerge in different fora, with overlapping but incongruent memberships. Introducing a taxonomy of regional migration institutions, this article assesses regionalism's contribution to multilevel migration governance in two dimensions: the vertical interplay between regional and multilateral institutions on the one hand and the horizontal relationship between regional institutions on the other hand. The article concludes that regional (economic) integration frameworks like ASEAN, ECOWAS or MERCOSUR may prove fruitful anchors for more substantial regional migration governance.     

Providing social protection to mobile populations: symbiotic relationships between migrants and welfare institutions

Studies on migration and social protection have shown that a lack of access to formal welfare in receiving countries leads migrants to rely on their informal social networks for support. This paper argues that such clear-cut dichotomies between formal and informal social protection systems ignore the manners in which both welfare-state institutions and migrants work together at the interstices of the formal and informal to cater to national and transnational social protection needs. Based on empirical data collected during 14 months of multi-sited and partially matched-sample ethnography with Sudanese families across the Netherlands and Sudan, this paper investigates how migrants sometimes enter into symbiotic relationships with different welfare-state institutions, such as municipal offices, non-governmental organisations and other immigration institutions, which in turn rely on the support of these migrants to provide social protection to people who would otherwise escape their purview. While these interplays allow migrants, who are sometimes undocumented, to informally participate in the formal social protection system, such practices are embedded within power relationships that are at times risky, especially for migrants.     

Development Mobilities: Identity and Authority in an Angolan Development Programme

This ethnographic essay considers how international non-governmental organisations are able to make claims to authoritative knowledge about development work by offering the transnational mobilities of their staff members as evidence. I examine how one professional's biography—his trajectory from Angola to Britain and back again—was differentially presented to external donors and internal staff members as befitting the institutional needs of an international good governance intervention in Angola. These presentations reflect a commoditisation of the cosmopolitanism of professionals' histories in the service of development as a regime of mobility. I argue that, in this development regime, a global hierarchy prevents some individual professionals, particularly those from developing nations, from realising the same benefits of their cosmopolitan mobility as professionals from industrialised nations. While one of mobility studies' many strengths is that it highlights global interconnectedness, social scientists should not read equality in these interconnections but examine how patterns of transnational mobility may produce and reproduce global structures of inequality.     

Migration decision-making and migration industry in the Indonesia–Malaysia corridor

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the involvement of migration industry (MI) in the migration system of Indonesia and Malaysia. The two countries share an extensive border and have much in common in culture and history but they are very different in geographical size, population and economic development, the latter being a main cause for labour migration from Indonesia to Malaysia. The changing context of government policies generates new niches for migration services taken up by formal and informal intermediaries, thereby confronting migrants with a varied migration-decision field and thresholds during their migration process. Much of the migration is legal, but a large part of it also takes place outside the control of the national governments. While taking mental processes in migration decision-making as starting point, we analyse how the MI, by way of fostering, facilitating and controlling geographic mobility and localised employment, connects to the production and negotiating of three migration decision thresholds faced by migrants.