CONFERENCE STATEMENT

International Conference on Migration and Development[1]

 24-27 May 2006 – Development Academy of the Philippines

Tagaytay City, The Philippines 

The interest of stakeholders worldwide to the social and economic issues of international migration has grown in recent years. These stakeholders–migrants and their families, government agencies, non-government organizations and development agencies, business corporations, financial institutions, academic and research institutes, multilateral agencies, and grant-making foundations–cannot overlook this growing phenomenon anymore; migrants and their remittances are growing in number.

We, development workers, also recognize the duality of international migration – covering both its positive and negative effects. We should never overlook the problems confronted by documented and undocumented migrant workers and immigrants; migrants’ anxieties and woes in host countries and also those of their families and children in home countries; migrants’ rights that are continually disregarded; and the many other ill effects spawned by international migration.

But we should never lose sight of international migration’s development potential. It is perhaps now, more than ever, that international migration’s development potential should contribute significantly to the development of different countries, hoping to make emigration overseas an option rather than a necessity.

It is incumbent upon us to harness the development potential of international migration - and use this potential to minimize international migration’s socio-economic costs. Utilizing the development potential of migration to improve the countries of origin should be premised on the values of social justice, respect for human rights, and gender equality.

But we the 97 delegates of the International Conference on Migration and Development, coming from 24 countries, must put our minds and acts together. We thus declare our united resolve on the following:

1. The migration-and-development agenda must be promoted to all stakeholders. Groups within these major sectors must gradually integrate the multifarious issues of international migration (economic, social, rights-based) as part of their advocacies. Demanding a careful look at these migration and development issues should prevail at the United Nations High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development this September, and migrants should be a part of these discussions.
   
2. Programs furthering people’s awareness of the lives, conditions and rights of migrants (especially women), as well as services addressing the social costs they face, should propagate. These programs should cover both origin and receiving countries.
   
3. Commitments of governments to meet the Millennium Development Goals through their mandated allocations (e.g. 0.7% of GDP for development assistance), to cancel unjust debts of poor countries, and to ratify the United Nations Migrant Workers Convention should be monitored and pushed.
   
4. Governments should adopt rights-based, gender-sensitive mechanisms and programs in support of migrants’ savings, investments, and philanthropic funds directed at home countries. These governments should also provide that enabling environment for these mechanisms to prosper.  
   
5. These mechanisms to direct remittances and other resources of migrants for development should be promoted and encouraged.



5.1.         Microfinance institutions should provide migrants and their relatives with access to microfinance services and business training so that these services can help them use remittances productively, as well as bolster their entrepreneurial activities.

5.2.         Philanthropic funds and savings of migrants should be directed actively to productive investments in the local origin communities of migrants.  On this score, organizations of migrants abroad (such as hometown associations and migrant workers’ trade unions) must be encouraged to develop programs that bring about long-term benefits to their origin countries and also to host countries. Individual migrants should also be encouraged to join in the development effort by saving their earnings and investing in their home countries; the same encouragement also goes to development agencies in providing counterpart or matching resources. We hope that these philanthropic and investible resources owned by migrants will contribute to local development in origin countries. 

5.3.         Migrant investors to their home countries, while they have some capital to start-up and build on existing enterprises, should be provided technical assistance, business advice, and marketing support.

5.4.         Steps and innovative ways to reduce the costs of sending remittances should be pursued. Our efforts should generate higher remittance inflows at lower transaction costs to benefit migrants and their families.

5.5.         Brain gain activities by migrants to their origin countries should flourish. Meanwhile, developing countries, which provided skilled labor to developed countries, should be compensated to offset the problems developing countries face because of brain drain.   

 

6.     Attempts to converge and build up on existing initiatives by the various stakeholders–especially diaspora organizations and migrants’ advocacy groups–should continue in an effort to further maximize the development potential of international migration. Stakeholders can do this by developing organizational forms of cooperation at the regional, country, and institutional levels. Migrant organizations, for their part, should actively lobby in their host countries to make them part of development policy-making processes.

7.     Pilot and key interventions in different countries that will actualize the development potential of international migration should be done. Among these pilot initiatives are the pooled funds and counter-parting or matching of resources that will be directed to substantial economic interventions.

8.     These interventions should also be backed up by solid research and gender-disaggregated datasets, done both at the countries of origin and settlement of migrants, and that also carry the perspectives of migrants and their families.

9.     Overall, governments should enact domestic economic policies that provide conducive conditions to economic growth; that lead to designing development plans where the migration-and-development agenda is a part; and that disregards countries’ systemic dependence to international migration as a development strategy. All these conditions depend - to a large extent - on the quality of governance in different countries and regional bodies, as well as the roles and responsibilities of both sending and receiving countries located within and outside the region. Billion-dollar remittances by migrants can not contribute effectively to sustainable growth of their home countries if these conditions are absent.

Never should the voices of migrants be silenced in these initiatives, and migrants should even be actively involved. All these endeavors, we believe, should also directly address the root causes of international migration.  Harnessing this development potential from international migration, coupled with the involvement of migrants and their families and groups, can be part of the solution.