Migration as a Part of Development Policy

Migration policy issues have to be coherently examined as a part of development policy. The importance of the interoperability of migration and development policy is also emphasized in several political comments of the European Union (Hague Programme, Strategy for Africa) Functional development policy and development cooperation have a strong impact on problems causing migration. They reduce poverty, improve people’s living conditions and environment, as well as advance health, equality and work and education possibilities. They also help prevent migration-related phenomena, such as human trafficking and human smuggling. However, migration-related problems have been emphasized in European discussions on migration policy. The EU should renounce the approach that concentrates on the threats and offer people legal migration channels. At the same time, it should ensure that the people who need protection are treated in a way provided in the international law. Currently, maybe the most visible migration-related topic concerns African migrants and their smuggling and treatment. The debate reveals how the reconciliation of development and migration policy fails, for example in the Mediterranean where human smuggling is a growing problem.

AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN MIGRATION POLICIES COLLIDE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN War, poverty and diseases are the main reasons for African migration. In many African countries, the income differences increase, the life expectancy falls and people become excluded. There are almost four million refugees in Africa and many times more those who have been forced to move because of the conditions, including natural disasters. Merely in Sudan, violence has driven six million people away from their homes. However, it is almost impossible for the people escaping from misery and violence to get into Europe. African and European migration policies collide with each other in the Mediterranean where hundreds of victims of smuggling and human trade are drowned every month. In Melilla, Spain, walls are built in order to prevent human smuggling. At the turn of the year, a third high barbed wire fence was erected beside the two old ones. In the news, we can see pictures of caught people’s property, bags and shreds of clothing tangled in the fences. The Moroccan police intensified frontier supervision on request of European countries and shot at the Africans trying to cross the fence, returned some of them to their home countries and ditched others in the Sahara desert. Migration caused by poverty cannot be restrained by reinforcing the frontier supervision or other control. One must focus on the root causes of the migration in the country of origin. Those illegal immigrants who reach Europe often face the cruel reality. They soon discover that they do not have a bright future ahead of them but a life as an illegal immigrant, which usually concludes with repatriation.