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	Migrants underwrite development through their remittances by François Crepeau Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants   October 2011   The Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, has urged the international community to embrace a new, balanced discourse on migration based on equal rights, non-discrimination and dignity, as well as on reality.   “Sealing the borders is a fantasy; migration happens and we have to live together,” Mr. Crépeau said in his first address* to the United Nations General Assembly. “Migration is in the DNA of mankind, is how we cope with environmental threats, with political oppression, but also with our desire to create a meaningful future for ourselves and our children.”   “We are all migrants and as such are contributing to the global economy and to global cultural diversity,” he noted. “How many of us live today in the city of birth of our four grandparents? Not many. We are all children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of migrants. Rare are those who have settled in one and the same place for numerous generations.”   The Special Rapporteur warned that a xenophobic discourse on migration is increasingly gaining ground in many countries, and pointed to a lack of a “push-back” and of a “credible political counter-discourse.” In his view, the difficulty of migrants, especially those in an irregular situation, to organize themselves and be able to convince relevant constituencies of their cause partly explains why anti-immigrant rhetoric continues to thrive.   “Irregular migration is not a crime. Crossing borders may be in violation of the law, but it is an abstract violation of it, since moving from one country to the other does not per se hurt or endanger anyone else,” Mr. Crépeau said. “Migration concerns us all and no State can escape from its obligations under international human rights law to protect and ensure respect for the human rights of migrants, irrespective of their migration status.”   “We often apply to foreigners, legal standards that we would abhor if they were applied to our sons and daughters,” the rights expert said expressing concern about administrative detention of migrants resulting in long detention periods without access to legal representation and review mechanisms.   Recalling that “dignity has no nationality”, the Special Rapporteur reiterated the shared responsibility of all for ensuring respect for the human rights of migrants. The principle of equal rights for all means that migrants must never be discriminated against because of their “foreignness.”   May 2011   Migrants underwrite development through their remittances.   UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has underlined the role of migrants in accelerating development through remitting funds regularly to their countries of origin, noting that their economic contributions to host societies are often overlooked.   “Let us not forget, entire communities subsist almost entirely on remittances,” Mr. Ban told the General Assembly’s thematic debate on Migration and Development.   “Across the developing world, remittances make it possible for families to get health care, send their children to school, and start up small businesses. Remittances underwrite development. They are a source for stability and social cohesion,” said the Secretary-General.   He observed that without the support of relatives working abroad, many more people might seek to migrate.   Mr. Ban said that migrants do not always fit into the stereotype of an unskilled group of people with low levels of education doing the so-called “3D” jobs – tasks that are considered “dirty, dangerous and difficult.”   “To the contrary, in many countries they are the best and the brightest: doctors, nurses, engineers and other highly educated professionals. These are a welcome addition to any society,” said Mr. Ban. “It is easy to see the negatives but it is much more difficult to appreciate the positives. And yet those positives ultimately overshadow the negatives,” he added.   Nearly two thirds of the world’s 214 million migrants live in wealthy countries, sending homes more than $300 billion in remittances every year, an amount that dwarfs international aid flows, the Secretary-General noted, reiterating his call to governments to keep their countries’ borders open and not to restrict migration unduly.   He condemned what he described as a growing business in human trafficking, especially the trade in women and children for sex.   “The global economic crisis has compounded all these problems. Increasingly, we see extremist politicians targeting migrants and migration to deflect attention from national problems. This creates more discrimination… more fear… and more problems,” said Mr. Ban. “We have to fight these trends with reason and common sense.”   Nov 2010   UN human rights chief tells States to end discrimination against migrants.   The top United Nations human rights official has told States to end the criminalization of irregular migrants and to reduce barriers to human mobility by expanding channels for legal migration, deploring the discrimination, abuse and exploitation many migrants are subjected to.   “Although States have legitimate interests in securing their borders and exercising immigration controls, such concerns do not trump the obligations of the State to respect the internationally guaranteed rights of all persons,” Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at the 4th Global Forum on Migration and Development.   She said that human rights violations against migrants are often closely linked to discriminatory laws and practices, and to deep-seated attitudes of prejudice and xenophobia.   “The principle of non-discrimination is fundamental in international human rights law and runs across all international human rights instruments inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, notably the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” Ms. Pillay said.   She said that there are an estimated 214 million people – about three per cent of the world’s total population – recognized as international migrants, while the number of internal migrants is estimated at 740 million.   Those people, Ms. Pillay said, contribute to economic growth and human development both in countries of origin and destination, noting that officially recorded remittance flows to developing countries alone are estimated to reach $325 billion this year, according to the World Bank, 3 times the amount of international development aid.   Oct 2010   With most of the world’s estimated 200 million migrants facing discrimination in housing, Raquel Rolnik, the Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, told reporters that in her work, she has seen first-hand the “situations of migrant workers living in metal containers without electricity or water or services,” as well as others sleeping in bathrooms, closets or the kitchen.   They are also often times subject to violence, sexual harassment and forced confinement, she told reporters after briefing the General Assembly on her latest report.   Migrants are sometimes obliged to live in unserviced, unplanned settlements within or on the outskirts of cities because of the impossibility of accessing public housing or due to discrimination they face in the private market, the expert said.   The “inadequate and often appalling” housing conditions migrants face can only be redressed through a “truly human rights-based approach which is based on international human rights law that protects the rights to adequate housing of international migrants and prohibits discriminatory, unfair and degrading treatment,” she stressed.   Migration, Ms. Rolnik said, is seen as a security issue by government and is handled by law enforcement agencies. Barriers on the free flow of people “don’t contribute to reduce the number of migrants, but they certainly contribute to increase their vulnerability to discrimination” and other crimes, such as smuggling and trafficking. Visit the related web page
	The Disintegration of the Public Sector: Recasting Public Conversation by Tony Judt New York University USA   One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others. We are familiar with complaints about the ‘atomizing’ impact of the internet: if everyone selects gobbets of knowledge and information that interest them, but avoids exposure to anything else, we do indeed form global communities of elective affinity—while losing touch with the affinities of our neighbors.   In that case, what is it that binds us together? Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments.   In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay.   This problem highlights a misleading aspect of globalization. Young people are indeed in touch with likeminded persons many thousands of miles away. But even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space—we vote where we live and our leaders are restricted in their legitimacy and authority to the place where they were elected. Real-time access to likeminded fellows half a world away is no substitute.   Think for a minute about the importance of something as commonplace as an insurance card or pension book. Back in the early days of the welfare states, these had to be regularly stamped or renewed in order for their possessor to collect her pension, food stamps or child allowance.   These rituals of exchange between the benevolent state and its citizens took place at fixed locations: a post office, typically. Over time, the shared experience of relating to public authority and public policy— incarnated in these services and benefits—contributed mightily to a tauter sense of shared citizenship.   This sentiment was crucial to the formation of modern states and the peaceful societies they governed. Until the late 19th century, government was simply the apparatus by which an inherited ruling class exercised power. But little by little, the state took upon itself a multitude of tasks and responsibilities hitherto in the hands of individuals or private agencies.   Examples abound. Private security agencies were replaced (and disbanded) in favor of national or municipal police forces. Private mail services were made redundant by the development of national post offices. Mercenaries were forced out of business, replaced by national conscript armies.   Private transportation services did not disappear—retreating instead into luxury provisions for the very wealthy—but were displaced as the primary means of communication by publicly-owned or regulated buses, trams, trolleys and trains..   Today, to the extent that we even acknowledge shared social obligations and claims, these are characteristically met in private. The mails are increasingly beleaguered by the private delivery services which cream off profitable business, leaving the Post Office to subsidize costly delivery and collection services for the poor and in remote areas.   Buses and trains are in private hands, festooned with advertisements and garishly decorated in loud colors that announce the identity of their owners rather than the service they provide. The arts—in Britain or Spain, for example—are funded by the proceeds of privately administered lotteries, raising money from the poorer members of the community through the encouragement of legalized gambling.   Football Leagues across Europe have devolved into ultrawealthy Super Leagues for a handful of privileged clubs, with the remainder mired in their poverty and irrelevance. The idea of a ‘national’ space has been replaced by international competition underwritten by ephemeral foreign funders, their coffers recouped from commercial exploitation of players recruited from afar and unlikely to remain in place very long.   Armies, especially the American army, are increasingly dependent for logistical support, material provision and transportation security upon private services—the latter furnished at great expense by companies hiring mercenaries on short-term contract: at the last count, 190,000 ‘auxiliary’ private employees were ‘assisting’ the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.   The police once incarnated the modern state’s ambition to regulate social intercourse and monopolize authority and violence. Less than two centuries after their first appearance, they are being displaced by private security companies whose function it is to serve and secure the ‘gated communities’ that have sprung up in our cities and suburbs over the past three decades.   What exactly is a ‘gated community’ and why does it matter? In its initial American usage—now enthusiastically applied in parts of London and elsewhere across Europe, as well as throughout Latin America and in wealthy Asian entrepots from Singapore to Shanghai—the term denotes people who have gathered together into affluent subdivisions of suburbs and cities and fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the rest of society.   Before the rise of the modern state, such communities were commonplace. If they were not actually fortified in practice, they certainly represented a distinct private space, its boundaries well-marked and secured against outsiders. As modern cities and nation states grew up, so these fortified enclaves—often owned by a single aristocrat or limited private company –blended into the urban surroundings. Their inhabitants, confident in the security now offered to them by the public authorities, abandoned their private police forces, dismantled their fences and confined their exclusivity to distinctions of wealth and status. As recently as the 1960s, their reappearance in our midst would have seemed quite bizarre.   But today, they are everywhere: a token of ‘standing’, a shameless acknowledgment of the desire to separate oneself from other members of society, and a formal recognition of the state’s (or the city’s) inability or unwillingness to impose its authority across a uniform public space. In America one typically finds gated communities in far-flung suburbs. But in England as elsewhere, they have sprung up at the heart of the city.   * Visit the link below to read the complete essay. Visit the related web page
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