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Not too many folk in Ireland will be familiar with the United Nations International Migration Review Forum. Its main role is to monitor the Global Compact for Migration. The Forum met for the first time since 2022 in New York at the beginning of May and was attended by Irish officials.
The Compact was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in December 2018 and its role is to facilitate the “safe and orderly” movement of all migrants around the world.
It is important to distinguish what it does from the various UN agreements and bodies that deal specifically with refugees, notably the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The Migration Forum and the Global Compact are fundamentally concerned with removing barriers to economic migration and free movement.
Its ‘vision’ regards migration as “a source of prosperity, innovation and sustainable development in our globalized world.” It regards migration not only as a positive factor but as a “defining feature of our globalized world.” And because it has been defined as basically an unmitigated positive, the goal of global co-operation has to be “dispelling misleading narratives that generate negative perceptions of migrants.”
The clear implication is that no individual sovereign state ought to have any overriding right to decide itself whether mass global migration is a good thing or not and that it might necessitate states imposing their own limits and controls. The United Nations has decided that it is a good thing and the EU has taken most of that power away from the 27 member states.
The Global Compact recognises that there may be “legitimate concerns” and that theoretically “States may distinguish between regular and irregular migration,” but the 23 objectives of the Compact are centred on removing barriers to migration and to the full integration of migrants into the host countries.
Objective 6 which is concerned with labour migration is of particular interest here as it recommends the liberalisation of access to jobs. The Irish state and ‘stakeholders’ among the employers’ groups are already in the process of doing this as they consider expanding the work permit system.
There is also a commitment to regularising the “informal economy.” The consequences of that have already hit Spain where an expected 500,000 applications for an amnesty for illegal immigrants has already been overtaken by well over twice that number. The amnesty it would seem is largely being taken advantage of by illegal immigrants who have been working in irregular employment.
A notable feature of the work permits statistics here is that an increasing number of permits have been sought by immigrant owned businesses to employ other immigrants. A number of cases which have been heard at the Work Relations Commission involving immigrant bosses and workers from their country of origin would point to a certain level of abuse.
The Irish state is of course a signatory to the Compact and Minister for State for Migration, Colm Brophy, attended the most recent Migration Review Forum in New York which he addressed on May 7.
Brophy struck the usual ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ theme in his opening pitch where he stated that “Migration has been central to Ireland’s history – and our diaspora has played a vital role in Ireland’s development.”
Unfortunately, he noted that “A further challenge we face is that the public debate around migration is frequently characterised by the cynical use of misinformation and disinformation.” As part of the effort to combat this, “Ireland has been proud to partner with IOM (International Office for Migration) on the Global Migration Media Academy, which equips media professionals and students with the tools to identify reliable information and transmit it effectively.”
The IOM here employs around 100 staff from 30 different countries and receives millions every year in taxpayer funding, including through payments made as part of its role in monitoring the International Protection process including voluntary repatriation.
According to Brophy, naturally, “People are, of course, fully entitled to hold different and opposing views but it is important that debate is based on reality and evidence,” and that if the migration Aspidistra is be kept in the air that “it should be well-managed, and seen to be so.”
Hence the importance of the “taking steps to reduce irregular migration,” part of which the Minister sees as the implementation of the EU Migration and Asylum Pact.
That is something perhaps that those who focus on illegal immigration lose sight of. It is clear that those who wish to facilitate the “free movement of Capital and Labour” which is the fundamental basis of mass migration understand that crude efforts to dump large accommodation centres with disproportionate numbers of young men attracts opposition.
That opposition in Ireland and other countries has been little soothed by lectures on racism and diversity and the attempt to ‘demonise’ and ‘marginalise’ opponents even when those opponents are elected representatives and others who present clear factual evidence on the impact of mass immigration.
Hence the public relations driven campaign to be seen to increase deportations here and to tighten up on border controls across Europe. While such measures are relatively minor in relation to the overall scale of the problem, states like Ireland do seem serious about tackling the more overt abuses.
That does not mean that they are planning to curb the overall levels of immigration. Far from it.
The McEntee amnesty here and the Spanish amnesty are part of regularising illegal migrants while at the same time restricting or being seen to restricting further flows.
One of the ways of accomplishing that is not to reduce migration but – as set out in the objectives of the Global Compact – to turn illegal and asylum seeking economic immigrants into actual economic immigrants by extending and liberalising the paths for entry to millions of people as workers not as asylum seekers.
The extension of EU membership to Ukraine and other countries is also part of that process and the official population projections by the Central Statistics Office forecast that 90% of current and foreseeable population growth will be the direct consequence of ongoing flows of labour migrants.
While that process – driven mostly by the demands of overseas corporations based here – continues, alongside it we have more subtle efforts to integrate asylum seekers – including the 80%+ who fail to satisfy the criteria for residency – into society through the allocation of social housing and the speeding up of the granting of citizenship.
The maintenance of any semblance of national identity as has been the traditional foundation of European societies is quickly becoming an historical anachronism.
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