Globally, one in every 122 human beings is now either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum. This represents an increase of over a third in the last five years. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are currently 59.5 million people across the world who have been displaced, 19.5 million of these are refugees.
Migration is not a new phenomenon. History demonstrates that migration has existed for centuries as trade relations, the expansion of empires, wars, persecution and political turmoil has triggered human movement within regions, countries and beyond. Migration is a global phenomenon that pertains to a broader scope of the population than what the media typically refer to as ‘migrants. Many of these risks and opportunities are in some way economic but may overlap with issues of humanitarian concern, such as violence, war, disease, resource scarcity and the right to re-join families and communities. Migration can be facilitated or discouraged by policy, and policy often attempts to classify migration. This makes the definition of ‘migrant,’ ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’ difficult to objectively determine. Before we dive deeper into understanding Government functioning, it’s significant to understand the concept of push and pull factors:- push factors include the numerous reasons why migrants might be incentivised to leave their homes, such as humanitarian concerns, overpopulation and destruction of the local environment, wage stagnation, or job scarcity; pull factors are incentives for migrants to journey to a certain place and include working opportunities, benefits, ease of travel, the possibility of permanent settlement and the opportunity to reconnect with family and community networks.
Source : UNHCR
Migration policy inevitably requires coordination at the local, national and international levels, as well as between governments, NGOs, and private sector actors. This is most evident in Europe, as governments strive to harmonise national and EU-wide migration policy. However, areas such as common border policies and security cooperation have often been reactive rather than proactive. National politics can often hamper international cooperation, as leaders refuse to take an active role in managing regional issues out of domestic political concerns. This was the case even before the EU’s migration crisis reached a crescendo in the summer of 2015, as EU leaders either ignored or failed to act pre-emptively on warnings from NGOs of an impending surge in migration. Additionally, the EU’s lack of common asylum policy has also led to other countries feeling the effects of one country’s pull factors, for example when German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared “refugees welcome,” some perceived this as contributing to the migrant crisis as they felt that this sent an incorrect message to migrants, and led to a large influx of migration across numerous EU countries, including Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria, and Germany.
Source : FHI 360 Degrees
Usually an unplanned phenomenon, migration presents a variety of political opportunities to governments. Migration can present demographic solutions to ageing populations, boost growth, and foster greater cooperation across regions and countries to address migratory issues. Migration can provide economic benefits, both through adding demographic diversity and boosting competitiveness, as well as boosting consumption, provided that a degree of integration is ensured by the state. Germany has historically benefited from migration and stands to profit in the future as well. Waves of Turkish migrants compensated for a deficiency of manual labourers in the post-war decades in Germany, and migrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East might offset the negative economic trends of an ageing population over the coming decades if there is successful integration.
Source : America magazine
When it comes to technology solutions, Technology companies, both enterprise and consumer-focused, provide hardware, software and infrastructure to governments and international organisations that maintain databases of incoming asylum seekers and migrants. The three main IT systems that the technology sector has helped create in Europe are the Eurodac, the Schengen Information System and the Visa Information System. Given the sheer number of refugees, data points and technical capacity constraints, information management remains one of the biggest challenges. Additionally, most databases cannot easily communicate with other databases in different countries. Information on asylum seekers often sits in silos and is ineffective in piecing together a cohesive picture at the time of decision making. Furthermore, technical standards and platforms are not always consistent across organisations and agencies within and across countries, complicating the linking of systems. Therefore, to address the technical challenges, governments, along with the private sector need to work together to enable the linking up of systems, or perhaps create a new, centralised, all-encompassing database on asylum seekers, immigrants and visitors.
As a concluding remark, international solidarity and burden-sharing together with collaboration, communication and information dissemination are absolutely necessary for increasing coordination and clarity around the growing migratory issues the world is facing.
References
1. Managing the refugee crises by Global crisis center (article)
2. Crossing the digital divide by SHELLY CULBERTSON, JAMES DIMAROGONAS, KATHERINE COSTELLO,
SERAFINA LANNA (article)
3. Opportunities and Challenges of Emerging Technologies for the Refugee System by Roya Pakzad
About the author
Aysha Saleem is currently pursuing literature from Jesus and Mary College. She loves everything about music, cinema and desserts and devour into them all day everyday.
Through her enthusiasm for gender advocacy, she wishes to be a part of a change through her words which she believes are to bring a revolution.