Nitin Desai: Managing migration

The policy dialogue on movements of people and capital is scattered in the global system

Outsourcing and migration are a response to the same phenomenon""the fact that the people who can best provide a service do not live in the countries where the service is in demand.

In one case the work moves to where the workers are and in the other the workers move to the work. Outsourcing is treated as a trade transaction and is subject to at least some of the protection afforded by multilateral trade rules.

But the movement of workers has no such protection. Every country is free to do what it wants.

The movement of people has been expanding but it is not necessarily the movement of long-term migrants. The big change is in the movement of people for temporary provision of services, for tourism, and for business dealings.

Every day, roughly two million people cross national boundaries. But despite this expansion we do not have anything that could be described as a global policy regime for migration.

There is a growth of interest as is evident in the Global Commission on Migration, which has been set up where India is represented by Mr N K Singh. This year's UN Economic and Social Survey, which has migration as a special theme, is another pointer of growing interest.

There are virtually no agreed standards and norms on migration policy at a global level. When it comes to trade, we have a set of global rules.

For instance, the rule of non-discrimination so that a country cannot discriminate between two suppliers, one from one country and another from another country.

Or the rule of national treatment, which is that once you have permitted a supplier to come into your country, that supplier is entitled to the same treatment as a domestic supplier.

Or the rule of least trade restrictiveness so that if there is a reason why trade has to be restricted, then it must be done in a manner that is least restrictive.

But when it comes to migration to provide a service neither the principle of non-discrimination, nor the principle of national treatment nor the principle of least restrictiveness applies.

India has been particularly vocal on the so-called Mode IV, the movement of persons to provide a service, in the GATS negotiations. The present regime for this is discriminatory.

A software supplier from India, the Philippines, or Costa Rica, who is competing for a contract, let us say in the United States, is not competing on the same basis as the supplier from Europe. Why?

Because he will face a more restrictive visa regime to go and supply that service in the United States, whereas the person from Europe will not necessarily face that. That is discrimination between suppliers from different countries.

Developing countries led by India and some others have naturally focused a great deal of attention on this question in the Doha Round negotiations. But the growing interest in migration involves much more than this. India, in particular, has a special concern as a large sender and a large receiver of international migrants.

First, there is the interest in the diaspora-development connection in the developing countries. The new NRI ministry and the hoopla around the Pravasi Bharati jamboree are examples. There is of course a connection because of remittances.

The UN Survey of this year estimates that these amount to around $80 billion, much more than the flow of aid. But the diaspora connection is more than that. Today's movement of people is very different from the 19th-century movement.

When the Indians migrated in the 19th century, mostly as indentured labourers, they cut off all connections and all ties with the home country. But the Indians migrating today to other parts of the world maintain those ties and it has an impact on India.

For instance, the boom in software exports from India has been facilitated by the fact that many of the people who are placing orders for software services abroad happen to be earlier migrants who left India when the stagnation of the Indian economy had starved them of opportunities.

It is one example of the connection but there are many other examples that one could think of in trade, in the movement of technology, in culture. Every country has special schemes for the non-resident people from their country who live abroad.

In the developed countries, the upsurge of interest in issues of migration policies arises from a different strand. It arises partly from the asylum problem in Europe.

Part of the reason for that problem is that countries do not always face up squarely with what their labour needs actually are and have an immigration policy consistent with these requirements.

In many cases the flow of asylum seekers is really a back door way of plugging gaps in the labour market. Asylum seekers are a problem precisely in the countries which do not have a policy of planned in-migration to meet labour shortages.

In fact, with an aging population these gaps will worsen and the dependence of Europe and Japan on migrant labour will increase. Unless these countries re-examine their migration policies, unplanned migration through asylum requests and illegal movements will continue and increase.

One common response is what I am going to call boutique migration, which is the business of going out and saying "I am interested in getting nurses, in getting software engineers but nobody else", and mostly, of course, these skilled migrants come from developing countries.

This boutique migration is focused on skills which are perhaps in short supply everywhere, including in the developing country, like doctors or software engineers or highly skilled personnel.

But there is growing concern as to whether there needs to be a policy regime at a global level, if nothing else, to compensate the countries which have invested so hugely in their training and then lose them to other countries.

Clearly there is a need for some semblance of a global regime that will set some minimal norms and standards. The movement of persons and the movement of capital must be treated more equally in global rules.

Yes, I know the argument that the movement of people is somehow more culturally disruptive. But is it more disruptive than the movement of capital to establish a McDonald's or a Kentucky Fried Chicken?

The reality today is that the policy dialogue on these issues is scattered in different places in the global system.

If it is remittances, it will be the IMF; if it is trade, it will be the WTO or UNCTAD; the demographics and statistics get discussed in the Commission on Population, the refugee and asylum issues in the UNHCR, trafficking is handled by the UN Office in Vienna; the whole issue of the rights of migrants is very much on the agenda of the ILO and the Commission on Human Rights and, of course, the IOM, which was started to facilitate the movement of stateless persons but which has a growing involvement in the policy issues.

What we require now is a more systematic and more honest analysis of domestic migration policies and a coherent global dialogue which does not treat all of these issues as separate issues to be discussed in separate places but brings them together for a more systematic negotiation of standards and principles. Our failure to do this is one of the worst gaps in the management of globalisation.

(The author is former under secretary general, United Nations, and before that former chief economic advisor in the finance ministry)