Statement to the 61st session of the UN General Assembly
Second Committee
Agenda item 55(b): International Migration and Development
19 October 2006
Delivered by the Hon Bruce Baird MP
Parliamentary Adviser
Permanent Mission of Australia to the United Nations
(Check against delivery)
Australia is pleased to take this opportunity to again address the topic of international migration and development.
Australia’s development owes much to our success in harnessing the benefits of migration. Since 1945, around 6 million migrants have settled in Australia and helped to build our nation. In an increasingly globalised world, we are also accepting larger numbers of temporary migrants. Migration to Australia has in turn benefited countries of origin, including developing countries, not least through providing an avenue for income generation.
We are pleased to have been recognised by the OECD as ‘an immigration country par excellence’, and our own migration experience convinces us that the benefits of migration - for countries of origin and countries of destination, as well as for migrants and the communities which receive them - are maximised when migration is well managed.
By well managed, we mean that temporary and permanent migration is facilitated through legal channels – that it is ‘legal, safe and orderly’, to adopt an expression used by the Chairperson of the High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, in her summary of that event. While border control is one facet of well managed migration, it is not just about protecting the legitimate interests of states. Facilitating legal migration also serves to protect the human rights of migrants, including by reducing opportunities for them to be exploited by people smugglers, traffickers and unscrupulous employers.
Managing migration, and in turn enhancing the developmental benefits, is not an easy task. It requires well designed national migration policies, backed by effective administrative capacity. It is for this reason that Australia considers maximising national capacities to be central to maximising the benefits from migration, including its development potential for both countries of origin and countries of destination.
We agree with the Global Commission on International Migration that the international community should support the efforts of states to formulate and implement national migration policies through the contribution of resources, appropriate expertise and training (recommendation 29, p.82). Where appropriate, policies to improve national migration capacity may be integrated into national development plans, including poverty reduction strategies.
Our extensive engagement with other states on migration issues over a number of years has taught us that states have different capacities to manage migration – and these capacities are not necessarily related to a state’s overall level of development. In addition to differing capacities, states also have differing migration policy goals based on their own economic, demographic, social and humanitarian objectives.
With our Bali Process co-chair Indonesia, we were pleased to hold a very successful event here in New York in the lead-up to the recent High Level Dialogue. As outlined during that event, the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime is an excellent example of how countries of origin, transit and destination, with a range of capacities and policy objectives, can cooperate on practical and achievable outcomes on migration-related issues of common interest.
We feel that regional approaches - focussing on specific matters of common interest - are the most effective form of international cooperation on migration, including its nexus with development. Within our region we are also involved in the Asia-Pacific Consultations on Refugees, Displaced Persons and Migrants (APC), the Pacific Immigration Directors Conference (PIDC) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Each regional process contributes in a different but important way to supporting migration-related capacity building in the region.
There was discussion during the High Level Dialogue in September about the UN Secretary-General’s proposal for a global consultative forum on international migration and development. Australia believes that the success of any new forum would depend upon whether it could add value to the work of existing bodies and processes.
If established, we believe that the forum should include a focus on capacity building in migration management, capacity being fundamental to the achievement of other benefits. It should also build upon the significant contributions of existing regional consultative processes.
Australia, for example, favours bringing together key actors from the regional processes throughout the world. This should facilitate an exchange of experiences, best practices and lessons learnt in policy and operational matters, that might be of real and practical benefit to states. Any such process would need to involve small-group, subject-specific exchanges among expert participants, allowing discussion in sufficient detail and depth to inform concrete state action on migration-related capacity building.
It would also need to draw on the considerable expertise of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has an unparalleled breadth and depth of expertise on migration issues. The IOM delivers a wide range of migration services all over the world, and also provides a valuable platform for dialogue among states- including through its own International Dialogue on Migration.
Finally, care must also be taken not to duplicate existing structures and activities, and to avoid placing too much demand on the time and resources of states, in particular developing states, many of which are already actively participating in regional migration fora, such as those operating in the Asia Pacific.
In short, a new global process will only add value to the many existing fora if it facilitates new and productive exchanges that assist in the formulation and implementation of migration-related policies – policies that may, as appropriate, be integrated into national development plans.
I thank you.