APMM Intervention at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the UN Network on Migration
Good evening from Asia!*
As we discuss workplans and ways forward in ensuring GCM implementation, migrant workers continue to experience vulnerabilities – somewhere in Asia crackdown on undocumented migrant workers was announced, migrant farm workers continue to receive subhuman wages and experience precarious work conditions, migrant workers, immigrants and refugees were affected greatly by the floods that hit places in Australia, the US and Asia.
Climate change does not only affect the people in their home countries but also migrants wherever they are at. And oftentimes, they are the sector least to be checked upon, attended and given support. Many migrant workers were themselves climate migrants whose farmlands and livelihoods back home were affected by climate change.
As we set out to develop indicators for the GCM implementation, migrant organisations and their advocates, particularly here in Asia Pacific, have taken steps to develop migrant observatorios where migrants, as primary stakeholders, will discuss and discern migrant indicators to the GCM – from stating whether their rights are protected across their migration journey, if their freedom of assembly, expression and speech will not put their jobs and visas at risk, if domestic work is recognized as work, to name a few.
In line with this, we recommend that we take concrete steps in partnering with migrants:
1. That migrant-led observatorios as well as new and upcoming migrant-led initiatives be welcomed and unconditionally supported in terms of technical support, funding or partnership, by members of the UN Network on Migration and government agencies;
2. Meaningful participation of migrants in the GCM process be realised concretely through invitation of migrants as speakers in multi-stakeholder processes and as contributors to the GCM workplan and future meeting agendas, opening government-led processes to migrant organisations and communities and ensuring their effective participation through facilitating language support, finances and safe space;
At the end of the day, meaningful and effective participation will be realised when the demands of migrants and their families are given, when the drivers or root causes of forced migration such as climate crisis, development aggression, poverty, economic inequity and neoliberalism – are addressed, and when the need to survive that forcibly separates us from our families is long history.
To measure migrant workers by virtue of their economic contribution is an injustice. Migrant workers are like us, people with families, with human rights, with dignity.
*Rey Asis, program coordinator for advocacy and campaigns of the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, gave his intervention during Session I (Key Thematic Priorities from the Network’s 2022-2024 Workplan) of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the UN Network on Migration