How can undocumented minors in the United States secure access to higher education?

Deportations are becoming a hot subject. They are actually happening too often among young undocumented migrants who were brought by their parents when they were little, and could not choose whether to come to the land of the American Dream or be left behind.

The estimated number of undocumented immigrants increased from 3 million in 1980 to 11.9 million in 2008, a four-fold increase. The increase in the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. coincides with an increase in the number of deportations, or removals, done by the federal government. According to the Department of Homeland Security, nearly 359,000 immigrants were removed from the USA in 2008, up from 18,000 in 1980.

Alberto Rodríguez from San Diego is one of those kids, the so-called 1.5 generation by professors Rubén Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes. The 1.5-generation refers to those who immigrate early in life, before or during their early teens. They earn the label the “1.5-generation” because they bring with them characteristics from their home country but continue their assimilation and socialization in the new country. Their identity is thus a combination of new and old culture and tradition.

Alberto was just 5 years old when he was taken to San Diego, California. His parents crossed the border through Tijuana, without documents and brought him along in the same way. Minors in the United States, like Alberto, can only obtain permanent status through their parents; there is no independent method to accomplish this. If a child is brought into the country without immigration visas there is no method for becoming a legal resident. Returning to their country of birth would not guarantee a path to legal status. Attempts to return are often too difficult, with roadblocks such as ten-year bans on re-entering the U.S.

Alberto had not realized his undocumented status until he was in High School. He wanted to apply for a scholarship to attend university more than anything else in life. That was when all of a sudden he realized that he could not apply for the so-wanted scholarship due to his irregular status.

Over three million students graduate from U.S. high schools every year. A group of approximately 65,000 are undocumented. Just like Alberto. These youth have lived in the United States for most of their lives and want nothing more than to be recognized for what they are, Americans.

Nevertheless, there is hope.

The DREAM Act
The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (The “DREAM Act”) is a piece of proposed federal legislation in the United States that was first introduced in the United States Senate on August 1, 2001, and most recently re-introduced there and in the United States House of Representatives on March 26, 2009. This bill offers more than 2 million young undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, a move that will re-open the debate on the issue ahead of the November mid-term elections.

On 21stSeptember 2010, Congress yet again failed to pass the DREAM Act – although this is not yet the end of the story. President Barack Obama has been under fire in the Hispanic community for failing to keep his promise to tackle immigration reform in the first year of his presidency. Some fear that Latino voters will stay home in November because of this latest inaction on an issue close to their hearts.

So what are the details of the bill? According to the 2009 version of the senate bill, DREAM Act beneficiaries would need to:

Have proof of having arrived in the United States before age 16.
Have proof of residence in the United States for at least five consecutive years since
Have their date of arrival compliant with Selective Service.
Be between the ages of 12 and 35 at the time of bill enactment.
Have graduated from an American high school or obtained a GED (high school equivalency tests).
Be of “good moral character”
During the first six years, the immigrant would be granted “conditional” status, and would be required to graduate from a two-year community college or complete at least two years towards a 4-year degree, or serve two years in the U.S. military. After the six-year period, an immigrant who met at least one of these three conditions would be eligible to apply for legal permanent resident status. During this six year conditional period, immigrants would not be eligible for federal higher education grants such as Pell grants, but they would be able to apply for student loans and work study. If all the conditions were met at the end of the 6-year conditional period, they would be granted permanent residency, which would eventually allow them to become U.S. citizens.

However if the educational or military service requirement within the six-year time period, was not meet, their temporary residence would be revoked and they would be removable. Being convicted of a major crime, or drug-related infraction would also automatically remove the six-year temporary residence status and they would be subject to deportation.

Making the Act reality: the odds in favour and the odds against
According to the New York Times, “Senate Democrats seemed more intent on talking about the [DREAM] Act than on passing it”. The Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid (Nevada), is introducing the bill. Reid has a personal interest in the issue, facing a tight race in Nevada that could depend on the Latino vote. By declaring his desire to attach the DREAM Act to a major military bill, Harry Reid sought to remind Hispanic voters that most Democrats supported the immigration measure. The military bill was blocked on September 21st, and it is unclear that Mr. Reid has enough votes, even among Democrats, to advance the Dream Act any further.

The Democratic Party used it as a no-lose situation. Now that the Republicans voted against, the Democrats are hoping this will cement their position as the party of the Latinos, the fastest-growing demographic group in the US. Obama urged Latino leaders to get out and vote in November. He portrayed the Democrats as their friends and the Republicans as their enemies. He told Latinos not to forget “who is standing with you, and who is standing against you”.

Moreover, the Pentagon is among the backers of the bill since the United States military have been struggling to maintain levels of recruitment, from 2005, in the face of troop demands in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere; events which were described as a “crisis”. Immigrants who do not have a “green card” are not allowed to enlist.

Several senior officials at the Department of Defense have spoken in favor of promising legal status to members of the military as a means of boosting recruitment. Passage of the DREAM Act is one of the Department of Defense’s official goals for helping to maintain “a mission-ready, all-volunteer force.” As a political tactic by the Democrats, the bill has been placed onto legislation that approves defense spending for next year, which makes it harder for the Republicans to obstruct it.

Democrats have a majority in the Senate. They need to secure 60 of the 100 votes to prevent Republicans blocking the bill. If the Defense spending approval is held up, the Pentagon will have to seek emergency funding elsewhere.

What is the future for the DREAM Act?
The Dream Act is a coherent, honest and very much needed bill to be passed at the U.S. Congress. This coming November the Congress resumes activities and it will be again on the discussion table.

Barack Obama promised during this presidential run that he would introduce legislation to provide the estimated 12 to 20 million undocumented immigrants, most of them Latinos, with a route to citizenship but has so far failed to deliver. Politicians should keep in mind that promoting the Dream Act is not only about their careers, and getting more Latino voters. This is about the life and education of 2 million students like Alberto Rodriguez who want to have access to a higher education in the country that saw them grow up.

“Without the Dream Act, undocumented students are relegated to a mere shadow”.

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Arizona’s SB 1070 law – a serious challenge for migrants rights in the USA

SB 1070 enables police officers to lawfully stop, detain or arrest a person whom they have “reasonable suspicion” to be unauthorized, in order to determine the person’s immigration status “when practicable”. However SB 1070 is not only a step-back for race relations in the US, but also puts the president in a real dilemma about delivering on his original promises towards much wider immigration reform.

I used to live at UCI’s campus, one of the several public universities of California located in Orange County. One could not imagine a single day when the streets were dirty or full of tree leaves. Every morning Hispanic workers would be cleaning the streets of Southern sunny California to keep all of us in a bubble full of guilty cleanness.

I very well remember being stopped by the police whilst driving several times, under any pretext; my Mexican heritage looks definitely would help in the cop’s decision to stop me and ask for my documents. Just like it happened to me, in Arizona nearly one-in-ten (9%) Hispanics said they had been stopped by the police or other authorities and asked about their immigration status.

It has now been a month since the state of Arizona passed and signed a law that authorizes local police to check the immigration status of anyone they reasonably suspect of being in the United States illegally.

The law SB 1070, signed on April 23rd 2010 by Governor Jan Brewer (a Republican), has generated a sharp debate between advocates who say it is needed to combat illegal immigration and opponents who say it is an infringement on civil liberties and an invitation towards racial/ethnic profiling of Hispanics by the police. Some say the law will create tensions between police and Hispanics that will hinder general law enforcement.

SB 1070, as amended, enables police officers to lawfully stop, detain or arrest a person whom they have “reasonable suspicion” to be unauthorized, in order to determine the person’s immigration status “when practicable”.

Even Arizonans could sue the police to force them to comply with the law. This means that if a member of the public sees “somebody” looking suspicious (hence Latino), and a police officer does not stop him/her to ask for immigration documents, it is lawful to sue the cop for not executing his/her job carefully.

Arizona’s immigrants must now carry proof of their legal status, and show IDs to police officers who suspect they might be illegally in the US; violators can be fined $2,500 or jailed up to six months.

According to Pew Hispanic Center tabulations from the 2008 American Community Survey, there are 2 million Hispanics in Arizona, representing 30% of the state’s population. One-third (33%) of Arizonan Hispanics are foreign born. Nationally, there were an estimated 11.9 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2008. Three-quarters (76%) are Hispanic.

The SB 1070 law will take effect on July 29th 2010. Employers who knowingly or intentionally hire unauthorized workers can lose their state and local business license. Therefore they are forced to use the federal E-Verify system to check the legal status of new recruits.

Recent national polls – one by Gallup, the other by Pew Hispanic Center – have found that a majority of Americans strongly approve of the state’s immigration crackdown. In fact, some even think it doesn’t go far enough.

Supporters say the legislation is needed because the state can no longer cope with illegal immigrants.The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that approximately 500,000 undocumented immigrants resided in Arizona in 2008. Nearly all (94%) of these undocumented immigrants are from Mexico. Moreover, approximately 10% of Arizona’s workforce is undocumented.

But opponents of the legislation say it will lead to victimisation of anyone who looks or sounds Latino. The head of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza, said: “We consider the bill clearly discriminatory against immigrants, and especially against immigrants from Latin America.”

Legislators in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania have already introduced similar bills to the Arizona law. In Arizona itself, the trend continues. Another law was signed by governor Brewer on 11th of May 2010, prohibiting ethnic studies at Arizona universities, especially those focused on “Mexican-American studies”.

This is getting even more absurd. It is one thing to racially profile people through laws, (already outrageous), but another to try to annihilate academic programs that educate future policy makers that will try to integrate migrants into society by knowing their cultural origins. Sadly, the fact of trying to keep people in ignorance as an instrument of domination is nothing new.

SB 1070 is not only a step-back for race relations in the US, but also puts the president in a real dilemma about delivering on his original promises towards much wider immigration reform, including some kind of amnesty for the 13 million undocumented migrants – mostly Mexicans – in the country.

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Policing the US-Mexico border: Is Border enforcement the real solution to stop unwanted migration?

For decades narcotraffic, human smuggling and undocumented migration have been a sore spot in the U.S.-Mexico border relations. The only solution I have ever observed, read and experienced on my own is a massive increase of border enforcement from the U.S. side. But is this really a proper response to a much more complex set of issues?
August 2, 2010

The U.S. government has steadily been raising its annual budget for the Mexico-US border – it leapt from about $250 million a year in the early 1990s to $1.6 billion a year in the early 2000s; yet at the same time there was a doubling of the undocumented population, from an estimated 6 million to 12 million. By 2008, the budget of the former Immigration and Naturalisation Service – INS, since 2003 part of the department of homeland security, stood at $35 billion. From 1986-2008, the number of border-patrol personnel increased from 3,700 to 18,000, and its budget from $151,000 million to $7.9 billion. And still, the gains, if any, were ambiguous.

Border control has not worked. No matter how big these states’ guns and border-control budgets, they have lost credibility – both with their citizens and with traffickers (who have, if anything, vastly increased their operations). The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that criminal syndicates made $29 billion in 2006 on human trafficking for the sex industry, evidently a sharp increase over prior years.

Border Patrol agents have swelled from 11,000 in 2004 to 20,000 today. Last year they caught 541,000 people, down from 805,000 in 2008 – patrolling one of the hottest border spots. The numbers are rising again this year—by 4%. But it seems likely that economic effects dwarf enforcement effects, since the worst the Border Patrol agents can do to those who aren’t running guns or drugs is deposit them back on the Mexican side, hence they are free to try again tomorrow.

So many weapons definitely bring along adverse consequences such as the assassination of two fellow Mexicans on the U.S.-Mexico border in less than two weeks: Anastacio Hernandez, 32, who had lived since the age of fourteen in San Diego, an agent shocked him with a stun gun and died hours later while being deported to Mexico.

The second one, Sergio Adrian Hernandez, 15, who was not even a migrant, was actually shot on the Mexican side of the border.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon condemned it as a “truly unacceptable violation” that involved “torture.” “A death with that degree of violence is a truly unacceptable violation.”

If it was not enough, right after the second dreadful event, the White House announced that it would send 1,200 troops to the U.S.-Mexican border after Senate Republicans told president Obama that immigration reform depended on border security.

It was informed that Obama would request $500 million in supplemental funds for “enhanced border protection” and deploy up to 1,200 National Guard troops to provide surveillance support and counter-narcotics enforcement.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), a senior leading member of the GOP conference and Obama’s 2008 rival for the presidency, told the president in no uncertain terms that immigration reform could not pass before action was taken to secure the 1,900-mile border.

Advocates have said that if Obama does not seriously engage Republicans on immigration reform in the next few weeks, the possibility of passing broad legislation this year will evaporate.

Obama is evidently under pressure by Republicans and centrist Democrats such as Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.) who affirmed that is necessary to secure the border before they agree to back a comprehensive reform measure.

New strategies and new technologies have significantly raised the probability of getting caught, but this stops almost no one. Migrants just try again—often in more remote border areas where the United States has fewer agents and less sophisticated defenses.

According to the Mexican Migration Field Research Program at the University of California, San Diego (MMFRP has conducted surveys for over five years in Mexican towns with high rates of undocumented migration to the United States), 700 miles of fencing already on the southern border – with a “triple fence” in some areas – does not deter people from crossing into the United States. Potential migrants were more worried by extreme temperatures, gangs and the inability to find work here than by a wall.

It was also found that 100 percent of the migrants surveyed eventually succeeded in getting into this country without documents. Therefore tougher border controls are unlikely to make a significant dent in the number of irregular migrants.

Politicians need to take into account the outcomes of such a policy before wasting more tax dollars on a measure that has not worked effectively. All these resources are being spent in order to control extremely powerless and vulnerable people who mostly only want a chance to work.

Clearly, the immigration system is broken, and enforcement alone—whether on the border or in the heartland—isn’t going to fix it, that is why the proposal of a guest-worker program that would divert the illegal influx into legal channels and legalize up to almost 13 million undocumented laborers already in the country is such an important development. This should form part of a sustainable and progressive immigration policy.

There is a substantial need for the U.S. to be more honest about its reliance on low-skilled foreign (and undocumented) labour and this should be reflected more on its immigration policy.

Massive deportation, border security, war against terror, manipulated fear towards people who look and believe differently from us. There is something wrong here. Should we continue in this denial state towards immigration, let massive deportations happen, and criminalize people who just want to work in another country for a more decent salary than the one offered in their homeland communities?

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The Global Forum on Migration and Development 2010 – what scope for securing migrants’ rights? (Part II)

Every year 400 to 500 migrants die of dehydration, drowning or other causes related to illegal entry to the United States. The border buildup has encouraged more illegal immigrants to employ professional smugglers, whose success rate is higher than that of individuals. Their presence in the United States has fueled an ever more strident anti-immigrant backlash, which helped to scupper Congress’ attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. Border enforcement has been stepped up, workplace raids have increased and deportations have more often been carried out in inhumane ways.

According to Wayne Cornelius, Director Emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego: “tougher enforcement has also discouraged many undocumented workers from returning to their homelands for occasional visits for fear of getting caught reentering the U.S. Fewer people coming and going across the border means fewer apprehensions”.

There is an urgent need to approach this problem at an international level. Immigration is a serious policy issue affecting fundamental human rights and economic interests.

The Global Forum on Migration and Development is an annual meeting of different governments that aims to reflect a progressive acknowledgement of the limits of a strictly national approach to migration, questions and implications at global level in an intergovernmental framework. In view of the social implications of these issues, civil society representatives have also been involved from the outset in this process.

The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) started by recommendation of the UN High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in New York, back in September 2006. Three meetings have taken place with not very remarkable results; in Brussels (2007), Manila (2008) and Athens (2009). In 2010, the Global Forum will be held in Mexico.

Undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo headed the Mexican delegation that participated in the 2009 GFMD meeting in Athens. The delegation consisted of officials from the National Institute of Migration (INAMI in Spanish), including Commissioner Cecilia Romero, as well as from the Ministries of Social Development and Foreign Affairs.

At the Athens meeting, more than 500 delegates from 130 countries addressed issues such as the interrelationship between international migration and the Millennium Development Goals and the integration and circulation of migrants. The forum was inaugurated by Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou; also present was UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Undersecretary Gómez Robledo and Ambassador Han-Maurits Schaapveld of the Netherlands co-chaired the session entitled “Engaging diasporas and migrants in development policies and programs: Their role? Their constraints?” that discussed the need to intensify the exchange of best practice between the countries of origin and destination of migrants that are interested in engaging the diasporas in activities that promote development.

During the closing ceremony, Ambassador Gómez Robledo received the presidency of the forum, given that Mexico will host the fourth GFMD meeting in 2010. Mexico hopes to contribute to enriching the forum and sharing the experience, vision and perspective of the region on the migratory phenomenon. He declared that “Mexico is interested in promoting alliances and/or partnerships based on shared responsibility and international cooperation that enable the countries of origin and destination to benefit from the valuable contributions made by migrants”.

Ambassador Robledo stressed that Mexico will seek to further the discussion of circular emigration in the fourth GFMD meeting. He lamented that a global consensus is lacking on the challenges of migration and development, and said that Mexico believes that a process of this sort should have some type of link with the UN, the most important universal organization, because it must have a degree of legitimacy.

The Ambassador also said that the discussion on migration and development becomes even more important during a financial crisis that affects both the countries of destination and those of origin, at a moment when organized criminal groups dedicated to smuggling persons have been demonstrated to have devastating power.

INAMI Commissioner Cecilia Romero is hopeful of establishing foundations for a new conceptualization of migration. She emphasised that Mexico would seek to open a discussion on the management of migration and the responsibilities of the nations involved in the phenomenon.
Why Mexico is interested in hosting the Global Forum on Migration and Development?

Facts:

* More than 6,500 drug-related killings made 2009 the bloodiest year since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels in late 2006 and deployed 45,000 soldiers to fight organized crime. There have been more than 20,000 murders since 2001, more than half in the past two years. Drug dealers are coordinated with human smugglers (polleros or coyotes) to let them cross through their zones.
* U.S. immigration officials have deported 672,593 immigrants because of criminal convictions since 1997 – after Congress passed legislation -, making deportation a mandatory penalty for a long list of crimes, including minor, non-violent offenses committed years before the laws went into effect. Many of those deported arrived in the US as children and were lawful permanent residents who had lived legally in the country for decades. According to the Pew Hispanic Center there are 3.1 million U.S. citizen children with at least one undocumented parent living here.
* For 13 years the U.S. government has been spending $20 billion-plus in the project to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, with more than 3,700 migrant deaths on the US-MEX. Border.

Which topics can Migrants’ Rights Network bring to the table at the GFMD 2010?

Many immigrants share problems, adversities or factors that push them to leave their countries and attract them to other places. The proportion of irregular migrants in the UK population is similar to many other EU countries and half that in the US. Most irregular migrants arrive to the UK legally and become irregular later.

A migrant working irregularly in the UK has no legal contract of employment and therefore no enforceable employment rights. It is evident that many employers in the UK are willing to employ irregular migrants. People working outside the law are at risk of exploitation, including low pay, lack of health and safety regulations and long working hours.

Migrants’ Rights Network should perhaps persuade the GMFD discussion tables to talk more about the installation of an inclusive regularisation programme in the UK. The regularisation programme could bring irregular migrants into the legal framework, generate tax revenue, tackle the informal economy and ensure that basic rights can be protected. As a result, the integration of migrants into local communities would be easier. It should be developed with effective measures that fulfil the labour market’s need for migrant workers, and properly regulate employment conditions; as it was made in Spain where 700,000 people were regularized in 2005.

Finally important topics such as guest worker programs, women and children migration/trafficking, and the invisibility of these issues, must be discussed in depth as well.

Conclusion
In the aftermath of September 11, there has been an increasing trend of demonizing immigrants and infringing upon the rights of immigrants. Minority groups have suffered social consequences, as punitive measures have unrolled in the name of national security and the “war on terror”, which have allowed federal governments and law enforcement agencies to trample the rights of many, including citizens “suspected” of activities against the state.

Douglas Massey has conceptualised this as a “postmodern racism”, a context facilitated by the government as well as by pundits and politicians in which immigrants become dehumanized or not fully human in the eyes of the public and thus are perceived as having no rights. This “opens the door to the harshest, most exploitative, and cruelest treatment that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another”.

The problems along international borders — which include theft, kidnapping and drug trafficking — are not likely to be solved until nations reconcile their concerns over large-scale immigration with its dependency on the cheap labor those immigrants provide.

Finally, receiving societies should work with sending countries to create binational institutions capable of maximizing the positive effects of remittances and fully harnessing their development potential. International migration should be approached not simply as a domestic political issue but as an international issue linked to broader matters of trade and geopolitics.

We expect that the Global Forum on Migration and Development this time will move towards accomplishing the goals it has outlined for itself. We also hope that integrating migration policies into development strategies will be this time for the benefit of all.

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The Global Forum on Migration and Development 2010 – what scope for securing migrants’ rights? (Part I)

By definition Human rights are believed to belong justifiably to every person and encompass civil and political rights, but also social and economic rights such as food security and the tights to education, a job, housing and healthcare, in other words: rights inherent that the state must protect and foster, and to the means by which people can live fulfilling lives.

Experts like Martin Ruhs affirm that the rights of migrant workers play an important role in shaping the outcomes of migration for migrants and non-migrants in sending and receiving countries. For example, whether or not migrants enjoy the right to free choice of employment in the receiving country’s labour market is likely to affect their earnings, remittances, and competition with local workers. Migrant rights can also influence the decision and opportunities of individuals or households to migrate to particular countries. Rights to settlement and family reunion, for example, may be an important factor in the choice of destination. They may also affect how easy or difficult it is to be legally admitted to particular countries and therefore help shape global migration flows and patterns.

Most academic studies and policy debates on “migration and development” have paid a relatively little attention to the role of migrant rights. The recent discussions at the Global Forum for Migration and Development in Brussels (2007), Manila (2008) and Athens (2009) are important exceptions. The main theme of the forum in Manila was “how the contribution of migrants to development, can be enhanced by making the protection of their rights a shared responsibility of origin and host societies”.

In Athens, a roundtable discussion was dedicated to “linking human rights and empowerment for development”. According to Ruhs “to further develop this important debate, there is an urgent need for more conceptual and empirical analysis that explicitly links and studies the inter-relationships between migrant rights and development”.

The Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) is an annual meeting of different governments, which started by recommendation of the UN High-level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in New York, back in September 2006. Three meetings have taken place with not very remarkable results; in 2010, the Global Forum will be held in Mexico.

During these three years, this governmental Forum has organized a series of civil society conferences of its own, while a growing number of social organizations have carried out the so-called People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA).

In Mexico, the main networks, as well as national and international civil society and Migrant organizations involved and committed to watching and defending migrant’s rights and promoting development, have agreed to seek a more organic participation in the Global Forum without disregarding their independence and diversity.

It has been observed in past meetings that the interests and opinions of the countries receiving migrant workers and their families prevailed and there was no effective dialogue between the governments of the sending and receiving countries or with the civil society.

The PGA will try to work towards the evolving of the GFMD, Mexico; changing from an isolated annual event, to a process where different activities and regional and international conferences on development, migration and human rights converge and, this way, contribute to write out and specify public policies.

Through this dialogue and oncoming approach, the PGA intends civil society to become a key factor in the building of a fruitful dialogue between migrant sending and receiving countries.

Some of the organizations that participate in the PGA are: Migrant Forum Asia, Migrants Rights International, National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights, Red International de Migración y Desarrollo, Instituto de Estudios y Divulgación sobre Migración, A.C., Red Regional de Organizaciones Civiles para las Migraciones and Sin Fronteras, I.A.P. Also, the World Social Forum on Migrations has shown interest in joining the process and contacts have been established with the Scalabrini International Migration Network, Global Union Federation, the European Working Group, the African Working Group, the International Federation for Human Rights and the Migration Forum, amongst others.

It’s important to mention that during previous forums, discussions have focused on the migrants’ contribution to the sending country’s economic growth, without considering the bottom causes of migration, their contribution to the development of the receiving country and the costs for the sending countries and communities.

The PGA is exceptionally interested this time to promote a wider agenda that includes the discussion of key topics, such as security, the increasing criminalization of migrants and their defenders, the migration of scientists and professionals, child migration, labour and human rights, environment and migration, return and migrant reintegration.

Lessons learned from former Global Forums

Belgium undertook the organization of the 1st GFMD in Brussels in July 2007. The main goal of this meeting was to examine the impact of migration on social and economic development, in terms of human capital development and labour mobility on the one hand and the contribution of migrant resources (financial as well as skills) on the other hand. Policy coherence between migration and development policies was the second main issue. Horizontal issues, such as human rights, gender and root causes, were also discussed. Operating modalities were put in place with the creation of a structured framework, which should guarantee the continuation of the Forum in the future on a sound basis.

The 2nd GFMD took place in Manila under Philippine chairmanship in October 2008; it revolved around the central theme ‘Protecting and Empowering Migrants for Development’. Its goal was to emphasize the human aspect of migration and the protection of migrants’ rights and to examine the impact of such protection in reinforcing development.

In Brussels as in Manila, around 160 representatives of Member-States and UN Observers, as well as over 30 international organizations, participated in the government meeting, while over 220 people participated in the Civil Society Days.

The 3rd meeting took place in Athens from 2 to 5 November, 2009. The Greek Chair selected as overarching theme: “Integrating Migration Policies into Development Strategies for the Benefit of All”.

The focus and emphasis on development in the migration and development nexus as a key to ensure that, if people move, they do so by their own choice not out of necessity, was central to the Greek theme. The goal was to strengthen the initiative of the UN Secretary- General to address the connection between the root causes of migration and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Mainstreaming migration in development planning at national and international level was the focus of the discussion. It also examined the impact of the economic crisis for the migration and development nexus.

The interrelationship between migrant integration, reintegration and development, including in the light of new patterns of migrants’ movement (such as circular migration), was analyzed. A progress reports on policy and institutional coherence and a discussion of latest policy relevant data and research in this respect were also included, with a review of the role of the GFMD national focal points in this context. Finally, the Athens GFMD discussed the progress made by regional consultative frameworks and interregional processes in linking migration and development.

The GFMD is designed to encourage an exchange of experiences, strengthen dialog and promote cooperation on migration and development. Hopefully this years’ GFMD will bring a transparent dialogue between governments and civil organisations in order to acknowledge the need of recognizing and respecting migrants’ Human Rights.

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A migrant to remember

I met Doña Olivia during my first field trip to Tunkás, Yucatán. A human being full of happiness and pride.
She migrated to United States in the late seventies, she was one of the pioneer migrants of her town. After few minutes of have met her, I was totally surprised of how easily she would trust me!
The day after that I met her, I paid a visit, I brought along a reporter, acquaintance of mine, she did not mind at all and then she started telling us her life: “I came to California following my husband, I brought with me my eldest children, I left behind the youngest girls”. She started to cry…
She earned a life by selling paper flowers on the street, her brother helped her to find that job. He migrated north in the early sixties through the Bracero program (US Guest worker program held from 1942-1964)
Her story is full of suffering and abuse, also of success and adventure. But in order to fluorish she had to learn “a system” (I will explain it in the next section), and she did. She was one of the many Mexicans who could obtain a Green Card (resident card) during the IRCA program in the 1986.
Right after, and seeing her as a trustworthy citizen, the owner of the apartments where she was living in Anaheim, CA, offered her the job as a manager of that complex. She happily accepted and ever since she has been doing so. Moreover she started her own business, she set some transnational entrepreneurial work. As soon as she got her green card she started selling clothes and American curiosities, even Yucatecan dresses.
I was surprised how a woman with 6 kids could make it so well in America…She did. This is a story to tell and I will narrate it in the next sections.

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For Sick Illegal Immigrants, No Relief Back Home

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/health/policy/01grady.html?ref=americas

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Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/us/03immig.html?th&emc=th

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It seems that detentions at US-Mexico border are going down.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/us/26border.html?ref=global-home

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Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives

This is a brilliant article from the New York Times. It offers an accurate picture of the present situation that increasing number of Mexican migrants currently face in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/americas/16mexico.html

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