Depoliticising Migration

Global Governance and International Migration Narratives

A. Pécoud

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137445926
• eBook ISBN: 9781137445933
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Social Sciences

Migration has become, since the nineties, the subject of growing international discussion and cooperation. By critically analyzing the reports produced by international organisations on migration, this book sheds light on the way these actors frame migration and develop their recommendations on how it should be governed.

1

Introduction

Pécoud, Antoine. Depoliticising Migration: Global Governance and International Migration Narratives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137445933.0004.

‘International migration has risen to the top of the global policy agenda’. This is the first sentence of the report by the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM, 2005: vii). It also serves, in slightly different versions, as an introductory sentence to countless publications of both research and policy nature – and could also serve as the inaugural sentence of this book. Such a statement has today become so common that one almost feels embarrassed to formulate it once again. It is not that this sentence is wrong, but rather that it corresponds to one of these common sense claims that pervade much of one can read on international migration and makes this scholarship, at times, somewhat repetitive.

This dilemma is characteristic of what could be called the ‘professionalisation’ of migration studies. This topic is now on the agenda of many actors: researchers, but also governments, international organisations (IOs), NGOs, and so on. This leads to an increasing number of publications, making it difficult to follow all the developments in this field of study. It is always tricky to establish historical comparisons and to claim that one has never talked so much about migration. But what is clear is that migration is much talked about today, more than a few decades ago: Stephen Castles (2000) provides a striking account of the context in the 70s, marked by a lack of interest and a vacuum of studies; some 40 years later, he recalls the ‘ambivalence’ of the current interest in migration, particularly as far as researchers’ independence is concerned (Castles, 2008).

One could discuss the reasons why migration is the object of so much discussion. The increasing number of migrants worldwide is often put forward: IOM publications, for instance, ritually mention new (and higher) figures, the last one being of 214 million migrants in 2013, with a forecast of 405 million in 2020. These numbers are almost as popular as the GCIM’s first sentence, but may not exhaust the issue. After all, the percentage of migrants with respect to the world population has remained stable over the last century, at around 3 per cent. Other reasons have to do with the disproportionate impact of a relatively small number of (often undocumented) migrants in Western societies, or with the heightened sensitivity surrounding foreigners’ presence.

Whatever the reasons, one of the consequences of this situation is the number of people and institutions that have become active in migration research and policy, sometimes without prior experience or knowledge of this issue. Between 2003 and 2012, I worked in UNESCO’s migration program, in a position that was created precisely to enable this UN agency to develop its activities in this field. As a young researcher with a PhD in migration studies, I was expected to strengthen the expertise of this organisation in this new area of work. UNESCO was not alone in this respect: for instance, most of the IOs that now compose the Global Migration Group had, until recently, little or no knowledge of migration issues; they nevertheless sensed that this is an emerging topic that must be addressed and therefore took it up (Pécoud, 2013). There is nothing wrong here: experts, bureaucrats, or politicians must adapt to emerging challenges and move from one issue to another.

Yet, a minimal knowledge of a topic is required to get involved, and this is where international migration narratives come in. I propose to call ‘international migration narratives’ (IMN) the growing corpus of international reports and publications on migration, by IOs and other international entities (like the GCIM). As I shall describe, IMN have proliferated since approximately 2000 and now comprise a relatively coherent body of knowledge and ideas, regarding both what migration is (trends, numbers, dynamics, etc.) and what it should be (through the elaboration of so-called policy recommendations). IMN are therefore a relatively new phenomenon, which mirrors the worldwide interest in migration. The objective of this book is to analyse their core arguments and understand the way they think about migration. Given my own experience as an international civil servant at UNESCO, and in light of the sustained connections between researchers and the institutions that produce IMN, this is a necessarily self-reflexive project. As will become clear, my interest in IMN is directly related to my experience as both a researcher and a staff member at UNESCO.

A core argument in IMN concerns the relationship between migration and development. Indeed, development is a long-standing field of activity for IOs and, to some extent, their recent interest in migration takes place within the broader framework of development thinking, and of the new paradigms that have regularly been emerging over the past decades (Rist, 2002a). Development discourses have been the object of critical analysis, and this scholarship will constitute a major source of inspiration for my work on IMN. In particular, critical development research has documented IOs’ role in shaping the way both ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ are constructed and, consequently, the potential influence of their narratives on the way development is thought about. While the focus is often on what IOs do ‘on the ground’ (and on the much-debated efficiency of their interventions), this should not hide the equally important (but perhaps less visible) role they play in conceptualising global issues.

At first sight, IMN face a nearly impossible task. Their ambition is to produce a global and consensual discourse on a topic that is the object of bitter disagreements (both between and within states) and that is governed through largely unilateral and ad hoc policies. They envisage an ideal horizon in which migration would contribute to achieve IOs’ objectives, like development, but also human rights or peace. This stands in sharp contrast with today’s realities and one can therefore have doubts on their political influence: can IMN really claim that they have ‘solutions’ to solve contemporary migration dilemmas? Or do they merely play with naïve ideas that will forever remain on paper? Alternatively, do IMN have the potential of diffusing new norms and beliefs in migration politics, thereby slowly reshaping the behaviour of governments? Understanding IMN thus implies understanding the complex role of discourses in politics and the multiple manners in which knowledge and ideas influence (or do not influence) political decisions.

The book is constructed in the following manner. I start by briefly presenting the professional experience that is at the origin of this book, namely the years I spent as an international civil servant at UNESCO (Chapter 2). I then discuss the context in which IMN emerged: in a post-Cold War era, migration has been the object of increased cooperation at the regional and international level; while the main objective of such cooperation is the control of borders, this has also spurred debates on the ‘global governance’ mechanisms that would enable states to go beyond the mere control of migration, to jointly organise human mobility and better take advantage of its benefits. The elaboration of specific narratives is central in this process, as they make clear why this is necessary and how this can be achieved (Chapter 3). The fourth chapter introduces IMN, by presenting the corpus of reports upon which my analysis is based and their key characteristics (in terms of the topics they address, of their language, authorship, audience, etc.). I then turn to the reasons why an analysis of IMN is, in my view, necessary and to the different ways in which their role and function can be conceptualised (Chapter 5).

The following three chapters present the main dynamics at play in IMN. The first is the elaboration of a federating discourse, which goes beyond the different views and interests that exist among states to propose a consensual and universal understanding of what migration is all about, and of what it should look like (Chapter 6). The second is an ordering process through which IMN make sense of the apparently chaotic and threatening nature of migration dynamics and propose categories to both think about human mobility and govern it (Chapter 7). The third main characteristic of IMN is their depoliticising treatment of migration issues and the different strategies through which they call for apparently new and innovative immigration policies while at the same time negating the political nature of their object and the political implications of their recommendations (Chapter 8).

2

At UNESCO

Abstract: This chapter provides a brief description of the author’s professional experience as an international migration specialist at UNESCO. It explains the relevance of this experience for the author’s interest in international migration narratives.

Keywords: UNESCO; social sciences; migration policy; Global Migration Group

Pécoud, Antoine. Depoliticising Migration: Global Governance and International Migration Narratives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137445933.0005.

I joined UNESCO in 2003, after completing a PhD in social anthropology on Turkish migration to Germany. After several short-term contracts, I became an international civil servant in 2005; I resigned in 2012 to take up a professorship position in a French university. Throughout these years, I was active in the international migration unit, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. A small migration section had been set up in 2001 to address this emerging issue and, as a ‘migration specialist’, I was expected to contribute positioning UNESCO in the burgeoning field of international migration policy debates and projects. This is how I became interested in IMN and, given the importance of this professional experience for the arguments developed in this book, this chapter makes a few observations on my work at UNESCO.

My arrival at UNESCO coincided with the beginning of the work of the GCIM, and with a period of optimism. Many of my UN colleagues felt that, finally, migration was becoming a real issue for IOs. After decades marked by the reluctance to address this politically sensitive issue, as well as by the mixed record of UN activities in this field (like the UN Convention on Migrant Workers’ Rights), migration became the object of increasing attention, and of ambitious initiatives and meetings. Part of my job was to follow these developments, including the 2006 High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development (HLD), the subsequent Global Forums on Migration and Development (GFMD), or the creation of the Global Migration Group (GMG) (which UNESCO joined in 2007). On all these occasions, participants made an extensive use of IMN. This is how I became both sceptical of their content, and interested in the particular worldviews they contain. UNESCO’s role in these debates was (and still is) relatively marginal, compared to, say, the role played by other IOs like the IOM, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), or the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), My own situation was therefore rarely a leading one, which enabled a nice mixture of participation and observation.

In parallel, I was involved in a number of research projects, leading to publications of an academic nature under UNESCO’s auspices.¹ This was in line with UNESCO’s self-proclaimed role as an ‘intellectual agency’²: this organisation has its own publishing house (called UNESCO Publishing) and, from its creation, used to work with academics, intellectuals, artists, etc. On the other hand, this activity is at odds with the managerial and bureaucratic tasks that constitute the bulk of what UNESCO’s employees do; it is also perceived as having an uncertain (and immeasurable) impact, which is difficult to conciliate with UNESCO’s obsession with so-called results-based management. I mention this ambivalent attitude towards books and academic publications because it illustrates a broader attitude towards social sciences research, which in turn shed light on certain aspects of IMN. On one hand, IMN rely heavily on social sciences: like all technocratic discourses, they base their recommendations on the ‘evidence’ produced by experts and researchers. IOs also cooperate intensively with researchers, whose involvement increases the legitimacy of IMN. But IMN do not nevertheless belong to the realm of research; their primary purpose is to guide policy-makers, not to test hypotheses, play with ideas, challenge existing theories, exchange with peers, etc.

In practice, this means that IOs’ staff members do not do research and, usually, do not perceive themselves as researchers. They rather ‘outsource’ research activities to external consultants, and concentrate on the elaboration and dissemination of policy-oriented (and, from academics’ perspectives, ‘simpler’) messages, through reports, policy briefs, speeches, etc. This goes along with an emphasis on social sciences as providing positive and useful knowledge, or ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’. As Richard Hoggart³ writes:

Social scientists [at UNESCO] are at one and the same time over- and under-valued. They are mistrusted as dismembers of society and authority ... Almost no official loves a theoretical social scientist. On the other hand, the social sciences regarded as problem solvers are over-valued. They are cast as magicians or social plumbers, to be called in to fix whatever may be the latest social smell or leak, whether it be drugs or racism or teenage violence. (1978: 52–53)

As will become clear, IMN indeed aim at relying on research and evidence to find ‘solutions’ to migration ‘challenges’. But the ‘problems’ themselves are hardly problematised. For example, a recurrent question asked during international conferences is ‘how to make migration work for development?’ It is unclear, however, why this specific question was selected. Moreover, once this question has been designated as central, the range of answers that can be provided becomes quite limited. As Apthorpe writes, policy discourses thus function as ‘answers in search of questions’ (1996: 32). Of course, there are many obvious political reasons for narrowing the scope of international migration debates and for avoiding questions that may prove too sensitive in an intergovernmental setting. But this nevertheless poses limits to migration research and ultimately leads to a frustration that motivated this book.

One of the reasons why IMN must provide a simplified and politically acceptable account of migration is that, unlike researchers, IOs are expected to go beyond discussion and actually translate this body of knowledge into practice. IMN must thus serve as ‘blueprints’ that can guide policymaking, in different settings and by different actors. This excludes analyses of migration that are too detailed, nuanced, or context specific. Faced with the complexity of migration, practitioners need (over)simplified representations of reality to make sense of the dynamics in which they are to intervene (Roe, 1991). There is no point, therefore, in blaming IMN for their simplicity, which is line with their purpose.⁴ The point is rather to look at how they construct migration issues and at what they leave out of their scope.

Blueprints are all the more necessary because IOs’ staff members do not always have a broad knowledge of migration issues. They often lack the time to read books and papers. Moreover, many of them were trained in other policy fields and, as their career progresses and as IOs address new topics, they mus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  At UNESCO
• 3  Global Migration Governance and the Need for Shared Narratives
• 4  Introducing International Migration Narratives
• 5  Why Read IMN?
• 6  Constructing a Federating Discourse
• 7  Ordering Migration
• 8  Depoliticising Migration
• 9  Conclusion
• References
• Index