This blog was written from Brisbane, Australia, where I just attended a United Nations conference for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on global health. It was meant to rally NGOs to press for a renewed effort by governments to attain the "millennial development goals" (MDGs) agreed to at a UN summit in 2000. Most dramatic of those goals was to halve global poverty by 2015. Progress has been lagging, so later this month another summit will be held in New York to stir governments to quicken the pace. The NGO meeting was basically to recruit the organizations to press their governments to a renewed effort.
Australia's immigration history parallels that of the United States. Europeans came upon an unknown land, took it from those who lived there, welcomed others in times of prosperity, and restricted them in hard times–usually on racial, ethnic, and religious criteria. Immigration loomed large in the country's recent election, as it does in our election this coming November. But the Australian conflict had to do with granting asylum to political refugees–mostly Sri Lankans and Afghans. Many Australians fear the country will be overrun by Asians, much as many American fear the hordes crossing our southern border. The dynamics of why people want to migrate to Australia are markedly similar to the reasons people come to the United States.
At the UN conference immigration was taken up as a global heath issue. The public health community considers violence as "unhealthy." For instance, our National Heath Institutes consider youth violence as clinically epidemic. Violence against immigrants is identifiable and measures can be taken to prevent it. That was the context in which the conference considered migration.
Violence toward migrants is experienced at all level. The very reason people are leaving their homeland may be violent repression–consider the plight of refugees from Dafur in Sudan.
It is in passage that migrants experience the greatest danger. They may be being preyed on in the first receiving nation since the ethnic brothers of their oppressors extend across borders–as in the Congo where Hutu and Tutsi rivalry greet the refugees. In our own country the number of deaths in the Arizona desert is again rising to scandalous levels.
Finally, migrants and their children often confront violence after settling because lingering prejudice and the socialization of immigrant communities. When I living in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago, for instance, I heard youths say it was "unhealthy to cross Ashland Avenue or 47th Street" because of gang violence.
There was much talk about sex and domestic service trafficking. In Africa the fear is with carrying youth across borders for enslavement–either as boy soldiers, comfort women, or agricultural workers. A women employed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva stress that the fundamental issue of violence in migration is exploitation of labor–the sex trafficking is really a deceptive form of labor exploitation.
Most countries have ratified, and claim to live by, the 1932 Convention on Forced Labor. So there are international standards to protect migrants, yet the trafficking of people is on the rise. (Only this week the U.S. Justice department has charged a California-based employment agency with trafficking 400 Thai workers.) The ILO is in the last stages of developing a covenant that will set standards for domestic workers.
Most people do see migration as an economic issue. But our prospective has to be broadened to see it as a peace and health issue as well.
