From the News! – Your Daily News

William French
Agence France-Presse

GENEVA, Switzerland — Illegal immigration is likely to rise as the economic crisis continues and governments must do more to effectively manage the flow of labor, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Tuesday.

“In times of financial crisis, a growth in irregular migration is obviously a significant possibility,” said Ryszard Cholewinski, co-editor of the IOM’s World Migration Report 2008.

By its very nature, illegal immigration is almost impossible to measure but the best estimates are that between 10-15 percent of the world’s roughly 200 million migrants are “irregular,” he told journalists.

Tens of thousands of people are already fleeing poverty in the developing world in the hope of a better life in the West, often risking violence, extortion and even death at the hands of smugglers and traffickers.

For example, the UN refugee agency estimates that more than 38,000 people, often Somalis and Ethiopians, crossed the Gulf of Aden from Somalia to Yemen in the first ten months of 2008, while over 600 people have been reported dead or missing.

The onus is on developed countries to develop an effective immigration policy that matches labor supply and demand while not stoking resentment or xenophobia in the domestic population, said Gervais Appave, a fellow co-editor of the IOM report.

Europe is home to the highest number of migrants of all global regions at 70.6 million people, the IOM report said.

Migrants come to Europe for a variety of reasons including its relative wealth vis-a-vis its southern and eastern neighbors, large numbers of humanitarian refugees who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, and the emergence of organized trafficking and smuggling networks, the report said.

“The role of growing demand for migrant workers to fill gaps in local labor markets is also widely acknowledged” as demographic trends push the average age of Europe’s population ever higher, the report said.

Some EU member states have recently taken a tough line on immigration and right-wing populist parties focusing on the issue have scored well in recent elections in countries such as Italy and Austria.

Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni called last month for a two-year moratorium on accepting foreign workers from outside the EU, saying it would protect current immigrants amid the world economic crisis.

“With the economic crisis, we are concerned about protecting the most fragile people, and therefore people from outside the union who could lose their jobs,” he said.

But Appave warned against such a policy, saying immigration should not be reduced to a matter of states “opening and closing doors.”

“We need to manage mobility effectively… we spend too much time opening doors and closing them. What we should do is to have an open door that is sometimes kept ajar and sometimes open more widely,” he told journalists.

“This should not be a situation where migrants are scapegoated… it should be an opportunity to educate the public about the contribution migrants make to the societies in which they live,” he added.