These developments have created a number of important challenges for the international community. The first arises from the increasingly complex nature of human mobility. The majority of people on the move are migrants who leave their own country because they are unable to maintain their livelihoods at home and because their labour is needed elsewhere. Others are forced to abandon their homes as a result of persecution and armed conflict. Under international law, these people are considered as refugees. They have been granted specific rights, including protection from being forced to return to their own country. The responsibility of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN's refugee agency, is to uphold the rights of this latter group. In many parts of the world, however, refugees and migrants are to be found travelling alongside each other, heading in the same direction, using the same forms of transport and lacking the passports and visas that states require them to carry. Such "irregular" movements have prompted many states to erect new barriers to the admission of foreign nationals. Regrettably, these measures have had the effect of preventing refugees from seeking the safety they need. We must therefore ensure that border controls enable people to exercise their right to seek and enjoy asylum in other states.
A second challenge is to provide more opportunities for people to move in a safe and legal manner. Most states have now recognised the need for goods, services, capital and information to flow freely across national borders. But governments are apprehensive about applying the same principal to the movement of people. The result has been a massive growth in the expansion of an industry whose purpose and profit lies in smuggling and trafficking people across international frontiers. As well as cracking down on such activities, states should consider opening new channels and expanding existing programs of legal migration. The forces that are prompting many people to migrate are deeply entrenched within the international economy. It is an illusion to think that their numbers can be brought down in the present and dynamic phase of globalisation. Greater efforts are therefore needed to prevent the emergence of situations in which people are forced to leave their homes as a result of human rights abuses, armed conflict or other calamities that disrupt their lives and livelihoods.
If this third challenge is to be tackled in an effective manner, serious efforts must be made to promote environmentally sensitive forms of development in countries where the struggle for survival threatens to lead to violence. Above all, governments in every part of the world must be encouraged and supported to protect the lives and wellbeing of their citizens, thereby enabling them to live a peaceful and prosperous life in their own country. When people move from one country to another, they should do so out of choice and not because it is the only way they can survive.
By Antonio Guterres who is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
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