General Assembly review of migration and development opens this week

In a bid to identify ways to maximize the development benefits of migration and to reduce difficulties, representatives of governments from across the world will convene in New York this week for the first-ever plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly on migration issues.

In a bid to identify ways to maximize the development benefits of migration and to reduce difficulties, representatives of over 120 governments, including some 90 ministers, will convene in New York this week for the first-ever plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly on migration issues.

“We are only beginning to learn how to make migration work more consistently for development,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a report prepared in anticipation of the meeting. “Each of us holds a piece of the migration puzzle, but none has the whole picture. It is time to start putting it together.”

In addition to the plenary debate, the meeting will bring ministers and delegates together in informal round table discussions on themes such as monies sent home by workers abroad, or “remittances;” the smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons; and partnerships between and among countries.

Conceived and scheduled more than two years ago by the General Assembly, the 14-15 September High-level Dialogue follows a period of intense public attention to the cross-border movement of people, and a quickening pace of multilateral talks on migration.

The report of the Secretary-General on international migration and development estimates that 191 million people live in countries other than where they were born. It notes that migration does not follow only a South-to-North track. One third of the world’s migrant stock are workers and families from developing countries living in developed nations; one third have moved from one developing country to another, and another third have migrated from a developed country.

By the most recent estimate, $173 billion in remittances from migrants was sent to homes in developing countries in 2005. In the developed world, immigrants often fill certain work force shortages or take jobs that are unwanted locally, reduce the extent of population ageing and help to maintain the solvency of social pension systems, and stimulate demand and economic growth, the UN report finds.