Thailand - Migration experts, ambassadors, activists and UN and IOM senior management met at IOM’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok yesterday for a discussion on the future role and impact of migration.

The event marked the launch of “Integrating Migration into the Post-2015 United Nations Development Agenda”, a joint publication of IOM and the Migration Policy Institute. The tenth in the “Issue in Brief” series, it looks at how migration can be incorporated into the “Sustainable Development Goals, which will replace the Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2000.

The publication suggests that clear migration targets could provide substantial benefits to the world’s 232 million international migrants (and a further estimated 750 million internal migrants).

“Migration is not just about movement of labour, it is also brain circulation; the movement of ideas,” noted Rabab Fatima, IOM’s senior adviser for South Asia, who moderated the event. “Migration and development is a new debate and our goal is that this will be part of the Post-2015 Development Agenda that will be discussed next September in New York.”

The brief was presented by Yuko Hamada, IOM’s Senior Regional Labour Migration expert. On the panel were  Dr. Anisuzzaman Chowdhury, Director of the Statistics Division at United Nations Asia Pacific office, ESCAP, Francisco Fernandes, Chargé d'Affaires at the Embassy of Timor Leste in Thailand and Christine Schraner Burgener, Ambassador of Switzerland to Thailand.

Dr. Chowdhury called for development gains to be evenly spread: “The current world is open to discuss the freedom of trade and commerce, but not the free movement of labour. It is proven that migration has produced economic benefits to the countries of the global north; let’s give to that opportunity to the global south as well.”

Participants discussed how to reduce migration's social and economic cost, how to make legal processes simpler, the importance of partnerships, the protection of migrants' rights, and migration trends in the Asia Pacific region.

United Nations Member States will have negotiated a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) by September 2015, that are ambitious in their scope, focused on ending poverty and hunger, combating climate change, making cities more sustainable, and improving health and education.

These goals will frame the United Nations' post-2015 development agenda to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire at the end of 2015. While the MDGs did not contain any target-setting on migration and development, a draft of the SDGs does include improving the quality of the migration.

For more information please contact

Rabab Fatima
Regional Coordinator and Adviser for South and South West Asia
Email: rfatima@iom.int

Access Issue in Brief-10 “Integrating Migration into the Post-2015 United Nations Development Agenda” at http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/integrating-migration-post-2015-united-nations-development-agenda

Blog: “Migration on the Global Agenda” by Andrew Bruce, Director of IOM’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific at http://weblog.iom.int/migration-global-agenda#sthash.XRuY9lp9.dpuf