IOM Director General William Lacy Swing will arrive in Mongolia on
Sunday to meet with senior officials, attend the ASEM (Asia-Europe)
Meeting of Director-Generals for Immigration and formally open a
new IOM office in the capital Ulan Bator.

The visit, the first by an IOM Director General, follows a
decade of IOM-Mongolia cooperation and reflects growing interest in
migration management in Mongolia, which became an IOM Member State
in 2008.

During his visit, Director General Swing, a keynote speaker at
the ASEM meeting on Tuesday, is also expected to meet with high
level government counterparts from the Ministries of Foreign
Affairs and Trade, Labour and Social Welfare, the Mongolian
Immigration Agency, the National Emergency Management Agency, the
General Authority on Border Protection and the General Authority on
State Registration.

The world's second largest landlocked country, Mongolia has a
population of just 3.1 million. Between 120,000 and 250,000
Mongolians have migrated to work abroad, mainly in the Republic of
Korea, the Czech Republic and the United States. In 2010 they sent
home USD 210 million in remittances.

Rapid economic growth driven by mining and abundant natural
resources has also resulted in more Mongolians travelling and
studying abroad, and an influx of foreign workers, mainly from
China, the Republic of Korea, Russia and Central Asia.

The country has also seen major migration from the countryside
to the towns, partly as a result of abnormally cold winters known
as "dzud", which have decimated livestock and forced many herders
to leave their traditional pastures.

Over the past decade IOM cooperation with Mongolia has focussed
on helping over 5,000 Mongolian migrants to return home voluntarily
from 14 countries under its Assisted Voluntary Return programme. In
the past three years, IOM has also facilitated the return and
reintegration of some 352 Mongolian victims of human
trafficking.      

In 2010 IOM launched "Capacity Building for Migration Management
in Mongolia" – a broad technical cooperation programme
designed to build government capacities in border management, civil
registration information and labour migration.

In 2011 IOM assumed the lead of the group of UN and other aid
agencies in Mongolia responsible for Camp Coordination and Camp
Management (CCCM) in the event of natural
disasters.   

For more information please contact:

Kieran Gorman-Best

IOM Beijing

Tel: +976 11 99 00 69 61

E-mail: "mailto:kgormanbest@iom.int">kgormanbest@iom.int