Migration and Development

Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con): The International Development Committee is grateful for the opportunity to debate the report, not least because it gives a further opportunity to draw it and the Government's response to the attention of the House. This, as with every other report of the International Development Committee, is a unanimous report, and every recommendation is unanimous. If there were to be a headline, or for those who will read no further in Hansard, it would convey that we concluded:

"Migration and migrants should not be seen as problems to be dealt with. Migration presents both challenges and opportunities. Migrants are people trying to improve their lives and must be treated accordingly."

I hope that many hon. Members will read our report, because quite a lot of what we have to say may be counter-intuitive and perhaps not what people expect. I think that we exposed several myths about migration. The history of migration is the history of people's struggle to survive and prosper, to escape insecurity and poverty and to move in response to opportunity. When I considered how best to summarise the report for this debate it occurred to me that I could do no better than to share with the House the published summary:

"Migration is not a panacea for development problems, but properly managed it can deliver major benefits in development and poverty reduction."

The summary mentions that global flows of aid amount to just under $70 billion a year, and continues:

"The United Nations estimates that the Millennium Development Goals could be met if aid were increased to $100 billion a year. A slight relaxation of restrictions on the movement of workers—increasing the proportion of migrants in the workforce of developed countries to 3 per cent.—would deliver global gains of perhaps $150 billion a year."

Why? Because

"remittances sent home by international migrants through official channels currently amount to $93 billion a year; with informal transfers included, remittances are likely to amount to around $300 billion a year. Migration delivers massive economic gains, which could be used for poverty reduction.

The costs and benefits of migration are distributed, unevenly, between and within countries and social groups. The balance and distribution of costs and benefits depends upon the nature of the migration in question, and on the links which migration establishes between places of origin and destination. This report shows how governments and others could—by shaping the nature of migration and the distribution of its costs and benefits—make migration work for the poor."

There are, however, several migration myths, which we should like to dispel. Myth No. 1 is that migration and migrants are problems to be dealt with. That is wrong. First, migration presents both challenges and opportunities. In their determination to deal with the challenges, Governments must not miss the opportunities. Secondly, migrants are not problems. They are people trying to improve their lives, and must be treated accordingly.

Myth No. 2 is that there is a tidal wave of migrants about to crash upon our shores. That is wrong. Migration is hugely important—economically and politically—because of the links that it establishes between countries, but it remains the exception rather than the rule. International migration has increased over the past 40 years, but still only 2.9 per cent. of the world's population are international migrants.

Myth No. 3 is that migration is primarily about people moving from developing countries to developed countries. That is also wrong. Most migration takes place within and between developing countries. Fully 40 per cent. of international migrants move between poor countries, and the number of migrants who stay in their own country far exceeds that of international migrants. To compare, there are 175 million international migrants, whereas India alone has 200 million internal migrants and China 120 million. As regards refugees, two thirds live in developing countries and more than one third live in the least developed countries.

Myth No. 4 is that it is the poorest, most desperate people who migrate. That is also wrong. The poorest people often lack the resources to migrate; if they do migrate, they are likely to move locally. That obviously has major implications for policy. First, it cannot be assumed that policies to help migrants, particularly international migrants, will also help the poorest people. Secondly, migration will not necessarily be stemmed by    lifting people out of poverty. Nevertheless, improvements to governance in developing countries can reduce people's motivation to leave, and the encouragement of remittances and return can make the migration that occurs more development-friendly.

The fifth and last of those myths is that migration harms the prospects of developing countries by causing a brain drain. The response to that is that it does not necessarily do so. Migration can lead to a brain drain that harms the prospects of developing countries, but whether it does so depends on the nature of that migration, and the links that it establishes between host and home countries. Flows of remittances and other resources and the return of migrants with new skills can offset the loss of migrants, and may even lead to a "brain gain".

In our report, having dispelled those myths, we then tried to make it clear how to make migration work for poverty reduction. We did that through the examination of migration journeys. Each stage of the migration journey offers entry points for policy, through which Governments—in the United Kingdom and other developed and developing countries, and at multilateral level—can make migration work for poverty reduction.

Rich countries must not exacerbate the problems of the brain drain for poor countries. International recruitment—including that of nurses and teachers, about which I shall say more later—must be better regulated. The push factors that lead to migration from developing countries must be addressed. The opportunities for mutually beneficial arrangements—triple wins—for migrants, migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries should be explored.

In relation to travelling, arriving and living, more effort must be put into tackling trafficking in people, smuggling and illegal migration. Decisions about migrant status must be taken fairly and quickly. Migrants must be enabled to live productive lives. The Governments in host societies must ensure that migrants are not denied access to services, that migrants' integration into host societies is supported, and that migrants' rights are protected.

With respect to returning, reintegrating and circulating, flexible systems of temporary and circular migration, and ways of making return sustainable should be established. If such schemes are to deliver development benefits, development stakeholders must be fully involved in their design.

We also considered the matter of resource flows; remittances and the role of the diaspora. Governments and others can shape and use the links that migration establishes between home and host societies. Such links include remittances and the diaspora, two areas to which we paid particular attention. The onus is on policy makers to encourage the flow of remittances, to reduce the costs that migrants have to pay to send money home and to improve the investment climate in developing countries so that remittances can be used productively and in ways that reduce poverty. The diaspora and its members can be important agents of development. Governments have much to learn from deeper engagement with the diaspora, its members and its constituent organisations. The diaspora should be involved in discussions on development strategies, voluntary remittance schemes and sustainable development.

The Department for International Development and Ministers told us that the debate on migration and development is at the stage where the trade and development debate was 10 years ago. People are beginning to say that there is a development dimension to migration, but there is a lack of joined-up thinking at national and international levels and some resistance to connecting the issues. We share that analysis and hope that our work, our report and DFID's commendable efforts will ensure that it does not take another 10 years to reach the same stage as we are at now with trade and development.

I was glad to see that the Government stated in their response to our report that

"The Committee's report has a wealth of practical suggestions and observations that will feed into DFID's evolving work in this area, and also emphasises the importance of cross-Whitehall working to maximise the very real benefits that can accrue from well-managed migration policies."

As the Government rightly observe:

"The challenge is to make the most of migration by minimising the costs for developed and developing countries alike, as well as for migrants themselves."

We had a large number of conclusions, 61 in all. I do not intend to go through them all, but I would like to draw the Chamber's attention to a few.

Our first conclusion is that policies aimed at delivering development and poverty reduction should not start from the assumption that migration is a rare occurrence, a south-north phenomenon or a one-off event. Policies need to be based on an understanding of the multi-faceted nature of migration, including temporary, circular and seasonal migration within and between developing countries as well as from south to north. I have already drawn the Chamber's attention, for example, to circular migration in countries such as India and China.

Policy makers must pay careful attention to the experiences and concerns of female migrants to ensure that their migration is beneficial. As the poorest do not migrate or do not migrate far, it cannot be assumed that policies that help migrants will also help the poor. That is a dilemma for those who would like migration management to reduce migration; developed countries cannot expect to solve their immigration problems by simply reducing poverty in developing countries.

One of the conclusions that we came to, which has had quite a lot of attention recently in the media, is that it is unfair, inefficient and incoherent for developed countries to provide aid to help developing countries make progress towards the millennium development goals on health and education while helping themselves to doctors, nurses and teachers who have been trained in and at the expense of developing countries. It is difficult to pick up a newspaper here or anywhere else without seeing reference to that growing phenomenon.

On Thursday 27 January the Kenyan Business Day contained the headline, "Rich world 'gets free ride on skills'". The report from Addis Ababa read:

"Rich countries poach doctors and nurses that poor states spend millions to train, taxing already underfunded, overstretched hospitals in Africa and elsewhere, according to a report released yesterday".

That report was by the International Organisation for Migration. The article continued:

"The organisation estimated that it would have cost rich states about $184,000 to train each of the estimated 3-million professionals educated in poor countries now working in the developed world, for a 'staggering' total savings of $552bn."

The Guardian observed 10 days ago that Sri Lanka, still recovering from the devastation of December's tsunami, has accused Britain of undermining its embattled health services by failing to prevent hospitals from luring trained doctors and nurses to work in the United Kingdom. According to its Minister of Health, the offers of big money, better facilities and prestige training establishments in Britain is too much for many Sri Lankan doctors to resist, and are causing "a grave problem" for its health system.

A report last Sunday in The Mail on Sunday observed that two thirds of our new doctors come from developing countries. Of the 27,228 new doctors registered last year, 17,718—65 per cent.—were foreign, and almost one in three came from India. That is believed to be the highest number of foreign-trained doctors registered to practise medicine in the UK in a single year. Of the 34,617 new nurses registered last year, 44 per cent. were from overseas. That means that almost half of all new nurses from overseas come from developing countries.
 
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham) (Con): I have not read the report in The Mail on Sunday, as it is not my newspaper of choice on a Sunday. However, an important policy issue is clearly raised by the flow that my hon. Friend describes. Does he agree that it is incredibly important, when debating that phenomenon and deciding the appropriate policy response to it, that we avoid the development of a blame culture? As I said, I have not seen the report, but all too often there is an implicit suggestion that it is the people who are coming who are the problem—they are to be blamed and they are a source of nuisance—and a febrile atmosphere is created in which they become legitimate targets for attack. Consistent with what my hon. Friend said at the outset, that is, of course, quite wrong and should be regarded as unacceptable.

Tony Baldry : I entirely agree. As I said, the strapline of our report is, and should be, that migration and migrants should not be seen as problems to be dealt with. Migration presents both challenges and opportunities. Migrants are trying to improve their lives and must be treated accordingly. I should say, however, that I visited Lilongwe general hospital in Malawi about 18 months ago. It was probably one of the nearest things to hell on earth that I have ever seen in that there were almost no nurses. A cohort of nurses had recently finished their training and almost all were leaving Malawi straight away to come to the UK. That issue must be addressed.

The Select Committee concluded that the regulation and recruitment of health care professionals by the UK raised several issues that need clarifying. How effective has the NHS code of practice been? What will the Government do to enforce the code of practice, or to encourage NHS employers to adhere to it? Where does tacit recruitment end and active recruitment begin? Perhaps most importantly, how significant a loophole is the fact that the code does not apply to the private sector? Specifically, how many health workers from developing countries are employed in the private and public sectors, and how many of those employed in the public sector were initially recruited for the private sector? In exchanges in the Chamber, Ministers have rightly said that there is an NHS code of practice, but that code does not apply to nursing agencies. What frequently happens is that nurses from overseas are recruited by agencies and then go to work in the NHS.

Another of the Committee's conclusions is that, if the NHS is to depend on overseas workers, the Government should consider designing schemes to train nurses in developing countries for temporary employment for a specified number of years in the NHS on the understanding that they will then return to their home countries. Such a scheme would need to be carefully designed, but the potential development benefits and the fact that that would be a more cost-effective way of training nurses, no matter where they ended up working, make it worthy of serious consideration. The costs of training nurses should not be borne by countries that do not benefit from their training, particularly if they are among the poorest countries in the world.

We went on to observe that one way in which to reduce illegal migration might be to open more transparent and efficient ways for legal migration, but although that might undercut traffickers and smugglers, it would not satisfy the latent demand for migration, which needs to be managed. Illegal migration needs to be tackled.

We are concerned that the Government should do their utmost to protect migrants' rights to ensure that they are not exploited by employers, gangmasters and employment agencies. We certainly welcomed the swift progress of the Gangmasters (Licensing) Bill through Parliament; I hope that the subsequent 2004 Act will be an important step toward preventing the exploitation of workers, including migrant workers, by gangmasters.

There was a lot of discussion about the UN convention on migrants. We have invited the Government to explain why they have not ratified the convention and to provide the House with evidence to support the assumption that there is a trade-off between migrants' rights and immigration control.

We observed that, in order to ensure that returning migrants have something to go back to, Governments, with the support of donors, need to

"be serious about welcoming migrants back; make progress with improving governance and tackling corruption; ensure that pay structures and progression within the civil service do not unfairly penalise migrants who have worked elsewhere and may have acquired useful skills; and, help returning migrants to find suitable jobs, or to set up their own businesses."

We had an interesting evidence session in Southwark town hall with the Sierra Leonean diaspora in London, many of whom escaped or came to the UK in the years of conflict in Sierra Leone. For various reasons, I am a reasonably regular visitor to Freetown. The capacity of the civil service, and others, in Freetown is limited. There were probably more qualified and skilled people attending that evening in Southwark town hall than I have met in all my visits to Freetown. We must find ways to encourage people with skills to try to ensure that the countries of their birth can benefit from some of those skills, even if they do not go back to them permanently. That is not just about us, but about good governance in the countries concerned and ensuring that people feel that they can go back to countries where they have a future to look forward to.

We were pleased to hear that the Department for International Development and the European Union support programmes such as the IOM's migration for development in Africa programme, and pilot schemes in Ghana and Sierra Leone. It is only through learning from experience that the best ways of facilitating sustainable development can be discovered.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Putney (Mr. Colman) is not here—he usually is, but I suspect that he is busy elsewhere—as he is the expert on mode 4 of the general agreement on trade in services. DFID reported that the UK's position on GATS mode 4 is widely viewed as being among the most progressive, which may be because DFID knows all about it. We say that the Government should make the UK's policy stance on GATS mode 4 clearer, and explain what the UK is doing to promote an agenda that will be of mutual benefit to the UK and developing countries. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister whether GATS mode 4 is ever used to enable people to use their skills elsewhere.

We spent some time considering remittances. As I said in my opening comments, it became clear to us that the value of remittances from migrants often substantially outstrips the value of development aid. As part of the inquiry, we spent some time in Somaliland. I am sure that the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Tony Worthington) will talk about Somaliland, as he is probably the hon. Member with the most experience on that area, which has survived, grown and prospered almost entirely on the benefit of remittances. However, the transaction costs of those remittances can often be extremely high. We recognise

"the difficulty of gathering reliable data on unofficial remittances, and applaud the Government for its efforts to gather information about remittance outflows from the UK. The Government should encourage other European governments to do the same. In the absence of such information, evidence-based policy on remittances and on migration will remain an aspiration."

Migrants and their families have long been aware of the value of remittances. Greater awareness on the part of Governments and development agencies is welcome, but if the potential of remittances is to be maximised, more needs to be done to understand them and their use, to increase their flow and to make them work better for poverty reduction. The UK can encourage remittances by providing guarantees to back the issue of bonds by developing country Governments and by using tax incentives, such as treating person-to-person remittances as charitable and, therefore, as tax-deductible donations.

One problem for those who wish to send remittances back to developing countries is that the tightening of the rules on money laundering since 9/11 has made life a lot more difficult. This afternoon, we could go to addresses in Southall to deposit £5,000, and by tomorrow it would available for use in Hargeysa. However, that is becoming increasingly difficult because of the money laundering regulations, so it is much harder for people to send remittances home.

The UK Government and other Governments need to be concerned about that. We concluded:

"If transactions costs are to be reduced, then the market for remittance services needs to work better so that service providers compete harder, to offer better and cheaper services, to more informed customers.

The UK Government, NGOs and the private sector can all play their part in driving down the costs of remittances. Competition will help, but the Government needs to encourage this process by raising awareness about remittances, disseminating good practice and ensuring that the market is transparent and well-regulated."

We also spent some time reflecting on the role of the diaspora. We concluded:

"Diasporas' views are valuable and may help to deliver peace in their home countries, but it would be a mistake to assume that communities in exile are better able than people back home to represent their nations' interests."

However, we drew the attention of the House and the Government to a number of ways in which the Government and DFID might work further and better with the diaspora. We hope that the Government have taken note of those observations, because we all thought that diaspora groups, which have been largely overlooked in the development process, could, for example, be more systematically consulted on draft country assistance plans. The Treasury could also explore with the diaspora the possibility of developing schemes to enable migrants who wished to do so to channel remittances so that they have the maximum impact on tackling poverty.
 
Although we applauded DFID for the leading role that it has taken in moving migration up the international development agenda, we felt that the Government should consider further what might be done at a multilateral level to manage migration better, and particularly to make it work better in terms of poverty reduction. It is interesting that the main organisation that deals with migration—the IOM—is not a UN agency. As with so many aspects of migration, it seems to be slightly policy off-beat and needs to be brought far more into the mainstream.

We felt that

"The Presidency of the European Union in 2005 will provide the UK with an opportunity to promote a positive agenda on migration which takes full account of its development potential. We trust that the Government is preparing now to take this opportunity."

The Commission for Africa is meeting today for the last time before the report on its work is published in the middle of March. We hope that the Government will consider how migration might contribute to development policies, as well as many other areas.

I hope that hon. Members will take the opportunity to read our report, because it reaches a number of counter-intuitive conclusions that I hope are worth considering. We have given thought to the brain drain, remittances, the diaspora and the benefits of migration, which might not have been the focus of sufficient attention in previous work. We hope that our report is not the end but the start of thematic work, which needs to be done by the Government and other agencies, so that it does not take 10 years for migration policy to become an integral part of development policy overall, as happened with trade policy.