Pro/Anti-Migration: Silence on Foreign Force Causation

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is the outgrowth of the Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME) established in 1951 in the aftermath of World War II’s Western European “chaos and displacement.” 

The 67-year-old IOM is an inter-governmental organization of 168 member states and eight observer states with offices in more than a hundred countries.  According to its website, IOM “works to help ensure the orderly and humane management of migration, to promote international cooperation on migration issues, to assist in the search for practical solutions to migration problems and to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, including refugees and internally displaced people.” Under its constitution IOM “recognizes the link between migration and economic, social and cultural development, as well as to the right of freedom of movement.”

IOM images

It is incredible and disingenuous, in my view, that organizations—especially those like IOM, which seem to be about more than profiting on human beings’ misery and suffering—and all kinds of individuals and groups raising alarms and arms for and against immigrants and immigration never bring to the fore and insist upon examining and doing something about the unquestionable connection between “force” (policies, practices, partnering patterns of governments) and migration: indisputable factors of foreign, regional and internal wars and conflict; years long, unending foreign provocation, occupation and destabilization, invasion, and all kinds of insidious interference as the major cause and consequence of human displacement, mass movement, grave risk of lives at sea and on land, unspeakable human suffering, and deaths in the untold thousands.

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OM News June 26, 2018 - Western Africa: Assamakka, a small desert town in northern Niger, point of the only border crossing between Niger and Algeria.

IOM officials reportedly saw thousands of migrants in the desert. “The number of migrants walking through the desert from Algeria to Niger is on the rise,” the report said. “In May 2017, 135 migrants were left at the border crossing; and, in April 2018, the number of crossings reached 2,888.”

The organization estimates “11,276 migrants, among them women and children, have made it over the (Algerian) border.” Northern Algeria borders the Mediterranean Sea, and across the sea north is Spain.

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lobal IOM News headline June 26, 2018: “Mediterranean Migrant Arrivals Reach 42,845 in 2018; Deaths Reach 972”

IOM images

Since the start of 2018, 972 people have lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea alone. IOM’s Missing Migrants Project (MMP) recorded worldwide deaths during migration in 2018 totaling 1,644.

Sources

“UN Migration Agency ‘Greatly Concerned’ by Reports of Migrants Stranded at Algeria-Niger Border,” June 26, 2018, https://www.iom.int/news/un-migration-agency-greatly-concerned-reports-migrants-stranded-algeria-niger-border

“Mediterranean Migrant Arrivals Reach 42,845 in 2018; Deaths Reach 972,” June 26, 2018, https://www.iom.int/news/mediterranean-migrant-arrivals-reach-42845-2018-deaths-reach-972

International Organization for Migration (IOM, https://www.iom.int/about-iom

International Organization for Migration (IOM) https://www.iom.int/iom-history

“Assamakka,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assamakka

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB