Eid Mubarak — عيد مبارك — to all, and welcome to Mixed Migration—hebdo! Here, in the time it takes to read one feature, you get a global sweep of the last week's most relevant migration policy developments, along with links to all the articles you need to dig deeper.

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Spotlight

This Spotlight should cover the long-overdue resignation of Fabrice Leggeri, head of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, but I got inspired to write about something else the day before… see why it’s important to procrastinate? So, if you want to know more about Leggeri’s resignation, start with Der Spiegel’s latest report on Frontex’s wrongdoing, and continue with Lighthouse Reports borders newsrooms’ extensive investigative work. Lighthouse deserves huge credit for uncovering sustained wrongdoing and misuse of European taxpayer funds over the last few years—it’s hard to overstate its impact. Congratulations and thank you.

All that being said… the World Bank said last Tuesday that humanity is in for three or so years of dramatically increased fuel and food commodities costs, as a consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that’s a pretty big deal too. Per the World Bank’s forecast, the twin commodity shocks could lead to global stagflation. This period of unexpected economic stress, in an era of increasing environmental stress, can only drag down human security outcomes—worldwide. For the comfortable, life will get a bit less comfortable. For the resilient, life will likely get more trying. For the already vulnerable, life will become more precarious, leading some to greater undeserved suffering and others to complete devastation. Cue: misplaced fears of dramatic increases in irregular migration…

Migration plays a spectacular—if misunderstood and underrated—role in economic development. Simplifying many complexities, migration benefits sending and receiving countries alike. It allows developed economies to sustain employment in hard-to-fill sectors, at every skill level of their labor markets. It also pipes cash not just into the economies of developing countries, but also at the level where it is most needed and most effectively spent—the household.

For the last seven decades, migration has been to Europe’s economic growth both a fuel and an emission. In the immediate post-war era, young laborers emigrated in droves from Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, to work abroad. While their labor rebuilt northern Europe’s battered infrastructure, their remittances nurtured their home countries’ economies. (Economically) healthier PIGS allowed more and more yesterday’s emigrants to begin finding tomorrow’s job close to home, and as emigration from southern to northern Europe slowed down, northern Europe began sourcing labor from a wider arc of emigration: the Mahreb and Turkey. As the Mahreb and Turkey developed in the following decades, and as families became less reliant on remittance income, and more reliant domestic income, the Mahreb and Turkey’s migration patterns evolved. While fewer workers emigrated to work aboard, Europe’s labor migration arc was already shifting past their southern and eastern borders. As emigration from the Mahreb and Turkey to Europe slowed down, emigration through the Mahreb and Turkey, from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, have increased significantly. The Mahreb and Turkey are now equally significant as countries of transit, as they are as countries of origin.

Emigration, as both a fuel and emission of economic development, is by nature an exclusive undertaking, accessible only to those with the resources to finance emigration. The world’s poorest are not often in a position to meet the prohibitive costs of human smugglers, and as a result, not likely to migrate long distances in order to escape their impoverishment. The world’s rich (enough) are less likely to turn to emigration to sustain their livelihoods, so long as local economies can sustain their incomes. Those in between—the emerging middle classes of emerging economies—are those most likely to see their income suffer as stagflation takes hold, and to have enough resources to use emigration as a coping mechanism.

Staglation, however, can only dull the virtuous circle whereby emigrants keep developed economies humming by filling crucial jobs, and enrich developing economies with their remittances. Hardship—in the form of reduced household income in developing economies, and of increased hostility and prejudice in developed countries—can only grow as a result.

It’s important to remember that global migration is both more complex and more banal than the tropes that dominate public perception of migration in Europe and more broadly in the West. Forced migration justly receives a disproportionate share of our attention, but it constitutes only a small proportion of global migration. Much more of the sum total of global migration is driven not by hardship, but by market forces, than we usually acknowledge. If the world bank’s prognosis comes to pass, however, this vast majority of global migration, guided relatively smoothly by the invisible hand of the market will become strained, and the urgency that underpins forced migration will begin suffusing labor migration as well.

I wouldn’t bet on our news media to cover that suffusion well—nor on our leadership to adjust existing migration policies intelligently.

Case in point… (photo credit: UK Home Office, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

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On to the news…

Asia

Post-occupation Afghanistan
Last Monday, TOLOnews tallied 90 fatalities and 190 injuries in a wave of violent attacks across Afghanistan in the previous few weeks, illustrating for what it is the ability of Taliban leadership to secure Afghan soil. | On Tuesday, Save the Children documented how dramatic food price increases, such as a 45% increase in the price of wheat, and wage reductions by about one-third since the Taliban takeover last August, is forcing families into abjection this Ramadan (see StC’s full report here). | On Thursday, two bombs placed in minibuses blasted through different areas of Mazar-i-Sharif, killing 11 civilians and injuring another 17. | On Friday, a bomb attack on a mosque in Kabul’s Darul-Aman neighborhood killed at least 10 worshippers and injured at least another 20. | On Sunday, a gathering of clerics in Paktia issued a call for Afghan authorities to restore girls’ schooling from grades 7 onward.

Myanmar and its neighbors
Last Tuesday, villagers in central Myanmar’s Sagaing province denounced that Tatmadaw forces had burned down 200 homes in a village in Khin-U Township, contributing to a total 4.500 novel displacements in the area in the last 2 weeks. | On Wednesday, a 14-year old Rohingya refugee in Malaysia, injured in an ill-fated attempt to escape a detention facility in the week prior, succumbed to his injuries, bringing the attempted escape’s fatality toll to 7. | On Friday, Malaysian Home Minister Hamzah Zainudin announced that Malaysia would shortly begin issuing its own refugee identification cards, adjudicated according to internal adjudication processes rather than UNHCR standards. | On Sunday, UNICEF announced the Myanmar Curriculum Pilot, a schooling program teaching ~10.000 Rohingya children aged 4-14 according to Myanmar’s national curriculum, to be eventually expanded to all 400.000 Rohingya children encamped in Bangladesh—300.000 of whom receive some education and the remaining 100.000 of whom are completely unschooled (see UNICEF’s full statement here). On the same day, Malaysian authorities detained 143 asylum seekers, including 134 Rohingya, attempting irregular entry from Myanmar by sea, after their vessel got stuck on a sandbank.

Irregular migration to India
Last Wednesday, India’s Ministry for Home Affairs disclosed that there are ~93.000 Sri Lankan asylum seekers in India, ~59.000 of whom live in 162 refugee camps in southern India and another ~34.000 in self-sustained accommodation, many of whom are pending repatriation since 1995; and another ~72.000 Tibetan refugees, all but a small minority self-settled and self-sufficient.

Sources: TOLOnews, the Irrawaddy, FMT, Malaysia Now, EFE, IANS.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Ethiopia’s civil war
Last Monday, the TPLF announced it would withdraw its forces from Afar State, expecting as a result that aid deliveries would resume promptly to both Afar and Tigray. | On Tuesday, The New Humanitarian highlighted the grave state of healthcare provision in Tigray, with hospitals unable to provide patients basic medication or even clean bedding, an increasing number of home births and unattended delivery complications, and some 100.000 diabetes and hypertension patients having disappeared from the system. On the same day, local authorities lamented that federal aid is insufficient to feed the ~30.000 IDPs encamped across Afar State, let alone the 200-300 daily new arrivals to IDP camps. | On Wednesday, the Conflict and Environment Observatory issued a study documenting that tree and shrub cover in Tigray has declined in ~280 square kilometers as a result of the ongoing war, reversing decades of gains in vegetation cover beneficial both to Tigray’s natural environment, and to its agriculture and human security (see CEOBS’s full report here). | On Thursday, Ethiopian authorities contradicted the TPLF’s claims to have withdrawn from Afar State, insisting that as of Thursday, TPLF fighters remained in the Koneba, Abala, Berhale, and Magale districts.

Conflict and displacement in the Sahel
Last Monday, the General Coordination for Refugees and Displaced in Darfur lamented that 173 Darfuri civilians had been killed and another 100 injured, over the previous Friday and Sunday, as a result of clashes over scarce aid supplies. | On Friday, UN High Commissioner for Refugees visited Cameroon to evaluate conditions for refugees from the CAR, where smoldering conflict has produced 1.3 million displaced people, including 700.000 refugees. | On Sunday, Chad’s Foreign Ministry announced it would delay national reconciliation talks, slated to begin on May 10, as parties to a preliminary talks summit in Doha have yet to find common ground on the substance of the intended reconciliation.

Conflict and displacement in the Great Lakes area and southern Africa
Last Wednesday, UNMISS reported that ~40.000 people had fled conflict in Leer County in South Sudan’s north-central Upper Nile State, crossing the Nile to seek safety in adjacent Jonglei State. | On the same day, the UN and 44 INGOs issued a collective appeal for $47 million to provide food aid to ~35.000 refugees newly arrived to Uganda in flight from the DRC’s North Kivu and Ituri provinces since the beginning of the year. | On Friday, Japanese authorities announced a donation of just over $370.000 to Zimbabwean authorities to support refugees encamped near Tongrara in northeast Zimbabwe. | On Saturday, South Africa reopened its refugee reception offices, closed since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible for asylum seekers to register with authorities, lodge their asylum petitions, and access basic support.

Sources: CNN, The New Humanitarian, Addis Standard, Reuters, Middle East Monitor, VOA, AFP, the EastAfrican, the Herald, Daily Brief.

Middle East and North Africa

Asylum seeker mobility and mortality in Libya
Last Monday, Libyan authorities detained a commander of the Kaniyat militia, suspected of involvement in the detention and killing of hundreds of asylum seekers whose bodies were found in mass graves in Tarhuna over the last 2 years. | On Tuesday, an IOM-facilitated voluntary return flight repatriated 131 Sudanese asylum seekers from Libya to Khartoum. | On Friday, German lawmakers extended Germany’s participation in Operation IRINI, enforcing the UN arms embargo on Libya.

Yemen’s civil war
Last Monday, Yemen’s Abductees’ Mothers Association released its 6th annual report, documenting 586 cases of enforced disappearance in Yemen in 2021, attributing 422 disappearances to Ansar Allah, 109 to the Southern Transitional Council, and another 48 to Yemen’s internationally-recognized government (see the AMA’s full report here). | On Tuesday, the UN reiterated calls for an urgent disbursement of $80 million to support the transfer of 1.1 million barrels of crude oil stored on the FSO Safer, as part of a $144 million appeal to safeguard the Red Sea from environmental disaster should the oil spill from the decaying ship. | On Saturday, UN OCHA released its latest humanitarian appeal for Yemen, seeking $4.3 billion to provide basic services to ~17.3 million out of Yemen’s colossal at-need population of ~24.3 million.

Displacement in and from Syria
Last Tuesday, Turkish authorities disclosed that, since 2016, they have deported ~132.000 foreign nationals, naturalized ~192.000, and overseen the voluntary return of ~493.000 Syrians; that over 2021, they prevented ~450.000 irregular arrivals into Turkey, and prevented another ~127.000 irregular arrivals thus far in 2022. | On Thursday, the Syrian Response Coordination Group blasted poor food procurement and preparation standards by aid groups providing cooked Eid meals to displaced Syrians in Idlib, attributing recurring cases of food poisoning among IDPs to aid groups’ recklessness. | On Sunday, security forces in northeast Syria’s al-Hol IDP camp reported they had located the lifeless body of an adult camp resident, whom they believe had been killed by ISIS cells within al-Hol.

Sources: the Libya Observer, Middle East Monitor, UN News, Daily Sabah, Kurdistan24.

Maritime Migration Routes to & through the West

Atlantic routes—to the Canaries and to Great Britain
Last Monday, Salvamento Marítimo rescued 116 asylum seekers, retrieved 1 lifeless body, and tallied 24 missing persons, from 3 vessels intercepted in waters off the Canary Islands—one of which capsized 245 kilometers south of Gran Canaria as rescuers were still en route. | On Sunday, the UK Border Force intercepted 7 vessels transporting 254 asylum seekers toward British shores, the first crossings of the English Channel in 11 days.

Mediterranean Sea
Last Wednesday, the Ocean Viking announced it had rescued 131 asylum seekers from 2 vessels off the Libyan coast over the previous 2 days, as Italian authorities announced they had rescued another 80 asylum seekers from a fishing boat in waters off of Sicily. | On Thursday, Cypriot authorities rescued 25 Syrian asylum seekers adrift off of Cyprus’ Akamas peninsula, bringing 24 to the Kokkinotrimithia and arresting one suspected smuggler. | On Saturday, the Moroccan Human Rights Association announced that the lifeless body of an aspiring asylum seeker has been found in waters off the port of Melilla, in a tragic attempt to circumvent the land border between Morocco and the Spanish enclave, closed since the spring of 2020. | This Monday, the GeoBarents disembarked 101 asylum seekers it had rescued over a week prior in Augusta, Sicily, as the Ocean Viking continued waiting to be assigned a safe port of disembarkation.

Aegean Sea
Last Tuesday, the Greek Coast Guard rescued 73 asylum seekers who shipwrecked off the coast of Kythira, off the southern coast of the Peloponnese peninsula. | On Wednesday, the Turkish Coast Guard announced that, between the Friday and Monday prior, it had rescued 108 asylum seekers from multiple points in the Aegean Sea, whom it believes had been pushed back from European waters, and intercepted another 31 asylum seekers before they could depart Turkish waters. On the same day, the Turkish Coast Guard rescued 47 asylum seekers from 2 vessels off the coast of Seferihisar, in Izmir province, including one of which Turkish authorities believe had been pushed back from European waters with 24 people on board. | On Thursday, 34 asylum seekers arrived in Lesvos spontaneously, and where transported to the Mavrovouni Reception and Identification Center for registration and accommodation.

Gulf of Mexico
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard repatriated 84 Cuban asylum seekers, intercepted on multiple vessels off the coasts the Bahamas and the Florida Keys over the previous 3 days. | On Friday, authorities apprehended 3 Cuban asylum seekers on Plantation Key in the northern Florida Keys. On the same day, authorities detained 6 Cuban asylum seekers after they arrived spontaneously in South Beach, Miami. | On Saturday, 9 asylum seekers arrived spontaneously to Cayman Brac.

Sources: InfoMigrants, BBC, Cyprus Mail, Alarm Phone, Europa Press, TRT, Aegean Boat Report, Miami Herald, CBS Miami, loopcayman.

Europe

The two faces of EU migration policymaking
Last Wednesday, the European Commission issued a reform proposal to loosen restrictions on regular migration into the EU-27, allowing migrant workers to quit or change jobs without losing residency, for long-term EU residency to be transferable across EU states, and for third-country nationals to become eligible for naturalization after 5 years’ residence in the EU, rather than in a single EU state. On the same day, Lighthouse Reports issued a new investigation revealing that while Frontex designate most of their operations in the Aegean as departure prevention operations (where asylum seekers never reach European territory, such that their rights under European law are never triggered), Frontex has misleadingly used this designation in at least 145 incidents where just over 950 asylum seekers were expelled from Greek waters or soil without being offered a chance to claim asylum. | On Thursday, Sea-Watch and Fagdenstaat filed suit against Frontex, demanding it release 73 documents relating to a suspected pull-back to Libyan waters from the Maltese search-and-rescue zone on July 30 of last year. | On Friday, Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri resigned shortly after the European anti-fraud agency released preliminary findings of its investigation into Leggeri’s obfuscation of human rights violations conducted and condoned by Frontex.

Baltics & Balkan border brinksmanship
Last Monday, Polish authorities warned they had intercepted 103 asylum seekers trying to enter irregularly from Belarus, with arrivals rising to between 40 and 120 per day with the improving weather and via a novel apparent route from the MENA region, via Moscow, and through Belarus to the Polish border. | On Thursday, InfoMigrants highlighted the plight of 5 Syrian asylum seekers detained in the Lesznowola Guarded Center for Foreigners, who have been on hunger strike since April 19 to protest not conditions in the center—which they acknowledge are adequate—but rather the fact they are detained at all. On the same day, Bosnian authorities cleared an informal encampment and squat in Miral, returning 150-200 asylum seekers to facilities in Lipa, where most were already registered but had left of their own accord.

Displacement within and beyond Ukraine
Last Tuesday, the UN revised its projections for displacement out of Ukraine, predicting that 8.3 million Ukrainians will become refugees by the end of the year, with 5.2 million refugees and another 7.7 million IDPs as of Monday prior. | On Wednesday, the European Banking Authority called on European banks to reduce due diligence standards applied to Ukrainian refugees trying to open bank accounts in their country of residence, finding that strict anti-money laundering checks were preventing Ukrainians from accessing basic financial services (see the EBA’s full statement here). On the same day, EU authorities announced they would inaugurate the EU Talent pool to facilitate labor market absorption of Ukrainian refugees, as a pilot program toward a broader deployment of the Talent Pool for all incoming labor migrants. Also on Wednesday, Hungarian authorities announced they would admit 1.000 Moroccan students displaced form Ukraine, to complete their higher education in Hungarian universities. | On Sunday, Ukrainian authorities announced that 100 civilians had been evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, as part of a humanitarian evacuation organized by the UN and ICRC with Russian and Ukrainian compliance.

Med5 migration (mis)management
Last Tuesday, efsyn reported on a week’s worth of back-and-forth irregular crossings of the Evros River, marking the Greco-Turkish land border, where over the prior a group of Syrian refugees, at risk of repatriation from Turkey, had reached an islet in the middle of the river, applied for and been granted interim measures by the European Court of Human Rights compelling Greek authorities to admit them into Greek soil for asylum procedures, and then reported being repeatedly assaulted, pushed back to Turkish soil, and eventually placed in detention in Greece—all as Greek authorities repeatedly misled the Court, reporting to it that they were unable to find the concerned group. | On Wednesday, Save the Children warned that reception facilities for unaccompanied minors in the Canary Islands were nearly overwhelmed, tallying a caseload of 2.500 children—double their recommended capacity—and demanding that minors be relocated to reception facilities in mainland Spain.

UK migration policymaking
Last Wednesday, the Nationality and Borders Bill gained parliamentary approval after overcoming a last-ditch attempt to scuttle it in the House of Lords, clearing the government to seek royal assent and implement the bill into law. On the same day, Freedom from Torture announced it had demanded extensive documentation from the Home Office on the details of the UK-Rwanda asylum seeker relocation deal, as the first step toward likely litigation challenging the deal’s legality. Also on Wednesday, Doctors of the World issued a report documenting poor healthcare standards in UK asylum seeker containment centers, such as Napier Barracks, assessing that deficient provision leaves basic medical conditions untreated, visiting harm on asylum seekers’ physical and mental health (see the full report here).

Sources: Politico, the Guardian, euobserver, InfoMigrants, Reuters, ANSA, Middle East Monitor, efsyn, Europa Press, the Independent.

The Americas

Migration policymaking in North America
Last Monday, a U.S. federal judge issued an order suspending the Biden Administration’s intended termination of Title 42, preventing the Administration from rescinding the order prior to May 23, the termination date set by the CDC. On the same day, Reuters relayed figures from Canadian authorities finding that, between December 2021 and Februrary of this year, just over 7.350 asylum seekers crossed into Canada from U.S. soil, a dramatic increase from the year prior attributed to the loosening of pandemic-era restrictions on access to the Canadian asylum system. | On Tuesday, Gallup issued a poll indicating that 78% of Americans would support resettling 100.000 Ukrainian refugees, with 92% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans in agreement (see the full poll here). | On Wednesday, USAID announced a $670 million global food aid package, roughly a third of which would finance aid delivery in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen, with the remainder targeting logistics and supply chains. | On Thursday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas disclosed that there remain 1.000 separated children in U.S. custody as a result of the preceding Administration’s zero-tolerance policy, 500 of whose families have been traced and contacted, with 400 already in reunification proceedings.

Irregular migration in Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean
Last Monday, Mexican authorities disclosed that they had detained just under 5.700 asylum seekers from 42 countries over the 4 days prior, with nearly half coming from Honduras, Guatemala, and Cuba. | On Wednesday, Mexican authorities dissolved an asylum seeker caravan of about 300 just one day’s march out of Tapachula, securing their agreement to disband in exchange for providing them transport to a migration processing center in Huixtla, 30 kilometers ahead, to register their asylum claims there. | On Thursday, Mexican authorities announced they had dissolved an additional caravan shortly after it departed from Tapachula, offering its ~200 participants transport to Huixtla and registration there. On the same day, U.S. and Mexican authorities returned 47 and 84 asylum seekers, respectively, to Cuba, for a total 1.878 repatriations to Cuba from all countries of return since the beginning of 2020. | On Saturday, the third asylum seeker caravan to depart from Tapachula this week dissolved upon reaching Huixtla and meeting immigration officials in a position to register the ~300 asylum seekers’ claims. On the same day, Panamanian authorities tallied ~19.000 irregular arrivals across the Darién Gap thus far this year, a substantial increase from the ~11.500 arrivals recorded in the first 4 months of 2021.

Sources: NBC News, Reuters, USA Today, the New Arab, Milenio, EFE, Deutsche-Welle.

Oceania

Mobility to Australia and New Zealand
Last Tuesday, Australian authorities disclosed that Indian migrants have supplanted their Chinese counterparts as Australia’s second-largest diaspora community, with immigration having sustained 28-years of recession-proof economic growth in Australia. | This Monday, New Zealand re-opened its borders to COVID-19 vaccinated and negative-tested international arrivals from 60 countries, with the intention to admit arrivals from remaining countries by October.

Sources: Bloomberg, the Guardian.

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Mixed Migration—hebdo

April 25-May 2, 2022 Mixed Migration—hebdo