security of poor
classes. The immigrant-migrant divide must be seen in this respect. Open
borders may be a happy prospect for rich immigrants settling in new
countries, but are not such a welcome prospect for other poor classes
such as migrant workers and refugees.
States have also been interested in perpetuating their interests of
security. In this respect, they have benefited from labour flows and
capital flows that the processes of globalisation make possible. Both
the host country (hosting refugees and migrant workers) as well as the
country of origin benefit from such capital and labour flows. Migrants
from Kerala working as white collared labour in countries in Gulf,
migrants from Sri Lanka who work as housemaids or domestic help in
countries like Lebanon and other countries in West Asia have helped both
the host country and the country of origin benefit from remittances sent
home by migrants.
States have even attempted to provide for the security of industrial
employers. For instance, America has made it possible for employers to
hire paperless Mexican workers that exempt the employers from providing
any protection and allow these employers to give them low wages.
States have also attempted, in the interests of globalisation, to ensure
security of spaces. This they have attempted to do, by ridding local
spaces of slum squalor. They have attempted to wipe out illegality and
traces of squalor in carrying out beautification, commercialisation
projects that advertise erstwhile slum localities to be tourist
destinations.
States have on the other hand, not attempted to provide for security of
livelihood. They have not gone out of the way to enquire into loss of
various entitlements that result out of displacement and migration.
Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, Chechen IDPs in the Russian Federation have
all suffered from the apathy of the respective countries they migrated
to. They have on the contrary taken away these rights in the context
of |
|
such instances such as the Gujarat riots. In this regard, it was noted by
the participants that there is overwhelming global support for
terrorist, militant and fundamentalist activities. On the other hand,
there has been a tendency to associate the categories of migrant and
terrorist, using terrorist rhetoric to systematically cut off migrants
from human rights. Thus, states have not recognized the need to pay
attention to vulnerability and have not heeded the call of human
security in their global concerns.
At the end of the discussions, the participants
made the following recommendations to the plenary. While acknowledging
the right of asylum countries to introduce citizenship exams,
Participants noted that these countries also have a duty to provide
refugees with proper language/legal support so they have a better chance
of passing the citizenship exams and to integrate in their countries of
asylum. It was noted that there is a general need for generating
awareness campaigns relating to citizenship of women IDPs’/Migrants.
The campaign should not only target women IDPs/Migrants, but
should also be aimed at all other important stakeholders (legislators,
government officials, host communities, etc.) Many countries seem to be
dealing with citizenship issues on an ad hoc basis. Therefore
participants recommended that countries in South Asia and elsewhere need
to come up with proper policy/legal framework to look into the
citizenship issues of the displaced persons. It was also agreed that
states have also been heinously negligent of gender security. There have
been no attempts to frame universal, global laws of protection for women
against social, sexual and financial exploitation. The absence of legal
counselling for poor immigrating women in America and other countries of
the developed west as well as elsewhere is only one of the aspects of
gender security that states have ignored to take note of. The
participants agreed that the existing notions of globalisation, the
globalisation
|