The Ethics of Cherry Picking: The dilemma of where you live, work and play!!!
Release Date: 22 May 2006
By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary General
Dear e-CIVICUS Subscriber,
This week I participated in a conference entitled Immigration Futures, organised by the Monash Institute for the Study of Global Movements. The panel that I was part of was called the ethics of cherry picking.
This panel focused on outward migration which looks at the “brain drain” problem that is facing many predominantly poor countries since some of their most skilled citizens choose to live and work in predominantly rich countries. Manchester in England, UK for example, has more Malawian doctors than the entire Malawian health system!!! For this week’s column I have not used developing and developed or first and third world; these and other distinctions all have their problems; as does the formulation of rich and poor countries. Instead, I have used an equally cumbersome description of “predominantly poor” and “predominantly rich” countries. The reason for this is simple. During the last seven years that I have been with CIVICUS, I have been taken aback by the appalling levels of poverty in some of the richest countries in the world; equally I have been overcome by the excesses of wealth in some of the poorest countries in the world.
This conference could not have been more well-timed. In the week of the conference, several news stories relating to the challenge of immigration played themselves out. President Bush visited a border community with Mexico to stake out his immigration policy, following unprecedented peaceful demonstrations by the immigrant community and their allies in the United States; the French interior Minister Sarkozy pushed through a law that tightens immigration controls (there have already been some protests. The hard line law that actually sytemises cherry picking attracted protests and riots when Sarkozy went to Benin and Mali last week such is the strength of feeling (www.voanews.com/english/2006-05-18-voa36.cfm); a Dutch Member of Parliament of Somali background was stripped of her citizenship, for having lied about certain aspects of the circumstances she faced when she sought asylum. Then there was the story of potential asylum seekers in the UK facing sexual harassment from UK immigration officials. Tragically this last story revolved around an eighteen year old Zimbabwean woman, who had been a victim of rape back in her home country. In the process of her asylum applications, the chief immigration officer, at one of the immigration centres, essentially said if she had sex with him he would take care of her visa application (The Observer, UK, 21 May 2006).
Three points in President Bush’s speech are worth noting: The US needs to remember that the vast majority of US citizens have immigrant roots; that the numbers of illegal immigrants in the US was far too large for a mass round-up and deportation of affected undocumented citizens of Mexico and other countries. And finally, often the same work that hard working immigrants are prepared to do, current legal US citizens refuse to embrace. Some observers, such as Vicente Garcia-Delgado, CIVICUS representative to the United Nations in New York, have pointed out that some of the more adverse effects of NAFTA on workers’ employment, wages and benefits in both Mexico and the US, arguably the main reason for the high levels of Mexican migration, do not figure at all in the current debate in the US.
But before we look a bit more closely at the outflow of skilled human capital from predominantly poor to predominantly rich countries it is worth making the point that migration, like globalisation, is not new. And therefore it would be inappropriate to de-contexualise the challenge we face, if we are to find just, ethical and fair solutions to what are admittedly difficult challenges. Put in another way, can you imagine how different the world would look, if the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the Maori in New Zealand or the Aborigines in Australia, or the formerly colonised peoples of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean or the Pacific “discovered” visas, and were “civilised” enough to have possessed sophisticated military machinery to implement a visa system and were able to control the movement of people, many of whom where coming to destroy their culture, steal their land and the resources to be found there.
“Cherry Picking” within this broader context, is a concern for a blatant double standard that predominantly rich countries use when they develop immigration policies. Globalisation, according to some of its most enthusiastic advocates, was supposed to deliver an unhindered flow of capital, technology, ideas and so on across borders. However, one of the biggest contradictions about globalisation is that precisely at a time when there is a growing ability for people to travel globally as a result of increased and cheaper air travel we have the highest levels of formal and informal restrictions on travel for citizens from predominantly poor countries wishing to travel to predominantly rich countries.
In the context of the so-called war on terror, we have seen growing restrictions on travel, including racial and religious profiling and obstacles to travel of activists and civil society workers. Alan Fowler, who chairs the CIVICUS Board’s Programme Committee, has called this, “the curtailment of international civic mobility.” Practically this means that virtually every global gathering one goes to these days there will be a number of folks from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific that have been denied visas to travel. I have some personal experience of harassment because of the religious and racial profile that is often assigned to me. Apart from being taken off a flight from Atlanta to Washington, DC in 2002 and being “routinely” pulled out for what I am assured are “random” checks, the costs associated with my being able to do my job, which requires considerable travel, has huge cost implications, as most visas are not cheap, and time implications, since applying for a visa can in some instances be tantamount to doing a mini-thesis or short dissertation. Put bluntly, if the Secretary General of CIVICUS was from an OECD country, the travel costs associated with such a person would be considerably less than what it costs CIVICUS to have me on travel on their behalf especially given the huge amount of staff time that goes into applying for visas. I have jokingly said that if I were to write a reflection of my time at CIVICUS it would be called: Visa’s Bloody Visas.
However, there is one growing exception. If you have skills that the rich country’s economy or education or health system needs, not only will you be tolerated, you will be aggressively pursued, after your own government has spent a huge amount of public resources in preparing you for public service, usually in education or health. This issue of the so-called brain drain from predominantly poor to predominantly rich countries raises several complex and complicated conundrums. It is partly for this reason, some have written that just as much of the colonial world was underdeveloped by Europe historically, perhaps history is repeating itself and raises the question of who owes who in terms of “debt”. Some have called for a special tax to be levied on rich country governments as a compensation for the government who has invested in the education of say a doctor, or a mathematics teacher, who ends up in the UK, for example. Post-apartheid South Africa has lost large numbers of both black and white professionals particularly in mathematics and science education and the health sector more broadly to the UK, following recruitment campaigns in South Africa. It would be interesting to calculate the aid money given by the UK government since democracy , what impact the loss of professionals have had to South African society and what gain was enjoyed by the UK. Will it balance itself out? Or will the gain made by the UK outweigh any aid package possible?
In terms of what can be done about it; one positive story is the Campaigning on Education for All in the UK. Thanks to work of National Union of Teachers, one of the UK teachers unions, a Commonwealth Education protocol was agreed in September 2004. It provides for some regulation of recruitment and make some efforts to compensate countries whose staff are recruited. For example, investing in teacher training in countries it recruits from. Not perfect and not the level of compensation required - but at least minimising the damage it causes and protecting the rights of those who get exploited once they arrive in developed countries.
For more see (www.teachers.org.uk/resources/pdf/nn1804.pdf)
Yet, ideally, every citizen should have the right to choose where to live and work. In today’s fast globalising world, people fall in love with people who live far away, retiring parents sometimes want to move closer to their children, and work and learning opportunities might all contribute to people deciding to leave their home countries for short or long periods. Now this reality is not peculiar to citizens from predominantly poor countries moving to predominantly rich ones. Indeed, we continue to see much movement among several predominantly rich countries.
There are also significant movements of people from one predominantly poor country to another that may offer more prospects of prosperity. Another trend that still holds sway is the movement of citizens from predominantly wealthy countries moving to predominantly poor countries for purposes of solidarity and sometimes perhaps in search of good weather and good food, among numerous other positive reasons.
As to the right of all citizens to move wherever they want, as early as 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights already touched upon this issue, although there is disagreement between restrictive and progressive interpreters of the following two clauses:
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Of course, this does not mean that all citizens will be welcome abroad, but it provides some room for arguing that in the future all citizens of the world should be treated equally when entering, exiting or residing in a country (provided that they respect the laws of the land). Unfortunately, until now, no legal provision ensures that citizens can move freely from country to country.
The representative of the World Bank pointed out that the staggering level of remittances (monies that are sent by family members abroad to their loved ones back home) has an enormous positive development outcome. Often even seemingly modest amounts of money can be a life saver when family members convert it to the local currency. In fact, remittances often exceed the official development aid to some predominantly poor countries. While this is an important contribution to impoverished families back home, does this situation create a sustainable development path for the sending country? I believe that if we had to ask the question about whether aid is more valuable than say human resource development in predominantly poor countries, the answer to me is very clear. Unless predominantly poor countries can develop, and retain a certain number of skilled professionals, the future indeed looks bleak, irrespective of whether there is a doubling of remittances flowing to the poor countries of the world.
I hope that my colleagues and I on the CIVICUS staff and board will get to see you at the CIVICUS World Assembly in Glasgow, Scotland, and that visa problems will not keep you away from what promises to be an engaging, challenging and energising Assembly in less than four weeks time. One of the key purposes of the World Assembly is to try and help people working on different issues to make conceptual and practical connections. For example, if we were serious about development, the problem of migration to rich countries would be reduced dramatically. Poverty is a major factor breeding migration. So if you are interested in this issue, I hope you will be able to connect with those that are working on anti-poverty issues and for you to explore the points of intersection.
