As the United Nations High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development (HLD) takes place in New York City, CUPE extends our solidarity to the migrant workers, grassroots organizations and their advocates who are gathered to expose the conditions of migrants around the world and challenge the use of migration as a tool for development.
The 2013 HLD is a gathering of high level representatives of governments, including heads of state, ministers, vice-ministers and senior officials who are meeting under the guise of protecting migrant rights and finding ways to integrate their contributions to society into the post-2015 development agenda. Migration has garnered increasing attention amongst world leaders in recent years as many rely on the faulty free market and fail to create employment opportunities, decent work and living wages in their own countries. They have become proponents of migration recognizing that migrants can be a source of cheap, exploitable labour in receiving countries and provide needed remittances to prop up the failing economies of sending countries.
Grassroots migrant communities, migrant rights organizations, trade unions, faith groups, academia and other civil society organizations from around the world have gathered in New York to raise their collective voice in defense of migrant rights. Public Service International (PSI) and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) are participating in the 2013 People’s Global Action on Migration, Development & Human Rights (PGA). The PGA is an independent civil society and grassroots people’s event taking place parallel to the 2013 HLD in an effort to critically engage the HLD process, to challenge states to undertake migration and development policy-making from a human rights and people-centered approach, call to end the widespread criminalization of migration, and hold governments accountable to their international human rights and community development commitments.
Other parallel efforts by migrant communities to speak out on their own behalf are also taking place. These efforts make clear that migrants don’t choose to leave their home countries but are forced to; they call for the need for justice and recognition of their human rights; and maintain the need to address the root causes of forced migration.
It is no secret that migrants are some of the most vulnerable workers in the world. They are impacted by family separation, labour exploitation, detention and deportation, criminalization and repression, racism and xenophobia, war and displacement, and gender and sexual violence. Canada now allows more temporary migrants to enter the country then permanent residents and routinely caters to the need of employers over the rights of migrants to join and organize unions, toa living wage, or access to health and safety protection and social services.
We reiterate PSI’s point in their HLD statement that a sustainable development cannot be achieved without viable publicly-run and supported public services as a means for states in bringing development to their people. A strong public sector and access to decent work are the necessary conditions ensuring workers are not forced to leave the families to migrate in the first place, and to further ensure their basic rights are respected if they do.
For more information please visit: http://www.world-psi.org/en/psi-un-high-level-dialogue-migration-and-development-and-peoples-global-action-migration-development