Mind the Gap
by: Terry Martin, SPIA UG
“It’s like a scary movie.” That’s how Pierre Sanga from Cameroon describes his experience in Tunisia amidst an upsurge in anti-migrant sentiment. Mr. Sanga’s predicament was highlighted in a recent television report by DW News, Germany’s international broadcaster, where I regularly work as an anchor. (Report, intro, and interview with the Tunisia Director of Human Rights Watch here.) At the end of the report, Mr. Sanga is seen standing on a beach looking across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. He explains with resignation what it is that motivates him and millions of others to up stakes and seek a better life in Europe, often at great personal risk: “If you don’t have a possibility to change your actual life, probably you will take the decision to go to the sea.” Aware that he is speaking to a media outlet from a country where many people want fewer immigrants, Mr. Sanga humbly adds: “I’m sorry. This is the reality.”
click to watch the full DW News TV report
This reality – and Europe’s response to it – is what we are investigating in the GAPs research project. Our regional partners are gathering input from migrants, policymakers, and civil society in over a dozen countries across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. We’re also gaining insights from Canada, a country that approaches migration from a different perspective. Within this broad scope, we are focusing on one specific aspect of migration: return. In other words, we’re exploring everything to do with people “going back where they came from” - departing a country they have migrated to and returning to a country they migrated from, which may or may not be their home country/country of origin.
We’ll consider all types of return migration, both voluntary and involuntary, paying particular attention to gaps in policy goals and practice. My job is to help the consortium convey its finding to policymakers and ultimately achieve what many refer to as impact. If we’re lucky, some of our recommendations might get taken up and result in positive change, perhaps making the migrant “movie” a little less scary. Towards the end of the project, I will be closely involved in formulating briefing materials, mainly policy briefs, for policymakers at supranational and national levels.
Given persistent pressures on (and from) policymakers in Europe to curb migration, the GAPs project could hardly be timelier. Calls to deport migrants, especially those who have not secured legal permission to stay, are growing louder in many countries. The UK government has resolved to eject asylum seekers before their applications can be processed, preferring to send them to Ruanda while their cases are decided. (The UN has sharply criticized the plan which still faces legal challenges.) Countries like Germany where anti-migrant sentiment is resurgent are looking for ways to prevent what’s known as secondary migration. They want to set up migrant processing centers in Southern Europe to assure that asylum seekers who arrive on the continent are not allowed to cross any internal EU borders.
Meanwhile, efforts to stop migrants from reaching the EU’s shores at all are gaining momentum, raising serious concerns about commitment by member states to human rights and international law. The deal struck with Turkey to prevent millions of refugees from fleeing to the EU during Syria’s war is still in force. And an EU proposal from 2015 to distribute migrants and refugees equitably around the European Union has not progressed. This is indicative of the lack of solidarity among EU Member States when it comes to helping migrants and refugees, particularly those from Africa and the Middle East.
Migration policy in the European Union has always been contentious. It’s fair to say that as policy fields go, migration is as vexed as it gets, marked by unparalleled degrees of vitriol, cynicism, and hypocrisy. Social, economic, environmental, and political realities make it extremely difficult to develop a viable migration policy that fully respects international law and human rights. And the GAPs research project will not change that.
What we can do is strengthen the evidence base, particularly on key aspects of return migration. We can raise awareness about what’s going on and how we got here. We can use our research results – leveraged by the collective experience of our remarkable consortium - to offer recommendations that could lead to more humane, fair, and efficient return migration policies. There is much we can learn from people like Pierre Sanga.
Contact:
Terry Martin | SPIA UG | t.martin@spia-europa.de
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Story of One Returnee
From March 8-10, 2023, the “GAPs: Decentring the Study of Migrant Returns and Readmission Policies in Europe and Beyond” project consortium met in person at the University of Uppsala in Sweden to kick off an ambitious three year Horizon Europe research project that aims to better understand the complexities of return migration and examine the disconnects between policy expectations and their actual outcomes.
In addition to meetings on individual work packages, project objectives and management, dissemination, and ethics and data management, the meeting was enriched by several content-based events. One of these events was a film screening and discussion on the potential and challenges of digital storytelling for shifting migration narratives and informing research-based policy together with academics and migrants.
The screening event was led by our partner organization, Migration Matters. The second cluster focused on documentary storytelling from the international project Migrant Lives in Pandemic Times, featuring the stories of a diverse range of migrants around the world and how their lives were impacted by the pandemic in terms of work, family, mental and physical health, and community. This cluster included the story of one returnee[1] from the UAE to Kerala, India. The screened videos represented a mix of in-person productions and remote productions during Covid and were produced for diverse target groups, ranging from youth and university-level students to policy makers.
story of one returnee from the UAE to Kerala, India. Migration Matters Screening / GAPs Kick-off meeting