Secluding North America's Labor Migrants: Notes on the International Organization for Migration's Compassionate Mercenary Business

Abstract

The re(b)ordering efforts made by states over the last three decades, for instance the securitization of some border areas and harsher visa policies, may denote an evolution of the international migration regime. The increase of migrant and refugee flows in the 1970s and 1980s (Hatton 2012), coupled with demographic and security challenges in developing countries (Geddes 2005), started to significantly alter an international migration regime that was essentially based on the notion of ‘control’ (Pécoud 2010; Georgi 2010). In the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia added further policy makers’ concerns about the regulation of permanent and temporary migrations and refugee flows. A new regime, based on a global policy agenda relying particularly on the concept of ‘migration management’, was originally formulated by Bimal Ghosh, in 1993. Ghosh further developed this concept of ‘migration management’ in the 1996 project known as the New International Regime for Orderly Movements of People (NIROMP), funded by the Swedish, Dutch and Swiss governments (Ghosh 2000). Ghosh proposed a comprehensive international migration regime, designed to tackle what was perceived as current and future migration policy crises, and focuses on both migrants and refugees (Geiger and Pécoud 2010). Yet, Sassen argues that these two categories, migrants and refugees, cannot be merged: “there are separate regimes for refugees in all these countries and an international regime as well, something that can hardly be said for immigration�? (1996, 64). Nonetheless, Ghosh’s ‘migration management’ approach was welcomed and later borrowed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). This notion of ‘migration management’ became a mantra of the IOM, “committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society�? (IOM 2015e).