migrante-uae.net

In the midst of the worsening global economic recession, the International Migrants Alliance vows stronger campaigns as it celebrates its first year of founding.
                              
“The IMA’s founding in June 2008 came at a time when violations against migrants and refugees around the world intensify with the looming of the global financial crisis. Within this year, we registered our stalwart resistance against neoliberal globalization and we vow a stronger force in the years to come,” said Eni Lestari, chairperson of the IMA.
 
In October last year, members of the IMA launched an international campaign against the 2nd assembly of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). Co-organizing the International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR) in Manila as the genuine alternative migrants’ forum to the GFMD, the IMA exposed the GFMD as machinery in exploiting migrant workers within the neoliberal globalization framework.
 
“The GFMD’s concept of development is the further enslavement of migrant workers to salvage their respective ailing economies. By imposing labor flexibilization and intensified labor export, they aim to gain superprofits by ushering in cheap, rights-deprived and disposable migrant workers,” added Lestari. “Such cruel intentions have been exposed. What they failed to do in the World Trade Organization, they aim to clinch through the GFMD.”
 
In October this year, Lestari relayed, the IMA will once again engage and challenge the GFMD by holding the second IAMR side by side the GFMD’s Third Assembly in Athens, Greece.
 
The GFMD’s theme this year  is “Integrating migration policies in development strategies for the benefit of all and especially countries of origin” that, in the IMA’s view, will only restrict border control, further clip migrant workers’ rights, and haul undesirables, such as undocumented migrants and refugees.
 
Such motives and attempts, Lestari retorted, make the leaders and members of the GFMD feel like they are gods who can mold people’s lives and destinies according to their whim. “The leaders of the GFMD should not play gods with the rights and lives of migrant workers and refugees lest they want arrows of protest hit their very Achilles’ heel,” she said.
 
With the launching of international campaigns, the IMA is demanding host governments to stop criminalizing migrants, especially undocumented migrants and refugees, and seriously address the ongoing discrimination against them. It is also calling on the United Nations and other international bodies to stop promoting forced migration as one of the processes for economic development.
 
“Above all these, it is only when our own countries focus on genuine national-based industrialization and genuine agrarian reform instead of imposing economic liberalization policies that we can survive the impact of the global financial crisis,” Lestari concluded.