IT’S GOOD TO LEAVE, REPORT TELLS GEORGIANS

Daily Georgian Times
2009.10.12 16:24

Community

Migration, a fact of life for a large percentage of Georgians, aids
the development of not only the migrant but also the communities they
migrate to, and provides powerful opportunities for the migrant’s
own home community to improve its quality of life, the United Nations
Development Programme stated in its annual Human Development Report,
or HDR, last week.

The term "migrant" usually projects the image of an internally
displaced person (or IDP, such as those coming from the separatist
regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia) or a refugee (such as those
Georgians seeking asylum in Poland over the summer). In the report,
migrant refers to anyone who has changed their place of residence,
temporarily or permanently, by crossing a municipal, district,
regional, or international border from the place they were born in. By
the UNDP’s definition, President Mikheil Saakashvili was at one time
a migrant (having gone to the United States to study at Columbia Law
School in New York City and George Washington University Law School
in Washington, D.C., and to France to study at the International
Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg in the mid-1990s), and his
wife, Sandra Roelofs, is currently a migrant (having been born in
the Netherlands but relocated to Tbilisi, and having obtained dual
citizenship at the beginning of last year).

For Georgia, a moderately developing country according to the HDR,
migration has traditionally been to the also-developing Russian
Federation, and more recently into the European Union. As the report
states, migrants generally flow toward areas where wages, health
benefits, and educational opportunities are much better (or, according
to the report, areas that have achieved higher human development),
and where entry is not as strongly restricted by policy decisions in
the destination country. Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s invitation
for Georgians to migrate to his country after the South Ossetian War
created the perfect conditions for Georgian international migration
over the summer.

Again, the HDR noted that such migrations are not a bad thing. Granted,
those who are better educated and with higher incomes are more likely
to leave (creating a temporary dearth of trained specialists, or a
"brain drain"); there is a high initial cost to migration, and a lag
between arrival in the host country and the first wages being paid
that generally discourages the poor from migrating. Nonetheless, with
families back home migrants will send back remittances, often with
the cumulative benefit to their home country that is much higher
than that which can be obtained by available international aid
programmes. Further, most migrants return home after several years
abroad and bring back with them ideas that have worked in their host
countries with which they might try at home. One could suggest that
the reforms following the Rose Revolution might have been the result
of at least one such transmission of ideas.

The report also noted that the level of internal migration in
any country will be much higher than its outbound international
migration. If there is a big difference between the Human Development
Index, or HDI, of one region over another, people will choose to find
new opportunities in that other region and avoid the high initial
cost of international travel (which includes not only trans other
administrative costs, and the burden imposed by corruption in some
destination countries). This tendency for greater internal travel is
particularly true for larger countries such as Russia and China, but
it also applies in Georgia, which has several rural regions and a few
smaller municipalities alongside the capital Tbilisi. The anticipated
movement, as Georgia continues to develop, from rural communities to
the city indicates a need for additional urban planning to avoid the
creation of slums near the country’s growing urban centres.

The HDR also touched upon the issue of displaced people, a major
area of concern for the war-battered regions of north-central and
northwestern Georgia. In the past, internal displacement has proven
to be a major driving factor in the urbanisation of the country,
as ethnic Georgians from separatist regions relocated to Tbilisi,
many moving into buildings left vacant following Georgia’s civil wars
in the early 1990s.

The highly visible migrants who at one time lived in the Hotel
Adjara and the Hotel Iberia (the present Radisson SAS Iveria Hotel)
have since been relocated to new homes to allow for the growth of
Tbilisi’s hospitality industry, but the question of how to deal with
hundreds of thousands of IDPs has not ceased to be a major concern
for the Georgian Government. The potential for abuse of any new IDPs
in their new surroundings confirms the heightened need for their
protection by the Georgian authorities. But the HDR also notes that
support for the temporary international relocation of some IDPs may
also give them the freedom to find not only better opportunities than
what’s available in their own country but may allow them to benefit
their families, helping them recover from the loss of their original
homes and enhancing their socio-economic status.

The HDR is careful to note that migration is not a substitute for a
national strategy to help people flourish at home, but it nonetheless
calls on Governments to consider using it as a tool for creating better
eir people. One example of where the use of migration as a development
aid has been successful is in the Philippines, where the Overseas
Employment Administration has managed the well-being of a large body
of workers that have gone abroad to support their families. The OEA
has been effective in increasing the protection of workers from fraud
carried out by recruiting agents at home. It has also helped protect
vulnerable elements of its population from trafficking, particularly
in the Middle East, through education programmes and other actions.

This idea could be implemented in Georgia in the form of a
national employment agency, coordinating everything from training
to recruitment, the vetting of credentials, migration support and
working with consular officials abroad to protect migrants during
their period outside the country. Remittances would be left to the use
of the individual Georgian, with the idea that their earnings would
help the economy at home. The agency can also help promote the use
of Georgian migrants in potential host countries, helping overcome
the exaggerated perceptions there that Georgian migrants could take
away all the wealth of their communities.

Also, the HDR predicted a noteworthy trend that suggests developed
countries will be importing working-aged migrants in the coming
years as their own population ages beyond retirement; of the 2.8
billion additional people that will populate the world in 2050, 90
percent of them will be from the developing world. This suggestion
of opportunity presumes, of course, that the retirement age in places
like the EU or the United States won’t advance with the aging of the
population, or that the working age won’t drop with improved vocational
education programmes in the developed world, but the prospect of a
much smaller group of working people trying to support a much larger
aged population in potential destination countries does bode well
for developing country workers. Migration support, as a component
of Georgia’s overall human development po timely investment in the
future of the country if implemented in the near future.

Many reporters last week took the ranking of countries, based on
their UNDP-assigned HDI from 2007, as the most important item of
the report. This played down the message that the UNDP had wanted to
convey, namely that human development opportunities are not equal in
all countries, and that migration has high potential for improving
conditions for those countries trying to catch up with the developed
world. For what it’s worth, Georgia ranked in 2007 as number 89 out of
182 countries in overall human development, behind Belarus (no. 69),
the Russian Federation (no. 71), Kazakhstan (no. 82), Armenia (no. 84),
Ukraine (no. 85), and Azerbaijan (no. 86) but ahead of Turkmenistan
(no. 100), Moldova (no. 117), Uzbekistan (no. 119), Kyrgyzstan
(no. 120), and Tajikistan (no. 127).

By Ben Angel 2009.10.12 16:24