On November 18, 2024, the EMN held the EMN Austria National Conference 2024: Unleashing the Potential of Migration Partnerships: Towards a Comprehensive Approach; https://www.emn.at/en/emn-austria-national-conference-unleashing-the-potential-of-migration-partnerships-towards-a-comprehensive-approach/
I represented HAART Kenya as an expert on illegal migratory routes. Marian Benbow Pfisterer, Chief of Mission, IOM Country Office for Austria, addressed the meeting by stating that Europe needs external partners to curb migration. Though I completely agree with her remarks, I believe that cooperation should be on an eye level rather than just a donor-recipient level.
While Philippe Leclerc, Director of the UNHCR’s Regional Bureau for Europe, emphasized the importance of comprehensive approaches to migration partnerships, he failed to address the elephant in the room: the importance of an equal dialogue between these partners, rather
than the monologue that is currently underway.
The discussion that followed, led by Tobias Molander, Director for EU and International Migration and Special Representative for External Migration Policy, focused on Migration Diplomacy: How to Build Strong Partnerships. The panel examined several diplomatic approaches and instruments for forming migration partnerships. The majority of the speakers used their own experiences to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of these collaborations, as well as to provide insights into what makes them successful. What they failed to address was the inadequacy of Mediterranean migration policies, both in terms of the increasing death toll and their inability to accomplish the declared policy goals, which are primarily to reduce migratory flows.
My proposal is to push for policy formulation based on an understanding of migration decision making, which serves as a starting off point. The intricacy of individual decision making can be overlooked in debates on migration in the Mediterranean, and the policy approaches presented in the panel rely on simplistic models.
People travel for a number of reasons, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as heads of homes, sometimes as members of communities, but generally a combination of these. Over the course of change and growing focus on Mediterranean migration policy, one critical
dynamic has received little attention: individual decision making. For a long time, the Mediterranean Sea served as an important corridor and destination for people travelling from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and beyond. However, little has been said about how recent developments in the Mediterranean region have influenced individual decision-making among migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. The issue I posed was whether migration decisions made by people from Sub-Saharan Africa were influenced by changing conditions in the Mediterranean, and if so, how.
My novel perspective examines whether and how changing conditions in the Mediterranean region have influenced the migration decisions of people from Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically whether to move, move on, stay, or return. The underlying approach should be taken by policymakers is to view migrants as individuals, with their decisions made by individuals. Trust and familiarity systems influence how people choose to migrate, but incidental experiences, media, and individual priorities also have an impact. All of these factors must be considered in order to understand how individuals make decisions, even if such decision-making is understood on an individual basis.
