News

By 1 July, free movement should once again be a reality within the EU’s passport-free zone, more or less. The Union is re-opening the single market just in time to secure this year’s agricultural production and the tourist season. The big question now is whether and how to re-open to the rest of the world.

Co-organised by the Antalya Diplomacy Forum and ICMPD, hosted by the Turkish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, a high-level virtual meeting took place entitled "The Situation of Refugees and Other Displaced Persons during the Pandemic: The Need for International Cooperation".

ICMPD delivered the first digital training programme to officers of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) of Pakistan to support the FIA’s Training Academy maintain its operational training in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic to combat trafficking in human beings, prevent irregular migration and efficiently manage Pakistan’s national borders.

The country has a promising new government under Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi but faces a range of challenges connected to its large refugee and irregular migrant population.

The project "Improving Entrepreneurial Capacity for Sustaniable Socio-Economic Integration" (ENHANCER) is an EU-funded action, aimed at fostering opportunities for entrepreneurs by giving them access to national and global markets.

On May 26, 2020, ICMPD handed over personal protective equipment to the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine who are the first point of contact for travellers entering Ukraine.

Germany becomes the 18th Member State of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD).

One of the more sinister aspects of the global pandemic is the spread of deliberately misleading information online. ICMPD’s Regional Office for the Mediterranean considers how disinformation networks work to falsely portray migrants as vectors for the disease.

The first year of implementation of the Horizon 2020 Transnational Figurations of Displacement (TRAFIG) research project received an encouraging review by the donor, the European Commission.

On 12 March the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. In order to support the measures being implemented by our host country, the Republic of Austria, and the other countries where ICMPD has duty stations, we took a number of measures to protect our employees and stop the virus from spreading further, including working from home.

On 7 of May 2020 in Kyiv, ICMPD organized a kick-off meeting on business processes analysis and re-engineering thus launching the optimization process of partners’ functionalities. Expert support to national agencies has been rendered through the European Union Project "EU Support to Strengthening Integrated Border Management (IBM) in Ukraine".

ICMPD, in collaboration with the Swiss Government, has organised the first expert meeting in the framework of its Annual Policy Initiative 2020. Switzerland, as the chair of ICMPD’s Steering Group in 2020, has dedicated its chairmanship to the topic "Safeguarding human and public security in the new migration agenda" and ICMPD is running the Annual Policy Initiative 2020 under the same heading.

Governments are considering ‘immunity passports’ to allow those with COVID-19 antibodies greater mobility and to provide employers with an increasing pool of people to fill public-facing jobs. This may seem tempting but would lead to mass discrimination in the labour market, and also provide perverse incentives to potential migrants to become infected. There are alternatives.

The joint EU-ICMPD Migration EU eXpertise (MIEUX) Initiative, one of ICMPD’s longest-running projects, initiates a new phase for an initial three-year period. The joint Initiative is a capacity building facility that provides partners in Africa, Asia, the EU Neighbourhood, and Latin America and the Caribbean with short-term, technical assistance through tailored activities that match the expertise required by the requesting partner country.

Governments are seeking the balance between containing the COVID-19 pandemic and saving the economy. Migrant workers are essential in this regard, and the EU and its member states have to find ways to manage labour migration in an era of restricted mobility.