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The Migration Oxford Podcast: Bitter Carrots; A Restrictive Migration Agenda
Who is the anti-migration agenda actually serving, and what are the alternatives? We welcome experts from the six-year-long MIGNEX project, which gathered a range of perspectives to explore questions of migration and global development. Over recent decades, there has been a growing emphasis towards stopping migration to the EU. Policy tools that focus on return and readmission aim to control migration flows from non-EU countries while development aid in countries of origin is oriented towards preventing migration.
Although early days, the aftermath of the European Parliament and UK elections suggest much of the same is yet to come; one case in point being the UK’s announcement to increase aid spending with the aim of reducing migration at source. But what are the (unintended) impacts of a narrow focus on the restriction of migration, on the EU, its member states, and countries of origin? And what implications does this have for migrants themselves?
How does this focus impact other policy agendas or, for instance, the ability to fill EU skills and labour shortages? And ultimately, are these ambitions even realistic? Is the assumption that migration can be prevented reflected in the evidence?
In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we welcome experts Jessica Hagen-Zanker, Senior Research Fellow and Head Migration and Displacement Hub at the Overseas Development Institute; Leander Kandilige, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana; and Carlos Vargas Silva, Professor of Migration Studies at COMPAS and a Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Together they draw on six years of research conducted with the MIGNEX project which gathered data on the migration-development nexus from across 25 local areas in 10 countries. Now concluded, MIGNEX gathered a range of perspectives to interrogate questions of migration and global development, ultimately asking who is the anti-migration agenda actually working for and what are the alternatives?
