Migration Policy Development in Mauritania: Process, Issues and Actors

Abstract

‘International migration management’ has become a popular catchphrase for a wide range of initiatives that aim at renewing the policies pertaining to the cross-border movements of people. It is used by numerous actors, both within and outside governments. At the international level, the term is intensively used by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) (whose motto is ‘Managing migration for the benefit of all’), the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and other international agencies. At the national level, the approach in terms of ‘management’ pervades, for example, the British government’s White Paper on immigration, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’. Yet, despite (or because of) its popularity, there have been almost no attempts to understand what ‘migration management’ actually refers to. Most of the burgeoning literature is of an advocacy nature and does not investigate what is happening, but rather what could or should be done; this is the case with institutional publications (see, e.g. IOM, 2005) and also of more academic work (Taylor, 2005; Martin et al., 2006a,b). Many of these publications are, moreover, produced by institutions that promote migra- tion management or by people who work in close association with these organizations, which leaves little room for independent thinking. This book therefore seeks to understand what migration management is about. It looks both at the empirical trends that are associated with this notion and at the policy approaches it calls for. One of the central arguments of this book is that ‘migration manage- ment’ refers to at least three different trends. First, it is a notion that is mobilized by actors to conceptualize and justify their increasing interven- tions in the migration field. This points to the role played by the agencies mentioned above and to the importance of their strategies and functioning. Second, migration management refers to a range of practices that are now part of migration policies, and that are often performed by the institutions that promote the notion; these include, for example, counter-trafficking efforts or so-called ‘capacity-building’ activities. And third, migration man- agement relies on a set of discourses and on new narratives regarding what migration is and how it should be addressed. A second key argument is that the actors, practices and discourses of migration management are connected, but only partially and in complex manners. For instance, actors develop discourses to justify their existence and legitimize their practices; yet their actual activities and policy interventions often diverge substantially from the rhetoric underpinning them.