MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Migration in the Iberoamerican agenda

Iberoamerican countries called for “safe, orderly and productive” policies to face the challenges of modern world migratory movements.

Enrique Iglesias, Iberoamerican chairman said that migration is a desire for dignity for many millions of people and will be an issue very much present in international agendas in the coming years.

Mr. Iglesias was addressing the two days Migration and Development Encounter in Madrid which had as Latinamerican representative Mexican president Vicente Fox and Spain's leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for the Iberian peninsula.

After stressing that Latinamerica has lived all along its history with constant migratory movements which helped among other things the crossing of races, nowadays migrants leaving the region are playing a vital contribution.

On one side is "the enormous contribution and great opportunity" of the annual 50 billion US dollars remittances which help to sustain the economies of many of the countries they come from as well as those where they are now working.

"But remittances are not going to last for ever. The long term solution is based more on sustained development and jointly addressing the issues of emigration and development", said Iglesias who then called for "fair and efficient" methods to assess the impact of migrant workers in areas such as health, education and social integration, "with a special chapter for women migrants".

"The Iberoamerican community can and should strengthen its national migratory monitoring systems, and at the same time offer the world a political model of its own and a united voice in the issue".

"We must promote an open discussion, better informed, more rational, less superficial. We must confront xenophobia and racism and for that we must interpret and understand the perceptions of both the communities from where migrants come and where they are received to ensure they don't become the scapegoats of social change in the XXI century", underlined Iglesias.

The conclusions of the two days Madrid encounter will be examined and put into practice during the next meeting of the Iberoamerican community in Montevideo.