Kiev 1998:
A team of IOM specialists met with high-ranking government officials. An extensive 'Migration Management Programme' is set up with the unvarnished priority to 'control illegal migration'. Unlike its neighbouring states in the west the Ukraine is no EU candidate and therefore not bound by the Schengen agreements. However, the 'fortress Europe' in the interest of West European countries should start here at that 'important transit station of the eastern people smuggler route'. Thus the IOM programme is directed against transit migration on several levels: registration and documentation of refugees and migrants, setting-up a first deportation camp, training of Ukrainian border police at the US/Mexican border, equipment of a pilot project with radio and infra-red technique in Kharkiv at the Russian border... During their work the IOM specialists were confronted with a problem surprising to them. They found that more than 70% of the transit migrants entered the Ukraine legally! As a consequence the government was trained in working out new laws and above all new visa regulations. With instructions from the IOM, migration to the Ukraine was first criminalized to fight it afterwards with all means at hand which were also made available by the IOM.
Change of scenery
Quito, October 2002: IOM employees accompany a first group of young Ecuadorian workers on their flight to Madrid. They have passed a thorough selection procedure and are supposed to leave the country after one year. In March 2002, the IOM office in the Ecuadorian capitol established a databank, where young men and women could apply for work in Spain. In 2001 the Spanish and Ecuadorian government concluded a contract and instructed the IOM with its implementation. The Spanish employers needed cheap labour for the farms, the building industry as well as the nursing sector. With this pilot project they should not be recruited as usual from illegalised and thus uncontrolled migration. Moreover parallel to this legal recruitment project, the Spanish government had started a country-wide raid for 'illegals from Ecuador' and deported hundreds of people.
Two sides of the same medal
Whether in the Ukraine or in Spain/Ecuador, whether to destroy flight routes and engage governments of important transit countries in the migration control, or to recruit cheap labour corresponding to the economic requirements of the countries of destination - it is no coincidence that the IOM projects go in both directions. It is definitely this combination of exclusion and exploitation, their parallelism of fortress mentality and control which characterises the so-called migration management of the IOM. And that these projects serve mainly the interests of the West European governments is unquestionable - not only as in the two examples described.
