Michael Doyle Presents International Mobility Convention at HRW

At the April 5th Human Rights Workshop, Michael Doyle made the case for the Model International Mobility Convention—a new international agreement that seeks to fill the gaps in the preexisting international migration regime and give more protections to all classes of migrants. Doyle directs the Columbia Global Policy Initiative, which has spent the last few years drafting the convention with the help of more than forty academics and policymakers.

In their new convention, Doyle and his colleagues, who include Professor Guy Goodwin-Gill, who spoke at the Schell Center last fall, and Alexander Aleinikoff, former UNHCR Commissioner and the 2016 Gruber Distinguished Lecturer in Global Justice, sought to address what they considered failings of the current refugee and migration regimes. “We deeply respect but are very frustrated with the 1951 Convention on the Rights of Refugees,” said Doyle, who explained that the original convention’s criteria for refugee status were reasonable at the time the convention was written but are insufficient for today’s humanitarian realities. For instance, the convention does not count those who flee their homes because of drought or famine as refugees. Doyle emphasized that broadening the definition of a refugee would be an extreme, but “necessary [step] from a human rights perspective.”

The convention’s drafters wanted to create a new, all-inclusive document, because they believed that separating migrants, refugees, tourists, guest workers, forced migrants, and others into different treaties would have missed the “big picture—that human beings move across borders under various frameworks.” The drafters also did not want to create a convention that relied on what they consider faulty assumptions about different categories of migrants—for instance, that migrants make the choice to leave their homes, whereas refugees are forced to leave.

The convention demands a minimum set of protections for all migrants—from students to tourists to refugees. It also asserts that there are certain rights and duties that correspond to each migration status: for instance, it guarantees migrant laborers the rights to work, unionize, etc. and gives refugees the most rights of a citizen of a country because their own has driven them out.

Doyle added, “In order to make these rights viable, we can’t work under our current system, where providing refuge is based on proximity.” As Doyle explained, 84 percent of the world’s refugees are being housed in developing countries that border countries in crisis, such as Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, which have absorbed the majority of Syrian refugees. “We want to shift responsibility so that it is determined by capability,” Doyle stressed. “In order to have a viable norm that you will allow people to come to your country, you need to have responsibility shared.”

The drafters’ plan for enforcing responsibility-sharing is to partner with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which Doyle calls the convention’s “independent scorekeeper.” Like the Paris Climate Agreement, individual countries would design their own plans for implementing the International Mobility Convention. But nation states would also pledge to take in a certain number of refugees every year, which the UNHCR would calculate for each country on an annual basis.

As Doyle admitted, there are many things that need to happen before negotiations take place, such as gathering support for the convention. To spread awareness about the convention, the drafters are working from the bottom up by visiting universities and talking to mayors and other local officials who are, as Doyle said, “dealing with real people and real problems.” Wherever they go, the drafters try to counter negative propaganda about immigration and lead discussions on innovative ideas to improve existing immigration institutions, such as reducing undocumented immigration by issuing advance visas to guest workers who will fill jobs that are unappealing to the host country’s residents.

Doyle emphasized that there are also many revisions needed to the convention, such as its provisions on stateless peoples and child migrants. Doyle added that he wants the drafters to further explore how to address questions of compensatory justice for people living in formerly colonized countries. “Is there an argument to say you should have open border with a country you colonized?” Doyle asked. “Colonial exploitation is collective harm: shouldn’t there be a remedy that is more collectively available than the current situation—in which individuals who have resources to migrate get to leave?” But Doyle also emphasized that the convention should not try to be totally comprehensive: “We are trying to create a global floor, not a ceiling,” he said, and noted that the drafters welcome regional agreements that would take a more radical stance than the convention and perhaps advocate open borders.

Throughout the workshop, Doyle insisted that the convention was a long shot but still possible. He asserted that the convention seeks to create a “realistic utopia, and following Rousseau—we’re looking at men as they are and institutions as they should be.” But, he admitted, “We will need more leaders like Justin Trudeau in the world for this to be anything close to realistic,” he said. “If those changes don’t happen, this convention [will] be an academic footnote.”