News

On May 26, 2020, ICMPD handed over personal protective equipment to the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine who are the first point of contact for travellers entering Ukraine.

Germany becomes the 18th Member State of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD).

One of the more sinister aspects of the global pandemic is the spread of deliberately misleading information online. ICMPD’s Regional Office for the Mediterranean considers how disinformation networks work to falsely portray migrants as vectors for the disease.

The first year of implementation of the Horizon 2020 Transnational Figurations of Displacement (TRAFIG) research project received an encouraging review by the donor, the European Commission.

On 12 March the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. In order to support the measures being implemented by our host country, the Republic of Austria, and the other countries where ICMPD has duty stations, we took a number of measures to protect our employees and stop the virus from spreading further, including working from home.

On 7 of May 2020 in Kyiv, ICMPD organized a kick-off meeting on business processes analysis and re-engineering thus launching the optimization process of partners’ functionalities. Expert support to national agencies has been rendered through the European Union Project "EU Support to Strengthening Integrated Border Management (IBM) in Ukraine".

ICMPD, in collaboration with the Swiss Government, has organised the first expert meeting in the framework of its Annual Policy Initiative 2020. Switzerland, as the chair of ICMPD’s Steering Group in 2020, has dedicated its chairmanship to the topic "Safeguarding human and public security in the new migration agenda" and ICMPD is running the Annual Policy Initiative 2020 under the same heading.

Governments are considering ‘immunity passports’ to allow those with COVID-19 antibodies greater mobility and to provide employers with an increasing pool of people to fill public-facing jobs. This may seem tempting but would lead to mass discrimination in the labour market, and also provide perverse incentives to potential migrants to become infected. There are alternatives.

The joint EU-ICMPD Migration EU eXpertise (MIEUX) Initiative, one of ICMPD’s longest-running projects, initiates a new phase for an initial three-year period. The joint Initiative is a capacity building facility that provides partners in Africa, Asia, the EU Neighbourhood, and Latin America and the Caribbean with short-term, technical assistance through tailored activities that match the expertise required by the requesting partner country.

Governments are seeking the balance between containing the COVID-19 pandemic and saving the economy. Migrant workers are essential in this regard, and the EU and its member states have to find ways to manage labour migration in an era of restricted mobility.

On 22 April 2020, ICMPD organised the third project steering group (PSG) meeting in the framework of the EU-funded project Forced-Return Monitoring III (FReM III).

Millions of people are stranded abroad by COVID-19. The pandemic has triggered the largest repatriation operation in history. As a result, consular services are under tremendous pressure and are forced to work together.

The Mediterranean City to City project (MC2CM) co-organised a webinar on "Leveraging migrants contribution to the emergency and addressing vulnerabilities", on 16 April 2020 in the frame of a series of Live Learning Experiences piloted by UCLG in cooperation with UN Habitat and Metropolis.

The pandemic is teaching border agencies in Europe important lessons about operational preparedness in times of crisis. This has implications for the future in terms of training, staffing, cross-border information sharing and the use of technologies.

ICMPD field operatives track the ramifications of Covid-19 for migration in more than 90 countries. Over the past weeks, they have reported on developments in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. Here are some of the most important.