"WE NEED A BRAND NEW ARCHITECTURE TO COVER THE WHOLE SCOPE OF MOBILITY".

• Author: Doyle, Michael
• Position: Interview

Migration is polarizing societies around the globe and has become one of the most important political cleavages of our times. We spoke with Michael Doyle, the Director of the Columbia Global Policy Initiative and co-director of its International Migration project, about the challenges of migration in current times. In 2015, Doyle helped develop the Model International Mobility Convention which represents a shared framework among over 40 academics. It serves the ambitious goal of creating a holistic, rights-respecting governance regime for all aspects of international migration.

Journal of International Affairs: Let's start with your own work. Which effective policies have you identified since 2013 when you started with the project of International Migration?

Michael Doyle: In summary, what most of us here at Columbia have been working on is the Model of International Mobility Convention. What we have learned from it is twofold. On the one hand, the world of migration and refugees from a legal viewpoint is incoherent. The existing model, Migrant Workers Convention, which is designed to protect migrants in countries of destination, has no real ratifications from those countries of destination. The only ratifications come for countries of origin, so it is not functional. Also, the Refugee Convention of 1951 is a landmark of international law, but if you take it literally its definition of refugee is so narrow that it does not apply to most refugees today. According to it, one must be persecuted by the state on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, or social group. But if your life is being threatened by something else, like a civil war as in Syria, or generalized violence as in Honduras, or climate change through drought or flooding, and you have to flee for your life, you don't qualify as a refugee. Decent countries provide temporary protection for such people, but they don't have the rights to claim the Refugee Convention. Thus, if it depends on governmental will, President Trump can send the Haitians and the Salvadorans back. The existing legal architecture is radically limited, and it's way too narrow. We need a regime that covers everyone: tourists, students, labor migrants, investors, forced migrants and refugees. We need a brand new legal architecture to cover the whole scope of mobility and fill in the gaps of those two conventions.

On the other hand, in the process of doing this, we have found some low-hanging fruits and policy...