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Streamline immigration policies, Chidambaram tells G-20 meet

P.S. Suryanarayana

Nations should have a coordinated approach

— Photo: PTI

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram meeting his South Korean counterpart Dick Soo Han on the sidelines of the G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting in Kianghe in North China on Sunday.

SINGAPORE: Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram on Sunday emphasised the "need for a coordinated approach to immigration policies in labour-importing countries as well as labour-exporting countries."

Addressing the Group of Twenty (G-20) meeting of Finance Ministers and central bank governors at a resort-city near Beijing, Mr. Chidambaram said the "imperatives of globalisation require necessary policy responses" regarding the migration of workers and professionals from the developing countries to the developed bloc.

"Well-managed migration could actually provide a positive contribution to employment and global economic growth, if we manage to successfully promote the integration of the migrants in host-societies." Countries across the world "would do well to shift the emphasis from immigration control to better immigration management," he told the G-20 before the Ministers concluded the two-day meeting.

GATS talks

About the negotiations for a "general agreement on trade in services (GATS)," he said: "None of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) members have made binding commitments beyond non-specific horizontal commitments." A key argument from emerging market-economies and developing countries was "in favour of greater access by the developed countries under Mode 4 (movement of natural persons) in exchange for greater access by the developing countries under Mode 3 (commercial presence abroad)." With GATS still eluding the negotiators under the WTO auspices, "the current policy approaches to international migration is neither geared to realise its full potential nor respond adequately to its challenges."

Mr. Chidambaram said he would readily acknowledge that India "continues to reap the benefits of orderly out-migration."

Shining the spotlight on a related aspect of the "world-famous Indian Institutes of Technology," he said "it is sometimes asked: For whose benefit are we turning out qualified engineers?" However, "out-migration may create space for democratising education" in the countries exporting talent. Moreover, "migrant workers could become the nucleus of a worldwide network that can be harnessed for the home-country's development."

Knowledge transfer

Such networks might also "enable knowledge-transfer and promote new businesses in the home-country." Related to this was also "the phenomenon of ever-increasing remittances for both consumption and investment in the home-country." To be noted, at another level, was the impact of the migration of better-trained and risk-taking workers on the countries of their origin.

As for the economic effects of national-level population patterns, as outlined by the United Nations, Mr. Chidambaram said the "demographic dividend will not last long as the Asian population is ageing at a faster rate than the global population." The U.N. had emphasised "India will enjoy the benefit of demographic dividend at least until 2040." The study had also concluded that this dividend would "peak" around that time and "start to decline only after 2050." It was estimated that the demographic opportunities could push the growth-rate of India's gross domestic product by an additional 0.6 per cent to 1.5 per cent.

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