On 24 November we held the first edition of the Seventeen Dialogues, a new series of conversations promoted by Action Against Hunger and itdUPM to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda, which brought together experts and key voices in migration and asylum to present innovative proposals to address the challenges of European migration policies.
Participating in the conversation were Rut Bermejo, Senior Research Associate at the Elcano Royal Institute; Sunita Nasir, consultant at Atelier itd and Smart & City and activist for women’s and refugee rights; and Miguel Ángel García Arias, migration expert at Acción contra el Hambre.
In a debate moderated by Carlos Mataix, director of itdUPM and scientific director of Revista Diecisiete, the speakers highlighted the need to harness the potential of the displaced population as an engine of development for host societies and underlined the importance of reviewing the current shortcomings of the European Union’s Migration and Asylum Pact.
Rut Bermejo, Senior Research Associate at the Elcano Royal Institute and Professor of Political Science at the Rey Juan Carlos University, stressed the need to deactivate the extremist narratives that currently dominate political discourse on migration and asylum issues, something that distorts reality and prevents agreements from being reached. He warned that there is a climate of growing polarisation and simplification around populations on the move, which contributes to misleading messages and makes it difficult to find intermediate positions.
When immigration becomes an issue of political debate and is approached from a restrictive, nativist or closure point of view, as we have seen in recent elections in the United States or even in the European Parliament, it is very difficult to engage in dialogue. Various analyses reveal that hard political positions, those that speak of migration as a risk, are preponderant, difficult to counter and push people towards extremes,” he said.
Studying social networks in Spain, for example, we found that the node that posts about migration on Facebook talks about migration as a problem for society. This is a preponderant political position, which fills the discourse and makes the rest of the people, with different opinions, withdraw from the debate. This makes it difficult to reach that middle ground from which decisions should be made,’ he said.
Miguel Ángel García, a migration expert with Acción contra el Hambre, where he was Director in Central America for 10 years, stressed the advisability of opting for a circular migration model that provides displaced persons with employment contracts at origin. In this way, he recalled, both the migrant and the receiving country benefit.
This is an option that allows the displaced person to access opportunities that he or she does not have in his or her homeland and avoids the risk of suffering the abuses that illegal migration entails. On the other hand, the receiving country gets the labour it needs to fill the gap.
This year, 500 Guatemalans are coming to Huelva to work for six months in the red fruit agricultural campaign. By migrating with a contract in origin, they do not put their lives at risk, they have the right to housing and, when they return home after six months, they have an income much higher than the average salary in their country’, he says. As he recalls, 20,000 people, mainly Moroccan women, come to Spain in this way and, at the same time, there are also some 14,000 workers in Spain who go to France to harvest grapes, for example.
The third speaker, Sunita Nasir, originally from Afghanistan and a consultant for Atelier itd and Smart & City and an activist for women’s and refugees’ rights, stressed that dialogue between refugees and authorities is key to achieving effective integration, something that does not always happen. ‘Talking helps communities and states to understand each other better, to clarify misconceptions and also to reduce fear and rejection of foreigners,’ she stressed.
From her experience as president of the Association of Afghan Women in Spain (AMAE), she recalled that it is important to recognise that refugee communities are diverse and not to subject them to reductionist analyses. ‘Twenty per cent of AMAE’s Afghan refugees have a PhD and 16 per cent have a master’s degree. Of the 4,000 refugees we are in contact with in 35 cities in Spain, only 4% are uneducated,’ he stressed. ‘Even so, these people, like migrants, live a nightmare to access the labour market or decent housing.
For Nasir, there is a frustrating paradox: ‘After leaving their country because their lives were in danger and because they couldn’t study, Afghan refugees arrive in Spain and they can’t study either. They have come to continue their careers, but the only thing that is validated is the baccalaureate, a process that takes a year, and the government only offers them training in gardening. There are economists working as waitresses and judges as cooks. Despite the fact that Spain is the fourth country that takes in the most immigrants, she says that it is difficult to integrate. ‘There is no opportunity to make a career in Spain, nor is there any collaboration between European countries to make things easier,’ he added.
The launch of Diálogos Diecisiete also included the presentation of the latest issue of Revista Diecisiete, the interdisciplinary scientific publication that precedes it. From now on, the journal is transformed and adopts the format of conversations to pursue the same objectives of social transformation through the exchange of live knowledge.
The 11th edition of the magazine, Six years of knowledge, dialogues and solutions for sustainability, which is available free online, reviews its ten previous thematic editions through 20 key articles to understand the complexity of the challenges posed by the Sustainable Development Goals. With it, Action Against Hunger and itdUPM close one stage and begin another.
On 24 November we held the first edition of the Seventeen Dialogues, a new series of conversations promoted by Action Against Hunger and itdUPM to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda, which brought together experts and key voices in migration and asylum to present innovative proposals to address the challenges of European migration policies.
Participating in the conversation were Rut Bermejo, Senior Research Associate at the Elcano Royal Institute; Sunita Nasir, consultant at Atelier itd and Smart & City and activist for women’s and refugee rights; and Miguel Ángel García Arias, migration expert at Acción contra el Hambre.
In a debate moderated by Carlos Mataix, director of itdUPM and scientific director of Revista Diecisiete, the speakers highlighted the need to harness the potential of the displaced population as an engine of development for host societies and underlined the importance of reviewing the current shortcomings of the European Union’s Migration and Asylum Pact.
Rut Bermejo, Senior Research Associate at the Elcano Royal Institute and Professor of Political Science at the Rey Juan Carlos University, stressed the need to deactivate the extremist narratives that currently dominate political discourse on migration and asylum issues, something that distorts reality and prevents agreements from being reached. He warned that there is a climate of growing polarisation and simplification around populations on the move, which contributes to misleading messages and makes it difficult to find intermediate positions.
When immigration becomes an issue of political debate and is approached from a restrictive, nativist or closure point of view, as we have seen in recent elections in the United States or even in the European Parliament, it is very difficult to engage in dialogue. Various analyses reveal that hard political positions, those that speak of migration as a risk, are preponderant, difficult to counter and push people towards extremes,” he said.
Studying social networks in Spain, for example, we found that the node that posts about migration on Facebook talks about migration as a problem for society. This is a preponderant political position, which fills the discourse and makes the rest of the people, with different opinions, withdraw from the debate. This makes it difficult to reach that middle ground from which decisions should be made,’ he said.
Miguel Ángel García, a migration expert with Acción contra el Hambre, where he was Director in Central America for 10 years, stressed the advisability of opting for a circular migration model that provides displaced persons with employment contracts at origin. In this way, he recalled, both the migrant and the receiving country benefit.
This is an option that allows the displaced person to access opportunities that he or she does not have in his or her homeland and avoids the risk of suffering the abuses that illegal migration entails. On the other hand, the receiving country gets the labour it needs to fill the gap.
This year, 500 Guatemalans are coming to Huelva to work for six months in the red fruit agricultural campaign. By migrating with a contract in origin, they do not put their lives at risk, they have the right to housing and, when they return home after six months, they have an income much higher than the average salary in their country’, he says. As he recalls, 20,000 people, mainly Moroccan women, come to Spain in this way and, at the same time, there are also some 14,000 workers in Spain who go to France to harvest grapes, for example.
The third speaker, Sunita Nasir, originally from Afghanistan and a consultant for Atelier itd and Smart & City and an activist for women’s and refugees’ rights, stressed that dialogue between refugees and authorities is key to achieving effective integration, something that does not always happen. ‘Talking helps communities and states to understand each other better, to clarify misconceptions and also to reduce fear and rejection of foreigners,’ she stressed.
From her experience as president of the Association of Afghan Women in Spain (AMAE), she recalled that it is important to recognise that refugee communities are diverse and not to subject them to reductionist analyses. ‘Twenty per cent of AMAE’s Afghan refugees have a PhD and 16 per cent have a master’s degree. Of the 4,000 refugees we are in contact with in 35 cities in Spain, only 4% are uneducated,’ he stressed. ‘Even so, these people, like migrants, live a nightmare to access the labour market or decent housing.
For Nasir, there is a frustrating paradox: ‘After leaving their country because their lives were in danger and because they couldn’t study, Afghan refugees arrive in Spain and they can’t study either. They have come to continue their careers, but the only thing that is validated is the baccalaureate, a process that takes a year, and the government only offers them training in gardening. There are economists working as waitresses and judges as cooks. Despite the fact that Spain is the fourth country that takes in the most immigrants, she says that it is difficult to integrate. ‘There is no opportunity to make a career in Spain, nor is there any collaboration between European countries to make things easier,’ he added.
The launch of Diálogos Diecisiete also included the presentation of the latest issue of Revista Diecisiete, the interdisciplinary scientific publication that precedes it. From now on, the journal is transformed and adopts the format of conversations to pursue the same objectives of social transformation through the exchange of live knowledge.
The 11th edition of the magazine, Six years of knowledge, dialogues and solutions for sustainability, which is available free online, reviews its ten previous thematic editions through 20 key articles to understand the complexity of the challenges posed by the Sustainable Development Goals. With it, Action Against Hunger and itdUPM close one stage and begin another.
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© itdUPM 2024 | Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo Humano. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. | by Marmarru Studio
+34 910 67 13 97 | itd@upm.es
Av.Complutense s/n. Ciudad
Universitaria, 28040 Madrid (España)
© itdUPM 2024 | Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo Humano. | by Marmarru Studio
