Audio recording of a January 25, 2017 MEI Speaker Series event with Dr. Philippe Fargues, Founding Director of the Migration Policy Centre and Professor at the European University Institute, and MEI Associate.

"As 2015 comes to a close, the annual numbers of migrants smuggled to Greece and Italy and asylum claims lodged in Germany have passed a million, as well as the number of additional displacements produced this year by the conflict in Syria. Moreover, Europe’s Mediterranean shore has now the unchallenged title of the world’s most lethal border. Not only this. The migrant crisis is also putting to the test some of Europe’s most fundamental values, from the freedom of circulation within its territories, to international protection beyond..."

An audio recording of a public talk by Philippe Fargues, MEI Associate and Director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute.

"Capital-rich and labour-poor. This is how the curse of the Gulf States was described fifty years ago. The world’s largest oil stocks had just been discovered under the earth’s most arid and depopulated region. With oil internationally recognised as the property of the state and not of the company that did the pumping, the scarcely populated states of the Gulf acquired enormous wealth. From the largest and oldest (Saudi Arabia) to the tiniest and youngest (Qatar), all six Gulf states soon faced income surpluses with population shortages, to which they all responded by importing labour. In just five decades, the Gulf, which for centuries had received only small population flows, became the world’s third largest receiver of global migrants after the United States and the European Union."

The countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM) and those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are crucial to the development of the world economy. Highly skilled migration to and from these regions is key to the recent socio-political transformations that have occurred across the world.

"Irregular migration has great resonance in the Gulf, just as in the West. Migrants in irregular situation avoid state administrative procedures and so their numbers are unknown. The largest amnesty (Saudi Arabia 2013) would have affected more than 50 per cent of the migrants in the country. Irregular migration is by definition a breach of legislations that regulate the migrant’s status.

In the Gulf States it is, in particular, a by-product of: the sponsorship (kafâla) system that hampers both a migrant’s individual freedom of movement and the free functioning of the labour market; nationalisation policies that continue to extend the list of occupations reserved for nationals; and nationality laws that bar citizenship to all but a very few first- and second-generation migrants."

In 2015, more than a million migrants were smuggled to Greece and Italy, and a similar
number of asylum claims were lodged in Germany. Presenting an overview of available
statistics, MEI Associate Philippe Fargues addresses three questions: Is this a migrant or a refugee crisis? What triggered the crisis? And last, how can the crisis be resolved?