HUEVOS PACO E HIJOS S.L
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Un tema que me ha parecido curioso. amow The Money, una de estas "redes de periodistas de investigación progres", ha sacado un artículo sobre lo horroroso que les parece explicarle a los potenciales emigrantes de África los peligros de hacer el estulto en el Mediterráneo para intentar cruzar a Europa; esto lo estaría haciendo IOM, una organización financiada por la UE.
Ideológicamente, me parece deleznable la crítica a ese tipo de acciones, en plan montar un canal de youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/@MigrantsasMessengers/videos ) sobre los peligros de las redes de trata, los cayucos, las oportunidades laborales que puede ofrecer África, etc. Si en algo hay que meter pasta de cooperación es precisamente en eso, no en robarles recursos humanos para mantenerlos aquí haciendo el gandul o reventando el mercado laboral.
A diferencia de los progres españoles, estos de FTM al menos tienen cierto decoro profesional e intentan documentarse, con lo que de vez en cuando sacan datos jugosos sobre oenejetas o lobbies empresariales que no les caen bien. En este caso, asoma la patita la industria de ayuda al "migrante", su generosa financiación y sus dudosos resultados.
www.ftm.eu
‘On my way to paradise, I went through hell,’ Fatou says to the camera, talking about her traumatic experiences as a migrant. There are tears in her eyes. Another clip shows Mamadou, surrounded by ananas plants. He too was a hopeful migrant who never reached paradise. But now that he has his own farm, he has turned into a symbol of success, he says. ‘These days, my employees see me as a role model. I have one piece of advice for them: stay home.’ In another clip we see a girl surrounded by an audience, watching her performance. Slumping in a white plastic chair, she portrays desperation. Her white T-shirt brandishes the name of the YouTube channel that lists hundreds of similar clips: Migrants as Messengers.
This campaign is just one example of the ways in which European governments have attempted to communicate with potential migrants over the years. Film screenings, billboards, theatre pieces, group discussions, clips on social media – from 2015 onwards, governments have been investing millions of euros in awareness campaigns in countries from which larger numbers of migrants originate, such as Senegal and Pakistan.
This migrant awareness campaign sector has become a multimillion business. The most recent, rather conservative estimate puts the number at ‘over 23 million euros’ across the EU between 2015 and 2019. The campaigns are usually executed by non governmental organisations (NGOs). The main one is the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a large NGO with almost 19,000 employees all over the world, providing many different services re
The safest route
In the same vein, the wellbeing of migrants is the main goal of the awareness campaigns, says the IOM. The website of its campaign Migrants as Messengers (MaM) states that its aim is ‘to facilitate safe and informed migration choices’.
In reality, the information provided – of which the clips of youngsters like Mamadou and Fatou are examples – boils down to highlighting cruelties in Libyan prisons, the dangers of boat passages across the Mediterranean, or the bright prospects back home.
Sociologist Omar Cham is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is working on a dissertation on these awareness campaigns. He asserts that complete and objective information that helps migrants, needs to comprise ‘practical strategies', including ways to obtain a visa. Or, for those who want to risk taking the irregular route anyway, helpful information should include ‘how their rights can be protected whilst on the road, for instance by choosing the safest migration route’.
A bleak undertone
Such information is barely available on the YouTube MaM channel. The webpage of the project summarising the impact of the awareness campaign only talks about the audience now having a higher chance to 'associate the amowing risks with irregular migration: gender-based violence (8%), forced labour (9%), death (8%), abandonment (12%), and imprisonment (14%)’. The message: MaM is successful, because it paints a bleak picture of migration.
This is not only the case with MaM, but applies to most awareness campaigns. A literature review published in 2016, paid for by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the general message of these campaigns: ‘Leaving one’s country systematically leads to failure, misfortune and exploitation. Very few campaigns also show positive images of migration or success stories.’
A spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – which is financing the MaM campaign – contests this view by pointing to an MaM clip in which a volunteer says that ‘everyone has the right to travel’. The Ministry adds that ‘events are organised in schools, where information is shared on how one can travel safely’.
Urgent matters
European governments have been wanting to reduce the number of migrants for years, especially since the migration crisis of 2015. They consider information campaigns to be one of the instruments in this effort. In 2019, an expert group was founded where governments could discuss ‘reducing irregular migration flows to the EU’. The IOM is also participating in these conversations.
The IOM is not only implementing the awareness campaigns, but also a consultation partner that helps shape policy on the campaigns. The NGO structurally takes part in European high-level policy discussions and organises courses and conferences on the topic. And when scientific evidence is lacking regarding the effectiveness of the awareness campaigns, it is the IOM that conducts research to fill those gaps.
A conference on information campaigns that the IOM organised in Vienna in 2019 illustrates the close ties between the governments and the IOM. A major part of the program consisted of IOM researchers and officers who presented research proving the effectiveness of the awareness campaigns, or sat side by side with civil servants in a panel that was to shed light on ‘the future of the campaigns’.
Their approach is successful, as evidenced by the fact that Dutch officials use IOM reports when answering questions from members of Parliament or compiling knowledge on migration, and use those reports as the basis for their own research. In this fashion, the NGO advances awareness campaigns as a policy solution to the arrival of migrants. An IOM officer who gave a presentation at another conference on awareness campaigns in 2018, commented on the relationship: ‘I think the IOM and others are really trying to feed policy makers with solid baseline data.’
An aggressive edge
‘It is evident that there is a conflict of interest at work here,’ says Antoine Pécoud. The professor at the University of the Sorbonne North has since long been researching international migration policy and the IOM.
Although it is a non-profit, the IOM is still incentivised to take on as many projects as it possibly can, according to Pécoud. This is by and large the case for all organisations on the ‘humanitarian marketplace’, he says, but it is accentuated in the IOM: the organisation does not have any stable funding,and in order to survive and grow it has to make efficiency gains, limit costs and bring in project funding time and time again.
Jasper Tjaden, former head of the scientific bureau of the IOM and currently professor at the University of Potsdam, thinks the involvement of the IOM in policy discussions is rather a good thing. ‘It can actually be really useful to be familiar with the field that you advise on.’
He points out that there is scepticism about the awareness campaigns within the IOM itself, too. But by designing and implementing the campaigns themselves, they can inform migrants better than other organisations would. As Tjaden says, ‘At the IOM there is a stronger element of protection for the migrant in the information campaigns than at other organisations.’
Liberal with the truth
These reservations towards other organisations active in the awareness campaign sector are not wholly unfounded, as a closer look at one of them shows. Seefar, a relatively new player, explains on its website that it ‘applies commercial strategies to social progress’, and defines itself as ‘not a profit-driven organisation'.
Seefar is rather closed. The organisation does not publish any reports or overviews of their activities. A page on its website suggests a broad diversity of projects for migrants and ‘marginalised groups’, but pages on their ‘impact’ and their projects emphasise one activity: awareness campaigns.
Seefar manages different media pages, such as a Facebook page focusing on Senegal, or this website, where it publishes news articles and shares migrants’ personal stories. Like the IOM campaigns, Seefar’s content harps on the horrors of migration. In addition, Seefar offers counselling, and shares the migrants’ reviews of their counsel. As one of the potential migrants says there: ‘The consultation was very helpful and the information made me rethink migration.’
Seefar consists of a branch in Hong Kong and a foundation in Brussels. It is not clear how these two relate to each other. The foundation has reported spectacular growth in recent years: annual reports reveal that the turnover grew from 117,329 euros in 2017 to 3,222,390 in 2021 – all this while not employing personnel, or owning any assets.
What is clear, however, is that the organisation is confronted with more ethical grey zones in their collaboration with European governments.
In 2021, the British newspaper The Independent published an article about a website full of information on migration, apparently run by an independent, humanitarian organisation. The newspaper revealed that Seefar and the British government were responsible for it. A 2017 ‘best practices report’ explains that this kind of ‘de-branding’ – concealing the messenger– is part and parcel of Seefar’s method.
The website claimed that it ‘provide[d] migrants in transit with free, reliable and important information’ – but the information it actually published took great liberties with the truth. The website included the claim that the United Kingdom ‘regularly returns people who enter via irregular routes’, or that steering a dinghy onto British shores is [...] 'a crime' – which was not true at the time. As The Independent stated, the British government did not succeed in legally prosecuting people for this.
Emotional identification
Whereas the IOM does not provide false information, its selective messaging can be seen as questionable – just as some of the methods it uses to produce the media containing their messages, with the help of ‘volunteers’.
This is the moniker given to the ‘returnees’, who are supposed to convince others to ‘achieve change through authentic first-person testimonies’ that allow ‘emotional identification’. These are youngsters such as Mamadou and Fatou, who lead discussion groups, play in social theatres or produce video clips. But academic research shows that not all of them are primarily driven by compassion.
In return, the IOM offers them an ‘allowance’, which turns out to be an important source of income for the volunteers. Researcher Rosella Marino describes how the returnees in Gambia, who get a travel supplement, walk to and from their work sites instead of taking the bus. They need the transport allowance (approximately nine euros) too much.
The Dutch government, co-funder of the MaM project, emphasises that they are pursuing ‘harmonised but customised programmes of reimbursement for volunteers that are effective and sustainable’. Additionally, the IOM helps volunteers in other ways, according to the ministry, and is ‘constantly looking for a balance in the reimbursement of volunteers for their time and expenses’.
Getting a grip
Despite these problems, the awareness campaign industry is booming. ‘Irregular migration has once again become one of the most pressing issues in the EU,’ several European heads of state wrote in an open letter published at the beginning of this year. ‘National and local authorities are struggling to cope with the influx.’ The policy makers are diligently looking for solutions.
In their letter, the heads of state cite awareness campaigns as one of those solutions. Sweden suggested as much in January, and the Dutch Parliament decided last November to spend half a million euros on such campaigns in order to ‘get a grip on migration’.
At the same time, governments and the IOM insist that these campaigns serve the interest of the migrants. As a Dutch representative put it during the Vienna conference in 2019: ‘Migrants are helped mostly if you provide objective information. Because migrants can decide for themselves whether they want to come to the EU or not.’
Ideológicamente, me parece deleznable la crítica a ese tipo de acciones, en plan montar un canal de youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/@MigrantsasMessengers/videos ) sobre los peligros de las redes de trata, los cayucos, las oportunidades laborales que puede ofrecer África, etc. Si en algo hay que meter pasta de cooperación es precisamente en eso, no en robarles recursos humanos para mantenerlos aquí haciendo el gandul o reventando el mercado laboral.
A diferencia de los progres españoles, estos de FTM al menos tienen cierto decoro profesional e intentan documentarse, con lo que de vez en cuando sacan datos jugosos sobre oenejetas o lobbies empresariales que no les caen bien. En este caso, asoma la patita la industria de ayuda al "migrante", su generosa financiación y sus dudosos resultados.
Humanitarian organisation discourages migrants from coming to Europe: 'I have one piece of advice: stay home'
European governments fund the International Organization for Migration (IOM) with millions of euros to provide information to migrants about the journey to Europe. They do this via different media, such as short clips, which are all supposed to provide objective and complete information. In...
‘On my way to paradise, I went through hell,’ Fatou says to the camera, talking about her traumatic experiences as a migrant. There are tears in her eyes. Another clip shows Mamadou, surrounded by ananas plants. He too was a hopeful migrant who never reached paradise. But now that he has his own farm, he has turned into a symbol of success, he says. ‘These days, my employees see me as a role model. I have one piece of advice for them: stay home.’ In another clip we see a girl surrounded by an audience, watching her performance. Slumping in a white plastic chair, she portrays desperation. Her white T-shirt brandishes the name of the YouTube channel that lists hundreds of similar clips: Migrants as Messengers.
This campaign is just one example of the ways in which European governments have attempted to communicate with potential migrants over the years. Film screenings, billboards, theatre pieces, group discussions, clips on social media – from 2015 onwards, governments have been investing millions of euros in awareness campaigns in countries from which larger numbers of migrants originate, such as Senegal and Pakistan.
This migrant awareness campaign sector has become a multimillion business. The most recent, rather conservative estimate puts the number at ‘over 23 million euros’ across the EU between 2015 and 2019. The campaigns are usually executed by non governmental organisations (NGOs). The main one is the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a large NGO with almost 19,000 employees all over the world, providing many different services re
The safest route
In the same vein, the wellbeing of migrants is the main goal of the awareness campaigns, says the IOM. The website of its campaign Migrants as Messengers (MaM) states that its aim is ‘to facilitate safe and informed migration choices’.
In reality, the information provided – of which the clips of youngsters like Mamadou and Fatou are examples – boils down to highlighting cruelties in Libyan prisons, the dangers of boat passages across the Mediterranean, or the bright prospects back home.
Sociologist Omar Cham is a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is working on a dissertation on these awareness campaigns. He asserts that complete and objective information that helps migrants, needs to comprise ‘practical strategies', including ways to obtain a visa. Or, for those who want to risk taking the irregular route anyway, helpful information should include ‘how their rights can be protected whilst on the road, for instance by choosing the safest migration route’.
A bleak undertone
Such information is barely available on the YouTube MaM channel. The webpage of the project summarising the impact of the awareness campaign only talks about the audience now having a higher chance to 'associate the amowing risks with irregular migration: gender-based violence (8%), forced labour (9%), death (8%), abandonment (12%), and imprisonment (14%)’. The message: MaM is successful, because it paints a bleak picture of migration.
This is not only the case with MaM, but applies to most awareness campaigns. A literature review published in 2016, paid for by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the general message of these campaigns: ‘Leaving one’s country systematically leads to failure, misfortune and exploitation. Very few campaigns also show positive images of migration or success stories.’
More recent literature reviews confirm the bleak undertone in the campaigns. Legal ways and opportunities to migrate, involving visa procedures or job opportunities, are often ignored, sociologist Cham wrote in one of the reviews that he co-authored: ‘These topics have hardly ever been discussed in information campaigns.’ Political scientist Julia van Dessel, PhD candidate on awareness campaigns at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, agrees: ‘Almost all migration campaigns that claim to “provide information” or “raise awareness” in origin and transit countries are in fact aimed at deterring irregular migration to the EU.’
A spokesperson for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs – which is financing the MaM campaign – contests this view by pointing to an MaM clip in which a volunteer says that ‘everyone has the right to travel’. The Ministry adds that ‘events are organised in schools, where information is shared on how one can travel safely’.
Urgent matters
European governments have been wanting to reduce the number of migrants for years, especially since the migration crisis of 2015. They consider information campaigns to be one of the instruments in this effort. In 2019, an expert group was founded where governments could discuss ‘reducing irregular migration flows to the EU’. The IOM is also participating in these conversations.
The IOM is not only implementing the awareness campaigns, but also a consultation partner that helps shape policy on the campaigns. The NGO structurally takes part in European high-level policy discussions and organises courses and conferences on the topic. And when scientific evidence is lacking regarding the effectiveness of the awareness campaigns, it is the IOM that conducts research to fill those gaps.
A conference on information campaigns that the IOM organised in Vienna in 2019 illustrates the close ties between the governments and the IOM. A major part of the program consisted of IOM researchers and officers who presented research proving the effectiveness of the awareness campaigns, or sat side by side with civil servants in a panel that was to shed light on ‘the future of the campaigns’.
Their approach is successful, as evidenced by the fact that Dutch officials use IOM reports when answering questions from members of Parliament or compiling knowledge on migration, and use those reports as the basis for their own research. In this fashion, the NGO advances awareness campaigns as a policy solution to the arrival of migrants. An IOM officer who gave a presentation at another conference on awareness campaigns in 2018, commented on the relationship: ‘I think the IOM and others are really trying to feed policy makers with solid baseline data.’
An aggressive edge
‘It is evident that there is a conflict of interest at work here,’ says Antoine Pécoud. The professor at the University of the Sorbonne North has since long been researching international migration policy and the IOM.
Although it is a non-profit, the IOM is still incentivised to take on as many projects as it possibly can, according to Pécoud. This is by and large the case for all organisations on the ‘humanitarian marketplace’, he says, but it is accentuated in the IOM: the organisation does not have any stable funding,and in order to survive and grow it has to make efficiency gains, limit costs and bring in project funding time and time again.
This also motivates the IOM to get involved in policy discussions and to produce knowledge with which it can justify its own projects. ‘They have to prove their worth all the time. That gives them an aggressive edge.’
Jasper Tjaden, former head of the scientific bureau of the IOM and currently professor at the University of Potsdam, thinks the involvement of the IOM in policy discussions is rather a good thing. ‘It can actually be really useful to be familiar with the field that you advise on.’
He points out that there is scepticism about the awareness campaigns within the IOM itself, too. But by designing and implementing the campaigns themselves, they can inform migrants better than other organisations would. As Tjaden says, ‘At the IOM there is a stronger element of protection for the migrant in the information campaigns than at other organisations.’
Liberal with the truth
These reservations towards other organisations active in the awareness campaign sector are not wholly unfounded, as a closer look at one of them shows. Seefar, a relatively new player, explains on its website that it ‘applies commercial strategies to social progress’, and defines itself as ‘not a profit-driven organisation'.
Seefar is rather closed. The organisation does not publish any reports or overviews of their activities. A page on its website suggests a broad diversity of projects for migrants and ‘marginalised groups’, but pages on their ‘impact’ and their projects emphasise one activity: awareness campaigns.
Seefar manages different media pages, such as a Facebook page focusing on Senegal, or this website, where it publishes news articles and shares migrants’ personal stories. Like the IOM campaigns, Seefar’s content harps on the horrors of migration. In addition, Seefar offers counselling, and shares the migrants’ reviews of their counsel. As one of the potential migrants says there: ‘The consultation was very helpful and the information made me rethink migration.’
Seefar consists of a branch in Hong Kong and a foundation in Brussels. It is not clear how these two relate to each other. The foundation has reported spectacular growth in recent years: annual reports reveal that the turnover grew from 117,329 euros in 2017 to 3,222,390 in 2021 – all this while not employing personnel, or owning any assets.
What is clear, however, is that the organisation is confronted with more ethical grey zones in their collaboration with European governments.
In 2021, the British newspaper The Independent published an article about a website full of information on migration, apparently run by an independent, humanitarian organisation. The newspaper revealed that Seefar and the British government were responsible for it. A 2017 ‘best practices report’ explains that this kind of ‘de-branding’ – concealing the messenger– is part and parcel of Seefar’s method.
The website claimed that it ‘provide[d] migrants in transit with free, reliable and important information’ – but the information it actually published took great liberties with the truth. The website included the claim that the United Kingdom ‘regularly returns people who enter via irregular routes’, or that steering a dinghy onto British shores is [...] 'a crime' – which was not true at the time. As The Independent stated, the British government did not succeed in legally prosecuting people for this.
Emotional identification
Whereas the IOM does not provide false information, its selective messaging can be seen as questionable – just as some of the methods it uses to produce the media containing their messages, with the help of ‘volunteers’.
This is the moniker given to the ‘returnees’, who are supposed to convince others to ‘achieve change through authentic first-person testimonies’ that allow ‘emotional identification’. These are youngsters such as Mamadou and Fatou, who lead discussion groups, play in social theatres or produce video clips. But academic research shows that not all of them are primarily driven by compassion.
In return, the IOM offers them an ‘allowance’, which turns out to be an important source of income for the volunteers. Researcher Rosella Marino describes how the returnees in Gambia, who get a travel supplement, walk to and from their work sites instead of taking the bus. They need the transport allowance (approximately nine euros) too much.
In Marino’s research, one of the volunteers expresses their frustration: ‘You are giving lots of millions for the implementation of the project and those who are implementing it are poorer than anyone!’ The IOM itself emphasises that the reimbursements and allowances ‘can under no circumstances be considered as salaries,' and claims that it has supported the creation of volunteers’ unions.
The Dutch government, co-funder of the MaM project, emphasises that they are pursuing ‘harmonised but customised programmes of reimbursement for volunteers that are effective and sustainable’. Additionally, the IOM helps volunteers in other ways, according to the ministry, and is ‘constantly looking for a balance in the reimbursement of volunteers for their time and expenses’.
Getting a grip
Despite these problems, the awareness campaign industry is booming. ‘Irregular migration has once again become one of the most pressing issues in the EU,’ several European heads of state wrote in an open letter published at the beginning of this year. ‘National and local authorities are struggling to cope with the influx.’ The policy makers are diligently looking for solutions.
In their letter, the heads of state cite awareness campaigns as one of those solutions. Sweden suggested as much in January, and the Dutch Parliament decided last November to spend half a million euros on such campaigns in order to ‘get a grip on migration’.
At the same time, governments and the IOM insist that these campaigns serve the interest of the migrants. As a Dutch representative put it during the Vienna conference in 2019: ‘Migrants are helped mostly if you provide objective information. Because migrants can decide for themselves whether they want to come to the EU or not.’
