UN Chief: Millions of Migrant Workers at Risk from Global Financial Crisis

By HRVOJE HRANJSKI / AP WRITER

MANILA — Protecting the rights and livelihoods of millions of migrant workers during the global slowdown will benefit economies, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday, while also warning that some will lose jobs.

Ban said as countries slip into recession, migration flows have started to reverse, with foreign laborers leaving the construction and tourism sectors in industrialized nations.

He cited a slowdown in remittances—the backbone of poor nations' economies like the Philippines—and the risk of discrimination as national financial crises caused a rise in unemployment, personal hardship and anxiety.

"It would be naive to think the current crisis will have no effect on the movement of people across borders and on how our public perceive migration and the migrants in their midst," Ban told an international conference on strengthening overseas workers' rights in Manila.

Rather than a curse, Ban said migration should be seen as a tool to lift economies because human mobility makes them more efficient "even if they are not growing by ensuring that the right skills can reach the right places at the right time."

Migration "also helps redress the enormous imbalances that have led to harsh economic realities" as the developing world's young adults provide a counterbalance to an aging and shrinking population in the developed nations, he said.

Ban said that constraining migration will only make lives more miserable for an estimated 200 million laborers, but will never stop them from crossing borders.

"This will undermine confidence in our ability to govern—confidence that has already been damaged by the financial crisis," he said.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines, which hosted the Global Forum on Migration and Development, also called on governments to strengthen laws to protect migrant workers, saying, "All eyes may be glued to stock markets, but we can't lose sight of the poor."

With more than 8 million overseas workers, her country is among the world's top exporters of human labor, together with Mexico, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Some $14 billion remittances last year amounted to 10 percent of the Philippines' gross domestic product.

Arroyo said earlier that Filipino workers have not been affected yet by the global financial storm.