Youth sensitised to challenges of migration
The Assemblies of God Relief and Development Services (AGREDS), in collaboration with Maatwerk Bij Terugkeer in the Netherlands, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), has organised a day’s workshop on the challenges of illegal migration for the youth at Korle Gonno in Accra.
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The objective of the awareness-creation event, which was co-funded by the European Union, was to give the participants an insight into the economic and socio-cultural challenges that illegal immigrants face to enable them to weigh the options before they decide to travel.
Challenges
In an address to open the workshop, Mrs Grace Kombian, the Programme Officer for the Migration Programme at AGREDS, said developed countries had their own challenges; prominent among which was economic depression.
She also said the situation had forced them to tighten their economic and migration policies to ward off migrants, while those in the system already were being flushed out through the refusal to grant them resident and work permits, among others.
The result, according to her, was that there was desperation among migrants who could no longer provide basic necessities of life such as food, shelter and health.
Mrs Kombian noted that most prospective migrants were also ignorant of the economic and socio-cultural challenges they would face on their arrival, such as their inability to speak the languages of the host countries. That, she said, incapacitated their ability to meet their goals.
Migration flux
Mrs Kombian added that there had been a sharp increase in migration to Europe over the last two decades, resulting in the youth adopting several means of migration, apart from territorial and sea migration.
She cited the recent Lampedusa boat disaster in Italy and the associated bad press which suggested that the victims were escaping harsh conditions in their countries due to their governments’ inability to create conditions to empower their citizens to be self-sufficient.
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She urged the government to do more to meet the needs of its youth and encouraged families and communities to be more accommodative of members who returned empty-handed after travelling abroad.
“Migrants’ decision to return is usually not an easy one and if families are not welcoming enough, it puts them into more emotional, psychological and mental trauma,” she said.
A deportee who did not want to be named shared his experiences with the participants and impressed on them not to be in a hurry to migrate since they could make a decent living in the country.
“I now have a profitable business,” he said.