Migration, a fact of life for a large percentage of Georgians, aids the development of not only the migrant but also the communities they migrate to, and provides powerful opportunities for the migrant’s own home community to improve its quality of life, the United Nations Development Programme stated in its annual Human Development Report, or HDR, last week.

The term “migrant” usually projects the image of an internally displaced person (or IDP, such as those coming from the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia) or a refugee (such as those Georgians seeking asylum in Poland over the summer). In the report, migrant refers to anyone who has changed their place of residence, temporarily or permanently, by crossing a municipal, district, regional, or international border from the place they were born in. By the UNDP’s definition, President Mikheil Saakashvili was at one time a migrant (having gone to the United States to study at Columbia Law School in New York City and George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., and to France to study at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg in the mid-1990s), and his wife, Sandra Roelofs, is currently a migrant (having been born in the Netherlands but relocated to Tbilisi, and having obtained dual citizenship at the beginning of last year).

For Georgia, a moderately developing country according to the HDR, migration has traditionally been to the also-developing Russian Federation, and more recently into the European Union. As the report states, migrants generally flow toward areas where wages, health benefits, and educational opportunities are much better (or, according to the report, areas that have achieved higher human development), and where entry is not as strongly restricted by policy decisions in the destination country. Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s invitation for Georgians to migrate to his country after the South Ossetian War created the perfect conditions for Georgian international migration over the summer.
Again, the HDR noted that such migrations are not a bad thing. Granted, those who are better educated and with higher incomes are more likely to leave (creating a temporary dearth of trained specialists, or a “brain drain”); there is a high initial cost to migration, and a lag between arrival in the host country and the first wages being paid that generally discourages the poor from migrating. Nonetheless, with families back home migrants will send back remittances, often with the cumulative benefit to their home country that is much higher than that which can be obtained by available international aid programmes. Further, most migrants return home after several years abroad and bring back with them ideas that have worked in their host countries with which they might try at home. One could suggest that the reforms following the Rose Revolution might have been the result of at least one such transmission of ideas.

The report also noted that the level of internal migration in any country will be much higher than its outbound international migration. If there is a big difference between the Human Development Index, or HDI, of one region over another, people will choose to find new opportunities in that other region and avoid the high initial cost of international travel (which includes not only transportation, but visa and other administrative costs, and the burden imposed by corruption in some destination countries). This tendency for greater internal travel is particularly true for larger countries such as Russia and China, but it also applies in Georgia, which has several rural regions and a few smaller municipalities alongside the capital Tbilisi. The anticipated movement, as Georgia continues to develop, from rural communities to the city indicates a need for additional urban planning to avoid the creation of slums near the country’s growing urban centres.
The HDR also touched upon the issue of displaced people, a major area of concern for the war-battered regions of north-central and northwestern Georgia. In the past, internal displacement has proven to be a major driving factor in the urbanisation of the country, as ethnic Georgians from separatist regions relocated to Tbilisi, many moving into buildings left vacant following Georgia’s civil wars in the early 1990s. 

The highly visible migrants who at one time lived in the Hotel Adjara and the Hotel Iberia (the present Radisson SAS Iveria Hotel) have since been relocated to new homes to allow for the growth of Tbilisi’s hospitality industry, but the question of how to deal with hundreds of thousands of IDPs has not ceased to be a major concern for the Georgian Government. The potential for abuse of any new IDPs in their new surroundings confirms the heightened need for their protection by the Georgian authorities. But the HDR also notes that support for the temporary international relocation of some IDPs may also give them the freedom to find not only better opportunities than what’s available in their own country but may allow them to benefit their families, helping them recover from the loss of their original homes and enhancing their socio-economic status.

The HDR is careful to note that migration is not a substitute for a national strategy to help people flourish at home, but it nonetheless calls on Governments to consider using it as a tool for creating better lives for their people. One example of where the use of migration as a development aid has been successful is in the Philippines, where the Overseas Employment Administration has managed the well-being of a large body of workers that have gone abroad to support their families. The OEA has been effective in increasing the protection of workers from fraud carried out by recruiting agents at home. It has also helped protect vulnerable elements of its population from trafficking, particularly in the Middle East, through education programmes and other actions.

This idea could be implemented in Georgia in the form of a national employment agency, coordinating everything from training to recruitment, the vetting of credentials, migration support and working with consular officials abroad to protect migrants during their period outside the country. Remittances would be left to the use of the individual Georgian, with the idea that their earnings would help the economy at home. The agency can also help promote the use of Georgian migrants in potential host countries, helping overcome the exaggerated perceptions there that Georgian migrants could take away all the wealth of their communities.

Also, the HDR predicted a noteworthy trend that suggests developed countries will be importing working-aged migrants in the coming years as their own population ages beyond retirement; of the 2.8 billion additional people that will populate the world in 2050, 90 percent of them will be from the developing world. This suggestion of opportunity presumes, of course, that the retirement age in places like the EU or the United States won’t advance with the aging of the population, or that the working age won’t drop with improved vocational education programmes in the developed world, but the prospect of a much smaller group of working people trying to support a much larger aged population in potential destination countries does bode well for developing country workers. Migration support, as a component of Georgia’s overall human development policy, could prove to be a timely investment in the future of the country if implemented in the near future.
Many reporters last week took the ranking of countries, based on their UNDP-assigned HDI from 2007, as the most important item of the report. This played down the message that the UNDP had wanted to convey, namely that human development opportunities are not equal in all countries, and that migration has high potential for improving conditions for those countries trying to catch up with the developed world. For what it’s worth, Georgia ranked in 2007 as number 89 out of 182 countries in overall human development, behind Belarus (no. 69), the Russian Federation (no. 71), Kazakhstan (no. 82), Armenia (no. 84), Ukraine (no. 85), and Azerbaijan (no. 86) but ahead of Turkmenistan (no. 100), Moldova (no. 117), Uzbekistan (no. 119), Kyrgyzstan (no. 120), and Tajikistan (no. 127).