Nayelly Lozano - Academic Speaking Speech

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

Isabel Wilkerson

Migration is one of the most important social phenomenon that have been happening in the history of humanity. Sometimes we criticize migration, but at the end of the day we do not understand what is that or what is happening nowadays about migration, because we usually take the word migration as a synonym of irregular migration, and it is more than just that.

First, we need to define what is migration: Migration is the movement of people from one place to another. When someone leaves a country or region it is called emigration and when a person enters into a country or region it is immigration.

Also migration is considered one of the oldest recognized human rights, that concept as a right was introduced by Francisco de Victoria it was named “jus migrandi” in 1539.^[1] Anyway it does not mean that migration have been totally free and without regulation, at the same time that started the development of the nations and the globalization, appeared regulations to control migration, it gave as a result the rigidity of national frontiers.

Secondly it is important to say that there are two kinds of migration: Internal migration is when people migrate within the same country, and international migration is when people migrate from one country to another. We will focus on international migration.

Approximately 3.3% of the world population are migrants, in other words statistics from United Nations found that in 2015 at least 244 million of the world population are migrants.

Nearly two thirds of all international migrants live in Europe (where live near 76 million migrants) or Asia (with 75 million migrants), in Northern America  live 54 million of international migrants, followed by Africa with 21 million, Latin America and the Caribbean  with 9 million and Oceania 8 million international migrants.

By country United States is the country with the biggest number of migrants that is By country, the United States has the biggest number of migrants with 47 million, followed by Germany and the Russian Federation with 12 million in each one.

This subject is important because there is a lot of people who are actually migrants, and sometimes the hosting counties and their populations have problems to manage related to integration of international immigrants, the consequences are usually a lot immigrants who suffer human rights violations.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations has integrated some goals about migration, which means the international community has recognized the important links between international migration and development of the immigrants’ countries of origin and their new destinations in host countries for immigrants and their families.

Some of the goals adopted by United Nations in the 2030 agenda are to:

-       Respect the human rights of all migrants, regardless of their migration status,

-       Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration,

-       Facilitate integration through education and communication strategies,

-       Increase the number scholarships for study abroad,

-       Address the plight of stranded migrants,

-       Take into account the vulnerabilities of migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons,

-       Recognize the contribution of migration for global sustainable development,

-       Strengthen the resilience of host communities,

-       Improve public perceptions of migrants,

-       Promote faster, cheaper and safer transfer of remittances,

-       Support the right of citizens to return to their country of origin,  

-       Eliminate migrant exploitation, including human trafficking, and

-       Combat xenophobia.

Those are some of the goals that United Nations has, and there are a lot of things to improve about migration and immigration.  This is not a new issue, but we need to take new actions in order to resolve them.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” 

Thank you