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The strength of Youth Collective Action for a Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration

The Migration, Youth, and Children Platform (MYCP) was established in 2018 in response to the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) negotiations. At that time, young international migrants under the age of 30 constituted 32% of the global migrant population, with 60% residing in developing countries. This prompted a logical response—to create a constituency to empower and include migrant youth in policy-making processes. Fast forward to today, these numbers have increased, reflecting global migration's growing complexity and diversity.

Through GCM consultations, we have collaborated with over 380 youth-led organisations, representing more than 556,000 young people across all regions and countries. The outcomes of these consultations helped identify challenges and formulate recommendations for enhancing policies in the multifaced context of migration. For instance, some of these recommendations underline the importance of:

  • Properly implementing labour migration policies, including reinforcing strategies that safeguard and guarantee migrants’ security and rights and harnessing migrants’ benefits. In the EU, non-EU-born youth face the highest unemployment rate, while in Africa, young migrants are often categorised as low-skilled workers.
  • Recognising education as an essential investment for migrant integration into the community. This includes addressing language barriers and promoting social cohesion and migrant integration, contributing to combating discrimination.
  • Prioritising access to essential services such as healthcare, as well as providing information and legal counselling in the context of migration policy-making processes.

These points represent only a fraction of the challenges identified through the consultations. However, the consultations also showcased the resilience and strength of youth collective actions in addressing these challenges. For instance, they helped identify youth-led projects aimed at supporting migrants through legal, technical, and vocational capacity-building, as well as youth-led initiatives creating economic opportunities in low-income areas and advocating for youth inclusion in policy design and review. Despite the potential of youth-led organisations, several barriers impede them from contributing to the GCM objectives, such as lack of support for their initiatives, lack of spaces where they can meaningfully engage, limited capacity-building opportunities, and limited access to information, to name a few.

In the context of the GCM Regional Reviews, we then recommend:

i) Acknowledging the critical role of youth, not merely as "individuals with inspiring stories," which can lead to tokenisation and dismiss the diversity within youth, but as stakeholders.

ii) Supporting youth self-organisation. Grassroots, local and national youth organisations’ participation is key in the RMRFs.

iii) Providing systematic and structured support and resources for youth participation. In the current arrangement, only the most privileged young people can afford to volunteer their time and cover their expenses to engage in GCM processes and initiatives meaningfully. This results in a high turnover rate among youth participants and impedes adequate and diverse youth participation.

Consequently, meaningful collective participation from youth migrants at all levels has become an essential part of migration governance such as the GCM. This will align with 2022 IMRF’s Progress Declaration, Article 53, which recognizes that migrants are an integral part of our societies and therefore commits to promoting their meaningful contribution to policy development, delivery, and review; and with Article 68, which invites relevant stakeholders to engage at all levels in the review of the implementation of the Global Compact, enhancing cooperation related to its full implementation.

In 2019, the UN recognised "young people as rights-holders, and promotes and facilitates transparency, accountability, and responsiveness from duty bearers toward young people.” The UN's Youth Strategy 2030 "commits to supporting and strengthening the engagement, participation, and advocacy of young people.”, while the UN Policy brief of April 2023 highlights the importance of meaningful youth engagement in policymaking and decision-making processes, and showcases good practices from youth-led initiatives, including MYCP. Nevertheless, youth remain a minority in policy-making spaces, often tokenised or not even considered stakeholders. In addition, the current approach to youth participation in the GCM process is unsustainable; it continues to rely on volunteer platforms that do not have the capacity and resources to an adequate extent to effectively engage youth. Specific mechanisms and measures need to be put in place to make this possible.

Since its inception, MYCP has been operating as a volunteer-based youth-led organisation that reunites both individuals and youth organisations engaged in migration governance, representing all regions. In its capacity, MYCP organises regular constituency calls and capacity-building activities to ensure that youth-led organisations are included in decision-making processes. Among its many successful activities, MYCP has effectively facilitated the inclusion of migrant youth voices in various migration platforms and forged robust partnerships with numerous organisations.

This piece is published as part of the UN Network on Migration’s Guest Blog series and does not necessarily
represent the views or opinions of the UN Network on Migration nor its Secretariat.

*References to Kosovo shall be understood to be in the context of United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 (1999).