Migration and Research in Europe

I have listened with respect and awe to Prefect Carmine Valente’s remarks. As is often the case when you talk to those who have operational responsibilities in the field of migration, we have heard about a large number of prob­ lems to be tackled and of urgent decisions to be made. For the sake of concision, I will talk about ideas and money, or better still, of those who have ideas and those who find the money. I mean, I will talk about research pol­ icies, as viewed by CNR, which has been playing an im­ portant role in research on migration. EU Commissioner Carlos Moedas explains daily to other commissioners that research plays a crucial role if one is to find solutions on the basis of accurate analysis. One example of a structural problem that was solved thanks to a huge research effort is the environmental cri­ sis of the 1970s and 1980s, when the media published pictures of mountains being deforested, and we were terribly alarmed. The issue of deforestation was quickly solved as its cause had been identified. However, it stayed with us as a structural problem because researchers nev­ er ceased to draw attention to it. In fact, understanding global pollution and global warming requires a great deal of scientific research, and in order to solve those prob­ lems you need industrial conversion as well as a change in people’s mentality. Scientific research plays an important role in understand­ ing migration, too. Migratory phenomena also make for alarming pictures in the media; but the phenomenon is not only an emergency – it is a structural one. We should therefore increase the number of researchers working on migration, and we should also make the community of those involved with migration less parochial. I will just recall that when in 2008 Professors Andrea Di Porto and Tullio Gregory started the CNR’s Migration Project, the approach they chose was to take the exclusivity away from jurists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, and involve all human and social scientists in this field of research. That was in 2008. In 2015, at CNR, we launched an even broader project, presented first to Italy’s Ministry of Education and then to the EU – which greatly expand­ ed our knowledge of migration by way of a holistic ap­ proach. As a result, that expansion of the CNR’s Migration Project, called Mediterranean Migration Studies, was taken as an example by the EU, so that the Union launched a procedure for the establishment of a focus area on mi­gration. We thus went from a budget of EUR 15 million in the 2016­2017 work programme of Social Challenge no. 6 to a budget of EUR 30 million – a 100% increase – for the 2017­2018 work programme, which may in­ crease to EUR 150 million in the future. This means that if in 2016 only 15% of all human and social science re­ searchers were involved with migration, with the availa­ ble funds – and given the urgency of the issue – we will see a sizeable increase in the number of researchers in this field who will generate important data analyses. All of us know how complicated it is to analyse certain data. Some of it is public, some of it is sensitive; some data needs to be standardised, and metadata needs to be gen­ erated. These are all problems that scientific researchers know how to tackle. I am sure you now see in what direction the Italian government and the EU are proceeding. Prefect Morcone said that of course we hope to see society one day suc­ ceed in integrating migrants so that they are genuinely in­ cluded. This is something we at CNR are dealing with by means of a sizeable number of work groups on integra­ tion and inclusion. Please let me say that whenever I go to Brussels to explain CNR’s position regarding research on migration, our work is invariably praised. Just to give you one example, the European Commission called a meeting on 26 September 2016 in Brussels on rad­ icalism and terrorism. Participants noted that Italy and Greece are the EU countries where social inclusion is most effective, and as a consequence, radicalism and terrorism are less alarming. All of that further enhances the role played by scientif­ ic research. Financial resources are being made available, and researchers will have more work to do. For instance, they will have to study the data submitted by OECD, by Eurostat, and by a number of databases. For example, we at CNR operate jointly with the Health Ministry on bio­ banks. Our Directorate General for Medical Prevention contracts out important tests, including genomic sequenc­ ing on arriving migrants, on a daily basis, but unless the results are conveyed into biobanks, the data is eventual­ ly lost. Which brings me back to the role of the scientific research system. Here I should note that Italy’s national node of BBMRI­Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (www.bbmri-eric.eu), coordinated by CNR and by the Bicocca University of Milan, is the re­ search infrastructure that solves the problem of transfer­ ring DNA results. As you know, such information may not be transferred without a third­party guarantee, and the Italian node does guarantee that. Now this joint effort by health and research bodies makes it possible to achieve considerable savings in view of normalizing the manage­ ment of migrant flows and migrants’ integration. My final point concerns the issue of welfare. The CNR institutes dealing with social sciences are aware that neigh­ bouring countries should not compete using deterrence in the welfare area if a generalized impoverishment is to be avoided. Countries acting too generously in offering social services would draw so many immigrants that their wel­ fare system would become financially unsustainable. On the other hand, countries acting too ungenerously would trigger a ‘race to the bottom’ that would eventually harm even their own citizens. In view of all that, it is really a paradox that the EU has not yet been able to identify a shared migration policy in the field of welfare. Though the issue directly concerns in­ dividual regions, Italy, and all of Europe, it will take much effort to make it a truly European endeavour. In this re­ gard, I will conclude with an announcement: Italy has in­ itiated a process for establishing a JPI­Joint Programming Initiative Migrants, Migration, Integration. Its goal will be to harmonize EU policies on migration research, so that by making all initiatives and data interoperable its effective­ ness will be maximized.