We are a little bit concerned about making migration part of your strict allocation criteria for your development or humanitarian aid, thereby linking migration policies and humanitarian issues and, as you said it rightly, supporting sustainable development goals linked to migration. That is happening a lot. A lot of European development and humanitarian assistance is more closely linked to, basically, insisting on certain migration outcomes. This can have, in the short term, negative repercussions. A good example is how development aid is now conditional on increased border control on some of the routes in Africa, closing borders implicitly in western Africa, and breaking down some of the trade and development opportunities that the free trade areas of ECOWAS have already developed.
Here, you have a situation where you make short-term migration decisions that undermine some of the benefits of free trade and free movement in a region like west Africa, thereby having negative implications for both refugee migration outcomes in the longer run. So, yes, we need to support host communities and countries in reaching sustainable development goals as a long-term solution.
We need to understand, as it was said by the other panel as well, that in the short term, economic growth and opportunities will most likely lead to increased migration. Only when you narrow down the difference between a recipient and a sending country to around 1:6 will migration flows even off and migrants stay at home. Be very careful not to link development outcomes and migration decisions too closely, because the short-term nature of those decisions will then undermine long-term development endeavours.