In 2017, Asia and the Pacific will be home to 62 million international migrants. That’s a population larger than the Republic of Korea’s. Even more people from our region – over 100 million – live outside their countries of birth. At the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) we see this as an opportunity. One we should seize to shape a better future for our region.

There are many reasons for which people migrate. Students do so looking for an education unavailable in their own county, to broaden their horizons and improve their prospects. Some migrants are refugees, fleeing violence and persecution. In our region, we have tragically seen hundreds of thousands of civilians, the clear majority Rohingya, flee their homes in Myanmar to seek safety in Bangladesh in what the UN Secretary General has rightly described as a refugee emergency: an unacceptable humanitarian and human rights nightmare that must be brought to end.

But most migrants move in search of jobs, higher wages and a better life for themselves and their families. Their remittances – $276 million dollars in Asia-Pacific in 2017 alone – provide welcome support to communities in their countries of origin. Put simply, remittances feed children, pay for education and healthcare and lift people out of poverty. But if migrants move for their own benefit, they also do in response to the needs of the countries to which they travel. By moving where the jobs are, migrants support innovation, productivity and growth.

Migrants’ contribution is all the more remarkable considering the challenges they face on arrival, after long, expensive and perilous journeys. Migrants are often poorly paid and have limited access to public services. They tend to work in low skill jobs in the informal sector. Debts taken out to pay illegal fees to secure employment mean they can have little choice but to accept dangerous physical labour. Female migrants are particularly vulnerable. Often employed as domestic workers, they can suffer exploitation and abuse. To compound matters, migrants are frequently turned into scapegoats, their contribution downplayed by inaccurate, prejudice fuelled narratives.

Addressing these challenges could help unleash migrants’ potential as a force for positive change. The economic dynamism of the Asia-Pacific region and its ageing population means migrants could play an even bigger role in our economies and societies, plugging labour and skill shortages. But for them to do so, clear policies are needed to protect migrants’ rights in the workplace, improve their access to essential services and make it easier for them to help families they have had to leave behind.

This was recognised by Member States of the United Nations in the wake of the European refugee crisis when a bold initiative was launched to negotiate a global compact for safe, orderly, and regular migration by 2018. At its heart lies a simple ambition: to protect migrants’ human rights. Grounded in existing laws and practices, and with full respect for Member States’ sovereignty, this compact should lay the foundations for international cooperation for the benefit of countries of origin, destination, and the migrants themselves. Safe migration as an emerging anti-trafficking agenda?

Safe migration has become a way for anti-trafficking organisations to re-articulate how a concern with labour exploitation relates to migration, yet it remains unclear how ‘safety’ can be ensured.

Current efforts to combat ‘modern slavery’ must be understood within the wider context of discourses, programmes and policies that target migrant labour. Since the 1990s, the dominant political focus has been on ‘human trafficking’. Although anti-trafficking remains popular, it has been subject to considerable criticism, even within the anti-trafficking sector itself. A key point of contestation regards the ways in which anti-trafficking relates to migration policies.

For example, it is well known how anti-trafficking discourses easily lend themselves to anti-immigration agendas. Deporting a migrant under the auspices of anti-trafficking efforts makes deportation sound almost heartwarming: the poor victim gets to be re-united with their loved ones ‘at home’. The language of ‘modern slavery’ unsurprisingly emerged out of these anti-trafficking discourses. However in recent times we have also seen other related approaches come to prominence. One example is ‘safe migration’, a concept that allows aid programmes, activists and moral entrepreneurs to advocate for migrants in ways that attempt to evade a focus on repressive border control regimes.

The concept of ‘safe migration’ is not entirely new, but it has been gaining prevalence ever since organisations began to notice donor fatigue regarding human trafficking. As one senior IOM official in the Mekong region recently told me, “the human trafficking candle is burning down”. In response, programmes referring to ‘safe migration’ are now becoming more common.

So, what it ‘safe migration’?

‘Safe migration’ is related to, but not synonymous with ‘legal’ migration. Activists and scholars alike argue that providing legal avenues for labour migrants reduces the risk of exploitative practices in labour supply chains. The 2009 Human Development Report explicitly argues that legalising labour migration contributes positively to both the well-being of migrants (including reduced risk of trafficking) and to development. ‘Safe migration’ programmes however go beyond this to usually include four elements: the legal status of migrants, progressive awareness raising, trust building (brokers vs. social networks vs. licensed recruitment firms), and institutional support mechanisms in the migration process (such as hotline phone numbers for migrants).

 Thus, aid organisations move beyond a strict focus on the law when they talk of ‘safe migration’. They do not merely advocate legalising migration; they also work towards making migration safer by emphasising the importance of social networks and progressive awareness-raising amongst migrant populations. As with efforts to legalise labour migration, a key assumption is that empowering migrants will curtail the market for traffickers and other unscrupulous facilitators of mobility. Within this framework, both officially sanctioned modes of recruitment (licensed recruitment companies/brokers) and informal migration networks of friends and acquaintances are assumed to result in better (‘safer’) conditions for labour migrants. Hence, implicit inferences are made about vulnerability, risk and safety in relation to different modes of recruitment in the light of legal context and migration policy, and are evident in programmes in the Mekong region and elsewhere.

It is therefore important to maintain a healthy dose of caution regarding what ‘safe migration’ can do to improve conditions for migrant labourers.

As I have shown elsewhere, assuming certain ‘types’ of migrant recruitment constitute ‘safety’ (such as official labour recruitment companies, or informal migration networks) is problematic as it is precisely through such arrangements that non-consensual recruitment takes place.

The writer is the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Executive Secretary, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)