 It is a real pleasure to be and moderating this panel on the collaboration through innovative partnerships on promoting migrant integration and social cohesion. We have very good panelists here. I would like to present them briefly to all of you. The first one to my right is Mr. Elhabib Nadir, a very good friend of us, Secretary-General of the Ministry Delegate to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in charge of Moroccans living abroad and migration affairs. Mr. Elhabib Nadir has been there in this position since 2014 and he is currently also the co-chair for the GFMD 2017-2018. On my left is Mr. Professor Dr. Thomas Fabian, Deputy Major for Youth, Social Affairs, Health and Education of the City of Leipzig. Prior to his election as Deputy Major in 2006, Professor Dr. Fabian was Professor of Psychology at the Department of Social Work of the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences and from 2004 to 2006 he was a city councillor in the city of Leipzig. Immediately after it will be Mr. Ola Henriksen. Mr. Henriksen is the Director-General of the Department of Migration and Asylum in the Swedish Ministry of Justice. He has been working in this area for over 25 years both at the national and international level and he is a very close friend of IOM as well and the head of the Swedish delegation at the Strategic Committee on Immigration Frontiers and Asylum, the SCAIFA. And finally, last but not least, we have also here Mr. Douglas Sanders, International Affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, Canada, a writer with the Globe since 1995. He has extensive experience as a foreign correspondent. He has run the Globe's foreign bureaus in Los Angeles and London and has reported in the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. Mr. Sanders is the author of three books, Arrival City, The Myth of the Muslim Tide and Maximum Canada with 35 million Canadians are not enough. So thanks to all of you for being here at this important event. For us at IOM, integration is really an important matter. We were very happy that it was placed at the front and centre of the Global Compact for Migration first thematic session this year. There have been some events that have happened around this subject in the past. We had in IOM the International Dialogue for Migration in 2015, the city of Mechelen and the government of Belgium hosted a global conference on cities and migration on last 16 and 17 of November with ASA and UN Habitat. But integration for us is really essential, an essential component of comprehensive, well-functioning migration management that prevents the marginalisation of newcomers and contributes to stable and inclusive societies. Migration usually implies also the respect of a set of rights and responsibilities as well as the respect of a series of core values. We promote in IOM a comprehensive approach to integration because we believe that they are necessary to create an enabled environment in which migrants can develop their full potential and become real active members of the society. We are going to be looking at during this panel the question on the important role of the cities in the integration process. What can be the advantage or the point of local authorities compared with the national governments in this area? We believe strongly that local authorities, including majors, have a very important role in promoting diversity both at the workplace as well as within the community. We are also wanting to see a little bit what the role of the private sector is in this. We strongly believe and as the director general said before, I have been leading a process of strategic development in IOM about the private sector and we know that it is extremely important to engage in this type of partnerships and how much these partnerships between governments and media actors are helpful for everybody. I think the private sector has realized also that they have an increasing important role to play in the implementation of integration policies and they have been actively engaging lately into that. Finally, I think the last point that I would like to make is that integration is always more difficult when there is this prevailing anti-migrant sentiment that counters the narrative of the positive elements of migration and focuses on discrimination, xenophobia, etc., that very often permeates the media. So with these opening remarks, I would like to give the floor to Mr. Nadir for his participation. Thanks. You have the floor. Thank you very much indeed, moderator. Dear friend, I'd also like to thank the whole of the IOM team for having invited Morocco to share its experience with regard to the integration of migrants and our major achievements in immigration policy. We have adopted a policy about four years ago. We were traditionally a country of origin, but over the past few years we have become a country of destination for many migrants. I'd just like to remind you of two guiding principles of our migration policy in Morocco. A royal humanist vision based on the principle of solidarity with fellow African countries because most of the immigrants in Morocco are from sub-Saharan Africa as well as a few Syrians. The second guiding principle of the development of immigration policy was the constitution that was recently adopted in 2011 and which enshrines the principle of a pluralistic society in Morocco. That principle adopted in the constitution declares Morocco's commitment to protect its diversity as well as its national identity based on the conversions of Arab or Islamic asani and azabah origins as well as its Andalus, Hebraic, Mediterranean and African origins. What that means is that Morocco has enshrined in its constitution the principle of multiculturalism, cultural diversity. As we know migration is a cross-cutting and very complex issue and to effectively manage migration you need varied and innovative responses and that is what this panel is designed to address. Let's focus on what we have done, specific initiatives that we have taken over recent years as well as some weaknesses to those policies. Firstly, among our government agencies we have set up an inter-ministerial committee chaired by the head of government where all sectors and government agencies are represented. At least all of those are concerned by migration-related issues and they meet at least twice a year in order to take stock and provide necessary guidance to improve our programmes. The main objective is to integrate migration issues into all sectoral initiatives and programmes. We have made some progress recently but we need to integrate migration issues into education, health and agriculture programmes, otherwise the individual respective ministries won't be in a position to deal with this effectively. We also have a national steering committee for implementing the national strategy which meets four times a year in order to take stock of different sectoral programmes relating to education, health and so on. The second main partner for us is civil society. We have partnership agreements in place with about 130 civil society organisations. These are migrant associations for instance. We have encouraged migrants to form associations and there are about 30 of those in Morocco. All of this is fairly recent. The Moroccan law for the creation of association didn't initially allow that and we have now advocated and ensured that migrants can form associations and we have about 30 of those, three or four of which are associations of migrant women. We also have a trade union which is one of the main five unions in Morocco that is set up a specific union for migrants to help them integrate more effectively in all areas of society. We have launched two operations for regularising migrants, one in 2014 and one which will be completed at the end of this year. We have involved migrants in appeal committees at the local level and indeed the national appeal committee. So they are very much involved, they participate effectively at the administrative level. Just to give you some idea of that and the initiatives we have taken to promote migrant integration, we have those two regularisation campaigns. We decided to regularise all women and children. Even if they didn't meet the specific criteria set out for regular migratory status. In schools we have opened up our schools to all migrant children irrespective of the migratory status of their parents. We don't require parents to be regular migrants before admitting their children into schools and that was a measure that we took even before we started talking about our new migration policy. We have got to health, migrants are entitled to access to a healthcare system which is usually reserved for the poorest Moroccans. So they have that beneficial access along the same conditions as for Moroccans. In employment we have removed the national preference provision which was a terrible problem for migrants in our country. We copied that from our French friends but that's a provision that's been removed now so any migrant can now work freely in Morocco. We have also taken steps in regard to vocational training and income generating activity. As you know Morocco is not a very industrially developed country and all of our income generating activities, creating of cooperatives for example are managed by a specific framework and there we have allowed migrants as well to set up cooperatives in this way by amending the law. Cooperation with civil society as I've mentioned there are 130 different associations working on educational projects for example with regard to learning Arabic that's a key to social cohesion. We need to help people speak the same language as their Moroccan neighbours. There is formal education for children who have not been through that process. There is also formal support, very often they have specific linguistic challenges these children because of their origin and we have legal assistance programmes as well, care for children during the school holidays. I won't go into all of the details there. One of the weaknesses that we are working on now is involving local actors. Everything happens through local elected officials and authorities and thanks to the support from German agencies for example we have ten different towns in three different regions where there is a high level of immigration. There are projects to help local authorities to integrate migration into local development plans in their various communes. Another form of partnership that we have developed since we're talking about innovative partnerships, we have 20 university experts who are now involved in all of our thought process with regard to migration phenomena. So those university experts are working on master's programmes, doctorates in their relevant faculties focusing on migration issues. Now I'll finish by quoting from the GFMD which we are co-directing with our German friends in 2018. The three key themes include one on vulnerability, how to move from migrant vulnerability to migrant resilience in order to free up the potential of migrants as tools for development in their countries of origin and countries of destination. That's one of the themes that we'll be doing in 2018. We've also organised a thematic workshop on cultural diversity and migration in order to try to exchange experiences and learn from each other to help ensure social cohesion. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm not going to comment on any of them because we have 30 more minutes and we have three other speakers. So if Mr. Deputy Mayor, you have the floor. Yes, thank you. Do I see my presentation? Yes. Where? The big screen is up here. Okay, I couldn't see my own presentation which I have prepared for you. I'm going to speak about our experiences and our concept of integration of migrants in the city of Leipzig in Germany. To start off with, Leipzig has undergone some major changes in the past quarter of a century. You may know that in 1989 there was a peaceful revolution in Germany and Leipzig played a major role in the change, in the political change, which meant in the beginning that a lot of inhabitants of Leipzig left the city, especially to West Germany. So there was a big decline of population within Leipzig. But we have been able to make the turnaround. So Leipzig is now a fast-growing city. The birth rate has increased a lot and we have many people moving into Leipzig and also migrants. At the beginning, in the early 19s, there were very few migrants living in Leipzig like other parts of East Germany. But now the situation has changed and we are getting many people from abroad which live in our city. Maybe contrary to other cities in Europe, the migrants don't live at the margins of our city, but they live very closely to the city center. Like you can see on this slide, the darker the red is, the higher the percentage of migrants living in these neighborhoods is. In 2015 and 2016, we had a rapidly increasing number of refugees coming to Germany. And within Germany, we have a system of distribution between the federal states according to the number of the population and the strength of taxes. And within each country, we again have a distribution to the local areas according to the number of populations. This, I think, is a very fair system of distribution of refugees within Germany. As you can see on this slide, in the year 2015, we had almost 5,000 refugees coming to Germany, among them almost more than 500 unaccompanied minors. So what did we do? We had to take immediate action. And one of the most important things was that we, from the town hall, the mayor and his deputy mayors, took political leadership because, like in many other places also in Leipzig, there were also critical and to some extent also xenophobic attitudes on the one side. However, on the other hand, we had an overwhelming part of the population that was welcoming the refugees and was prepared to help wherever they could. But I think one of the most important things to have successful integration with integrating a certain big number of refugees in our city was that we had continuous communication and also transparent communication in all neighborhoods where we were having residential places for refugees where they arrived. Our policy is that they move as soon as possible into their own apartments, but in the beginning they live in residential places. We had to develop our collaboration within the local administration. Like in every other city, there are different departments and they all have their specific tasks. But we could only be successful with providing housing for the refugees if all departments work together. Therefore, we set up a high-level task force led by the mayor and his deputy mayors and all heads of the departments. So we were able to accelerate all decision-making processes. We have for the past 10 years a developed concept and strategy for integration because we didn't want to repeat mistakes that were done in the 1960s and 70s in West German cities. And because the number of migrants in the 90s were still very small, we had the chance to develop new concepts and regard the migrants as part of our population and try to integrate them as soon as possible. Of course, we needed political guidelines that were decided by our local city council and a very differentiated concept for integration covering all areas. Regarding the houses of refugees, we had a concept that we wanted to distribute these residential places all over the city, which means that not in one specific area we had all the homes for the refugees, but they should be spread all over the city. And as you can see on this slide, we managed to have these places all over the city. Why was this so important? Of course, a city like Leipzig undergoes social segregation like all big cities, but we didn't want to have on top of the social segregation the problem with refugees in poor people's areas. Of course, in the beginning, it was easier to find empty houses in poor people's areas, so I had big difficulties arguing with the neighborhoods that we wanted to have residential places for refugees, but as soon as I was able to tell them that in other neighborhoods where the upper middle class people lived, we were also able to have residential places for refugees, the situation calmed down a lot. Also, I must say that even in those areas where in the beginning the people had concerns about having their new neighbors being refugees, once the refugees moved into the houses, we had hardly any problems at all. Being a psychologist, I usually told my students before I became a mayor, fantasy is wild and reality is diverse. So as soon as the refugees moved into the houses, we even had support by the neighborhood in those areas where at the beginning there were negative attitudes towards them. One of the crucial keys to being able to have a good integration of the refugees is the social work that we provide in every single residential place for social workers. They have three tasks. First of all, they support and give counseling to the refugees. Secondly, they are the persons for the immediate neighborhood to turn to if there are problems or if they want to provide help. And they also build networks within the local community. One of the key elements for a successful integration is in Germany learning the German language. And we say we want to start from day first with integration and providing German classes for the refugees. And also one of the important things is that the children get places in kindergartens as soon as possible and they are integrated into schools. In Germany, everyone has to go to school. Also the refugees have to go to school. And also the refugees' children have a right to get a place in a kindergarten. Then to have, I would say, more or less complete integration it is necessary for the refugees to find employment. And we work very closely together with the national agencies and we have several programs. Also specific programs for young people, programs for women to be integrated into the labor market. However, I have to admit this is one of the most difficult tasks because, first of all, they have to learn German. Secondly, we have a lot of young people because of different reasons. They have not been to school for a long time. Then many professions, the refugees have learned in their home countries usually don't really fulfill the qualification requirements in Germany. So this is one of the most challenging tasks. But it is necessary for full integration and also for them to be able to learn to earn their own living. The area of culture is also a very important one. One example, we had a theater play which was done by the local actors together with refugees and having a play about the experience of the refugees and the integration in Germany. Sports is usually also a very good area for integration because usually when you play football you don't need to know German. They understand themselves by body language. We have many different areas which are important to deal with, to help with integration and we have very many different players. We cooperate with different administrations but also with the local economy, with welfare organisations and of course with the civil society and we had a lot of support from the civil society. Our task, this is always our main message is that we have to help refugees to settle in well in our city. Thank you. Thank you very much Mr. Deputy Mayor and let me now give the floor to Oda Henriksen from Swedish. Thank you Deputy Director-General and thank you for letting me speak on this important topic. Sweden has a long-standing tradition of welcoming migrants. Migration does not only contribute to development through the hundreds of millions of dollars remitted each year. Migration also contributes through filling needs in the labour market, encouraging trade and investments between countries as well as transferring skills and ideas as transnational networks are formed. One example of the many positive contributions of migrants in the Swedish ICT sector, which each year employs thousands of IT specialists from all over the world. Their employment in Sweden is often essential to the success of Swedish companies but it also empowers people from developing countries by increasing their know-how and financial situation and thus in the long run also the development in their home countries. For migrants who come to Sweden specifically to work the Swedish labour migration system provides an avenue to go from temporary to permanent migration once firmly established on the labour market. Spouses of migrants workers coming to Sweden are entitled to work. This employment policy is good for gender equality and it's good for integration and it also raises tax revenues. Looking more broadly, workers in Sweden enjoy the same labour rights regardless of the country of origin. This means, for example, that migrant workers have equal access to parental leave and childcare, that they have access to the same level of health care including sexual and reproductive health rights. Such rights are crucial for decent work in general and for gender equality in particular. In 2015, we experienced the largest per capita inflow of asylum seekers ever recorded in an OECD country. This has caused strains on our reception system and will have a long-term impact in various sectors of the Swedish society. What we now experience is when welcoming so many newly arrived immigrants to Sweden in such a short period is also an opportunity. Let me share some of our experiences with integrations of newly arrived immigrants in Swedish society. Around 70% of the newly arrived migrants currently in Sweden are between 20 and 39 years old. This means that the number of persons in Sweden who have valuable experiences, connections and language skills from other countries of the world are increasing. About one third are well educated, but some have basic education and some lack sufficient skills for the Swedish labour market. We need to provide sufficient tools and opportunities for people to fulfill their potential and contribute to society. In order to lower the thresholds for newly arrived migrants to enter into the labour market, we have introduced a number of targeted measures such as subsidized jobs, complementary education programs and validation of work placement. For newly arrived immigrants, Sweden has a fast track system for sectors with skills shortages. Through this system, newly arrived can have their skills validated, be offered complementary education and training where this is required in internships to gain foothold on the labour market. The fast track system relies on a public-private partnership whereby branch associations provide guidance on competencies required for the respective fields of work. A recent OECD study called Making Integration Work highlights this fast track system among a number of important lessons in the assessment and recognition of foreign qualifications. Still, there are more work to be done. Employment rates are still significantly lower among persons born abroad and among persons born in Sweden, especially among women. This remains a particular area of concern for the government, especially when it comes to women born outside Europe with low education and limited working experiences. Achieving better results and providing more targeted and efficient measure for these women is crucial. This is why it is important to incorporate gender-sensitive perspective in legislation, policies and programmes. The Swedish government is a feminist government. This calls for ensuring that migrant women and men are empowered as well as their rights are fully protected through a regulatory framework. Research suggests that female dominant occupations suffer from more stressful work environment and that women are overrepresented in work related to diseases. Accordingly, a gender perspective is needed to address these challenges. Our goal must naturally be to have our new citizens, women and men, will be active and influential in developing and empowering our society. We are convinced that this is good for the migrants that join our societies. It is good for the Swedish public finances as it raises tax revenues and it's good for public perception and social cohesion as people feel included and that refugees and migrant are contributing to our societies. It is also in this spirit of leaving no one behind that we must continue to strive towards the goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and for which we should find inspiration as we continue to engage in the global compact on migration. Thank you. Thank you very much. And to conclude, Mr. Saunders, you have the floor. We've just heard from one representative from the global south and two from cities and national governments of Europe and I think what's interesting is what's in common between the approaches to integration they discussed, which is quick access to the educational system, access to the labour force and fairly rapid pathways to citizenship and full inclusion. I think these are common factors that we're starting to understand across the countries and the cities that are successful in bringing people from being newcomers to being full and equal participants and citizens in the country therein. My area of research and specialty during the last 15 years has been the places, the neighbourhoods in cities where immigrants first settle and what makes some of these places to places of great intergenerational social and economic mobility and the places where a new middle class is born. What makes some of these places spiral into intergenerational poverty and into exclusion and sometimes violence and extremism and what are the best interventions to turn those spirals of decline into spirals of success again. And I think if there's one common feature in the places that have been able to turn the migration experience into one of mobility and inclusion it's that these places tend to view integration not as something that is done to immigrants by governments, not as something that you have an immigration department or ministry that imposes integration onto people but rather as a matter of self-integration by migrants and immigrants themselves and the government's role and the city's role as being one of removing the obstacles to self-integration that are often built into these urban districts where people first settle. And this is equally true for the international migration experience as it is for the internal rural to urban migration experience. The urban districts created by these migration experiences often have similar features similar opportunities and resources for the new migrants to include themselves in the economy and the political and educational and cultural system of the city. They also usually feature very similar obstacles to that inclusion. So my unit of analysis is the place we tend to call the Arrival City which is the city within the city you could say that do we have that slide up? No, yes we do. The city within the city created by networks of migrants themselves sometimes in the form of a specific urban district where people cluster by place of origin where they loan each other money where they provide each other with housing they provide each other with assistance in integration sometimes more of a virtual place where migrants scattered across the city link each other up through institutions through connections often through electronic media nowadays to again assist one another with inclusion and integration to getting past the barriers of economic marginality sometimes of racial and cultural exclusion of the usual barriers of beginning on the bottom floor and one of the factors I find in all cities regardless of their income level regardless of their geographic position is that the urban places where people first settle are ideally suited to be the bottom rung on the ladder of integration usually because the housing is at a much lower cost whatever the form of tenure than elsewhere in the city but this whatever the factor is that makes a place a good bottom rung on the ladder often removes the second and third rungs on the ladder what made the housing cheaper than elsewhere usually whatever it was whether it's a terribly long commuting distance from the main city or it's a bad reputation or history of racial or cultural exclusion or poor quality of housing, poor quality of schools whatever made that neighborhood a good bottom rung because the housing is cheaper will often create spirals of failure in subsequent generations and it's worth cities looking at what it is that made a place a good starting point what it is that's missing on the next rungs and we'll take a look at some of those factors in a moment now we have to acknowledge that cities contain many forms of migrants in them this is a useful template here this is a I owe this graph to the World Health Organization of the types of migrants who tend to find themselves in cities and tend to be intermixed in complex mixtures ranging from formal economic migrants either internationally or internally to irregular migrants who are not recognized by the city as being legitimate residents to various forms of refugees and trafficked people and asylum seekers and I think the important lesson from places that have managed to do integration right is that we need to create quick pathways for people of these different categories to become members of different categories for most importantly for refugees very quickly to be turned into regular economic migrants who immediately have access to the labor force ideally before they've learned the language and then for those economic migrants very quickly to be able to be turned into citizens or long-term permanent residents of the place for when there are large pathways of irregular and illegal migration for those to be reduced by the creation of legal pathways of regular migration that allows those populations to migrate back and forth in a temporary and legal way rather than a permanent and irregular way and so on often a recognition that the people settling in your city are coming in various ways and the creation of pathways between those methods and an understanding that the urban districts where people settle are often are places that are subject to forces that push them in different directions as I mentioned there are things built into the resources of these urban neighborhoods that can cause a downward spiral of failure and upward spiral of success this is the world economic forums way of examining this set of pressures on these urban districts as influences on negative and positive development let me show you how we develop this I was engaged in a research project over the last couple years with the World Bank to look at barriers to inclusion of labor migrants in western cities but this grid is also applicable to cities of the global south and less developed countries a very simplified version of what we're looking at basically we looked at the resources used in every city that we could examine that are used by immigrants and migrants to include themselves, to become included in the economy to become integrated into the social and political and educational systems and we flipped that around and said what causes people to fail to be integrated in the lack of one of these important resources so we looked at the categories very often these are physical resources caused by the design and shape of the places where people first settle in cities housing is often the first thing people seek people will seek to live in places where they can afford to live but migrants will often choose to live in somewhere where they cannot afford to live if there are economic opportunities small business opportunities or there are networks of people from similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds to help them integrate and we need to recognize that often the lowest cost housing is not the ideal place for people to settle because whatever caused the housing to be lowest cost means there's no economy there and so on and the physical barriers to integration often involve transportation and a migrant district that has a two hour bus ride to the best jobs in town and a two hour bus ride back creates barriers to integration because the people who are taking those commutes are isolated from their families no surprise if their children use the empty spaces between the housing buildings as their only form of childcare they join a gang or something like that the ability to have long term tenure on your housing I found the cities both in less developed countries and in the west where immigrants are able to integrate most effectively are ones where there's a pathway to long term tenure or ownership of the housing even at low income value often the barriers are institutional the lack of good schools the lack of good institutions I found that often what can reverse of failed integration is to invest in the schools in immigrant districts not simply to bring them up to the average level of the city around them but to put a school in the immigrant districts that is much much better than any of the other schools in the city so that those districts rather than being a place people try to escape become a place that students from middle class districts compete to get into and include themselves and economic barriers are often the most significant barriers to inclusion we need to stop thinking of immigrants whether internal or international as being units of labour who are either filling labour shortages or competing with the domestic labour force we have to understand that migrants are more often today creators of employment opportunities to employ people if we allow them to do so before they've learned the language if we allow them to do so with each other after they've settled if we can remove barriers to the creation of legal small businesses and shops and so on that creates the instruments of self-integration and finally there are political barriers to integration built into many cities sometimes these are simple matters of racial or cultural intolerance of the backgrounds of the people who are settling that need to be dealt with often they are a lack of access to citizenship by which I mean not just full legal citizenship but the resources of de facto citizenship the ability to be included in the institutions of the city to be represented in the governing bodies of the city to be seen by the city as being full members of the urban community and in summary I would say we need cities and national governments need to look at these obstacles to self-integration because by removing these barriers early by making a small investment to remove these sets of barriers so that people can engage in the process of self-integration it can save a lot of cost and a lot of political and social difficulty down the road that will be more expensive if it's allowed to spiral into generations of failed integration thank you very much thank you thank you very much and I think very briefly to summarize very good for presentations of different perspectives but a lot of commonalities as the last speaker said language learning, child children integration labor market and how difficult it is to bring people validation of skills and foreign qualifications is one of the things that I like very much the end of your presentation Mr. Sanders about the physical, institutional, economic and political obstacles that I think basically put all of the comments that were made before we have literally five more minutes in order to finish this and I'm really sorry about this but we started a little bit late the panel, is there any burning question that you Mr. delegate from Yemen and Sierra Leone I think I will give you the floor to both of you really short comments please or questions to the panelists thank you, Yemen you have the floor thank you madam moderator and I wish to thank the entire panelist for their informative presentation madam moderator I just wish to talk about the building capacities of the migrants which is so important to help for the sustainable and dignified integration of the migrants in this regard I just wish to emphasize the importance of the multi-stakeholders approach where the social initiatives needs to be promoted and supported I thank you madam moderator Ambassador Stevens you have the floor yes thank you very much I have two quick questions I just wanted the panelists to comment a bit on their policy and their experiences in terms of family unification and also to mention the international convention on human rights of migrant workers and their families and it is I think of the panelists their morocco is one that has ratified but the other countries have not so just for them to comment on it why is it because it's only looking for the human rights of migrant workers no any additional rights but in only 49 countries have ratified or acceded to that convention thank you thank you very much Mr. Minister you have the floor mine goes to the Deputy Mayor from Lesbic I want to know what they are doing how he reconciles it with their national policy of trying to encourage more migrants to go back home and also making sure that at least from their countries of origin they become happy there and they do not even come to Europe especially to Germany thank you very much Ambassador of Gabon you have the floor thank you Madam moderator the time is so brief that I'm just going to make a few comments first to congratulate the panelists on their brilliant presentations and then particularly talking to Mr. Nadir from Morocco Gabon would like to particularly express its pleasure at all the measures taken by the Kingdom of Morocco and the pro-Afghan policy of the King Mohammed VI we'd like to particularly emphasize the geographic position of Morocco which has a very close border with Spain and we'd like to say that Moroccan policy is welcome in the sense that at present we know what's going on in the world today and it brings us back at other times in the past and we just congratulate Morocco for all their efforts also with the relations of Morocco with Germany through the GFMD thank you very much I realize the time I just couldn't avoid taking the floor just to acknowledge the excellent presentations of the panelists today and Mr. Saunders good to see you here as well in light of the time and especially considering where we are in the course of the path to the global compact as Canada as you may all know we do promote a whole of society approach when it comes to integration and many of the aspects in the presentation today reflect that I'd like to in terms of if we're thinking of the commitments that states here will want to make in the global compact I'd like to ask the panelists to if they can share their views in terms of not only trying to implement this kind of whole society approach and the commitments that states can be putting forward in the compact but also in terms of the roles and responsibilities of political leadership in terms of influencing public attitudes and opinions in the society that influence the attitudes and facilitate integration of Nukes which are so critical in terms of facilitating the efficiencies of those efforts that states may be trying to put in place in collaboration with civil society in the bright sector thank you thank you very much I will give each one of you 30 seconds to respond and I will start with Mr. Saunders if you have any comments to make Mr. Farmer okay there was one question directly addressed by Ghana to me as a deputy mayor of the city of Leipzig on the local level we try to do everything to have a successful integration of refugees and migrants that come to our city and we also try to have what Mr. Saunders described as self-integration this correspondence with one of the basic principles of social work helping people to helping themselves especially in the beginning what we also provide is counselling social counselling for people who do want to return voluntarily because a lot of refugees that come to our city do not want to stay forever in Leipzig some want to stay for a long time but there's also quite a lot of people who would like to return if the situation in their country has changed and there is I always say no population as diverse as refugees coming to our city yeah they come from lots and lots of different countries lots of lots of different personal backgrounds so the situation is different for different kinds of people what we provide is counselling for people who want to return but forcing people to return is not on the local level this is national policy then the question by Sierra Leone family reunification this is as you probably all know is a big political topic at the moment in Germany from the local level I personally believe that family reunification helps integration because we also observe that children are the ones who are able to self-integrate themselves the quickest thank you very much Mr. Herrickson thank you yes on family reunification let me start by saying that we promote safe orderly and regular migration friendly country but it needs to be under those circumstances we have quite large number of family unifications there are some temporary limitations right now but we still have quite big numbers of family unification people coming to Sweden on the migrant workers convention no we have not ratified the convention as you know I don't see that we will do it either in the near future at least the rights that are enshrined in that convention we looked at it quite carefully are already implemented in national legislation and it's also enshrined in other parts of international law that we have ratified so I think that there's no loss of rights due to the fact that we haven't ratified the convention thank you Mr. Sanders thank you with regard to family reunification and this speaks to the sort of whole society inter institutional approach to integration I think many governments particularly of developed countries have a fear of family reunification based on based on the idea that having a lot of migrants settled in one place who are closely connected together and who speak the same foreign language and come from a foreign culture that they are going to cluster together and form a parallel society or a segregated place or a ghetto or something like that but we know from the experiences of places that have had very successful integration that have had waves of people coming from many different backgrounds and languages and religions quickly within a couple generations becoming very well included parts of the society that actually what makes integration work best is also this form of self-selected mutual assistance the formation of networks and that sort of thing and one of the things that can be the most difficult barriers to integration is not allowing families to unify turning people into isolated units of labor stuck as the only person who's a member of their background in a neighborhood can be one of the biggest barriers to integration so we need to deal with what are the actual root problems of failed integration and allowing full family reunification as quickly as possible is an important tool to integration not to its opposite. Thank you very much. To conclude Mr. Secretary General. Thank you. I'd just like to thank all the delegates who've encouraged Morocco in its migration policy. Morocco ratified the convention on rights of migrant workers and their family members and on the question of the role of cities with our German friends we have in our GFMD 2018 agenda to organize a workshop on migration and the role of cities to try to share good practices in this area. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to all. Thank you very much to the panelists and thank you particularly to the interpreters that have accepted to remain a little bit longer in order to be able to respond to these questions. This meeting is adjourned and we will see each other at 3 o'clock.