 Mr. Gabriel Fahl, who's from the Gambia originally, as I mentioned, but has lived and worked in the UK for a very long time. And what Mr. Fahl does is very interesting because he's kept a very close relationship with Africa and works with the African diaspora to help with the development initiatives on the continent. So let's hear from him now. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honour to be here with you and we thank IOM for their kind invitation. I was like your story as migrants and descendants of migrants is always most fascinating at a personal level. Yet the stories of migrants in total tend to fall under what I call the five Ls. As one of the five Ls is a reason why we migrate. We migrate to protect life, limb or liberty. We migrate to improve livelihood and lifestyles. For those who migrate for the reactive reasons of protecting life, limb or liberty, their story is slightly different from the story of those who migrate proactively to improve livelihood and lifestyles. Mine is perhaps of all the panel the most boring of migration stories. I migrated from the Gambia in West Africa, a small country, to the United Kingdom, which was the colonial master, they shared the Commonwealth heritage. I do not know the answer to how one becomes a successful migrant in any culture, but in United Kingdom or British culture, having a sense of ironies would help. In the UK, we applaud winners, but most importantly, we celebrate losers. Now, in 55 BC, Julius Caesar invaded Britain, and of course, he famously said, I came, I saw, I conquered. I have always wanted to say about my migration to Britain, that I came, I saw, I left. Fortunately or unfortunately, I cannot say that because I did not leave, but that is what gives us the story. But wherever we are, there are the positives and there's the negatives. It is the balance that we gain that makes life interesting. When I left Gambia in 1987, age 19, we did not have a university, it's a small country, the population was about 800,000, so when you finish the top level of education there, you have to leave to go to university. But my family perhaps is a story of how communication, modern technology, have helped increase movement, perhaps at levels that the world has not seen before. Just in terms of efficacy, the world have experienced tremendous levels of migration before. There's epic biblical stories of tracks and movements of people, but in the modern world, we do it quite quickly. We take a flight, premium economy, and look forward to very lovely immigration offices in airports all over the West. Now, for a very long time, if I wanted a family reunion, I wouldn't go to Gambia, I would go to Clement, California, because most of my siblings lived there, and that is the story of modern migration. There is the question of where do we belong, the question of identity and citizenship. My view, and it is entirely my view, not even the view of the organization that I chair, is that the migrant is the person who has left and joined a new community. Remember, I speak mainly for the last two hours, the positive, the proactive migrants who are moving to improve their lifestyles and livelihoods. So I would say that there is a great deal of duty on them to know the people, their meeting, and to integrate themselves. In our own countries, the countries we've left, there is xenophobia, there is racism. In fact, the fact that we have migrated has helped us change our own views of the xenophobia that we used to display. Folliba Thibault is originally from Guinea-Conacre, there are generations of people from Guinea-Conacre who migrated to Gambia. As a child, I remember these guinea migrants being rounded up, put in the bath of lorries and deposited at the border. I remember that. So it is a xenophobic place everywhere we go. It's about how, so they're not particularly targeting us as migrants, they are targeting us because we are the weakest in the link. If we were not there as migrants, they will find amongst their own folk the weakest and they will target them for all of the ills. So there is a bigger global context to it, I would say. We have all mentioned that the migrants, ever so often, when we see the distressing stories Haitian trying to go to Bahamas, it's live now on the news, tragedies of Lampedusa, and from the 1970s the emergence of the bold people, we see weak and vulnerable people. That is true. But even those weak and vulnerable people do have a great deal of initiative in them. What they need is the basic tools to be able to look after themselves. I do think that Britain is my home. I perhaps even know the exact day that I knew that it was my home. I had spent in 1995, after eight years of living in the United Kingdom, I had spent several weeks in the United States from east coast to west coast, perhaps the best ever sort of trip that I had had ending up in California, which was bright, new and beautiful. And I returned back August day in the United Kingdom. I was carrying a Gambian passport, so you joined the queue that says everyone else. The lovely immigration officer is waiting to hustle you, of course he hustled me. I went through all of that, got out, it was raining, it was dark, it was miserable. I got a taxi, the taxi driver was impolite, he was, I remember he was smoking, and I said, do you mind, he said no and continued smoking, and I felt so happy. That's when I knew that Britain was my home. You see just before that I have caught myself several times complaining about things in the country. Now I know, I was complaining because I cared, prior to that when I thought I was just an itinerant student, I didn't care how much they wrecked their country, it didn't bother me, let them mess it up, I'm leaving. But because it's my home, I care, that's why I complain. But that is why I take on my civic duties to make so I play my part in keeping that home, that house good for me and for everyone else. And very quickly when you accept that it is your home, you treat it as your house, some of us are proud, some of us are not, but still we treat it well. The people who we meet there, we treat them well, we try to understand, we play by civil and civic rules. Now that duty I think is important for migrants and the diaspora, and it brings it down that it's all about people. You see, several times I hear politicians playing up on the xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiments and say let's close our borders and they've come, they've taken our jobs, they've taken our money, they've taken our women, let's get rid of them. Now, but often I also hear illegal immigrants or irregular immigrants who, because their children are going in a local school, the school, the family members would stand up and say no, these immigrants should not be deported. And I and many other migrants have also been in situations where your local friends, they may be white or not, may talk about all of these terrible immigrants and they look back and say of course it does not include you. It's all because as a person they know me. So I'm a very simple person. I think perhaps a way to deal with this is to know each other. And you know in some of the countries we come from we have very good traditional rules of how we know each other. In Gambia for example, if you come from even not another country but another village, you come to a new village or town, you go and find people and introduce yourself so that you become us rather than them. So there is a great deal of work to be done on that basis. Now on the wider questions of just can rich countries for example, welcome or take very many migrants, that to me is a fraught question because poor countries take actually lots more than rich countries do. The United Nations tells us that the stock for migrants is 232 million. That's incredibly low, unbelievably low. 232 million out of six, seven billion people, three percent. So what's going on? Actually people want to stay at home. So if we open the borders, there's not going to be any rush. People do want to stay at home. I think what we find in my case and many others is you find a migratory equilibrium. People want to better themselves so they migrate to places where they think they can earn more and have a better life. Now if there's no job opportunities, they won't go there. So the bottom line is for self-development to get a good life, migration is all about people having those opportunities. So it is important to link migration to development. That is for people to have the means so that when they choose to move, it's really a choice rather than absolute desperation. Ourself as a charity, as a diaspora charity, we were founded in 1994 by a gentleman called Chukwu Emeka Chikese. Some of you know him, IOM knows him. And at that time they were making this argument of the linkage between diaspora and development, saying that let's not concentrate on the active migrant, the one in the process. When we say migrant, there's a level of sort of activeness in EGSE in it. But yet there are the descendants of migrants. There are those who are settled for many years and all of them have a role to play in development. For many years, I would tell you, Ambassador Swing, that we as a small charity will not work with IOM because IOM we saw that was very much interesting in returning people home. In the United Kingdom it was a return. And in the United Kingdom the only other people who talked about return were the racists who wanted to kick us out. Yet we have seen, especially since the last high-level dialogue, a significant shift to say it's not just that returning people but it's about development. And IOM is taking a lead in talking about engaging, empowering and enabling migrants to contribute to development in that sense. And I think the future of migration would be about that. We have a choice to move, as most of you diplomats have, to move different places. You are migrants but you don't have the hassle that orders do. Why? Because countries who own sovereignty and are very jealous of the guards, they want prosperous migrants. That's the bottom line. They want prosperous migrants. Any country you want to go to, if you have money and means, they let you in. The ones that IOM are worried about, the distressed migrants, are the ones without means. Again, I'm a simple man. What's the fundamental answer? Let us have means. Let us be rich. Let us be wealthy. Then migration becomes a matter of choice rather than desperation. Now, I would say that that then leads us to a sense of transnationalism. In the United, sorry, in Europe, we've seen it. A number of countries that are wealthy. So we have no borders. We leave transnationalism. No borders within the EU because everyone is relatively wealthy. Now, is this not possible for the whole world? I would say it may be impossible, 100%. But perhaps we can do it 80%. Because right now in the United Kingdom, visa requirements for Chinese people have just become easier. Why? Because China's getting wealthier. So almost no Middle Eastern Arab country has problems getting visa. It is a question of are you poor? If you're poor, I don't want you in. We don't complain about all these rich migrants coming in, spending their money and hiring our staff. We don't complain about that. We make another complaint. So my story is, I said, my girls, it's ordinary and boring. Got to England, thought I'll be a student, I'll finish and leave. Opportunities arise, you take it home. Until you realize that that's where you belong. Then you challenge yourself and deal with all of your prejudices. We told you that, oh, you are a loyal Gambian, with all of the Gambian culture and nothing else. I'm never going to beat a Gambian. Well, it's not true. We can have more than one home. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It's very interesting to hear you say that we can have more than one home because I'm sure you know that a lot of people would disagree with you on that. But it's very interesting to hear about your experiences. Well, I think we'll open up now. The floor to the floor.