 So, my name is Michelle Klein Solomon. I'm currently Senior Policy Advisor to IOM's Director General. Before that, and until very recently, I served as the Director of the Secretariat of the Initiative that Angela just spoke with you about, actually, over the course of the last two years. And before that, I was IOM's representative to the UN in New York. And going back even further, but I'll stop there, used to be the head of migration policy and research for IOM at headquarters. So that's my background of particular relevance of immediate background. As Jeff intimated, I've actually just arrived from New York last night where I was participating in the summit that took place, the very first head of state summit in the UN on large movements of refugees and migrants. And this was truly an historic occasion for many reasons. The summit looked at the large movements of refugees and migrants. It was certainly informed by the current movements from the Mediterranean to Europe that very deliberately not limited to that situation, using the momentum and the concern of the international community on that current crisis to call attention to the fact that there are longstanding refugee and migration crises in other parts of the world of greater numbers of longer duration of limited immediate resolution and really trying to bring the international community's collective attention to these issues in a political context where refugees and migrants are under threat and are often penalized and discriminated against at a time when in great need. So I'm going to talk about three things with my presentation and really then look forward to an interactive exchange. I'll spend a few minutes talking about the summit and specifically the migration related aspects of the summit, then turn to IOM in the UN as Jeff mentioned in connection with the summit IOM in the first time in 65 years of its history actually entered the UN system as a related organization. And then third talk about what will be a process that will take place over the course of the next two years to develop a global compact for safe, regular and orderly migration which is really meant to help improve the governance of migration generally. So those will be the three focuses of my remarks and let me turn first to the summit. I should mention actually that I also spent most of the first half of this year on a temporary assignment to the Secretary General's office in the UN helping to prepare the Secretary General's report for the summit. As I said, the summit came about largely precipitated by the European crisis but very much with a view toward not focusing on that and using that as an opportunity to highlight the challenges facing refugees and migrants around the world and the challenges that states face in assisting and protecting them. In the context of large movements, whether somebody is a refugee or a migrant is much less important than their immediate needs, their lifesaving immediate needs. And one of the key messages coming out of the summit and something IOM absolutely advocated for fearlessly was that we need to think about human beings first, much like with the MICA initiative, save lives, respect the rights and dignity of individuals and figure out legal status and additional protections and responsibilities afterwards. But in the context of large movements, all refugees and migrants will be facing vulnerability and they need to be received with dignity and respect for their rights and their needs. That's a key consideration. And with respect to migrants, much like as Sandra just talked about in the Migrants and Countries and Crisis Initiative, a recognition really very much for the first time at this level by the international community that migrants have human rights and those human rights need to be respected at all times and regardless of immigration status. That's a very fundamental notion, one that was not widely accepted before this summit and I believe is a singular achievement of the summit. Now of course, applying it in practice is going to be the real challenge, but that notion is now firmly established by the international community. Equally important, when it comes to the migration related aspects of the summit, there's a recognition that overall, and this is important in the context of this development discussion, overall, that migration can be a positive force for development for individuals and their families by creating opportunities beyond the opportunities that they have at home and also for the countries that they go to and dedicate their considerable human capital and talent to, but also for their countries of origin. Of course, we've heard about remittances, which is the most obvious form in which migrants contribute back to their home countries, but it's by no means the only form. It's sharing of knowledge, skills, networks, investment, exchanges that really allow migrants to enrich both their host and home countries. But for that to take place, it means having in place the right policies to make it possible and this is where the summit was all about on the migration side, looking toward creating a world in which migration takes place through safe, regular and orderly channels where people migrate as a matter of choice and not desperate necessity and where they're welcomed when they arrive. I'm afraid we're a long way from that right now, but that's the vision. That's the vision from the summit. That's also the vision that was articulated a year ago in the adoption of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which for the very first time recognized the links between migration and development and the importance of migration to inclusive growth and sustainable development if the right policies are in place. 10.7 of the Sustainable Development Agenda, which is in the chapter that deals with inequalities, uses a phrase that you're going to be hearing a lot more about in the coming years. In it, governments committed to cooperating internationally to facilitate safe, regular and orderly migration as well as the humane treatment of migrants. And they suggested that it was necessary to do so through planned and well managed migration policies. I'm going to come back to that in a moment. One of the other things that the September 19th Summit did made reference to the guidelines that Sandra just talked about, the guidelines on protecting migrants in countries experiencing conflict and natural disasters. They also made reference to another set of non-binding guidelines that were developed over the course of the last few years through what was called the Nansen Initiative. Very similar in outlook, meaning state-led, inclusive, consultative process, non-binding, but the particular focus of those guidelines and the Nansen Protection Agenda is the cross-border displacement of people as a result of environmental degradation and climate change. And what can be done recognizing that, of course, in the world that we live in today, there's more and more environmental degradation, exacerbating risks and leading to natural disasters and many hazards, displacing people primarily internally within their own countries, but some across borders, and thinking about what can national governments and the international community do to provide better protection and assistance. I highlight those because in many ways those two initiatives, the MICAIC Initiative and the Nansen Initiative, really emanated because in contrast to refugees where you have a centralized international legal framework, the 1951 Refugee Convention, its 1967 protocol, and regional instruments in Africa and the Americas, you don't have a central unified normative framework on international migration. There are, of course, many international standards that apply. The whole body of human rights law, labor law, as applied to migrant workers, transnational organized crime law, and particularly the protocols on trafficking and smuggling. The migrant workers convention that was adopted in 1990, which unfortunately has not been widely ratified and is even less well implemented, but I say this because there's not a central organizing normative framework with respect to protection of migrants or management or governance of the migration process. And for some important reasons, it's not appropriate to have one, or it's not surprising, let me put it that way, it's not surprising that we don't have one, because with respect to refugees, refugees exist as a result of failures of the state to protect their own citizens. So there is a need for international protection in the failure of state protection or the inability of the state to protect its own citizens. In the case of migrants, we're talking about something fundamentally different. In a perfect world, there would be no refugees. You only have refugees when there has been a failure, a failure of state protection, a failure of the ability to address citizens needs. In a perfect world, you actually would have migrants. You would have the ability of people to move to other countries, but as I said, to be able to do so as a matter of choice, not compulsion, to be able to do so safely and legally, not putting their lives at risk on unsafe boats or through abusive smugglers or traffickers, and they would be warmly welcomed where they come. So in a perfect world, we'd have migration, but it would be of a fundamentally different character from the migration that we have today. And that's really the challenge which brings me to my second point, which is about IOM in the UN. IOM was established in 1951, at the same time the High Commissioner for Refugees was established. It was originally intended to be a temporary organization addressing what was considered excess population in Europe after the Second World War and to facilitate orderly movement of people and their socioeconomic integration into new societies. Over the years, of course, that organization has changed greatly. It was originally made up of 16 member states. Today, IOM is made up of 165 member states and has offices in more than 150 countries around the world, more than 500 offices total and some 10,000 staff. And of course, its membership is no longer reduced, no longer limited to a small segment of countries focusing on a specific issue, rather more global, both in membership and in concern. And so the organization has evolved enormously because migration has evolved enormously. Migration is now a global phenomena for a whole host of reasons, transportation and communications, revolutions, the greater integration of economies where it's possible to move to different places, to perform different functions and skills, knowing about new societies and being able to access them, but also the push factors. I mean people are forced to leave their countries sometimes for lack of economic opportunity, lack of safety, in order to seek an education or training abroad, maybe to be reunited with family which may be spread all over. And there are a whole host of drivers of today's migration and we have absolutely no reason to believe that migration will stop nor do we think it would be a good idea for migration to stop. The goal should not be to stop migration, but as I said to change its character to one that is safe, regular and orderly. Well IOM's growth over the last 15 years in particular is very much related to the growing importance of migration as a major global issue. In and of itself, as Sanjula said, there are now 244 million international migrants in the world today and probably three times that in terms of people moving within their own countries, estimates are about a billion people total, although nobody knows for sure. So in and of itself the movement of people is a huge phenomena, but it's also intimately and very directly linked to other major policy agendas and you need to think about the impacts of human mobility on those other policy agendas as well as the impacts of those policy agendas on human mobility. Those agendas include human rights, development, environment and climate change, peace and security, so many things that are really at the heart of the global agenda and it would be an anomaly today not to have a dedicated institution of the global the global institution which is the United Nations that is dedicated to addressing them. So in June of this year IOM's 165 member states took the decision to affiliate IOM with the UN system and in July of this year the General Assembly of the UN validated that decision and reciprocated and this agreement to bring IOM into the UN system was signed on Monday of this week as part of this summit. A lot of questions about what that means, what it changes, we can certainly discuss that in the in the Q&A forum. I think in some ways this is filling a gap that has long been understood to exist in the UN system. Kofi Annan in 2000 when he did a review of the UN he said there are certain functions of the UN at that point that were outmoded and outdated and didn't make sense anymore for example many of the trusteeship arrangements given the independence movements that had taken place in Africa and elsewhere but there were also certain areas where the UN hadn't anticipated operating when it first set up that really needed to be addressed and two of the key areas he mentioned at that time were climate change and migration. So Kofi Annan's vision has now been realized with bringing IOM in to fill the gap on migration in the UN system but without prejudice in any way to the existing mandates and very important roles of other parts of the UN system that work on aspects of human mobility. Obviously UNHCR with respect to refugees, ILO with respect to international labor standards and particularly those that applied to migrant workers, the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights with respect to human rights protection for migrants, UNODC with respect to transnational organized crime elements and on and on and on. So IOM coming into the UN doesn't supplant any other organization or take away their mandates but the idea is to have more of a coherent and greater capacity in the UN system as a whole both to serve migrants and to help member states in developing more comprehensive balanced and effective policies which brings me to my third point and that's the process that's going to take place over the next two years and that is all about global governance of migration. So one of the key outcomes of the September 19 summit was to launch what will be a two-year process to develop a global compact for safe regular and orderly migration. Again those buzzwords from the Sustainable Development Agenda 10.7 with a view toward having that compact adopted in 2018 at the very first UN-sponsored International Conference on Migration. Well of course there have been endless conferences on migration but this one is different and it's historically significant and I'll explain why very briefly. For many years and this will come as no surprise to you migration has been seen historically as an issue for sovereign jurisdiction and something for governments to manage at the national level. No states have been willing to turn over questions of the sovereign ability to determine which non-nationals enter their countries under what conditions because those are fundamentally linked to national labor markets social security education etc. So there's been a real reticence by many states primarily the major receiving states of migrants to cede any authority and control to a super national authority to make those decisions. As early as 1994 in the context of the International Conference on Population and Development that took place in Cairo there was a call to convene a global conference or an inter-national conference on migration and every two years where that idea was brought up in the General Assembly the major developed states the major states that receive migrants said no no no no this is not an issue to be taken up at the global issue we want to address it bilaterally or maybe perhaps at the regional level and look at particular trends and every two years a coalition of governments primarily from the G77 led often by Mexico Philippines excuse me other countries that primarily were countries of origin or migrants said we need an international conference. What happened in the intervening years was the developed countries basically kept the idea of an international conference away from the UN and instead created a whole series of what are called regional consultative processes on migration there's some 20 of those around the world today which create which are useful because they create regional discussion for to address particular migration dynamics and and and trends. There as I said about 20 of them around the world but what has also happened in more recent years is a recognition that national and regional approaches on their own are not sufficient and so this historic outcome of the 19th of September summit is to say it's now time to have that international conference on migration and to really look at migration in all of its dimensions and to see if we can come up as an international community not with a new treaty not a binding convention but something that would really be an international cooperation framework on migration so over the next two years there will be effort to develop what those elements of a global compact should be comprised of. There's already an expression by states in the outcome document from the New York summit called the New York Declaration that it should be comprehensive it should be focused on cooperation it should look at both migration and migrants rights but also human mobility more generally so not simply protection of rights but how do we facilitate mobility in a way that benefits everybody and that it needs to address all aspects of migration its linkages in the humanitarian side migration and crises what we're talking about earlier here today but also how to foster the positive benefits of migration for development for individuals and societies ensure protection of rights linked to climate change and environmental degradation so seeing migration in all of its manifestations and to ground it in the 2030 development agenda looking at what are some of the drivers of migration that are non-refugee related drivers but nonetheless compel people to move serious poverty inequality lack of opportunity environmental degradation making certain parts of the world very difficult to lead safe and productive lives and look at ensuring full respect and the humane treatment of migrants regardless of status so states have already put out a list of about 20 things that they would like to see in that global compact but that's only the beginning over the next two years we need to engage an inclusive discussion process that that of course is led by states and ultimately will be adopted by states but that brings to the table civil society intergovernmental and private sector actors because they do all have an important role to play as Angela explained before and we need to look at how to facilitate creation of more legal channels for migration for labor migration at all skills levels not just for highly skilled educational opportunities through migration family unification opportunities through migration but also have to look at some of the negative sides as well and the real influence of smugglers and traffickers and the exploitation and abuse that are suffered by so many migrants in the process we have to work to address combat the the criminal organizations and protect the victims and the last point and it's really a fundamental one is really addressing the xenophobic racist and negative discourse and attitudes the terrible narrowing of the policy space for productive policies in this area migration has become a very cheap target of populist movements and very short term thinking by politicians when the longer term trends make it very clear that migration is here to stay migration will be needed to address the differences in demographics between different parts of the world the skills and gaps between countries and that we need not demonize migrants as somehow taking away jobs or being a security threat to countries we've got to change the narrative around migration and change the policies around it so that's our challenge over the next couple of years thank you very much for your time and really look forward to hearing your questions and comments and to working with you as we move forward thank you