Speaking at this meeting, placed under the theme “migrants in the Mediterranean”, Mohamed Harakat, professor at Mohammed V University in Rabat, presented a report on “the governance of Mediterranean migration”, in which he stressed the importance of ensuring strategic governance to limit the negative effects of this phenomenon and to give meaning to a critical analysis of this topic.
The academic highlighted, in this regard, the role of the state, global governance of migration and different actors in improving the situation of migrants, noting that migration brings 150 billion dollars per year of profit, although it is costly in human terms.
Harakat referred to the global context of migration marked by economic stagnation, rising unemployment, declining production and the emergence of new global economic goods, such as health, food, climate change and the knowledge economy, noting the imperative to adopt a new strategic vision of humanitarian migration and ensure good communication around this issue.
For his part, CEO of Lions District 414 Tunisia, Sami Zitouni, focused on the issue of refugees in the Mediterranean, calling for effective solutions that promote the intervention of Lions Clubs and strengthen collaboration between the North and South of the Mediterranean to address this scourge.
Zitouni stressed that in the first quarter of 2022, more than 18,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean to reach Europe, noting that about 2.3 million people have made the same journey in the past eight years.
President of the Moroccan Association for Migration Studies and Research, Mohamed Khachani, gave a presentation on “the migration context in the Euro-Mediterranean area: for a concerted management of flows”, in which he noted that the European Union had 24 million non-European citizens on January 1, 2021, or 5% of its population, noting that the countries hosting the most migrants in Europe in 2021 are Germany (15.8 million immigrants), the United Kingdom (9.36 million), France (8.52 million), Italy (6.39 million) and Spain (more than 6 million).
As for Claude Mermet, District 103 France, he highlighted the difficulties encountered by Mediterranean countries in managing migration flows, noting that these countries will face in the future a new form of migration, namely climatic immigration, which requires the federation of efforts of all Mediterranean states and the promotion of investment in countries of origin of migrants.
