Global free movement and “safe”, orderly mass migration should be a right for all poor and unskilled migrants from the third world, according to the director general of the United Nations’ Migration Agency.

Penning an article for International Migrants Day entitled, “Our Right of Passage Should Be Safe Migration”, International Organization for Migration (IOM) chief William Lacy Swing opined that the right of “safe migration” should not be limited to the “global elite” – of which the “privileged” caste he believes to include tourists, students, and legal migrant workers – but should be extended to those who would “have no chance of getting a visa or work permit”.

“While we live in a time when a privileged elite considers global mobility virtually a birth-right, it is denied to countless others, trapped in hopelessly bad economic or conflict circumstances,” Swing writes, lamenting that “hundreds of millions who are not part of the growing, truly global labour talent market find themselves outside looking in, and looking onto a world they can only dream of.”

Swing, a former U.S. ambassador, has previously demanded the European Union (EU) open her borders to migrants and described endless third world migration to Europe as “inevitable”.

Heralding the advent of the smartphone as the “great leveller” in mass migration by giving migrants “intimate knowledge” of “elite” goings on, the open borders proponent said it was “no surprise” that “vast armies of hopeful young migrants” were “vulnerable to the siren song of social media” and began travelling en masse to Europe.

In fact, the IOM is actively contributing to the call of global free movement after the UN organisation launched ‘MigApp’ on Monday – a mobile phone app developed to “empower” migrants which informs them of their rights and allows them to share their migration stories with other “migrants-to-be”.

Asserting that the world is “on the move” and mass migration cannot be stopped – only “managed” – Swing believes the best way to handle the “toxic issue” of chaotic, uncontrolled migration of unvetted people is to organise the “global mass movements” so they are seen to be “orderly, normal and beneficial for all” – implying citizens of sovereign, Western nations would not notice continents of people on the move if undertaken in an efficient manner.

“It should be possible to find some common rules in order to allow many more to travel, migrate and return home freely and safely,” he writes, comparing mass, mostly permanent, migration of people from alien cultures to administering airline flights.

The director-general also pointed to his agency’s work on the Global Compact for Migration, which he expects UN member states to adopt by the end of 2018 and which aims to “address international migration in a comprehensive manner”.

Though he writes this week that the compact would not impinge upon nations’ autonomy, speaking to the eurativ website in November, Swing said the agreement “would give countries a commitment to share responsibility for people on the move” – much in line with the EU’s proposed changes to the bloc’s asylum system which would see all member states forced to accept an unlimited number of ‘refugees’.

The measures were denounced as the “institutionalisation of migration” and an attack on sovereignty by conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

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