Preventing illegal immigration: juggling economic imperatives, political risks and individual rights

Every day unknown numbers of people take the hazardous route of irregular migration. Men, women, and children pay a high price to leave their homes in search of a better place elsewhere; more often than not, forced to do so by events outside their control, such as poverty, violence and war or natural disaster and environmental damage. Developing countries in the south are pushed by the processes of globalisation towards monocultures that are dependant on demand from their developed neighbours in the north, a dependency that threaten and puts at risk the livelihoods of their workers. Claude-Valentin Marie has sought to situate the flows of irregular migration within the structural context of globalisation, seeking to balance the needs of social and economic policy and human rights.