Geneva, May 21: About 86 million people are working outside their native countries and the number of economic migrants will increase rapidly as globalisation has failed to create more jobs in their home nations, the International Labour Organisation said today. But the ILO underlined that migration brought huge economic benefits and called for a concerted international effort to manage the trend and to counter major social problems in host countries or abuse of migrant workers.
During the 1990s, the total number of migrants in the world -- including refugees -- increased by six million a year to reach 175 million in 2000. About half of them are economically active, the ILO said in a report.
"If you look at the global economy in the perspective of people, its biggest structural failure is the inability to create enough jobs where people live," the ILO's director general Juan Somavia said.
"We should consider ways of providing decent work to this vast flow of migrants through multilateral actions and policies," he added.
The report advocated "a fair deal" for migrant workers, pointing out that they help rejuvenate ageing populations and stimulate inflation-free growth in their host countries.
Bureau Report