The 109th World Day of Migrants and Refugees will be celebrated on Sunday, 24 September 2023. The Holy Father has chosen as the title for his traditional Message, “Free to choose whether to migrate or to stay”, with the intention of fostering renewed reflection on a right that has not yet been codified at the international level: the right not to have to migrate or, in other words, the right to be able to remain in one’s own land.
The fact that many persons are forced to migrate demands a careful consideration of the causes of contemporary migration. The right to remain is older, more deeply rooted and broader than the right to migrate. It includes the possibility of sharing in the common good, the right to live in dignity and to have access to sustainable development. All of these rights should be effectively guaranteed in the nations of origin through a real exercise of shared responsibility on the part of the international community.
The theme is more fully developed in a paper of the Dicastery from December 2022 entitled The "right" not to have to emigrate. In encouraging local Churches to work with the authorities of their countries and regions in order to alleviate the inequalities that might drive peoples to migrate, this paper notes that the decision to emigrate is not always one that is made with freedom:
While violence, conflict, and climate change contribute most significantly to involuntary migration, economic development is also a major factor. Some regions of the world are more privileged than others, and within each society, access to the common good – work, health, education, welfare – is not always guaranteed. In the absence of opportunities for personal and family fulfillment, migration sometimes emerges as the only truly possible choice.
There are two points here that I find of interest. The first is that the inability to take a proper part in the economic and social life of a country provides a driver in favour of migration that is just as legitimate as is persecution, a driver that represents a constrained choice rather than a free choice. The right to freedom of movement within one's own country, and the right to leave from and return to that country, enshrined in Article 13 of the UN Universal Declaration, has in part an intention of enabling such migration.
The second point is that, though the intention of the theme chosen for the 2023 World Day of Migrants and Refugees is to focus on creating awareness of what needs to be done so that people have a genuinely free choice with regard to staying in their own country, it also recognises a right to choose to migrate, and a desire that the exercise of such a choice may be made with freedom rather than constraint.
The implication of this for Governments is that they should be willing to commit resources to the integral development of people in less developed nations; and where they are not able to do this, to make provision for the consequent migration.
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