The intricacies of the complex world of migration brokerage

by Priya Deshingkar

There is an increasingly broader and deeper realization that there are many players in the migration industry, a loose and changing conglomeration of individuals and institutions that work together to facilitate mobility. The incentives for brokerage are often large, and there are many people in sending and receiving communities who have a stake in ensuring that irregular migration and smuggling succeeds.

A recent webinar from the Migrating out of Poverty consortium presented cutting-edge analysis on migration brokerage in Africa and Asia. Presenters from the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, the Centre for Migration Studies in Ghana and the University of Sussex in the UK explored how brokers are part of the system of creating and producing precarity through their role in facilitating journeys and connecting workers with employment. Migrant workers live and work in precarious conditions, not just because of the way they’ve been employed, but because of the restrictions placed on them by the immigration and government systems that control their rights from the country of destination.

In policy terms, the migration industry is usually framed as an evil and highly exploitative system that perpetuates forced and unfree labour. However, case studies from the webinar demonstrated that migrants can, and do, exercise agency even in highly constrained and unfree situations.

Traditionally scholars have considered worker agency in relation to collective forms of protest mainly in industrial work settings. However, more academic attention is now being given to individual forms of agency. There is now greater recognition of migrants’ strategies of accepting precarious work in the short term in order to build a better future in the longer term. But the role of brokers in achieving long term aspirations, and how they are integral to migrant agency, is an under-researched area. This framing better reflects migrant’s own views and experiences of brokerage, which can often be at odds with the way that brokerage is viewed in migration policy and international development more broadly.

The research presented in the webinar provides insights into the internal workings of brokerage networks and their role in recruiting, training, obtaining official documents and visas, organising journeys and ensuring placements at destination. It explores the profit-making impetus of brokerage but also pays attention to the overlapping moral motives of brokers and relations of reciprocity between migrants and brokers.

In Ghana, for example, internal migration (mainly rural to urban) is very common, with girls and women migrating to urban areas to find employment in low-paid and insecure places particularly in domestic work. Here brokers are embedded in the system of exploitation by moulding the migrants’ behavior and appearance to be “good” and fit the expectations of their employers who are looking for docile and subservient women and girls.

However, the studies from the webinar also conceptualized brokers as an important part of migrant risk management strategies in enabling them to fulfil their own migration agendas. While brokerage is often viewed in a “here and now” way, the studies show how brokers work with migrants to realise their future goals. For example, when migrants want to switch jobs or bargain to improve their working conditions, brokers can play a critical role.

A study of how employment agents in Singapore and Indonesia recruit and place migrant workers introduces the concept of conditionality. That is, the proposition that a migrant worker’s experience of precarity is contingent on a set of formal and informal conditions, the actions of institutional actors, and migrants’ own resources and strategies. Viewing conditionality as not merely additive, but as compounding, sharpens our understanding of precarious work. For example, remember the childhood game ‘Snakes and Ladders’? (NB: Snakes and Ladders, originating from India and commercialised as a family board game in the UK, and again commercially reincarnated as ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in the USA). In this game, ‘Snakes/Chutes’ or vices (poor decisions) set one back and ‘Ladders’ or virtues (good decisions) pushes one forward.

The researchers in Singapore use this model of ‘Chutes and Ladders’ to help demonstrate how migrant domestic workers move in and out of varying degrees of precarity over time. Based on qualitative interviews with migration intermediaries, the study suggested that these ‘chutes’ and ‘ladders’ are not static, pre-existing, or inherent; instead, they are dynamically produced by migration brokers, who actively produce, shore up, or mitigate situations of precarity for workers by ‘patching’ chutes, leaving them, or opening up new ones. Conversely, brokers and employers redraw the boundaries of conditionality through the creation of ladders. Workers’ access to security is hence not merely conditional, but conditionally compounded, based on the necessity of simultaneously meeting multiple mutually reinforcing and interwoven conditions.

The webinar does not try to downplay the inequality in most migrant–broker relations. However, it provides a multi-layered view whereby brokers and migrants, both, should be understood as co-creators of complex pathways of migrant circulation. Migration brokerage crafts and supports structures that produce ‘good migrants’ and precarities, however, over time, migrants may successfully maneuver and challenge these structures with the potential for social and economic change. Furthermore, the research shows that brokers can also play a role in lessening precarity and increasing protection for migrants from abuse.

Listen to the recorded webinar here: Connection Men, Dalals, Maid Agents - traffickers or not?

See the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies special issue articles here:

Please, thank you and sorry – brokering migration and constructing identities for domestic work in Ghana 
Mariama Awumbila

A game of chutes-and-ladders: How maid agents and domestic workers navigate the migration industry in Singapore
Kellynn Wee

The recruitment of Bangladeshi migrants for construction work in Qatar
Priya Deshingkar

Here is not my home. The story of a migrant construction worker in Ghana

by Collins Yeboah

In Ghana, both skilled and unskilled migrant workers seek greener pastures in the highly concentrated city of Accra and its sprawling peri-urban areas. Most of these migrants end up working in the informal and insecure sectors as domestic and construction workers.

Usually, the migrant construction workers are practicing craftsmen – masons, carpenters, and steel benders. A study by Yaro et al (2015) indicates that migrants skilled in construction work spend years perfecting their trade at home before migrating, due mainly to the surplus of crafts persons in their originating communities.

Why do construction workers leave?

“There are jobs in the Volta Region for masons like me, but they are not too many - it is the big construction firms that get all the contracts and pay us the masons as they want”. 

These are the words of Divine, a 23-year-old mason from Tsitsito, in the North Tongu district in the Volta Region of Ghana. Divine migrated to Accra because of poor salaries and low frequency of jobs in the Volta region.

Our Migrating out of Poverty global qualitative study in Ghana* found that the livelihood options in origin areas, though diverse, are of limited benefits to the emerging youth. The towns and peri-urban areas have limited construction projects mainly provided by the state, the Ghanaian diaspora and residents. It was also found that the non-farm sector has blossomed but with limited profit margins due to poor purchasing power and low populations. Farming is an important activity in both Northern and Volta Regions of Ghana but one whose significance is decreasing due to dwindling land sizes in peri-urban areas, falling soil fertility, soil erosion, and rising input cost. Petty trading is therefore the norm in the origin areas, especially for women.

Given the above local origin context, rural-urban migration for skilled work is encouraged by the entire household. The study further found higher wages in Accra are a major attraction for migrants. Also, the waiting time for moving between contract jobs is shorter in Accra. Added to this is the fact that the desire for housing - as reflected in the aspiration of the middle classes desire to own houses - drives the demand for the services of construction workers. Global processes of industrialization, modernization, and urbanization also provide the opportunities and conditions for migration.

Our study found that the migration of skilled workers is encouraged by the entire household as it holds promise for moving them out of poverty. Like many migrants, Divine reported that his family members consented to his migration and gave him their blessings. He self-financed his migration from his savings as a mason in Tsitsito and thus doesn’t have any debts to repay:

“I financed my migration from Tsitsito to Accra. I do not owe anyone in my village. I have a purpose, to make enough money and go back so I can start my own business…” 

Others use loans from family members and friends to finance their relocation.

Conditions in the migrant construction sector

Migrants seek jobs wherever they perceive jobs are possible. Where there is an opening, an offer is made with conditions advantageous to the employer. There is little job security in the sector and few people have formal contracts. Arrangements are usually agreed verbally. Our study found that masons in the construction industry earn between Ghc 30-40 a day. Workers are only paid for days worked - an indication of the extent of casualisation in the industry. They are not provided with sick pay, except in cases where a worker falls ill on the job and cannot continue for the rest of his/her hours that day. But they are not paid for any subsequent days off.

Construction workers tend to labour throughout the week from 7:30 to 17:00, with one day off on a Sunday. The six-day work regime is used across all categories of construction work and there are high levels of flexibility for the non-formalised sector where the rule is fulfilling one’s contract rather than the time used. A mason in Accra is expected to lay 100 blocks a day or plaster two walls a day. A good worker is capable of achieving this task in 5 hours (also called ‘finish and go’). As Divine puts it:

“I can lay more than 100 blocks a day. Masa, when you start, there is no rest for you. You see the difficulty involved? It is a work for the strong not the weak” 

Despite the challenges that he faces in the city Divine still holds the idea to save enough and go back to Tsitsito. The intention to stay in Accra permanently, or acquire assets in Accra, is not part of Divine’s plan. He considers himself a ‘hustler’ and therefore sees Accra as a temporal place, a survivalist strategy to save money and return home:

“I did not come here to spend heavily on food. No way! I have plans to save enough of what I earn so I can go back to Volta region and establish my own work. Here is not my home”. 




Yaro, J. A, Awumbila, M & Teye, J.K (2015). The life struggles and successes of the migrant construction worker in Accra, Ghana. Ghana Journal of Geography Vol. 7(2), 2015, pages 113-131

*GP011 MOOP study- See one of our journal articles based on this study: Social Networks, Migration Trajectories and Livelihood Strategies of Migrant Domestic and Construction Workers in Accra, Ghana

A Stranger in Fiction?

Talking with the director of Not Working Today

by So Young Chang

Abu Ahasan is a Bangladeshi construction worker in Singapore whose boss has withheld payment from his employees for several months. Unwilling to tolerate this situation any further, Abu gathers testimonies from his co-workers and jots them down in his notebook. One morning, he fakes being sick and instead of getting into the lorry, he gets into a city bus to pay a visit to the Ministry of Manpower. Written as such, the premise may seem rather straightforward. But as the opening scenes to Shijie Tan’s short film Not Working Today, the story of Abu’s day off holds a dramatic power that captivated an audience at a civil society event showcasing art about and by migrant workers. As people made their way out of the cinema, there was a collective buzz about the film, as well as about other segments such as a poetry reading from a migrant worker. “It might be a bit of preaching to the choir,” Shijie says in humble response to the reception it got at the event. But there is something special about the communal experience of watching a film in a darkened theatre, in how it can evoke our empathy for strangers and also offer social commentary about a system that is just “not working”.

Abu also happens to be the actor’s real name, and the story he acted out could easily have been his own. Shijie met him at Dibashram, which is a resting space in Little India for migrant workers run by the publisher of the only Bangladeshi newspaper in Singapore. While no longer in session, there used to be troupes of migrant workers who would perform plays once every few months. There you could feel the same conviction for how arts and entertainment could bring people together through shared emotions. Locals would come by to watch the plays and even without subtitles, everyone understood what they were about. In one particular play, Abu was playing the role of a jester and he had a special quality about him that caught Shijie’s eye. Not Working Today was filmed during Abu’s last three weeks in Singapore as he waited for his medical claims to be settled and two days after the end of filming, he returned to Bangladesh.

By the time he made the film, Shijie had spent six months volunteering with TWC2, a migrant worker support and advocacy organization in Singapore. Still in film school at the time, he was compelled to do something after reading an article about the treatment of migrant workers. While he felt strongly about reacting to injustice, he does not subscribe to the term ‘activist’ because it would be reductive in his role as a filmmaker. For one, there is no single cause that he feels committed to as an individual, and furthermore he does not think that one should make art to dictate ethics or moral statements.

“I’m inviting people to complete film. Typically how I think about it is you want to show them just enough for them to be interested, and give them the necessary tools to make their own decisions about the situations that they’ve just seen.”

The focus on provoking thought and sparking conversation is a core driver of what motivates him to make films. What the medium allows for is the space to engage with the human being on the screen, where you can be intensely interested in the well-being of someone else, and in that process, see yourself become a little kinder and a little more humanist.

This work of presenting human emotion and experience requires a lot of care, especially when dealing with subject matter that involves a social justice element. As a filmmaker, there is a fine line between feeling compelled to act and making use of the material. Ultimately, it comes down to having integrity and thoughtfulness from the moment you approach a topic and maintaining it throughout the storytelling. For example, if he had made a film that purely blamed society, it would have been a disservice to the migrant worker community.

“My job when I think of dramatic scenarios is to find the most appropriate, most dramatic, and most human thing to put on the screen. These three things don’t always settle on one thing, and they might be in separate directions sometimes. But when you do find something that pulls them all together, it’s quite special. So my job is to find those things and put it on the screen.”

Where power imbalances abound, the best one can hope for is to open up small pockets of exchange where people can start to listen to each other more. Unlike activists, the difficulty for artists, as Shijie says, is to express a message in a way that doesn’t involve him just telling you what he thinks.

As he wrapped up the film editing process and submitted a rough first cut to the faculty (after all, this was a school assignment), the Little India riots happened. The precise timeline was this: a week after submitting the finished product, he was called in to hear the evaluation, and the night before was when the events unfolded that changed society in ways both minute and profound. This sequence of events coloured the entire proceedings that followed and he was vindicated in the worst way possible that this was an urgent issue.

“Not Working Today, it’s fictionalized, but is it fiction?”

Three years after the film was made, the story of Abu still rings true. Where the line between fiction and documentary blurs, the artist positions himself, hoping to communicate something that will eventually make life better for some. For the filmmaker, “you don’t need to think up stories, just look around.”

Abu is not working today. 




FOOTNOTE:
Not Working Today won Best Singapore Short Film at the Silver Screen Awards at the 2014 Singapore International Film Festival. It was screened at HealthServe’s event, Builder, Father, Poet at the Projector on August 14, 2016.


So Young Chang has recently finished a 3 month internship with Migrating out of Poverty based at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Refugees and migrants - research objects and human realities - a reflection on ‘Queens of Syria’

By Eva-Maria Egger

Every day we hear and read about the horrific events in Syria, about refugees dying in the Mediterranean Sea, running from European police at borders, and still we cannot grasp that this is the reality of ordinary people.

What does it mean to be a refugee? What does it feel like to leave your home to be destroyed, not knowing when you will return - if ever - and what you will find left upon your return? How can you cope with the horrors you saw in war? When will you hold your children, your mother, in your arms again? What is it like to be constantly asked what it is like? Who will really help you? Who will let you into their country and into their home when you seek shelter? Articles and videos of journalists and researchers try to give answers to these questions. However, nothing compares to having a person look you in the eye and tell you their story.

In the theatre production ‘Queens of Syria’ Syrian refugee women from a refugee camp in Jordan tell their stories, each one at her own pace, with her own voice, with her own strength and with all her vulnerability, and each one with the motivation that “I have a scream I have to let out. I want the world to hear it.” There is little that is this powerful to get a message across. There is little that is so purely human. There are few moments in which I felt so close, yet so distant to these women and their realities. One Syrian woman in the play said, that she wondered why telling her story in the form of a play would be of any use, but then she learned that the British really like theatre and that they take it very seriously. Thus, she understood that she would have to do theatre to make the British listen to her story.

As a migration researcher, this experience made me reflect on how we can communicate our research results. We should aim not only for methodologically and theoretically sound journal articles but also for ways that make everyone, from policy makers through to ordinary citizens and to researchers, understand that these topics are human realities. Thus, I am very excited to read the comic recently published by the Migrating out of Poverty consortium. It is one result from research our Sussex colleague Robert Nurick and Cambodian colleague Sochanny Hak conducted in Cambodia. The comic, Precarious Migration: Voices of Undocumented Cambodian Migrants, tells the story of irregular Cambodian migrants who move to Thailand in search of a better life and for a job that pays them enough to support their family, whom they’ve left behind. These people take risks that we cannot imagine, but the comic helps the reader to gain an idea of these experiences. In a few pages, in a few pictures, a range of emotions, from hope to fear, from desperation to relief, find their space. In this way, thousands of unheard voices, scarcely ever talked about in the news, are given the space to tell their story. And we, as researchers, and as ordinary citizens, get a little bit closer to their realities.

After the Migrant Leaves Home

By Kudakwashe Vanyoro

“I came here with the hope of a better future, nothing more than that. I couldn’t study because of poverty”. These are the exact words of Ram, a young male Nepalese migrant working in Japan, in the short film ‘After Ram Left Home’, which was screened at Migrating out of poverty’s gender conference in Singapore, 30 June – 2 July.

The film managed to capture some of the most powerful dynamics at play in the process of the migration of young males in Asia. These included the sacrifice of borrowing money - up to US$20,000 - to pay recruitment fees required to secure work in a restaurant; the tribulations of the left-behind wife and parents; and the promising yet lonely and uncertain life of the migrant seeking a better life elsewhere. The migration of Ram was undoubtedly informed by gender roles and expectations based on what I perceived to be the instinct to provide for his family and himself in order to make the statement “I am a man”. In many ways, Ram’s migration symbolised a rite of passage, of a sort.

Yet that social statement was underpinned by certain presumptions about how Ram was behaving in his host country, particularly on the part of his wife. She was very suspicious and convinced that he may be cheating on her with a more beautiful and younger girl (because that is ‘how man roll’). In as much as Ram felt that his manhood could be qualified and asserted through economic prowess, the migration that this entailed produced certain household challenges that were not easy to deal with.

Ram’s dad, on the other hand, felt that if only he had been a better man financially, his son would not have had to go through the process of migration that brings with it insurmountable debt and uncertainty. He must have thought that his son’s migration was a challenge to his own gender ascribed role: providing for his own kin and maintaining his nuclear family intact. In the film, he lamented over this and his sentiments, which  many sons growing up in nuclear families would also get from their dads, resonate with me. Ram’s wife, besides being continuously insecure about her husband’s degree of faithfulness, also had to grapple with adjusting to her new role of heading the house and supporting her in-laws which was not an easy task as it had previously been Ram’s role.

In as much as migration yields benefits as seen in Ram remitting money here and there, it is clear that it challenges the concept of family life as we are raised to understand it. Migration questions norms, brings us out of our comfort zones, and presents us with potentially newer ways of understanding and negotiating gender roles and the family. This is not limited to male migration as in Ram’s case. It is also a similar challenge in female migration.

In Zimbabwe for example, female domestic and cross-border labour migration were traditionally associated with prostitution. I’m certain that this is not unique to that context alone. Predominantly, women on the move are seen as deviant and are often ostracised and labelled as incorrect. However, I have seen many instances where female ‘cross-border’ migrants lift families from poverty and increase the family’s upward social mobility. During Zimbabwe’s economic crisis from 2000 to 2008, it was the women that dared to pick themselves up, challenging the status quo by migrating to sell baskets in South Africa. Leaving their children behind in the care of their grannies and fathers, through their agency these female migrants both challenged societal, cultural and economic structures, and facilitated household subsistence and development. Nonetheless, this migration presented challenges to the nuclear family as some men ended up taking up female-ascribed roles of caregiving and cooking.  

Evidently, both male and female migration is equally problematic. So the end question is; given the challenges that migration presents to the domestic setup is migration necessarily a bad thing? I don’t think so.

Through migration, individuals are able to shape their own lives beyond the scope of the conventional. We begin to understand gender and family in nuanced ways, if we allow ourselves to, that is. Poverty is one of the greatest challenges facing mankind today. It incapacitates families to an extent where there is ultimately no gender or family to talk about. So if migration can help with this, what should take precedence: the order of things or livelihood? I would argue that livelihood should come first. I think that the evidence speaks for itself.

So, what are the key lessons from all this? Migration is not without its challenges. But what does it challenge predominantly? It challenges how we do things, what we tell ourselves is the domestic order of things. But interestingly, it questions our gender ascriptions about who should be cooking and caregiving against who should be working outside the home; who should be making decisions in the household and who (if anyone) should be subservient. More importantly however, by challenging the status quo, it illuminates. It does so by showing us that daddy is actually a good cook after he cooks the food that mummy sent from her income using the cross-border bus (and that that food still tastes the same). It shows us that women are equally good decision makers in the family when daddy is working in another country. Most of all, migration is key to development in contexts where there is not enough on the table. If we adequately harness it and allow ourselves to see the family beyond traditional gender roles, norms and expectations, there are more victories in store for us in the fight against poverty.  

 

*Acknowledgements: ‘After Ram Left Home’ by Dipesh Karel (University of Tokyo) was screened at the Gendered Dimensions of Migration Conference held at the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore as part of his presentation to the conference.

Kudakwashe Vanyoro is a Research Assistant at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He was an intern under the Migrating out of Poverty RPC Research Internship Scheme from April to November 2014. His internship involved supporting all ACMS communications work, preparing and packaging policy briefs, research data capturing, undertaking desktop research and blogging on contemporary issues related to migration and poverty in Southern Africa.

The migration researcher: Who's doing the talking?

by Paul Clewett

 

December 18^th marks the true Christmas of the migration world, as disciples of all things-migration meet and tweet their way through a copious amount of reflection on the developments of the last year. They will have talked about a global protection system in crisis and rising anti-immigration sentiment in the West; burgeoning South-South migration and global development; labour rights and the World Cup…  Yet they will not, I surmise, have talked much about themselves: a sprawling network of migration geeks united by a common obsession with understanding why people move.

So I’ve decided to make some sweeping statements about the characteristics of those who inhabit the field in a bid to provoke some group reflection on what it means to be a researcher of migration. I do so with the aim of shining a light where light is not usually shone, but without any kind of moralising agenda. We all know self-reflection is important in research, but what does this look like collectively? Who are the migration geeks of this world and why should we care?

Migration researchers are mostly women. This is in many ways refreshing as it bucks the general trend in European research which sees women underrepresented in almost every subject area. Yet one has to wonder where all the men are at. I’ve started calculating the gender balance at conferences in Brussels and, with the caveat that expert panels tend to reflect the dominance of men in senior policymaking positions, audiences are always clearly weighted towards women. I’ve found a similar imbalance in studies and at work, where far more often than not I’m the only man in the room. My unscientific hunches lead me down the dangerous path of conjecture: are there more women in migration studies because of this long-standing habit we have of portraying migrants as victims in need of (feminine) care? And are the men in migration largely confined to economics departments because policymakers, despite all the progress in the social sciences, still favour overtly economically rational (and masculine) approaches to understanding the world? Priya Deshingkar’s recent post brilliantly underscores the importance of taking a gendered approach in understanding the close relationship between social mobility and human mobility.  Maybe we should also be extending the approach to research and policy itself, where gender divisions between disciplines are part of wider gendered structures that affect the quality of our migration policy.

Migration researchers are often closet activists, supressing the urge to shout aloud about how ridiculous the stance on migration is in the north. I’ve heard more than one person express feelings of restlessness whilst in the thick of a major piece of research or trying to produce a piece of ‘dispassionate’ policy analysis against the grain of a growing internal rage at the injustices meted out by sovereign states and borders. We know that evidence is crucial to better, fairer policy, but sometimes the desk-based approach to changing the world just doesn’t feel like it can ever faithfully reflect the urgency for change.

Migration researchers often feel guilty about deriving pleasure from their work. Stephen Hopgood’s thoroughly engaging ethnography on Amnesty International - Keepers of the Flame – (which I read as part of a reading group organised by the Religion Cluster at the Asia Research Institute), dealt with the conflation by Amnesty staff of hard work and personal suffering, i.e. if you’re not in great pain and anguish yourself, then you are not doing justice to the topic.  Hopgood paints a picture of research staff who could not be satisfied with work that did not take them to the same dark places inhabited by the victims of grave human rights abuses they support. Most migration researchers perhaps aren’t at that extreme, but I think there is a fairly constant sense that enjoying what you are doing can somehow invalidate it. For instance, a friend of mine told me of his guilt that his PhD research proposal doubled-up as the perfect strategy for making his long distance relationship work. But his supervisor told him he was being ridiculous, he produced an excellent thesis, his subsequent work is original and well-respected, and the relationship is (so far) happily ever after.

Those studying mobility are hyper mobile and often migrants themselves. It stands to reason that we study those things that reflect our personal experiences and interests, but do we think enough about what this means for the subject we’re studying and the agenda we bring to our work as a consequence? Of course, many of us regularly write up reflexive pieces to accompany our work, but there’s more to this: I find, for instance, that my increasing mobility as I entered adulthood and started doing things of my own accord made me feel strangely detached from the places to which I was supposed to belong; the increasing ease and need for international travel made distance and difference less consequential. This has to matter for studying migration. Our place in the world and our understanding of what that means has to be especially important for those responsible for generating knowledge about other peoples’ place in the world. It’s not the most straight-forward conversation to have, but maybe one worth taking up.

Migration is both the Holy Grail and the poisoned chalice of contemporary global challenges, simultaneously propping up our economies whilst undermining the sacred principle of national sovereignty. Given the amount of energy expended year round through conferences and seminars trying to make sense of all of this – and the emotion that pulsates through the debate in constant duel with evidence – International Migrants Day offers a great opportunity to step back and take a minute to consider who is actually doing the talking.

 

Paul Clewett was the  Asia Research Institute's 2014 Migrating out of Poverty Research and Communications Intern at the National University of Singapore. He is currently Program Assistant at  MPI-Europe, the Migration Policy Institute's Brussels office. He writes in a personal capacity.