Nowhere to GoNovember/December 2019 133on Refugees—endorsed at the £ General Assembly last year—is a
step in the right direction. The agreement calls for responsibility shar-
ing on refugee issues and encourages what could be termed “solidarity
summits,” gatherings at which countries faced with major displacement
challenges can present projects and proposals to the global donor com-
munity. Such summits would provide a platform for governments to
agree on policies and norms around migrants, refugees, and those who
fall in between. The summits would allow governments to pilot new
approaches to forced displacement, creating mutually beneÄcial growth
opportunities for both displaced populations and host communities.
The most obvious place to start would be a solidarity summit to ad-
dress Venezuelan refugees and migrants, since there is a clear consen-
sus in South America on the need for cooperation and an existing
institutional mechanism through which to achieve it. Such a meeting
could be hosted by the so-called Quito Group, 11 countries that signed
a declaration in 2018 in the Ecuadorian capital calling for “substantially
increased” resources to deal with the crisis. Whichever countries from
the group that were prepared to move forward with the initiative could
do so. The £ ̈ and the International Organization for Migration
would play a key role. (Eduardo Stein, the two organizations’ joint
special representative for Venezuelan refugees and migrants, called for
a “coherent, predictable, and harmonized regional response” in Au-
gust.) Ideally, the summit would lead to a sustained process resembling
the one employed by ¤μ¬, run by an intergovernmental secretariat
and backed by donor countries in the global North. The main purpose
o the process would be twofold: to channel international funding into
development projects that will beneÄt both migrants and host-country
citizens and to commit to common regional standards for the reception
and recognition o migrants across countries. Rich countries such as
Canada and the United States have strong incentives to contribute,
given the risk that an anti-immigrant backlash across Latin America
may spread populist and even revolutionary politics.
The goal, above all, must be to expand some o the provisions tra-
ditionally available only to refugees to the survival migrants that are
the face o today’s crisis. C¤μ¬ proved that such an approach can
work, and its legacy is indisputably positive—the sustainable inte-
gration o thousands o refugees and other displaced populations. It
is high time that the region embarked on a similar project, focused
on building anchors rather than walls.∂