From traffic to safety

This chapter explicates aid agencies’ gravitation towards safe migration. The chapter contends that safe migration&s;s traction must be understood in light of changing aid architectures and how safe migration enables divergent actors (NGOs, UN agencies, donors, Government) to mobilise around this discourse despite diverse and competing agendas. In order to understand this, it is important to appreciate how safe migration has emerged within anti-trafficking interventions. Hence, this chapter explicates the genealogy of safe migration and the ways in which it is situated within anti-trafficking interventions. Delineating donor fatigue in anti-trafficking funding, the chapter shows how safe migration programmes dovetail restructuring of donor funding within the aid sector, and how safe migration discourse appeals to both governments and aid agencies. Analytically, the ascendance of safe migration must be understood within a broader context of two regimes of aid funding: a propensity gravitating towards technocratic “grand schemes” and humanitarian discourses of suffering. Furthermore, the chapter considers aid actors’ understandings of safe migration in order to explicate how the concept accommodates a wide range of competing migration policy positions that are often in conflict, and how aid agencies transform safe migration into specific modalities of interventions (which will be interrogated ethnographically in later chapters).