Ghana has no comprehensive policy and legal framework to facilitate the management of migration, says the Director of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS), Ms Elizabeth Adjei. As a result of this, she said, issues on migration were lagging behind and despite the growing recognition and visible impact and significance of the link between migration and development, little priority had been given it by policy makers. Ms Adjei said these at a dissemination seminar on preliminary report on migration impacts on development in Ghana, organised by the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS) of the University of Ghana in collaboration with the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) with funding from the Global Development Network (GDN). The objective of the report is to measure the economic and social impacts of migration so as to provide policy guidance to optimise migration's impact on development. Ms Adjei said although there had been some legal and institutional changes such as the passage of the dual citizenship law and ROPAL, the Non-resident Ghanaian Secretariat and the designation of Ministry of Tourism to include diaspora relations, little successes had been achieved. "This is mainly because they were born out of sector decisions and lack of priority in the development strategy of the government", the GIS Director stated. Ms Adjei said migration was marginally touched as a resource for Ghana's development in the Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy. "There is neither a coordinated strategy for political actions nor are there responsibilities and capacities of various institutions entrusted with issues clearly delineated from each other," she indicated. Ms Adjei stressed the need for government to prioritise capacity building in the collection and research on migration data, adding that it was important that knowledge gaps concerning the migration and development nexus on the basis of updated and easily accessible data, were addressed. She called for support for the creation of a national taskforce to produce regular country reports that would compile and publish coherent and appropriate data and research on migration and development. On the preliminary report, Dr Stephen O. Kwankye, a fellow of RIPS, said emigration from the country had been influenced largely by policies of destination countries. He said for instance that the US H1-B Visa and Diversity Immigration Lottery Programmes contributed to an estimated 50,000 Ghanaians entering the US since its inception in the early 1990s. That, Dr Kwankye said, had led to the brain-drain of highly skilled professionals, noting that "until the September 11 attack on the US, undocumented immigrants faced no serious challenges in staying". He said Ghana lacked specific migration policy besides the mandate of the GIS to manage the flow of documented immigrants into the country. Source: Times/Ghana