Globalization has failed to create jobs where they are most needed, effectively fuelling mass economic migration worldwide, the Director-General of the International Labor Organization (ILO), Juan Somavia, said on Monday.
Speaking to the ILO's annual assembly, Somavia said more than one billion people were unemployed, prompting 120 million migrant workers to leave their families and home countries in the hope of finding a job elsewhere.
"The present form of globalization has not produced enough jobs for all those who seek them or in the places where they are most needed," Somavia told government, workers' and employers' representatives from 175 ILO member countries.
"This is probably its biggest failure," he added, advocating "a new form of globalization".
Somavia estimated that about 500 million new jobs needed to be created mainly in developing countries over the next decade, just to cope with young people and women entering the labor market.
"No one is producing a scenario for the next decade based on the need to fill this yawning deficit," Somavia warned.
Somavia called greater localized development initiatives as well as new ways of guaranteeing social protection and support for the "informal economy".
"International trade and foreign investment are important, but experience shows that only around 15 developing countries have captured the share of the benefits," he added.
European countries have been seeking to clampdown on illegal immigration in recent months, an effort which has focused mainly on economic migrants from poorer countries.
Somavia's outlook was backed by migration specialists on Monday, who said that there were signs that overall migration flows -- including refugees fleeing persecution -- had grown in recent years from annual rate of 150 million people to 175 million, most of them unskilled workers.
"For the happy few with skills, there is a market," Jean-Phillipe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration told AFP.
"They will be leaving with a contract in their pocket, an information technology specialist in Germany will even earn about 50,000 euros (47,100 dollars) a year." "But the big question now is the unskilled, the constitute the bulk of irregular migrants," he added.
IOM estimated that there were three million unauthorized migrants -- who left their home countries mainly to seek a job -- in Europe in 1998, compared to just under two million in 1991.
It estimated last year that recent migration into Italy was dominated by unauthorized arrivals from Morocco, Albania, and other Mediterranean and African countries seeking work in Italy's informal economy.
But it also highlighted movements in Asia and Latin America between poorer countries and emerging markets.
Somavia also called on public authorities to try to harness the potential of informal workers and small businesses, and to provide a greater social safety net through minimum income schemes.
"Employment continuity is an increasingly fragile foundation for the social protection system," he said.
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