IOM Director General William Lacy Swing will arrive in Mongolia on Sunday to meet with senior officials, attend the ASEM (Asia-Europe) Meeting of Director-Generals for Immigration and formally open a new IOM office in the capital Ulan Bator.

The visit, the first by an IOM Director General, follows a decade of IOM-Mongolia cooperation and reflects growing interest in migration management in Mongolia, which became an IOM Member State in 2008.

During his visit, Director General Swing, a keynote speaker at the ASEM meeting on Tuesday, is also expected to meet with high level government counterparts from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Labour and Social Welfare, the Mongolian Immigration Agency, the National Emergency Management Agency, the General Authority on Border Protection and the General Authority on State Registration.

The world's second largest landlocked country, Mongolia has a population of just 3.1 million. Between 120,000 and 250,000 Mongolians have migrated to work abroad, mainly in the Republic of Korea, the Czech Republic and the United States. In 2010 they sent home USD 210 million in remittances.

Rapid economic growth driven by mining and abundant natural resources has also resulted in more Mongolians travelling and studying abroad, and an influx of foreign workers, mainly from China, the Republic of Korea, Russia and Central Asia.

The country has also seen major migration from the countryside to the towns, partly as a result of abnormally cold winters known as "dzud", which have decimated livestock and forced many herders to leave their traditional pastures.

Over the past decade IOM cooperation with Mongolia has focussed on helping over 5,000 Mongolian migrants to return home voluntarily from 14 countries under its Assisted Voluntary Return programme. In the past three years, IOM has also facilitated the return and reintegration of some 352 Mongolian victims of human trafficking.      

In 2010 IOM launched "Capacity Building for Migration Management in Mongolia" – a broad technical cooperation programme designed to build government capacities in border management, civil registration information and labour migration.

In 2011 IOM assumed the lead of the group of UN and other aid agencies in Mongolia responsible for Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) in the event of natural disasters.   

For more information please contact:

Kieran Gorman-Best
IOM Beijing
Tel: +976 11 99 00 69 61
E-mail: kgormanbest@iom.int