Lord Dr Michael Hastings speaking at the Concordia Annual Summit in New York City on Sept. 19, 2017.
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Hiring, educating, and housing refugees and asylum seekers is the “next big challenge” for businesses, according to a longtime leadership professor and UNICEF vice president.
“The big, ugly elephant in the room is migration. Over 120 million people now have migrated from one place they lived in to another place they’re existing in, often as refugees or as migrants seeking asylum or trying to get established this movement of people,” said Michael Hastings, referring to U.N. figures on forcibly displaced people.
Hastings urged business leaders to “grab” the issue and ask themselves: “How are we going to provide education and employment, legal services, establishment and housing, dignity for the young prospects, for women?” he said, speaking to CNBC’s Tania Bryer.
Low- and middle-income countries host 75% of the world’s refugees, and around two-thirds of refugees live in poverty, according to the European Commission.
Hastings has advocated for underrepresented groups throughout his career, and his current roles include chairman of SOAS University of London (formerly the School of Oriental and African Studies) and professor of leadership at Utah State University.
Hastings praised business leaders for taking on the challenge of climate change by reducing their carbon emissions and use of single-use plastics, but said they needed to go further. “The corporate world is missing the next big challenge. Yes, climate is a big deal. We’ve grabbed it, but migration is the next big thing. We need to grab that one too,” he said.
Around the world, most refugees (73%) come from five countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela, according to the European Commission, leaving their homes because of conflict, violence or disasters such as floods.
“People are losing their lives, desperate to find another future,” Hastings said, describing people trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, the Mexico-U.S. border and the English Channel.
Hastings, who is a House of Lords peer in the U.K., said the British government needs to work out where migrants who cross the channel in small boats are coming from.
“You’ve got to ask, why are they coming here?” he said. “Let’s go back to the source of the supply and genuinely invest in prospects and futures in peacemaking,” he said. “This is a European-wide problem. It’s a North American problem. It’s a development world problem.”
Having previously taken on corporate social responsibility and citizenship roles in organizations such as the BBC and KPMG, Hastings is known for a focus on leadership with a purpose. “If somebody has a purpose that drives their thinking and therefore their action, it’ll drive your spending, it’ll drive your time, it’ll drive your emotional commitments. My purpose is to speak up for the poor and to bend the power of the prosperous to the potential of the poor,” he said.
Hastings described the role of a leader as “a servant” rather than “a controller.” “A leader, more than anything else, has got to be a vulnerable person who knows that the real purpose of a leader is to empower other people to rise,” he said.
