Migration and Development

A Global Perspective

Ronald Skeldon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138151109
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891581
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The first text that specifically links both international and internal migration with development at a global level. The world is divided into a series of functionally integrated development zones which are identified, not simply on the basis of their level of development, but also through their spatial patterns and historical experience of migration. Migration and Development stresses the importance of migration in discussing regional, rather than simply country, differences. These variations in mobility are placed within the context of a global hierarchy, although regional, national and local cultural and social conditions are certainly not ignored in this wide-ranging work.

Chapter 1

Theories and approaches

The ways in which we have looked at both migration and development have shifted considerably over the years. The approaches espoused in the literature have changed, with some methods falling out of favour as new techniques and theories have been introduced. It would be satisfying to think that these shifts were purely the result of rigorous scientific investigation but they are as often likely to reflect changing ideologies, and what are considered acceptable views at any particular time, as they do any real advance in knowledge. However, such a view may be too disparaging as the shifts have made important contributions to development studies in particular, as well as to work in migration.

Most texts on development draw out the emphasis given to economic growth in development studies during the early years of the subject between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s. Then there was a change to a broader concern with social issues in the basic-needs approach from the early 1970s. More recent thinking has incorporated environmental issues in ‘sustainable development’. Within this broad sequence of change in emphasis, although not shifting contemporaneously with it, have been various ideological biases representing those favouring the free-market approaches of neoclassical economics and those leaning towards a greater degree of state intervention. The individualist approaches of the free market were contrasted with structural approaches, which focused on the need to change institutions. Marxists and neo-Marxists, dependency theorists and those favouring a Maoist philosophy, and more free-market thinkers have all made their contribution to development theory at particular times (for a series of useful charts, see Edwards 1985). One of the most comprehensive reviews of all these ‘competing paradigms’ will be found in Hunt (1989), and the early and pioneering work of Brookfield (1974) is also useful. No comparable assessment of migration theory yet exists (although see Massey et al 1994). As part of population studies, migration has a strong empirical orientation. There is still a marked preoccupation with measurement and the provision of basic data to the possible detriment of the development of theory. Nevertheless, migration, as stressed in the Introduction, is an integral part of development and has been given considerable attention in the development literature. Readers interested in the important conceptual issues behind the measurement of migration should pursue these through the various population or demography texts such as, for example, Jones (1990), Bogue (1969) and Courgeau and Lelièvre (1992).

A persistent theme running through migration studies is the issue of analysis at different levels. Migration is the result of the behaviour of individuals, but equally it has an aggregate social form. Migration can thus be analysed at the individual or family level or at the level of the broader social group, depending on what emphasis one gives to the key determining factors. There has been a distinction between those who have given preference to individual decision-making processes as the key to understanding migration on the one hand and structuralists, who favour the analysis of the macrolevel social and economic factors that facilitate and constrain movement on the other. I have argued that the examination of the reasons why individual people move is quite distinct from the examination of the reasons for migration as a group phenomenon (Skeldon 1990: 130). Any emphasis on structural factors, however, leads to the charge that individuals are little more than automatons responding to external stimuli, whose actions are determined by economic and social structures. Migrants are agents whose actions can have consequences, either intended or unintended, upon social structure. The interaction and mutual dependence between individual and structure have been captured in the theory of structuration of Anthony Giddens (1981), which has made a considerable impact in geography and the social sciences in general since the early 1980s. The results of this interaction produce a greater variety of outcome than would be allowed from the single aggregation of individual decision-making. The tension between structure and individual will underlie much of the discussion in this book but will be implicitly accepted rather than explicitly addressed. The increasing emphasis on variety of outcome, as raised in the Introduction, has also introduced to migration studies the latest ideological wave to affect the social sciences, postmodernism. Its reaction against scientific reasoning and unilinear ‘meta-narrative’ has brought a very different perspective to migration research that will be touched upon later in this chapter and again in the Conclusion.

The present chapter will focus on the major trends in migration research specifically related to development issues in a brief historiography of the subject. We begin with its antecedents in the work of Ravenstein and move on quickly to the main trends in the literature after the Second World War.

Antecedents to models of migration and development

In the work of the founding father of modern migration research and analysis, E. G. Ravenstein (1885, 1889), it was implicit that migration was in effect caused by economic development. Two of his famous ‘laws of migration’ make the relationship clear: that ‘migration increases in volume as industries and commerce develop and transport improves’ and that ‘the major causes of migration are economic’. Migration from Ravenstein’s point of view thus appeared to be a consequence of development. It also symbolized development. ‘Migration means life and progress, a sedentary population stagnation’ (Ravenstein 1889: 288). A total of eleven laws, principles or rules of migration can be identified from the various writings of Ravenstein and these can stated as follows (from Grigg 1977):

1. The majority of migrants go only a short distance.

2. Migration proceeds step by step.

3. Migrants going long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centres of commerce or industry.

4. Each current of migration produces a compensating counter current.

5. The natives of towns are less migratory than those of rural areas.

6. Females are more migratory than males within the kingdom of their birth, but males more frequently venture beyond.

7. Most migrants are adults: families rarely migrate out of their county of birth.

8. Large towns grow more by migration than by natural increase.

9. Migration increases in volume as industries and commerce develop and transport improves.

10. The major direction of migration is from the agricultural areas to the centres of industry and commerce.

11. The major causes of migration are economic.

These generalizations (few social scientists today favour such a definitive term as ‘law’) were derived from an empirical analysis of the data for nineteenth-century England, and Grigg (1977) showed that many of these were still valid in the context of migration in Britain today and that several others were still worth testing. While this is not a major theme of this book, we can nevertheless bear the generalizations in mind during the discussions of migration to see the seminal importance of Ravenstein’s work as several of his generalizations are relevant not only to internal migration but also to international movements.

The economic basis for movement remained in many subsequent interpretations of migration, even when social variables were also introduced. These could all be categorized as ‘development’ variables of one type or another and they were explicit in the attempt by Everett Lee (1966), over eighty years after Ravenstein, to elaborate a general ‘theory’ of migration which would provide a schema of the factors that could explain the volume of migration between any two places. This attempt was essentially a descriptive model of migration incorporating a series of ‘pushes’ from areas of origin and ‘pulls’ to areas of destination. These pushes and pulls tended to be couched in a dualistic way: the pushes from origin were the polar extremes of the pulls to destinations. Lack of job opportunities in villages, as opposed to the existence of job opportunities in towns, was seen to cause rural-to-urban migration, for example. Other means of earning income such as access to land, and more social factors such as education, health and housing, were similarly incorporated into this descriptive model of migration. Rural areas were also seen to have their pulls (community life, relaxed lifestyle, for example) and urban areas had their pushes (congestion, crime and so on), but these models were almost entirely descriptive and rarely attempted to relate, in any rigorous way, how the development variables influenced migration.

The pushes and pulls leading to migration were generally seen to be created by two main forces: population growth in the rural sector that brought a Malthusian pressure on agricultural resources and pushed people out, and economic conditions generated mainly by external forces that drew people into cities. As Williamson (1988: 426–7) has argued in an important review article, demographers and early development economists favoured the former interpretation, while most economists by the 1980s had turned towards the latter interpretation.

Among the approaches which adopted population as a key driving force were a family of models that arguably have been the most influential in relating migration and development in recent years. These evolved from work in economics which saw the migration of people from a rural labour-surplus economy to an urban labour-deficit economy as an essential component of the whole development process. These were the neoclassical dual-sector economic models of migration. They stemmed from the work in the 1950s of the Nobel laureate Arthur Lewis and saw migration as the ‘natural process’ (Todaro 1994: 260) by which surplus labour in the rural sector would be released to provide the workforce for the modern urban industrial economy. Migration in this sense was necessary for development. The subsequent experience of developing countries belied this optimistic interpretation as the industrial sector did not generate sufficient jobs to absorb the migrants from the countryside. Instead of migration slowing in the face of increasing urban unemployment, as might be expected from the assumptions of the equilibrium model, it in fact was seen to persist and even to increase.

In the late 1960s, Michael Todaro outlined the basis of a very influential model that attempted to explain the apparent anomaly between rising urban unemployment but continued high rates of rural-to-urban migration (Todaro 1969, 1976). This model was based on expected rather than real income differences between the rural and urban sectors. Potential migrants as individual decisionmakers would ‘consider the various market opportunities available to them as between say, the rural and urban sectors, and choose the one which maximised their “expected” gains from migration’ (Todaro 1976: 28–9). A potential migrant could thus discount periods of unemployment against expected higher income, once access had been gained to an urban job. Over the longer term, this strategy would yield more gains than continuous but low-paid rural occupations.

The strength of this approach, quite apart from its analytical simplicity, was that it focused attention on the rural sector and on rural development. The model showed that increases in the number of urban jobs or urban incomes would lead to still further increases in rural-to-urban migration rather than alleviating the urban unemployment problem. Rural dwellers responded to these increases by moving to towns in ever larger numbers in the expectation of finding one of these new jobs sooner or later. Hence, attempts to alleviate urban unemployment simply by creating more urban jobs were likely to be self-defeating as they merely raised expectations and accelerated migration. Measures to solve urban unemployment had therefore to be taken as much in the rural sector, to improve conditions there, as in the urban sector. The principal value of this approach was that it drew attention to the linkages between rural and urban sectors and to the centrality of migration in any programme of integrated development. The model spawned a whole series of studies of internal migration in developing countries which emphasized the critical role of population movement in development.

We must recognize at the outset, therefore, that migration in excess of job opportunities is both a symptom of and a contributor to Third World underdevelopment. Understanding the causes, determinants, and consequences of internal rural-urban labor migration is thus central to understanding the nature and character of the development process and to formulating policies to influence this process in socially desirable ways.

(Todaro 1994: 241–2)

The weaknesses of this whole approach are now well known and revolve around its assumption that migrants are individual actors who are seeking to maximize income in undifferentiated labour markets.

New economics approaches

An understanding of the causes and determinants of migration is more likely to be achieved by conceptualizing migrants as being embedded in tight social and economic networks and attempting to minimize risk within highly segmented labour markets. Rural populations do not have access to perfect or comprehensive information about urban job opportunities; they have information that is selective and that comes through particular channels. Most migrants arriving in the city have a very good idea of what is lying in store for them but their knowledge may encompass only a single community and perhaps one occupation. The concept of migrants freely competing in an integrated general labour market is false.

Migration can be as much a family or group decision which seeks to exploit opportunities in various ‘niches’ spread among origin and destination areas as it is one for individual improvement. Resource diversification, rather than income maximization, thus becomes a central explanatory variable of migration (Stark 1991). The city, or the plantation, or any sector in the non-traditional rural sector, in effect becomes part of the resource base of the peasant household to be ‘harvested’ regularly (permanently or seasonally) or intermittently, along with village lands, as part of a survival strategy (Hugo 1994b). This type of approach can be broadly seen to fall under the ‘new economics of migration’ category of explanation to distinguish it from the previous neoclassical models to the extent that income-maximizing strategies have been replaced by risk-minimizing strategies. The distinction between the two approaches has already been drawn for studies in international migration (Massey et al 1993, 1994). However, the approach as described here would also incorporate two other theories that Massey and his colleagues identified separately for international migration, namely, segmented labour market theory and network theory. Risk minimization can only be implemented through networks, and the networks established by families serve not only to perpetuate the migratory flows but also to control access to particular labour markets. These issues will become apparent in the more detailed discussions of migration in particular areas in subsequent chapters and have also been treated at length in a previous work (Skeldon 1990).

While risk-minimization strategies within family networks as an explanation for migration are still very much centre stage in current approaches to the topic, an important and serious challenge has been raised by those analysing gender relations (for example, Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). The unity of an integrated family acting to access different areas may be more presumed than real, and there can be significant differences of opinion within the family, with wives and daughters migrating despite the wishes of husbands and fathers. There are female networks, separate from those of the men, which influence decisions to move. It is unlikely that there will ever be a retreat back to the primacy of the individual decision-maker in a social vacuum, but one of the challenges of future research will be to balance gender and generational networks within an integrated structured model of migration.

The neoclassical and new economics approaches to the study of migration both highlighted its role in the transformation of traditional rural societies consequent upon the movement to new centres of influence, or ‘modernization’, primarily towns and cities. Studies of internal rural-to-urban migration in the developing countries have certainly continued apace, but the emphasis in the consideration of issues of migration and development has broadened over the last ten to fifteen years to place international migration firmly at the centre of migration studies. This trend has evolved to such an extent that internal migration has been reclassified by some as ‘popilation redistribution’ (see, for example, United Nations 1994), which is usually associated with urbanization. Migration has come to mean only international movements. The Age of migration of Castles and Miller (1993), for example, is an age of international movements just as Myron Werner’s Global migration crisis (1995) is a crisis of growing international movements. Clearly, international migration is not a product of the last ten to fifteen years and it was of concern long before the recent upsurge in interest. However, previously, the interest focused on movements within what could be considered the developed countries of the then First World and primarily those of the Atlantic Community (see, for example, Thomas (1954)). Now the concern is with the movement out of poorer countries towards the richer countries of Europe and North America and among the poorer, developing countries themselves. Yet the number of int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction: myths and movements
• 1 Theories and approaches
• 2 Systems and boundaries
• 3 The old core
• 4 The new core
• 5 Core extensions and potential cores
• 6 The labour frontier
• 7 The resource niche
• Conclusion: the system and the future
• Annexe tables
• References
• General index
• Geographical index