Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies

2nd edition

Steven J. Gold, Stephanie J. Nawyn, Steven J. Gold, Stephanie J. Nawyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315458274
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

This revised and expanded second edition of Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies provides a comprehensive basis for understanding the complexity and patterns of international migration. Despite increased efforts to limit its size and consequences, migration has wide-ranging impacts upon social, environmental, economic, political and cultural life in countries of origin and settlement. Such transformations impact not only those who are migrating, but those who are left behind, as well as those who live in the areas where migrants settle.

Featuring forty-six essays written by leading international and multidisciplinary scholars, this new edition showcases evolving research and theorizing around refugees and forced migrants, new migration paths through Central Asia and the Middle East, the condition of statelessness and South to South migration. New chapters also address immigrant labor and entrepreneurship, skilled migration, ethnic succession, contract labor and informal economies. Uniquely among texts in the subject area, the Handbook provides a six-chapter compendium of methodologies for studying international migration and its impacts.

Written in a clear and direct style, this Handbook offers a contemporary integrated resource for students and scholars from the perspectives of social science, humanities, journalism and other disciplines.

Part I

Theories and histories of international migration

Economic and psychological overview chapters

This section offers an overview of economic and psychological perspectives on international migration. It also summarizes migration history in four major world regions – Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. These chapters introduce readers to many of the disciplinary and conceptual distinctions and assumptions around which studies of international migration have been constructed. It also provides regional and historical backgrounds that trace the origins and trends that underlie contemporary migration.

Economic approaches

In their chapter, “Economic perspectives on migration,” Peter Karpestam and Fredrik N. G. Andersson assert that economic literature on migration has a strong focus on labor migration. It typically distinguishes between migration within countries and between countries and focuses on the determinants of migration rather than their consequences.

Motives and consequences of migration are difficult to separate. The authors explore the policy implications and empirical support of six common theories, distinguishing between theories of the initiating causes of migration and of the self-perpetuating causes of migration. Their discussion reveals the complexity of motives for migration and highlights the necessity of viewing alternative models as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Finally, the authors show that there is support for different interpretations of migration at different time horizons (the short run, medium run and long run), a supposition commonly ignored in the empirical literature.

Psychological approaches

In their essay, “Psychological acculturation,”, Marc H. Bornstein and a group of scholars known as the Acculturation Collaboration (Judith K. Bernhard, Robert H. Bradley, Xinyin Chen, Jo Ann M. Farver, Steven J. Gold, Donald J. Hernandez, Christiane Spiel, Fons van de Vijver and Hirokazu Yoshikawa) begin by pointing out that, traditionally, acculturation has been conceived of and defined to include phenomena that result when groups of individuals, having different cultures, come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original culture patterns of either or both groups. However, the authors assert that it is individuals who actually migrate and adjust. Almost 250 million individuals today are said to live outside their country of origin. That number tallies to approximately one in thirty individuals living on earth.

Having made that key distinction, the chapter first reviews general theory about migration and acculturation and then differentiates individual-level from group-level acculturation. Next, it distinguishes and discusses variability of different sorts that constitutes the heart of individual psychological acculturation. Finally, the authors review profitable future directions of theory development and empirical inquiry in the area of psychological acculturation.

Historical approaches by world region

A considerable body of the literature on international migration has been created by historians. The products of this research are essential for understanding the origins of contemporary migration, the nature of the migration process and in order to compare the experience of today’s migrants to those moving during earlier periods.

The historical perspective is indispensable because other scholarly disciplines that examine international migration – most notably the social sciences – focus on the present. This is a consequence of disciplinary and institutional pressures to address immediate social problems, and inform social policy, in response to the dictates of funding agencies (which too often regard historical research to be without practical application).

Despite the clear value of historical studies of international migration, historians have themselves become increasingly critical of many aspects of their discipline, noting that established scholarship is insufficiently complex, has failed to attend to the full variation of migrant process and populations, and is “limited and skewed” (Harzig and Hoerder 2009: 1). Focusing excessively on migrants to the U.S., the field has neglected women and non-whites, has ignored return migration, makes ill-informed and arbitrary distinctions between various conceptual categories and world regions, and devotes insufficient effort to recording the myriad social processes in countries of origin (Harzig and Hoerder 2009).

In an effort to address the origins and current trends of migration, four chapters provide an historical summary of migration patterns in four world regions – Europe, by Leo and Jan Lucassen, Asia by Adam McKeown, Africa by David Newman Glovsky, and the Americas by Donna R. Gabaccia. These chapters offer a framing and contextualization of international migration while also addressing the diversity and complexity that is too often elided in existing literature.

Reference

Harzig, Christiane and Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia (2009) What Is Migration History? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

1

Economic perspectives on migration

Peter Karpestam and Fredrik N.G. Andersson

Introduction

The economic literature on migration has grown rapidly over the last decades. The literature has three distinct characteristics. First, it focuses almost entirely on labor migration, and other types of migrants (e.g. refugees) are typically ignored. Second, it contains a well-known, but often unexpressed, division between internal migration (migration within countries) and international migration (King and Skeldon, 2010). Third, it emphasizes on the determinants of migration rather than their consequences (Greenwood, 1985).

The causes of migration cannot always be separated from its consequences, and because motives to migrate are complex, different theories should be viewed as complementary rather than contradictory. In this chapter we explore six common theories, discussing their policy implications and their empirical support. We end the chapter by reflecting on a commonly ignored issue in empirical surveys, i.e. we discuss the importance of accounting for different time horizons when evaluating causes and effects of migration empirically.

Migration theories have been separated into two groups of theories: (1) theories of the initiating causes of migration and (2) theories of the self-perpetuating causes of migration (Massey et al., 1993). At least three theories can be placed in the first group; neoclassical theory, the new economics of labor migration theory and dual/segmented labor market theory. And, at least three theories can be placed in the second group; network theory, cumulative causation theory and institutional theory.

In neoclassical theory, individuals will migrate when the expected income is higher at the destination than at their current residence. The new economics of labor migration (NELM) theory, on the other hand, stresses the importance of the household as the decision maker rather than the individual, and hypothesizes that individuals are not indifferent to risk (i.e. they are risk-averse). Dual labor market theory studies migration at a higher level of aggregation than the former theories, and emphasizes basic structural characteristics (e.g. the wage formation process) in the economy, which creates a demand for immigrant labor.

The second group of theories explain how current migration flows can cause future population movements, i.e. they explain the self-perpetuating mechanisms of migration. Network theory, for instance, belongs to this category as it acknowledges the fact that migrants provide friends and relatives back home with support and information about the destination area.

Cumulative causation theory adds several self-perpetuating forces of migration, for instance the effects of migration on the income distribution and agricultural production in origin areas. Institutional theory focuses on the necessary institutions, which assist both legal and illegal (typically international) migration. One example relates to the fact that many countries restrict immigration, which generates a need for services that can assist the “underground migrants”. Therefore, former migration leads to more migration because of the formation of different underground activities such as smuggling of migrants and providing the migrants with false documents (visas, passports, etc.).

In the next section we discuss theories of the initiating causes of migration. Following that, we discuss the self-perpetuating forces of migration and, finally we elaborate on empirical issues and exemplify by drawing from our own work on migrant remittances.

Theories of the initiating forces of migration?

Neoclassical theories of migration

For a long period of time, neoclassical theory was the dominating paradigm in economics. In neoclassical theory, it is assumed that individuals are rational, risk-neutral and that they maximize their utility (which typically implies maximizing their income). Under these assumptions, it has been possible to establish different hypotheses, which explain migration from both a micro- and a macroeconomic perspective.

The early microeconomic neoclassical theories of migration state that individuals migrate when the wage is higher elsewhere than at their current residence (Sjaastad, 1962). Todaro (1969) and Harris and Todaro (1970), which are two of the most significant contributions to neoclassical migration theory, extend this proposition by suggesting that instead of actual wage differentials, migration is de facto driven by the expected wage differences between regions. To illustrate this point, assume an individual considers migrating in order to increase her income. If she evaluates that the benefits exceeds the costs, she migrates. Assume she has a real wage of 10 dollars at her current profession and residence. Further assume that if she chooses to migrate, she has a chance to double her real wage to 20 dollars. However, migrating could also result in unemployment. Let p denote the probability of being employed if she migrates and, consequently, (1 – p) the probability of being unemployed. The expected income from migrating equals p × 20 + (1 – p) × 0. If this expected income exceeds her present income of 10 dollars she migrates, otherwise she does not. This simple calculation can be made more complicated by, for example, adding the costs of migration. If migrating is associated with traveling expenses, the expected income from migrating equals p × 20 + (1 – p) × 0 – traveling costs. Her migration choice is consequently based on her perceived probability of being employed at the destination, her expected income if employed and the costs of traveling to the destination. The greater the probability of employment and the lower the traveling cost, the higher incentives to migrate. The higher the costs to migrate, the fewer who will be able to afford to move. This means that individuals who arguably have the highest incentives to migrate (i.e. the poor) may end up staying at home.

At the macroeconomic level, the neoclassical models shift focus from the individual toward supply-side growth theories. At the macroeconomic level, migration is an essential part of a developing country’s transition toward a developed economy. According to neoclassical growth models, there are three main sources of growth: technology advancement, capital accumulation and labor accumulation. Lewis (1954) and Ranis and Fei (1961) expand the neoclassical growth model to take into account the initial development stages that transition countries go through in their transformation toward a developed economy. A large part of the labor force is employed in agriculture at the initial stages of the transition period. The agricultural sector is assumed to be overpopulated with surplus labor, and the amount of land available is not enough to occupy the available labor in farming. Agricultural wages are thus driven down to a subsistence wage. Wages in the industry are higher, but limited capital availability restricts the expansion of this sector. Capital accumulation in the industry sector generates an increased labor demand. Because the industry sector offers higher wages than the traditional sector, labor migrates from agriculture to industry. This way, labor migration constitutes an essential part of the growth process in developing countries and the accumulation of capital is fundamental for sustained economic growth.

Certainly, the Lewis model is relevant from many aspects but is still unable to explain the population movements from rural to urban areas that occur “despite the existence of positive marginal products in agriculture and significant levels of urban unemployment”.¹ In the Lewis model, the urban sector is assumed to be able to absorb all labor coming from rural areas, and therefore there should be no urban unemployment, which is clearly unrealistic. By introducing the concept of minimum wages in the urban sector, the Harris-Todaro model is able to explain how urban unemployment arises. Harris and Todaro state that the legally determined minimum wage in many countries is considerably higher than the wage that otherwise arises when the labor markets are unregulated. Firms in the industrial sector, therefore, cannot afford to absorb all rural–urban migrants.

Attempts to empirically evaluate the neoclassical model involve statistical testing of whether wages and unemployment rates at the origin and destination areas influence migratory flows. Several studies support that both higher incomes and better employment possibilities create incentives to migrate (see e.g. Todaro, 1980; Greenwood, 1985; Pederzen et al., 2004). But, the early neoclassical models have been criticized for their simplifying and restrictive assumptions. For example, in the Harris-Todaro model it is assumed that all individuals are homogeneous and therefore have an equal chance of finding employment when they migrate. But because individuals are heterogeneous and individual characteri...