Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development

Tanja Bastia, Ronald Skeldon, Tanja Bastia, Ronald Skeldon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351997751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études du développement mondial

The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development provides an interdisciplinary, agenda-setting survey of the fields of migration and development, bringing together over60 expert contributors from around the world to chart current and future trends in research on this topic.

The links between migration and development can be traced back to the post-war period, if not further, yet it is only in the last 20 years that the 'migration–development nexus' has risen to prominence for academics and policymakers. Starting by mapping the different theoretical approaches to migration and development, this book goes on to present cutting edge research in poverty and inequality, displacement, climate change, health, family, social policy, interventions, and the key challenges surrounding migration and development. While much of the migration literature continues to be dominated by US and British perspectives, this volume includes original contributions from most regions of the world to offer alternative non-Anglophone perspectives.

Given the increasing importance of migration in both international development and current affairs, the Routledge Handbook of Migration and Development will be of interest both to policymakers and to students and researchers of geography, development studies, political science, sociology, demography, and development economics.

PART I

Conceptual perspectives and approaches

Many approaches to migration and development are overtly theoretical, but apparently descriptive approaches, and most policy prescriptions also tend to have underlying conceptual assumptions and underpinnings. In order to help readers through the conceptual maze of ideas swirling around the extensive literature and debates on migration and development, Chapters 1 through 3 provide critical guides. The economic and non-economic ‘drivers’ of migration are placed in as broad a development context as possible and the tensions between national and transnational approaches are highlighted. Perhaps the basic tension, however, revolves around whether development causes or is caused by migration, and clearly both apply. As seen in the Introduction to this Handbook, the way in which the terms ‘migration’ and ‘development’ are defined is critical: what kinds of migration are included and how development is being applied, whether as a large or a small ‘d’. In a changing context of development, with countries changing development categories at least partially the result of, or at least facilitated by migration, the migration itself can, in turn, be changed: development and migration are inextricably interlinked.

Moving on from these more conceptual/theoretical discussions, the chapters in the second half of Part I introduce three areas of both conceptual and methodological concern: the linkages between internal and international migration; the whole meaning of ‘borders’; and the issue of irregular or undocumented migration. Internal migration, so often omitted from the debates on migration and development, has only recently become of interest, despite the clearly established relationships among migration, urbanisation, and development. Whether internal movements give rise to international migration or whether international migration can substitute for internal movements remain intriguing research and policy questions. Yet international migration is more than just the spatial extension of internal migration: the crossing of a national boundary is important and adds complexity. However, the creation of borders themselves leads to more than just a line in the sand but to extensive zones of engagement that are profoundly influenced by modern technologies and surveillance. Nevertheless, political developments through the creation of areas of free movement can lead to the virtual obsolescence of physical borders as a means of migration management. In so doing, any distinction between legal and illegal migration is eliminated among those with the right to move within the area of movement. Given the significance of irregular or undocumented migration within much of the so-called developing world, questions can be raised about the best strategies towards its regulation, management, or even elimination. The section concludes with an examination of the concept of unfree labour in the context of the development of a specific country, Mauritius, where labour demand simultaneously creates migration but enforces immobility. The essays in this part of the Handbook deal with such contentious and critical ideas and lay the basis for the more specific and focused chapters that follow.

1

Paradoxes of migration and development

Hein de Haas

Introduction

Migration is an intrinsic part of broader processes of development and social change. Yet political discourse, media, and also many researchers continue to represent migration, implicitly or explicitly, as the antithesis of development. This is evident in many policy proposals to use aid, trade, and remittances as fast-track means to accelerate development in origin countries in order to remove the need to migrate. This is grounded in the tenacious idea that poverty, violence, and other forms of human misery are the main cause of migration. Development is thus presented as a ‘solution’ to perceived migration problems. However, this ignores mounting evidence pointing to the fact that development initially tends to increase internal and international migration.

Studies of historical and contemporary migration have found overwhelming evidence that processes of state formation, infrastructure development, demographic transitions, increasing education, and transformations from agrarian toward industrial societies typically coincide with accelerating migration, particularly in early phases of development. This typically coincides with accelerating rural-to-urban migration, part of which tends to spill over into increasing international migration. Migration requires significant social, cultural, and economic resources in the form of connections, knowledge (‘human capital’), and money. Extreme impoverishment, illiteracy, and inadequate infrastructure often deprive people of the resources required for migrating. Populations which are most vulnerable to violence, oppression, economic shocks, as well as environmental stress often belong to the involuntarily immobile, those who are unable to move in order to save their lives or build new, and possibly better, lives elsewhere (see also Carling 2002).

Development typically leads to increasing levels of migration because it simultaneously endows people with (1) the capabilities and (2) the aspirations to move (de Haas 2007, 2009). Increasing education, access to modern media, and exposure to the relative wealth of migrants typically coincide with changing ideas of the ‘good life’ away from agrarian or pastoral lifestyles, as well as increasing material aspirations. Increasing levels of education also tend to increase mobility levels because people are more likely to have to move in order to obtain degrees, or just finish secondary school, as well as to find jobs that match their qualifications in labour markets that grow in structural complexity. While farmworkers or construction workers are likely to find employment in close geographical proximity, the geographical extent of labour markets typically increases with specialisation levels. Such factors help to explain the paradox that economic and human development in low-income societies typically accelerates emigration. Only when countries achieve high-income states, and when rural-to-urban transitions have been largely completed, do emigration levels tend to go down. This typically yields a non-linear, inverted-U-shaped relation between development and emigration levels (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The non-linear relation between development and migration

Source: de Haas (2010b)

Development as a migration driver

The popular idea that much ‘South–North’ migration is essentially driven by poverty, warfare, and environmental degradation (in recent years, climate change has frequently been added to the mix of alleged causes of South–North migration) or that such migrants would constitute a growing mass of destitute victims desperate to leave, ignores growing evidence that most long-distance migration neither occurs from the poorest countries nor from the poorest segments of the population in those countries. In fact, middle-income countries tend to be the most migratory and international migrants predominantly come from relatively better-off sections of origin populations (Czaika and de Haas 2012).

It should therefore not come as a surprise that countries such as Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, and the Philippines figure prominently among origin countries of international labour migrants. In Africa, for instance, extra-continental migration (mainly towards Europe, but also the to the Gulf and the Americas) is dominated by middle-income countries in North Africa and South Africa, while migration from most low-income sub-Saharan countries is lower on average and predominantly intra-regional. Citizens of sub-Saharan countries who are migrating to Europe or North America tend to be from among the relatively well-off and educated groups, as the relatively poor struggle to qualify for visas and generally do not have the means to assume the risks and costs involved in migrating.

According to migration transition theory (de Haas 2010b; Skeldon 1997; Zelinsky 1971), demographic shifts, economic development, and state formation initially increase internal (rural-to-urban) and international emigration. Only when countries achieve higher development levels does emigration tend to decrease alongside increasing immigration, leading to their transformation from net emigration to net immigration countries. The most comprehensive quantitative historical analysis of migration transitions is the study by Hatton and Williamson (1998) on large-scale European migration to North America between 1850 and 1913. Their analysis showed that European migration to the Americas was initially dominated by citizens of the most developed, fast-industrialising nations in northwestern Europe as they went through fast rural–urban and demographic transitions. When the emigration potential of these countries decreased, economic, demographic, and infrastructural transitions in more peripheral European countries in southern and eastern Europe started to gain ground. Their analysis revealed that emigration increased while wage rates in origin and destination countries actually converged. They explain this paradox by arguing that the hypothetical migration-decreasing effects of declining wage gaps were outweighed by the mass arrival of cohorts of young workers in the labour market, increasing incomes (which enabled people to migrate) and a structural shift of the labour out of agriculture. Furthermore, expanding networks partially gave migration its own momentum by reducing risks and costs of migration (Hatton and Williamson 1998, see also Massey 2000).

In recent years, the validity of migration transition theory for contemporary global migration has been assessed using new data sources. In 2010, drawing on new data from the University of Sussex/World Bank Global Bilateral Migration Database (GBMD), I provided a first global assessment of the relation between various origin and destination country migration determinants and levels of immigration and emigration (de Haas 2010a). As shown in Figure 1.2, the relation between levels of development immigration is robustly positive and largely linear, indicating that societies are likely to attract increasing numbers of immigrants as they become more prosperous. While this finding is largely intuitive, the paradox (and the inconvenient truth for policymakers and bureaucrats arguing that development can somehow be a medicine against migration), lies in the non-linear relation between development and general levels of emigration. This finding was also confirmed in multivariate regression analyses that tested the effect of other relevant variables (de Haas 2010a).

Figure 1.2 Association between levels of development and levels of immigration and emigration

Source: de Haas (2010b)

The analysis provided clear evidence of migration transition theory, finding an inverted-U-shaped association between development and emigration. Higher levels of economic and human development, whether measured by GDP per capita or the Human Development Index (HDI), are initially associated with higher levels of emigration. These findings using 2000 census data were confirmed by more recent studies that estimated the relationship between income per capita and relative emigrant levels of the 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 census rounds (Clemens 2014; de Haas and Fransen 2018). Only when countries shift into upper-middle-income and higher income categories, does further development lead to a decrease in emigration levels.

Of course, this data only provides national averages, and, depending upon the specific context, we find considerable variation across countries, even though some regularities can be detected. For instance, large and populous countries tend to have lower emigration levels (relative to their population) mainly because more migration is contained within their borders. The approximately ten million China-born people living abroad may appear like a high number, but they represent only about 0.7 per cent of the total Chinese population. Likewise, the 16.6 million India-born international migrants only represent 1.2 per cent of the total Indian population (de Haas et al. 2019a). By contrast, small states without large urban centres such as Lesotho or Cape Verde have high emigration rates as it is less likely that aspiring youth will find work and lifestyle opportunities that match their aspirations within their own countries.

Some countries have much lower emigration rates than one would have expected based on migration transition theory. For instance, during its economic and demographic transition of the past decades, Thailand seems to have experienced lower emigration levels compared to other countries with similar development levels, and did not experience as significant a migration transition as for instance South Korea or Malaysia. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but are likely to be related to cultural factors and the fact that Thailand has never been colonised and hence has no extensive historical links with a metropole. Small countries with long histories of colonisation and transnational connectivity, often have extraordinary high emigration rates, such as the Caribbean nations of Guyana and Suriname, where about half of the population currently lives abroad (Vezzoli 2015). Such extremely high emigration levels are generally also linked to the introduction of immigration restrictions by former colonising nations (such as Britain and the Netherlands) and other destination countries, which created significant levels of ‘now or never’ migration and pushed migrants into permanent settlement by discouraging return.

Finally, immigration levels in industrialised, high-income countries vary significantly, depending on factors such as labour market structure, immigration policies, and cultural factors. While in most high-income countries such as the US, France, and the UK, immigrants constitute about 10 to 15 per cent of their population, these percentages...