Migration and Democracy

How Remittances Undermine Dictatorships

Abel Escribà-Folch, Joseph Wright, Covadonga Meseguer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691223056
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How remittances—money sent by workers back to their home countries—support democratic expansion In the growing body of work on democracy, little attention has been paid to its links with migration. Migration and Democracy focuses on the effects of worker remittances—money sent by migrants back to their home countries—and how these resources shape political action in the Global South. Remittances are not only the largest source of foreign income in most autocratic countries, but also, in contrast to foreign aid or international investment, flow directly to citizens. As a result, they provide resources that make political opposition possible, and they decrease government dependency, undermining the patronage strategies underpinning authoritarianism.The authors discuss how international migration produces a decentralized flow of income that generally circumvents governments to reach citizens who act as democratizing agents. Documenting why dictatorships fall and how this process has changed in the last three decades, the authors show that remittances increase the likelihood of protest and reduce electoral support for authoritarian incumbents.Combining global macroanalysis with microdata and case studies of Senegal and Cambodia, Migration and Democracy demonstrates how remittances—and the movement of people from authoritarian nations to higher-income countries—foster democracy and its expansion.

1

Introduction

According to United Nations’ estimates, there were nearly 272 million international migrants worldwide in 2019, representing 3.4 percent of the world’s total population (United Nations 2019; International Organization for Migration 2020). This total had increased by 56 percent since 2000 and by 78 percent since 1990, when the number of migrants was 153 million. Human history has witnessed many waves of migration that have transformed the social and political landscape of regions and countries across the globe; but the current patterns present a number of distinctive traits. The most recent prior wave of mass migration, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, saw mostly Europeans—perhaps as many as 55 million—leave their countries for the Americas and other territories under colonial control (Hatton and Williamson 1998; McKeown 2004).¹ Advances in transport and communications technology not only facilitate movements of people over long distances, but also provide better access to information about opportunities in other countries for those aspiring to emigrate, which helps to explain the large volume of migrants and its steady growth over the past few decades.

Most importantly, “the primary destinations of inflow and outflow are different” (Freeman 2006, 148). Today’s migration patterns mostly entail migrants from the Global South trying to reach the Global North, particularly the relatively high-income countries in North America, Western Europe, and Australia. In 2019, high-income countries, mostly advanced democracies, hosted more than two-thirds of international migrants (United Nations 2019). As Czaika and de Haas (2014, 315) observe, over time “migrants from an increasingly diverse array of non-European-origin countries have been concentrating in a shrinking pool of prime destination countries.” The prevalence of internal violence, poor governance, and poverty makes exit an attractive if not predominant survival strategy for many people in the Global South. But while migration brings with it enormous potential to transform sending societies (as this book shows), a narrative focusing on the negative consequences of immigration in host countries dominates academic studies and policy debates.

The key questions this book aims at answering are: Can migration foster democracy? And if so, where? And through which mechanisms? Many on the receiving end of migration streams would swiftly answer “No” to the first of these questions, since they have come to see increasing immigration as a challenge to democracy in host countries. Academics, commentators, and politicians in the West point to several potential mechanisms to suggest that migration weakens democracy (IDEA 2017). One view, often expressed in facile, even derogatory, language by politicians, emphasizes a lack of cultural fit between migrants from the Global South and citizens of countries in the Global North. Ex-US president Donald Trump, for example, reportedly once asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”² The values and behaviors that migrants from some specific, supposedly dysfunctional, and problematic backgrounds would, according to this view, threaten the norms, culture, and security of host democratic communities (Dawsey 2018). Many voters, not only in the USA but also in Europe, share this sentiment with regard to migrants from Muslim countries. A more thoughtful version of the same argument suggests that migration erodes shared social values and identities, which in turn undermines trust in political institutions, hinders cooperation among citizens, and diminishes public support for social welfare provision (Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007; Dancygier 2010; Collier 2013). According to this line of reasoning, migration, in the most extreme case, could even breed violent internal conflict.

A second view suggests that the greatest threat to democracy may not stem from migration itself, but rather from the political backlash it might trigger. Increasingly, politicians exploit and even foster anti-immigrant sentiment—as well as animosity towards other minority groups—which has altered the political landscape of many Western democracies, where public support for radical-right populist parties has grown (Inglehart and Norris 2017; Judis 2018). At the time of writing, populist anti-immigrant parties—some even openly sympathetic to racist platforms and neo-Nazi ideologies—control governments in Brazil, Hungary, and Poland; and similar parties have until recently held key positions in governing coalitions in Italy and Austria. Even where right-wing anti-immigrant parties have failed to win power—in Germany, France, Spain, and Sweden, for example—their electoral support in national and subnational elections has steadily increased in the past decade and may continue to do so in the coming years. In the USA, even with Donald Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020, nativism is unlikely to recede as a motivating force in the Republican Party. The emergence and growth of right-wing, anti-immigrant political parties is not only a direct threat to democracy; it may also shape public opinion and thus political support for policies that undermine democratic norms, institutions, and government respect for human rights. Even some mainstream, traditional parties in government attempt to halt the rise of radical groups by embracing their political rhetoric and policies that chip away at the foundations of democracy. For example, President Trump’s decision to build a wall at the US–Mexico border led to a government shutdown in the late 2018, and subsequently to Trump declaring the so-called “invasion” a national emergency and assuming additional executive powers allowing him to bypass the usual political process (Baker 2019). Earlier in 2018, the Trump administration implemented a policy of separating migrant parents from their children, prompting UN condemnation: this policy contravened both domestic and international law, constituting a government violation of human rights. More than prior US presidents, Trump deployed executive orders and proclamations to make and enforce immigration policy, “circumventing Congress and even members of his own administration” (Waslin 2020, 54).

In Europe, Italy’s anti-immigrant interior minister Matteo Salvini dismantled migrant camps and reception centers, and refused humanitarian rescue ships entry to Italian ports. Under pressure from Salvini, the Italian parliament passed a law in 2018 to abolish humanitarian protection for those who are not eligible for refugee status but cannot be returned to their place of origin. A law of 2019 then set out to punish any citizen who used a boat to rescue refugees from the sea. When some of his policies were challenged in court, Salvini responded with threats against judges and called for a reform of the judicial system. In Spain, meanwhile, a decree passed by the Popular Party government in 2012 had denied undocumented immigrants access to the public healthcare system. In 2014, at least fifteen people died trying to reach Tarajal beach, which separates Spain and Morocco, when Spanish Guardia Civil officers fired rubber bullets to stop migrants from attempting to swim into Spanish territory. Hungary, under Viktor Orbán’s government, closed its border with Croatia to all refugees in 2015, and in 2018 its parliament passed a law criminalizing “good-Samaritan” aid to immigrants and asylum seekers. Similar worrisome trends have crept into European Union policy. For example, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in September 2019 that Europe’s migration policy would become the responsibility of a so-called “vice-president for protecting our European way of life,” raising concerns that the EU will undermine its own commitment to the free movement of people.

In efforts to curb migration, some governments in the Global North undermine democracy and human rights not only within their own borders, but also in third countries, via their foreign policies, most notably migration management partnerships. Migration to rich democracies has prompted their governments to outsource migration policy enforcement to sending and transit countries, a process whereby democratic governments pay autocratic ones to repress migrants’ rights in order to prevent them from reaching their borders. This migration management aid, in turn, funds government budgets in sending countries, thereby entrenching government power and weakening states’ respect for human rights in these countries (Oette and Babiker 2017). For example, the EU created a partnership with Libya to strengthen its coastguard’s ability to intercept migrants in the Mediterranean. These people were later detained in inhumane conditions in Libya and have been victims of racist attacks. The EU also pays millions of euros to Niger in exchange for increased military control of its northern borders, to combat smugglers and to reduce migrant flows to Libya (Penney 2018).

Moreover, in pursuit of this goal, other foreign policies, some officially aimed at fostering economic development, are being reshaped. For example, European foreign aid and other bilateral development assistance increasingly flow into border-control budgets, to contain migration and enforce readmission. Likewise, under the Trump administration, the US government used trade policy to force sending and conduit countries to detain and repress migrants hoping to reach the States. Democratic governments may see this as the most viable method of preventing the rise of nativist populist parties: as one observer notes, “If Mr. Trump’s experience is anything like Europe’s, he may find that persuading Mexico or Guatemala to detain refugees on the United States’ behalf will drastically worsen conditions for refugees, but alleviate much of the backlash from Americans” (Fisher and Taub 2019b). This worrisome phenomenon may result in less migration to wealthy countries, but also entails a reduction in democracy and human rights in sending countries, insofar as democratic governments in the Global North provide economic benefits directly to non-democratic governments, rather than to the citizens who live in those countries.

Despite these costly efforts to protect and even militarize borders, international migration will likely continue to grow. The income gap between poor and rich countries has been widening for decades if not centuries, providing people with powerful incentives to seek a better standard of living by moving to another country (Pritchett 1997). And even in countries, such as China, where rapid economic growth over the past three decades has closed the average income gap with rich countries, much of the wealth produced by this growth has been captured by elites, leaving hundreds of millions of their citizens still much poorer than the average citizen in OECD countries (Milanovic 2016). As income disparities persist and even grow, the attractiveness of leaving one’s own country increases, especially when poverty is accompanied by conflict, violence, gender inequality, and autocratic government. Furthermore, native-born population levels in Europe, the Americas, and wealthy countries in East Asia are stagnating, if not already starting to decline; and global warming will likely prompt mass population movements, as some areas become increasingly uninhabitable. Thus, despite the economic growth in some low- and middle-income countries during the wave of globalization over the past three decades, the incentives for migration from the Global South to the Global North are growing stronger.

Discussion of migration policy focuses almost exclusively on how immigration influences democracy, security, and social cohesion in rich host countries. Yet, this narrow view neglects the reality of circular migration and the power of migrants to shape outcomes in their home countries. Public debate over migration and its consequences has not only intensified but also polarized in the recent years, and a migration debate focused on host countries is often simplistic and, worse, prone to manipulation by opportunistic leaders. This makes it all the more important for researchers to examine carefully and empirically the many claims about the social, economic, and political consequences of migration. One element that tends to be lost in the debate is any reflection on and analysis of how emigration influences politics and democracy in migrant-sending countries. Both ends of the migration stream deserve attention. This book focuses on the sending end and, in particular, on the political effects of the money migrants send back home: that is, of remittances.

Technological changes not only facilitate the movement of people and information, but also increase migrants’ capacity to send money back home. Indeed, the recent rise in migration has been accompanied by an even larger increase in the money migrants send to the relatives and friends they have left behind. In 2017, migrants totaling nearly one-quarter of a billion sent via formal transfer mechanisms over $600 billion in remittances back to their families, friends, and communities in their home countries, with over 75 percent of this money flowing to low- and middle-income countries (World Bank 2019a). According to most recent estimates, the equivalent figure neared $700 billion in 2018.³

This remitted income is vital for the survival and economic well-being of millions of households across the globe. For some, such inflows make it possible to escape poverty and weather domestic economic downturns and other shocks to family incomes. For others, remittances boost consumption of basic goods (such as food or clothes), durable goods (such as housing), and services (such as clean water), and allow them to make long-term investments in education, health, and businesses. Furthermore, many recipients pool these resources from abroad to fund the provision of local public goods, such as infrastructure, social services, and agricultural projects that benefit a wider community. The potential economic benefits of these private money transfers are so large that the United Nations considers them a vital pathway for reaching its Sustainable Development Goals. With the aim of boosting remittances’ size and global impact, UN members set a target (Goal 10, target 10.c) to reduce remittance transaction costs to less than 3 percent, in doing so eliminating remittance corridors with costs higher than 5 percent, by 2030. Indeed, in 2018, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 16 June the International Day of Family Remittances to raise awareness of the importance of this type of cross-border flow.

The consequences of migration and the attendant remittances are not exclusively economic, however. As this book demonstrates, this massive inflow of money also directly transforms the balance of political power in recipient countries. Indeed, most of this income accrues to middle- and low-income societies, many of which are—or historically have been—governed by non-democratic governments. This book aims to reshape the debate about migration by demonstrating how emigration fosters democracy in the Global South. We advance a theory of democratic migration that focuses on the foreign monetary resources, namely worker remittances, which flow directly to the agents of democratic change in autocracies, that is, citizens. Our research shows that remitted income in recipient autocracies increases political opposition resources and decreases government-dependence, two mechanisms that undermine dictatorships and foster democratic transitions. Our investigation thus turns the debate about global migration on its head, focusing on the democratizing potential of emigration for developing countries.

While we explain how remittances enable citizens in the Global South to challenge their governments, the consequences of migration and remittances have larger political and economic implications. As Paul Collier points out, “[a]lthough migrants themselves do well from migration, it can only be truly significant in addressing hardcore global poverty if it accelerates transformation in countries of origin. In turn, that transformation is at base a political and social, rather than economic, process. So the potential for migration to affect the political process for those left behind really matters” (Collier 2013, 187). Our story of the power of migration to foster democracy in origin countries therefore has profound implications for human development in the Global South. If remittances sent from rich countries to poor ones help transform politics and institutions in the latter, the second-order effect of migration on global poverty—via democratic change in migrant-sending countries—is likely to be large. As ample research shows, open societies with democratic governments underpin sustained economic development (North et al. 2009; Acemoglu et al. 2019).

1.1. Globalization, Migration, and Political Change

Globalization entails reducing barriers to economic, cultural, and political exchanges resulting from rapid innovations in transport and communication technologies, and migration is one dimension of the accelerating transnational exchange and interconnection that characterizes globalization. It is in fact the most human aspect of globalization; but it is debate over the economic aspects of globalization that remains predominant. Many, focusing on international trade and financial flows, argue that economic globalization promotes democracy. Economic globalization entails not only cross-border exchanges of goods and services (i.e., international trade), but also the global movement of the two key factors of production, namely capital and labor. Most of the faith in the democratic benefits of economic globalization stems from the belief that finan...