Introduction to International Migration

Population Movements in the 21st Century

Jeannette Money, Sarah Lockhart, Jeannette Money, Sarah P. Lockhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000391152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Introduction to International Migration introduces students to state-of-the-art knowledge on international migration, a contemporary issue of central importance to virtually all countries around the globe. Original chapters by prominent women migration scholars cover a complex and multifaceted issue area including various types of migration, the mechanisms of migration governance, the impact of migration on both host and home societies, the migrants themselves in a transnational space, and the nexus between migration and other aspects of globalization. Key topics include labor, gender, citizenship, public opinion, development, security, climate, and ethics. Refugee flows are tracked from beginning to end. Photos, figures, text boxes with real-world examples, discussion questions, and recommended readings provide pedagogical structure for each chapter. Intended as a core text for courses on migration and immigration and a supplement to more general courses in global studies, this book is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate students in the variety of disciplines that deal with the challenges of international migration.

Special Features

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• Consistently structured original chapters by notable scholars include an Introduction, Empirical Overview, Theoretical Evolution, Continuing Issues, and Summary for every chapter.

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• Chapter pedagogy includes Discussion Questions, Suggested Readings, and References as well as a Data Appendix for the book.

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• Photos with thematic captions and Text Boxes on hot topics round out the visual and substantive appeal of the text.

Part I
Why, Where, and How People Move, and How States Respond

1
International Migration

Patterns and Theories

Melanie Kolbe

An immigrant family, circa 1900.

Source: The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Cornell University. Used with permission.

Introduction

According to the United Nations, as of 2019, 272 million people live outside their country of origin (UN DESA 2019). Despite this impressive figure, migrants constitute only around 3.5 percent of the world’s population, indicating that most individuals do not migrate permanently across international borders. Nonetheless, the 2017 Gallup World Poll survey found that about 750 million people, 15 percent of the world’s adult population, would like to permanently immigrate to another country if they had the chance to do so. Most of these aspiring migrants live in Sub-Saharan Africa (33 percent) and Latin America and the Caribbean (27 percent), but also in European countries that are not part of the European Union (26 percent) and in the Middle East and North Africa (24 percent) (Gallup 2018). This raises the questions, why do people migrate, where do they come from, and what are their destinations? To answer these questions, this chapter first discusses empirically where migrants originate, where they go, and how these flows have changed over time. Second, it introduces major theories that have been advanced to explain why migration occurs. Third, the chapter turns to the question of whether, and to what extent, states’ migration policies matter.

Empirical Overview

This chapter adopts the UN (United Nations) definition of international migration, which comprises individuals who leave their country of usual residence to live in another country for at least one year, regardless of personal motivations or characteristics. This definition excludes temporary visitors such as tourists, business travelers, or posted workers. While it is a minimal definition of both what is and who constitutes international migration, it allows us to examine more closely general patterns of international migration in a systematic fashion. For this, we also need to measure international migration. However, this is challenging because precise data on how many individuals arrive and leave a given state are often unavailable. Instead, we must rely on migrant stock data, generated by country censuses or population registers that provide the count of foreign-born individuals residing within a given state’s borders. To facilitate comparisons across countries with different population sizes, migrant stock data are also used to calculate the proportion of foreign-born in each state. While useful, stock data come with some caveats, e.g. they do not allow us to say anything about the legal status of the migrants and, hence, the number of irregular migrants (migrants who do not possess valid visa documents). It is especially difficult to quantify irregular migration because of the clandestine nature of the phenomenon, the lack of (or access to) administrative data, and the fluctuating nature of legal statuses of migrants, as most irregular migrants enter countries legally and then overstay their original visas (IOM 2017, 20).

The First Age of Mass Migration

Traditionally, the first age of mass migration is placed between the 1840s and 1914. As the economists Hatton and Williamson (2005) chronicle, faster and cheaper transportation, sending country government subsidies, and the Irish famine led to a massive increase in previously moderate transatlantic migration flows from Europe to North America. Between the 1820s and the 1850s, immigration to the US, for example, increased more than twenty-fold, from 12,847 to 275,458 annual arrivals. This growth culminated in 1.1 million arrivals in 1913, but immigration levels dropped significantly after 1914, driven by the two world wars, the Great Depression and a series of restrictive US immigration policies; by the end of the 1920s, only 50,000 new immigrants arrived each year, on average (ibid.).

Table 1.1 Three major destinations of long-distance migration, 1846-1940

	The Americas	Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean Rim, and the South Pacific	Manchuria, Siberia, Central Asia, and Japan
Volume	55-58 million	48-52 million	46-51 million
Main origins	Europe	India and Southern China	Northeastern Asia and Russia
Additional flows	2.5 million from India, China, Japan, and Africa	4 million from Africa, Europe, northeastern Asia, and the Middle East
Average annual population growth	1.72 million	1.45 million	1.57 million

Source: Adapted from McKeown (2004, 156, 59).

Yet, speaking from a global perspective, transatlantic migration is only one of three mass migration flows that took place roughly at the same time and of comparable intensity (see Table 1.1). In fact, as the historian McKeown (2004) demonstrates, during the same time when transatlantic migration boomed, over 29 million individuals from the Indian sub-continent and 19 million Chinese migrated within Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean and South Pacific; in the third circuit, more than 28 million Chinese and over 13 million Russians migrated into Central and Northeast Asia. Thus, migration within Northern and Southern Asia combined considerably overshadowed transatlantic migration. It also outlasted it; migration within Asia continued to grow in the 1920s, reaching a peak of 1.25 million migrants to Southeast Asia in 1927, and 1.5 million to North Asia in 1929. Only the onset of the Great Depression put a significant damper on international mobility in Asia, starting in the 1930s (ibid.).

The Second Age of Mass Migration

During the post-World War II decades, international migration slowly picked up again, fueled by several major developments, as described by Hatton and Williamson (2005). First, Western and Northern European countries’ economic recovery created a large demand for foreign workers, which was satisfied by guest workers from the European periphery, such as Greece, Italy, Spain, and Yugoslavia, as well as Turkey. In addition, Latin America underwent socio-economic transformations that turned it from a traditionally migrant-receiving region to a migrant-sending one, with destinations in North America and, later, in former colonial powers in Europe, such as Spain and Portugal. Simultaneously, larger flows of Asian and African migration were set in motion in the aftermath of decolonization, often with destinations in former European colonial powers, such as France, the Netherlands, and the UK. Moreover, fueled by the oil boom, resource-rich countries in the Persian Gulf experienced major development spurts in the 1970s, leading to increasing demand for foreign workers from nearby Arab neighbors and, since the 1990s, predominantly from countries in South and Southeast Asia. Lastly, traditional flows of European migrants from Eastern to Western European countries resumed in the late 1980s after previously restrictive emigration policies of the Soviet era slowly dissolved (ibid.).

The contemporary volume of global migration has by now surpassed that of the first age of mass migration (see Figure 1.1). In the last 30 years, the international migrant stock has increased by 80 percent from 150 million in 1990 to more than 270 million in 2019. Figure 1.1 also reveals that the migration rate, i.e. the percentage of the global population that are migrants, has increased markedly. The decreasing trend between 1960 and the 1980s is largely due to the world population growing at a faster rate than the number of migrants, rather than a decline in migration. Yet, in the 1990s, this changed significantly, coinciding with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the outbreak of violent ethnic conflict, and mass migration toward the Global North and within the Global South.

Figure 1.1 Global migrant stocks, 1960–2019

Source: Adapted from World Bank (2018, p. 41). Author’s calculations based on data from the World Bank (2015) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (2019).

Origins, Destinations, and Migratory Patterns

Where do international migrants originate and where do they go? Roughly two-thirds of the world’s migrant stock is highly concentrated in a small number of countries in North America, the South Pacific, and Western and Eastern Europe, as well as in high-income countries in the Middle East. ¹ As of 2019, the top 10 countries with the largest number of migrants (the US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the UK, the United Arab Emirates, France, Canada, Australia, and Italy) alone host 50 percent of the world’s migrant population. When expressing migrant stock as a percentage of a country’s population (see Figure 1.2), we note that, on average, migrants in Western European and North American countries make up between 13 and 20 percent of the population; in the small but wealthy, oil-rich Gulf states such as Kuwait, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates, migrants make up more than 75 percent of the population. These high numbers are a function of these states’ higher than average migrant inflows and simultaneously highly restrictive laws on settlement and naturalization that prevent immigrants from becoming citizens (Boucher and Gest 2018).

Figure 1.2 Migrant-hosting countries, 2019

Source: Adapted from World Bank (2018, p. 46). Data from UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (2019).

In comparison to migrant-receiving countries, migrant-sending countries are less concentrated. As of 2019, the top ten migrant-sending countries (India, Mexico, China, Russia, Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ukraine, the Philippines, and Afghanistan) together make up only about 32 percent of the global migrant stock. Despite greater diversity in source countries, some countries have disproportionally higher emigrant-to-population ratios (see Figure 1.3). In terms of absolute number of citizens abroad, countries like India (17 million), Mexico (11 million), China (10 million), and Russia (10 million) are the top four migrant-sending countries; when compared to their home population, these numbers constitute only between 1 and 7 percent of their populations and, in the case of China, even less than 1 percent. Figure 1.3 further suggests that for most

Figure 1.3 Migrant-sending countries, 2019

Source: Adapted from World Bank (2018, p. 45). Data from UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (2019).

countries, less than 10 percent of their populations live abroad, except for states in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, where almost a third of citizens live permanently outside of their home countries.

Historically, most migration has been intra regional (occurring within the same geographic region). However, as travel costs have decreased, inter regional migration (migration between global regions) has increased. The World Bank (2018) reports that, in the 1970s, around half of global migration was confined to geographically proximate neighboring countries; by the mid-2010s, intraregional migration accounted for only one-third of total migration. The most significant shift from intraregional to interregional migration occurred in South Asia. In contrast, due to the EU’s free labor mobility, intraregional rather than interregional migration has increased in Western Europe (ibid., 48). Currently, almost 47 percent of all global migrants reside in non-OECD countries. Comparing shares of migrants between countries in the Global North and Global South² reveals that the relative share of South-North migration has steadily increased between 1970 and 2019, and that it overtook South-South migration by 2000 (see Figure 1.4). South-South migration, often because of its intraregional nature, has traditionally constituted about a third of all migration, but as of 2019, it is tied with South-North migration in comprising almost 40 percent of the global migrant stock.

Figure 1.4 Migration flows between the Global North and the Global South

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from the World Bank (2015) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (2019).

Lastly, using data provided by the UNHCR, Figure 1.5 p...