Migration, Education and Socio-Economic Mobility

Nitya Rao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317978138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The primacy of education in development agendas is unquestioned. With the gradual acknowledgement of the potential benefits that migration can hold for development, the relationship between migration and education is a growing area of research. Migration, Education and Socio-Economic Mobility explores how the decisions people make in terms of both their migration choices and educational investments, mediated as they are by gender, class, caste and nationality, can potentially contribute to earning incomes, building social and symbolic capital, or reshaping gender relations, all elements contributing to the process of economic and social mobility.

Much of the existing literature examining the links between migration and education focuses either on the investment of migrant remittances in the education of their children back home or on 'brain drain' that refers to the migration of skilled workers from the developing to the developed world. Most of these discussions are firmly rooted in materialist arguments and while undeniably important, tend to underplay the social processes through which migration and education interact to shape people's lives, identities and status in society. Along with economic security, people also aspire to social mobility and status enhancement. The ideas presented in this book take a more varied and nuanced view of the relationship between education and migration.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Migration, education and socio-economic mobility

The primacy of education in development agendas is unquestioned. With the gradual acknowledgement of the potential benefits that migration can hold for development, the relationship between migration and education is a growing area of research. The main purpose of this Special Issue is to explore how the decisions people make in terms of both their migration choices and educational investments, mediated as they are by gender, class, caste and nationality, can potentially contribute to earning incomes, building social and symbolic capital, or reshaping gender relations, all elements contributing to the process of economic and social mobility.

Much of the existing literature examining the links between migration and education focuses on two types of relationships: first, the investment of migrant remittances in the education of their children back home; and second, the perspective of ‘brain drain’ that refers to the migration of skilled workers from the developing to the developed world. While it is true that remittances sent home by migrants can play a key role in funding children’s education, as documented in studies in the Philippines (Yang 2004), El Salvador (Edwards and Ureta 2003) and Nepal (Thieme and Wyss 2005), to name a few, the level of investment depends on the immediate needs of the household, local investment patterns as well as an assessment of the quality of education and the likely returns from an investment in education. The correlation need not always be positive and in some instances migration can actually create disincentives for education.

Similarly, while migration of the skilled or highly educated from developing countries is widely viewed as a problem for these countries, for the highly skilled migrants themselves, this often represents an opportunity to further their training and skills acquisition. In fact, some people may even move in order to improve their educational prospects, whether this involves attending university or acquiring professional qualifications abroad, or through moving from rural to urban areas to attend better-run schools, or take up apprenticeships in trades with growing demand. In either case, one needs to remember that the outcome is not fixed, as migration carries within it significant risks and costs – and may not always result in overt improvements in education for the migrants or their family members.

Both the inter-relationships between migration and education discussed above are firmly rooted in materialist arguments and while undeniably important, tend to underplay the social processes through which migration and education interact to shape people’s lives, identities and status in society (Gardener and Osella 2003; Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey 2008). Along with economic security, people also aspire to social mobility and status enhancement. This Special Issue seeks to open up some of these areas for discussion, going beyond the conventional debates around remittance use and brain drain.

Pathways to mobility

The notion of mobility underlies much of the literature on poverty reduction and social change. With each successive generation, there is an aspiration to change the course of one’s life and improve one’s standard of living, though sometimes and particularly for the poor, this involves a struggle to just maintain one’s position in the face of natural disasters, economic crisis or social threats. People confront a range of constraints in their attempts to achieve upward mobility, some material, but many social and ideological, for instance, caste hierarchies in India or gender norms and race relations globally, that serve to legitimise particular interests, power relations and divisions of work, and justify social difference. People’s experiences of mobility can then be understood as attempts to change the relational dynamics of social domination with a view to achieving a greater measure of equality for themselves and their families in society, both in terms of opportunity and life chances (Young 1990; Piketty 1995; Blanden, Gregg, and Machin 2005; Erikson and Goldthorp 2002).

Change occurs not only from above, through legislation and policy measures that seek to address discrimination and promote equality, but equally from below. There are many ways in which people try to change their lives: through diversifying livelihoods, through better education, through building social networks (social capital), through reducing present consumption for future accumulation, through constructing alternate narratives of their lives, through having more or fewer children, through moving. The strategies adopted ultimately depend on the resources available to a particular individual in terms of money, their own skills and capacities, their social support networks and household responsibilities, and social norms and expectations, as individuals are socially embedded and rarely are such decisions made in isolation (Curran 1996). Further, outcomes are not just context-specific, but are also contingent on larger state policies and market responses in relation to both education and employment (Hashim 2005; Rao 2009; Skeldon 2006; Thorsen 2005). Despite the constraints, as Bertaux and Thompson note, a sufficient number respond to opportunities provided by the ‘local and national economy, access to education, means of travel and social imagination’ (1997: 2).

Migration has been a key channel for mobility – an opportunity to earn money, see a new place, experience new cultures, gain skills and accumulate consumption goods. In the case of overseas migration, particularly to the Gulf countries, for instance, one finds that much of this is unskilled or semi-skilled and relatively low paid, yet the difficulties are far surpassed by the very experience of travel to a distant land and the bringing back of gifts and the status and prestige this entails (Siddiqui 2003; Pahl and Rowsell 2006). Migration however is a varied process, it can be seasonal and short term, or for a much longer duration, even permanent; it carries varying levels of risk in terms of security, payment of wages and legality and consequently has differential implications for earnings, remittances and consumption; it requires different levels of skills and resources, both financial and social.

There is a need to distinguish between these different types of migration: internal and external, migration that is voluntary (even though driven by economic need) or forced (under conditions or war or conflict), as the variation in the circumstances of migration does result in differential needs and strategies, especially in relation to educational investments. Most of the papers in this issue deal with voluntary migration, yet it is important to clarify the conditions under which migration is undertaken and the nature of the process as this mediates final outcomes, whether in terms of responding to immediate survival needs or aspirations for accumulation of both material and symbolic wealth. The decision to migrate then is a complex one, involving a range of trade-offs in terms of allocation of household funds, sale of assets, child work (and/or withdrawal from school) or investment in further education (Kothari 2002).

Schooling and formal education has been seen as another major route to socioeconomic mobility – the path to secure skilled and better paid jobs, but more importantly, for its role in the expansion of opportunities for individuals in society and as a catalyst for social change (Dreze and Sen 1995, 109). Democratisation is expected to ensure equitable access to basic education for children of all social categories, especially in the context of Education for All (Dyer and Rose 2005). While this does contribute to a higher level of awareness about modern institutions and in turn an ability to protect oneself from exploitation, and a level of self-worth, self-confidence and social prestige, it does not necessarily lead to improved employment opportunities, and as Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffery (2008) demonstrate in their study in North India, money, power and social networks appear to be more important for accessing jobs than educational credentials. In fact, unemployment may even increase with better educational levels as the educated are more discerning about the kind of job they engage with and the respect attached to it, aspiring to more prestigious white-collar work and rejecting manual labour. Migration sometimes offers a way out of this employment impasse for the educated, enabling them to undertake lower-status jobs at a distance from their locality and community, in the anonymity of an urban metropolis perhaps. They compensate for this loss of prestige at the workplace through enhanced consumption in their homes and personal lives, giving an appearance of wealth, leisure and in turn status (Rao 2009).

The policy emphasis on schooling has, however, further devalued the role of informal learning, whether through social networks or in relation to migration and the exposure to new cultures. Schooling has now become the prerequisite for occupational ambition, with even poor parents often willing to sacrifice immediate consumption and personal expenses to send their children to fee-paying private schools (Caddell and Day Ashley 2006; Rose 2009). Yet schooling is also seen to reproduce social and economic inequalities and hierarchies by justifying privilege and attributing poverty to personal failure. Children from working-class families consistently underachieve at every level within the education system compared with middle- and upper-class children, explained by Bourdieu in terms of ‘class habitus’ or the distinctive cultural and knowledge systems that enable the upper classes to relate more easily to what happens in school (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977).

In the current context of globalisation and widespread migration, outcomes, nevertheless, can be different, with educational encounters having ‘both reproductive and transformative potentials’ (Collins 2009: 1). While maintaining class, race and gender divisions in the labour market, returns from migration, especially across borders, are often higher, enabling status shifts in the local context. Further, the experiences and outcomes of schooling can be different for boys and girls. While gender is often not an explicit focus of either migration (DRC 2009) or education research (Arnot and Fennell 2008), educational aspirations, migration experiences and well-being outcomes are all gendered, and in contexts such as South Asia, establishing particular sets of gender relations remain central to the process of social mobility.

In terms of the links between migration, education and mobility then, as mentioned in the introduction, the major global debate has centred around skill transfers and brain drain versus brain gain. In fact, there has been a call by developing countries to be ‘paid’ for the ‘professional exodus’, as reflected for instance in the Commonwealth Protocol for Recruitment of Teachers (Commonwealth Secretariat 2004; Morgan et al. 2006). A second issue has been the investment of migrant remittances in education. One finds a lot of variability in remittance use patterns to establish any form of causality between migration and educational improvements (Siddiqui and Abrar 2002; Ozden and Schiff 2006). McKenzie and Rapoport’s (2007) study of Mexican migrants found that educational achievements were in fact lower in migrant as compared to non-migrant households since the jobs in the USA were comparatively high-paying but low-skilled, hence would not be attractive to educated youth. Further social networks here seemed to play a more crucial role than education. While important for securing employment, in particular for migrant workers, such networks, however, pose limits on individual mobility by creating a pressure for downward levelling, thus also contributing to the reproduction of social norms rather than their transformation.

Yet there need not always be a trade-off between the strength of social networks and educational investments. Robinson-Pant (2001), for instance, found that literacy facilitators in Nepal saw their involvement with non-governmental organisations and their education programme as an opportunity to become a part of new networks (the ‘development’ family), with possible access to new resources in the future. Munshi and Rosenzweig (2003) too point towards the new opportunities offered by education, including in terms of unconventional marriages, or new jobs not associated with particular castes or classes of people. Similar is the case with students migrating to institutions of higher education, with the formation of networks and connections with influential people and institutions driving the investment in education.

Methodological imperatives

Structural constraints remain, yet these are not insurmountable, and people exercise their agency in many different ways in order to do so. Social mobility research has tended to focus on inter-generational shifts in social standing as measured by educational achievements and their transition to occupational outcomes. As Bertaux and Thompson (1997) point out, this simplification is partly a result of the domination of this field of research by economists using the survey method, seeking generalisations rather than complexity and difference. Individuals are embedded in their families and local contexts, and influenced in their decisions also by market opportunities and state policies. Their interpretations as well as the representations of their experiences then equally form a part of their subjectivities and lived realities, since education–work transitions are not straightforward, especially in the case of migrants, whose work motivations might be quite distinct from that of local populations. Anthropological critiques have influenced more recent economic research in this field, which in accepting that wealth, race and schooling are all important for the transmission of economic status across generations (Bowles, Gintis, and Groves 2005), acknowledge the role played by individual subjectivities and social identities in the experience of mobility.

The papers in this collection primarily use a range of qualitative and ethnographic methods to explore the meanings and dimensions of mobility and its relationship with processes of migration and varied levels of educational attainment. These are located within a larger context shaped simultaneously by universal state policies and principles of non-discrimination with respect to education provision, and the persistence of strong social norms in relation to occupational and social differentiation. These methods are crucial for capturing the complexities inherent in processes of mobility that are at the same time contextual, contingent and contradictory.

Papers in this collection

While much of the debate in the mobility literature, drawing on its base in economics, relates to the returns from schooling, the papers in this collection present a more varied and nuanced view of the relationship between education and migration. Four of the papers directly address the issue of the links between formal educational credentials, migration and mobility (Benei, Cuban, Del Franco and Rao), while the remaining three question the primacy placed on schooling in studies of mobility (Corbett, Maddox and O’Hanlon).

First, in thinking about the transformative role of formal schooling, Del Franco shows how higher education for Bangladeshi girls contributes to the development of their sense of selfhood, and personal agency, and unlike their younger counterparts, who stop studying in order to get married, girls who enroll at college develop more complex and differentiated aspirations for the future. By prolonging in temporal terms their transition to adulthood, these girls find the formal educational system quite empowering in their personal lives, even though the ultimate outcome might be marriage rather than an independent career or working life.

Rao, in her paper, points to the somewhat contradictory effects of formal education for a marginalised, ethnic minority group (Scheduled Tribe) in eastern India, emerging from the social identity of the students. Parents and young adults creatively invest in the choice of particular types of schooling that are socially valued, for the lifestyles and culture they inculcate. Private schools, in this case mission-run schools, are seen as contributing to the development of personal characteristics including dress, speech and deportment that can lead to enhanced social status and prestige, and are hence preferred. These attributes can also contribute to manipulating existing social hierarchies and accessing new networks and opportunities. Despite such investments, outcomes however are often constrained by the nature and segmentation of migrant labour markets, with ethnicity here serving to exclude them from both white-collar employment and private enterprise, despite acquisition of formal education.

Cuban illustrates this point in the case of international migration. She shows how skilled migrant nurses from South Asia to the UK are ideologically and socially represented as ‘deskilled’ care-workers, performing an important job, yet one that is low paid (in the context of the destination) and socially devalued. While the nurses use a range of strategies to advance their careers, from choosing reputed hospitals for training in their home countries, attending and taking English-language tests etc., many of them fail to overcome the structural barriers that stop them becoming full-fledged health professionals in a new country.

The relationship between determinism in terms of mobility outcomes and contingency in the everyday lives of people is brought out clearly in Benei’s paper. Focusing on a single formerly ‘untouchable’ family, she finds evidence of spatial mobility leading on to considerable gains in both economic and educational terms, as reflected in the everyday lifestyles and consumption patterns of the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Migration, education and socio-economic mobility
• 2. Aspirations and self-hood: exploring the meaning of higher secondary education for girl college students in rural Bangladesh
• 3. Aspiring for distinction: gendered educational choices in an Indian village
• 4. ‘It is hard to stay in England’: itineraries, routes, and dead ends: an (im)mobility study of nurses who became carers
• 5. To fairly tell: social mobility, life histories, and the anthropologist
• 6. Marginal returns: re-thinking mobility and educational benefit in contexts of chronic poverty
• 7. Standardized individuality: cosmopolitanism and educational decision-making in an Atlantic Canadian rural community
• 8. Whose education? The inclusion of Gypsy/Travellers: continuing culture and tradition through the right to choose educational opportunities to support their social and economic mobility
• Index