Globalisation and Migration

New Issues, New Politics

Ronaldo Munck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically examines the new issues and new politics regarding migration in the era of globalisation from a majority world perspective. It examines the current shifts in the global political economy and the effects it has, for example, in relation to rural displacement. When and how does this lead to national and/or transnational migration? We need to examine the ways in which migration is cut across and impacts on the generation of racism and xenophobia in the west. The issue of remittances by migrants to the 'developing' nations needs careful study as does the controversial issue of 'brain drain' versus 'brain gain' through migration. The growing importance of trafficking for forced labour has now been taken up by various international bodies but is it the new normality or simply an unfortunate side effect of globalisation to be overcome through legislation? Migration is becoming increasingly gendered in its composition and flows but also in the receiving countries where men and women do very different jobs. We can predict the increasing racialization and gendering of migration but how will the state and society respond to these shifts?

This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Globalisation, Governance and Migration: an introduction

RONALDO MUNCK

As Stephen Castles put it recently at a migration futures workshop, ‘Never before has international migration been so high on the political agenda’.¹ A token of this importance was the establishment in 2003 of the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) to place international migration on the global governance agenda. Much of the state attention on migration has been negative, especially after the ‘evénements’ of September 2001 in the USA. It is thus fitting that this introductory overview begins with a consideration of migration and security to unpack the dominant discourse of migrant as security threat. The other major way in which migration is approached today is as a governance problem. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) argues that. ‘Despite the prominence of migration on international agendas for more than a decade now, efforts to achieve global consensus on its governance have proven elusive’.² We thus end this introductory survey with a consideration of managing migration as global governance problem, but also by articulating the alternative prospect of open borders.

To refer to a ‘Southern’ perspective on migration and development might seem perverse in the era of globalisation when such binary divisions are supposedly overcome. At best it might appear as a crude appeal to a geographical Thirdworldism long since forgotten in a global order where flows and hybridity prevail. Yet most (all?) of the contributors to this collection show in different ways how the globalisation and migration debate now opening up is over-determined by the perspectives and the interests of the rich countries. As Raúl Delgado Wise and Humberto Márquez Covarrubias put it succinctly, ‘there is as yet no theoretical—conceptual framework that takes into account the point of view and particular interests of the underdeveloped countries, which, at this point, are seasoned exporters of cheap qualified and unqualified workforce’.³ What is, indeed, a global issue is invariably studied from the perspective of the receiving countries, with little or no understanding of the political economy of development which caused the migratory flows in the first instance. The dominant paradigm thus studies migration in a somewhat decontextualised manner, with a sometimes heavy tinge of ethnocentrism as well as methodological nationalism.

We could argue that adopting a Southern perspective is in fact a first step towards a holistic global approach to the interlinked processes of migration and development. It is not really a question of reversing the receiving country perspective to become a sending country outlook. Rather, it is a question of developing a paradigm through which a specific process (or set of processes) can be properly contextualised and, for that matter, placed in a historical perspective. The North—South divide continues as an overarching feature of the global system and is the inescapable context within which international migration today needs to be set.⁴ The uneven development of global capitalism sets the parameters of both migration processes and development prospects in the South or Third World. Unidirectional and un-dialectical treatments of the migration—development nexus (seen not least in the burgeoning literature on economic remittances) will not provide us with the analytical tools to understand (let alone change) the world around us. Migration studies should be embedded within the broader debates around the political economy of globalisation and its implications for development.

Migration is not, of course, a topic or a process which can be studied in isolation. Migration studies have hitherto been somewhat of a self-contained problematic in the academic as well as policy milieus. We need to consider carefully, based on the evidence, what it means to say we live in ‘The Age of Migration’. It is also important to consider why existing theories of international migration have such difficulty in explaining a complex, if not chaotic, socioeconomic and intercultural process. One of the major elements of this complexity is that of gender, race and class, which breaks with a common underlying assumption that migration is a unified process. Clearly the transnational flows of the business class traveller cannot be equated with the situation of those trafficked across national borders for the purpose of sexual or labour exploitation. Finally, and most appropriately for this journal, we turn to an engagement with migration and development, where sustained international attention is now being paid to this complex problematic. We need to go beyond simple theories of a ‘brain drain’ from dependent countries to understand much more about remittances and their development impact.

The Age of Migration?

The globalisation of migration is usually taken to refer to ‘the tendency for more and more countries to be crucially affected by migratory movements at the same time’.⁵ International migration is, in short, seen to be part of a revolutionary globalisation process which is reshaping economics, political systems and our whole cultural parameters. There is also a common belief that ‘the current flows of migrant labour are now fundamentally different from earlier forms of mass migration’.⁶ Such is the complexity of current population movements that existing explanatory frameworks are seen as inadequate. John Urry, in theorising the new ‘global complexity’, refers to ‘massive, hard-to-categorise, contemporary migration, often with oscillatory flows between unexpected locations’, which can only be seen as ‘a series of turbulent waves, with a hierarchy of eddies and vortices, with globalism a virus that stimulates resistance.’⁷ The migrant—from this ‘globalisation as revolution’ perspective—becomes more or less a symbol of the fluidity, impermanence and complexity in an era of time—space compression.

The actual increase in the numbers and, more importantly, proportions of those migrating has not actually expanded that dramatically. The IOM points out that all 190 or so sovereign states in the world are either migrant sending, receiving or transit points and that there are some 190 million people now living outside their country of birth.⁸ That figure is double what it was as recently as 1980 and equivalent to the population of Brazil, the world's fifth most populous country. However, this is still less than 3% of the world's population, up only slightly from the 2.5% of the total world population who in 1960 were classified as international migrants. What this means is that we need to see migration in context as just one element in the global process of capital accumulation and labour exploitation (not that all migrants are workers of course). Migration theories perhaps need to examine more closely not only why people move, but why (preponderantly) they do not, the factors inducing immobility as well as mobility, centripetal socioeconomic factors as well as centrifugal ones.

What is particularly interesting is to examine the broad flows of migrants, in terms of the North—South divide, insofar as international migration is often just assumed to be a flow from the South to the North. With due regard to the limitations of the data, current global migration flows can be presented as in Table 1.

TABLE 1 International migration by region, millions and percentage (2000)

	From OECD countries	From rest of the world	Total
To OECD countries	22.2 (16.2)	34.1 (24.9)	56.3 (41.1)
To rest of the world	2.5 (1.8)	77.9 (57.0)	80.4 (58.8)
Total	24.7 (18.0)	112.0 (81.9)	136.7 (100.0)

Source: A Harrison, T Britton & A Swanson, Working Abroad: The Benefits Flowing from Nationals Working in Other Economies, Paris: OECD, 2004, p 4.

It is immediately apparent from this table that only a quarter of international migrants go from the global South (non-OECD countries) to the global North (OECD countries), while not quite two-thirds of migrants move within the global South. This reflects the reality of globalisation as an uneven process with poles of development within the South promoting migration. Certainly media attention is focused almost entirely on the 16% of migrants who move across the South-North divide, giving a quite unbalanced feeling to the resultant understanding of migration as a global process.

Since the era of mass migration began researchers and policy analysts have sought to explain it. However, these efforts have not been particularly successful, with knowledge acquisition and theory building not being cumulative. Rather, as Joaquín Arango puts it ‘theorising about migration takes the form of a string of separate, generally unconnected theories, models or frame-works’.⁹ The main economic explanation for migration has been the ‘push-pull’ theory in its various manifestations. This approach was and is one-dimensional, based at it is on a reductionist, neoclassical model of the rational individual. This model cannot explain why more people do not move in pursuit of higher wages or better welfare systems, nor does it tell us why there is more migration from some countries. The political economy model which developed in the 1970s clearly brought in the missing political element but, despite its radical intent, tended to be quite economistic. Based on an understanding of the world system, pitting an industrialised North against a dependent agrarian South, the structuralism of this approach had a similar ‘water-pump’ approach to migration to the push-pull theories, except that the units of analysis were social classes and not the neoclassical rational individual.

Most recently the theory of ‘migration networks’ has tended to dominate in critical thinking about migration. The relations between migrants and their friends/relatives at home act as an information network; this also builds social capital and facilitates further migration. Migration can thus become cumulative and self-perpetuating over and above any particular push-pull factors operating in a given situation or period. There is also increased attention currently being paid to the family or household theory of migration. The focus here is on the household as relevant decision-making unit rather than on the individual. Migration can thus serve as a strategy to diversify income and spread the risk across a household.¹⁰ Gender relations in the household and in relation to migration can be foregrounded in this approach. A third alternative seeks to move beyond both the simplistic push-pull theories and the dualism of structure/agency explanations of its rivals. The emphasis is very much on flows and on cultural hybridity, on diasporas and the complex turbulence of migration. Whether the implicit underlying chaos theory is an alternative paradigm, or is even meant to be one is, I would say, a moot question.

If we accept that no new paradigm for the overall understanding of migration is about to crystallise, where does that leave us, in terms of a proactive critical understanding of the Age of Migration? We probably need to turn away from the compulsion to ‘explain’ the causes of migration in some semi-scientific manner. While, at one level, migration is a complex process, it is quite simple to understand the actual processes involved. What might be better than using migrants as metaphors for global movement (as good or bad thing) would be to bring together the various middle-level theories out there, but also to dig deeper into the regional dimension sometimes subsumed by the attention to the global/local divide. This knowledge-building exercise will by definition be interdisciplinary and it will also involve diverse forms of knowledge, from the scientific, to the policy domain, to the personal. We then need more detailed attention on the different aspects of migration, such as the gender and race dimensions. The ‘old’ debate on migration and development interactio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Globalisation, Governance and Migration: an introduction
• 2 Globalisation, International Labour Migration and the Rights of Migrant Workers
• 3 The Ideal Immigrant? Gendered class subjects in Philippine-Canada migration
• 4 Feminisation of Migration and the Social Dimensions of Development: the Asian case
• 5 The Myth of Invasion: the inconvenient realities of African migration to Europe
• 6 Globalisation and Migrant Labour in a ‘Rainbow Nation’: a fortress South Africa?
• 7 ‘Keeping Them in Their Place’: the ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa
• 8 Capitalist Restructuring, Development and Labour Migration: the Mexico-US case
• 9 The Violence of Development and the Migration/Insecurities Nexus: labour migration in a North American context
• 10 ‘Remittances are Beautiful’? Gender implications of the new global remittances trend
• 11 Development and Return Migration: from policy panacea to migrant perspective sustainability
• 12 Migrant Workers in the ILO's Global Alliance Against Forced Labour Report: a critical appraisal
• 13 Towards a Theory of Illegal Migration: historical and structural components
• Index