New Perspectives on International Migration and Development

Jeronimo Cortina, Enrique Ochoa-Reza

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231527491
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

With contributions from leading scholars in international development, economics, political science, and sociology, this collection draws attention to migration's developmental impacts on sending and receiving societies. Through current case studies, contributors examine the interplay among migration, development, culture, family reunification, human rights, and government, all with the aim of advancing more effective solutions to international migration issues.

The volume's multidisciplinary perspective combines theoretical discussions with empirical applications, appealing to both academics and policymakers eager to maximize migration's developmental impacts. The collection begins with a discussion detailing when and why migration promotes growth and what kind of indicators beyond GDP should be considered. Challenging a number of misconceptions, such as the assumption that redressing poverty and alleviating underdevelopment in immigrant communities are solely economic pursuits, contributors acknowledge the inherent cultural dimension in the migration–development debate and define the contours of a research program that systematically and comparatively weighs the cultural dynamics of development and migration. They also emphasize the role of human rights in reinforcing positive developmental outcomes, how traditional social roles and its developmental impacts are reshaped by the international migration of women and children, and international migration's developmental impacts within specific geographic regions.

PART 1

Migration, Development, States, Culture, and Human Rights

This part introduces a mélange of topics that provide a new perspective on the migration-development nexus. The chapters presented here provide a conceptual discussion that seeks to push the migration-development dialogue beyond the traditional remittances-development dichotomy.

In chapter 1, Josh DeWind and Damla Ergun provide a macrostructural, historical, and geographical framework for analyzing the migration-development nexus. Based on the European case, they argue that industrialization has long driven the relationship between development and migration through causal mechanisms that are embedded within four socioeconomic transitions: from agricultural to industrial economies, from rural to urban societies, from high to low levels of fertility, and from emigration to immigration societies. Although they expect that similar transitional processes in other regions of the world are similarly driven by industrial development, they argue that testing this hypothesis will require researchers to draw on theories of global development and world migration systems, which have not yet been synthesized by development and migration specialists.

DeWind and Ergun do not explicitly treat the state as a macrostructural variable, but rather point to the necessity considering the impact of state development and migration policies in accelerating or slowing developmental and migratory processes. This chapter, moreover, raises important conceptual considerations regarding how to frame the role of the state and national boundaries in order to understand transnational migration and development processes and the indicators that are needed to compare development and migration transitions internationally.

In contrast, in chapter 2, Rodolfo de la Garza explicitly analyzes the role of the state and argues that in order to understand the migration-development nexus it is necessary to understand, at the outset, how the state influences development and the consequences of migration on development as it is affected by the state’s economic, social, cultural, and political policies.

De la Garza questions governments’ efforts to shape development through migration given that states are more constrained in managing their economic variables than they are in shaping political characteristics, which in turn shape economic, social, and cultural variables. Political variables in this context could become more important policy tools for national governments to shape the development-migration nexus. The political capacity of the state is in contrast to the state’s limited ability to stimulate or manage the economy.

As conceptualized by de la Garza, the state is a uniquely situated actor that can initiate and implement changes in political practices and policies, which in turn can reduce or increase incentives for migration and development. De la Garza argues that if sending countries stabilize politically and economically, migrants would be among the first to recognize and leverage the resulting new opportunities at home, stimulating growth through investment and circular migration.

Development, however, is not only about economics, and economics is not the whole story. In chapter 3, Peggy Levitt and Deepak Lamba-Nieves take a different but complementary perspective on the migration-development debate by arguing in favor of bringing culture back into the dialogue. Culture permeates all aspects of the development enterprise: it defines how development goals are established, what polices are put in place to achieve them, and how successfully they are achieved. Ideas and practices travel in response to migration, regardless of national boundaries, enabling people to move and create new forms of membership and belonging. Culture then becomes a useful tool to conceptualize the role or lack thereof of national boundaries for framing and understanding the migration-development nexus. More important, culture becomes a unique conceptual anchor to define what kind of indicators will be appropriate in order to measure and compare development between migration systems.

The “blurring” of national boundaries and the creation of a mutual transnational space between sending and receiving countries have implications not only for framing and measuring the impact of migration on development but also for shaping the legal framework of international migration. Khalid Koser in chapter 4 argues that despite a robust legal and normative framework for protecting the rights of migrant workers, protection gaps persist. Part of the answer is that the existing legal framework has not always been adequately implemented because the new dynamics generated by international migration have outstripped the existing legal frameworks. The reality of international migration colored by globalization and the transnational flow of ideas and culture have surpassed the political, economic, and social realities of countries of origin and destination. This gap is particularly evident in three areas (recruitment, the temporal nature of migration, and the growth in irregular migration) that intersect the role of the state with the reality of international migration.

CHAPTER 1

Development and Migration

HISTORICAL TRENDS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

Josh DeWind and Damla Ergun

In recent years, scholars and policymakers have turned their attention to the relation between migration and development, largely due to the recognition that migrants send home remittances that total more than international development assistance (World Bank 2006). Remittances are private, individual funds, while development assistance is chiefly public. For policymakers, enhancing migrants’ contributions to development has been a major motivation behind the creation of the Global Forum on Migration and Development, whose member states now meet annually to enhance the contribution of migration to development.

But among scholars there is a growing number of pessimists who doubt that migrants and the resources they bring home have or can have much of an impact on larger structural transformations needed to promote development in many poor, migrant-sending countries (de Haas 2010). The core question was posed by Stephen Castles in a conference¹ paper titled “Development and Migration—Migration and Development: What Comes First?” (2009). In his review of the history of migration and development theories he asserted what he thought was obvious: that “the two are part of the same process and thus are constantly interactive.” While the assertion is undoubtedly true, its generality does little to identify or explain the causal relations between migration and development that are central to both social scientific analyses and policy interventions to manage migration or promote development. To understand and explain such relationships it is necessary to identify which aspects of migration, development, and their relations with one another should be considered significant and on what historical and geographic scale those relations can and should be analyzed.

Scholars of migration studies have struggled to evaluate and improve the explanatory and predictive powers of social science theories that focus on both the individuals’ decisions to move and the social contexts that motivate and channel movement. In discussing the difficulties of establishing the appropriate scale of micro- and macro-level approaches, Alejandro Portes (1997) warned against not only grand theories that end up being so abstract as to render their predictive power meaningless in specific situations but also narrow theories that, in seeking to take all specific exceptions into account, lose their broader explanatory power. Finding a meaningful level of analysis would seem to require adjusting the scope of a theory and/or the nature and extent of the phenomena to be explained. We make both types of adjustments to refine and advance the contribution of a macro-level approach to explain the relationship between migration and development. In specifying those aspects of the relation between migration and development to be addressed, we hope our approach will not only avoid “such a level of abstraction as to render its predictions vacuously true” (Portes 1997:811) but will also attain advantages and insights that can be strategically derived from tackling “big structures, large processes, and huge comparisons,” as encouraged by Charles Tilly (1984).

In what has probably been the broadest and most systematic evaluation of theories of international migration, including relations between migration and development, Douglas Massey and his colleagues (1999) take the position that, far from being contradictory or mutually exclusive, micro- and macro-level theories complement one another in providing a satisfactory theoretical explanation. Pointing to the contributions of macro-level theories, they write, “Our review of research from around the world suggests that international migration originates in the social, economic, and political transformations that accompany the penetration of capitalist markets into non-market or pre-market societies.…In the short run, international migration does not stem from a lack of economic development but from development itself” (277). But important as macrostructural contexts may be in shaping migration, the authors suggest that the contributions of macro-structural theories to a broader synthetic understanding remain underdeveloped: “Although the country case studies summarized above highlight the importance of contextual variables in shaping both the determinants of migration and the impacts of migration on development, most suffer from a lack of theoretical and statistical rigour” (251). By specifying the historical and geographic fit between migration and development, we seek to strengthen the contributions of a macrostructural theoretical approach.

To clarify which aspects of development and what kinds of migration are analytically relevant to one another on broad historical and geographic scales, we have begun by focusing on long-term processes and turning points in development and migration processes that seem theoretically related and to fit with one another. With regard to development, this approach emphasizes economic and social transformations in the organization of economic and social reproduction that began with industrialization in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and has continued to expand across the world until the present day. Thus we focus on long-term secular trends rather than the effects of short-term cyclical fluctuations in production, markets, or trade on migration flows. With regard to migration, we focus on voluntary migration that results in permanent changes of residence, whether internal or international, rather than on forced or circulatory migration. Although both are numerically significant forms of movement, they do not seem as directly responsive as voluntary migration to long-term development trends. In other words, despite the long-term and geographically expansive scope of our approach, we are not attempting to elaborate a theory to encompass all aspects of development or migratory movements but rather to focus on explaining those aspects that are most significantly related to one another.

Scholars from different disciplines have identified four developmental and migratory processes that are increasingly becoming accepted as universal transitions: social transformations that have taken place in the past or are continuing today in all parts of the world, from agricultural to industrial economies, from rural to urban societies, from high to low levels of fertility, and from net flows of emigration to immigration. While analysts have examined how pairs of these processes are related and might affect one another, the long-term and broadly geographical relations between all four of these processes have not yet been proposed as being causally related or systematically examined to specify the sequential nature of their relationships.

In proposing that there are sequentially causal relations between these developmental and migratory transitions, we review contributions that others have made to understanding their interrelations, present empirical evidence that the four transitions have taken place in similar sequences in all world regions, draw on the history of European development and migration to suggest how these processes have been causally related to one another in Europe and can be expected to be similarly related in other regions of the world, and outline issues for future research and analysis to test the extent to which this long-term and geographically broad hypothesis might be tested further to determine its theoretical effectiveness in explaining and predicting contemporary and future migration trends.

RELATIONS BETWEEN MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT TRANSITIONS

The cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky (1971) was the first to propose that the ongoing global transition from high to low fertility among women was somehow linked to a transition from low to high, and then back to lower rates of migration. Though he was unable to specify how the two transitions might affect each another, he suggested that “modernization” provides a link. Ronald Skeldon (1990) corrected and refined Zelinsky’s descriptive stages of the migration transition, particularly as they take place in underdeveloped countries, and subsequently identified “migration and development units” within a global migration system that linked different types of movement with different modes or levels of economic development and different regions (Skeldon 1997). Manolo Abella (1999), then with the International Labor Organization, focused attention on the transition from emigration to immigration taking place in countries that reach full employment. While each of these scholars explored and advanced understandings of causal relations between some aspects of migration and development, specifically between fertility and migratory transitions or between development and migration transitions, none attempted to identify regular patterns and causal relations between all four of the major socioeconomic and migratory transitions.²

We hypothesize that there are causal relationships between these transitions that begin with and are largely driven by the spread of capitalist modes of production and trade. Industrialization disrupts and transforms agricultural production and markets so as to displace rural populations and, together with the demand for labor in urban centers, to stimulate rural–urban migration and urbanization. Access to better health care in cities at first results in population increase, but improvements in health and limited incomes from industrially related employment lead women to reduce the number of children they bear, which results in a decline in population growth. When rural–urban migration and the initial population growth in cities fill the employment needs of local industries, migrants congregate in poverty or, whenever possible, go abroad to find better opportunities. But as local industries grow and urban population growth declines, depleted rural and declining urban populations can no longer fill the demand for labor, industries turn to immigrant workers, and countries of net emigration become countries of net immigration.

To the extent that these transitional processes are universal, we expect to find that the hypothesized relations between them will also be found in all regions of the world. Because the four transitions of industrialization, urbanization, fertility decline, and shift from emigration to immigration first took place within Europe, beginning in Northern Europe and then in Southern and Eastern European subregions, we will test our hypothesis in other parts of the world on a regional and subregional level, though we will also have to consider these transitions on a national level as well. In the end, however, compiling national data to examine what are transnational processes offers insights into the extent and staging of transitions but it will also be shown to have analytic limitations.

TRANSITIONS DATA

To te...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series List
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Migration, Development, States, Culture, and Human Rights
• Part 2. Migration, Development, Children, and Women
• Part 3. Migration and Development: Country Experiences
• Notes
• Index