There is quite a lot of evidence that migration can stimulate development in migrant-sending countries. Before this evidence is reviewed, we need to clarify our understanding of ‘development’. Earlier purely economic definitions of development, which relied on comparative and time-series trends in GDP per capita, have broadened in recent decades to encompass a more multi-faceted conceptualisation of human development and well-being. This conceptual shift owes much to Sen’s (1999) revisioning of development as freedom of choice and the capacity of people to exercise autonomy in their lives.
Following the initiative of the UNDP’s Human Development Index, quality-of-life variables such as literacy, health, life expectancy, infant mortality, human and political rights and gender equality have been added to the standard measure of per capita GDP or GNI49. Also increasingly important are measures of inequality and therefore of absolute and relative poverty. Therefore alleviating poverty and reducing inequality, both between and within countries, become key development objectives.
The most recent trend in capturing ‘change’ and ‘progress’ in human development within the wider context of the migration–development nexus is to follow a human well-being perspective. The IOM’s World Migration Report 2013 was a landmark in this respect, shifting the focus of previous reports – which had been mainly themed around remittances, the return of skilled migrants and the involvement of the diaspora in development – onto the well-being, happiness and life satisfaction of migrants and their family members.
A key distinction in the being literature is between objective and subjective well-being (see Wright 2012: 9–11). Objective measures are statistical indicators of things like income, health, employment, housing etc., while the subjective dimension includes both perceptions of the objective measures and culturally embedded meanings and understandings of life satisfaction or what it means to ‘feel good’. Some convergence between objective and subjective well-being is naturally to be expected, but not always.
Simple material wealth does not necessarily bring happiness or contentment – as Graham (2009) points out, there are happy peasants and miserable millionaires.
49 Published annually by the UNDP since 1990, the Human Development Report has become a fun-damental resource for reconceptualising and interrogating the complex phenomenon of development, and for providing up-to-date statistics on progress in the countries of the world.
Migration and well-being
The IOM’s comprehensive review of several studies on migration, happiness and well-being, including a major Gallup survey, revealed mixed results, depending on geographical context, type of migration and length of stay. However, insofar as one can generalise – and, given the scale of the Gallup survey50, generalisations are rather robust – it appears that migrants do enjoy enhanced well-being compared to non-migrants in their home countries. Focusing on those migrants who move from the global South (low- and middle-income countries) to the global North (hence into Europe), key findings can be summarised as follows (IOM 2013: 114–115, 168–
169):
• South-North migrants do not rate their life satisfaction as highly as the native-born in their country of residence, but they rate their lives higher than matched stayers in their country of origin.
• Newly arrived migrants are optimistic about their future lives; long-time migrants are more pessimistic.
• Migrants moving within the global North experience the greatest advances in well-being. South-North migrants also make significant gains, but less so than intra-North movers. For instance, after living in their destination country for more than five years, North-North migrants reach the financial level of the native-born; there is less improvement for South-North migrants.
The IOM review pushes us, if anything, to be cautious about the impact of migration on human well-being. These findings stand in some tension with the thrust of the UNDP’s 2009 Human Development Report, entitled Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development, which concluded (UNDP 2009: 49) that ‘the majority of movers [i.e.
migrants] end up better off – sometimes much better off – than before they moved.
The gains are potentially highest for people who move from poor to the wealthiest countries’.
Gamlen (2014: 587) wonders whether the 2009 Human Development Report may have been the ‘high-water mark’ of migration–development optimism. Along with Vammen and Brønden (2012), he cautions against the danger of ‘buzz and spin’, which diverts attention away from the underlying structural inequality in the global political and economic system with its inherited legacy of colonialism, institutional frameworks, policy regimes and political struggles embedded within specific local, regional and national contexts.
50 The Gallup World Poll collected data in 2009–11 from 25,000 first-generation migrants and 442,000 native-born individuals in 150 countries. It collected data on five subjective-evaluative aspects of well-being – financial, career, community, social and physical – and compared the results across migrants moving along four global migration pathways – North-North, North-South, South-North and South-South.
Our main concern in this review is migration along the South-North pathway.
Others offer a more balanced view of this contested field. Summing up a six-year programme of empirical research on migration, globalisation and poverty51, Black (2009) concluded that the evidence showed that migration – both internal and international – represents an important route out of poverty. Two crucial questions arise from this generalisation: one about whether migration and development are positively or negatively correlated cross-sectionally and over time, and the other about the relationship between migration and inequality.
First, then, does reducing poverty in developing countries diminish the push factors for migration? MAFE research found a link which worked in the opposite direction – between increasing propensity to migrate to Europe and increasing levels of development. This finding was based on empirical research conducted amongst Ghanaian, Senegalese and Congolese migrants in several European countries and included research carried out both in the countries of origin and those of destination (for details, see Schoumaker et al. 2013). Policies that assume, via the ‘root causes’ mechanism, that fostering economic development will lead to a reduction in the pressure to migrate may be wide of the mark (see MAFE 2013a). Indeed, the very opposite can be argued: namely that economic development in countries of origin can be associated with increasing emigration over the short term.
Both the theoretical and the common-sense rationale for this positive association between migration and development rest on the notion of the ‘migration hump’ (Martin and Taylor 1996): in other words an inverted U-shaped curve expressing the relationship between development (horizontal axis) and quantity of migration (vertical axis). Very poor people are too poor to migrate: they lack the financial and human-capital resources.
When social and economic development occurs, it enables and inspires more people to migrate (de Haas 2007; Telli 2014). At a later stage of development, however, people are sufficiently well-off not to need to migrate to improve their material well-being, although they may still move for other reasons (career progress, personal factors, lifestyle etc.).
The case of Southern Europe is instructive in this regard, for this region experienced a remarkable ‘migration turnaround’ – from mass emigration between the 1950s and early 1970s to mass immigration during the 1990s and after. The region’s rapid evolution from a condition of widespread rural poverty and underemployment in the early post-war decades to a much-more-highly developed industrial and service economy since the 1980s is the underlying economic reason for the turnaround. Other factors played a role, too, including EU enlargement and the availability of structural and regional development funds, the boom in tourism and the relative openness of the southern EU borders to immigration from outside (King et al. 1997).
The research by the EUMAGINE team reported earlier (section 2.1) shows that, in Turkey and Morocco, there was a correlation between low income and propensity to migrate (so that middle-income households had lower aspirations to migrate). This suggests that these two countries may be following the Southern European model and moving over
51 The research was funded by the UK Department for International Development and coordinated from the University of Sussex in the form of the Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisa-tion and Poverty over the six years 2003–09, with partners in Albania, Bangladesh, Egypt and Ghana, all countries of large-scale emigration in recent years.
the ‘hump’ at the top of the curve.
The second crucial question concerns the relationship between migration and inequality in the migrant-origin countries. There is some evidence that inequality encourages migration because the poor and less well-off feel a sense of relative as well as absolute deprivation (Stark and Taylor 1989; Stark 2006; Czaika and de Haas 2012). This generalisation is not unambiguous, however, because of the challenges of measuring inequality (social, income, spatial, which scale to adopt etc.) and the not-uncommon fact that the nature of the evidence differs from one migration context to another. But what impact does migration have on inequality in the sending countries?
If there are cost barriers to migration, then the benefits of migration will accrue to those who are already reasonably or very well-off; this will also be the case if migration is selective towards the highly skilled. By contrast, where poor people have a choice in terms of migration options, the net effect on inequality is to reduce it – always assuming that there are positive returns to migration (Czaika 2013).