Until recently the two interdisciplinary academic and policy fields of migration studies and development studies remained apart from each other. Scholars of migration said little about development; development specialists tended to overlook migration. Relationships between migration and development were either not investigated or remained implicit rather than explicit. Thus, historical migrations of colonisation and settlement were seen as helping to ‘develop’ underdeveloped areas where there were unexploited resources of land and other primary products. These were primarily migrations out of Europe, lasting from the age of colonisation to the 1960s. Meanwhile, migrations within Europe, such as the so-called ‘guestworker’ migrations of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, were primarily seen as functional to the rebuilding and industrial development of Europe in the early post-war decades. There was little recognition of these migrants’ links to their home countries and their possible impact on development there, except an implicit assumption that remittances and return migration would be somehow beneficial.
However, several field studies carried out in the 1970s and 1980s in various Mediterranean countries found this hoped-for migration–development effect to be largely absent47. This critical perspective was pushed further by Marxist-inspired authors such as Castles
47 See the overview of Böhning (1975) and research in Turkey by Abadan-Unat et al. (1976), Spain by Rhoades (1978) and Southern Italy by King et al. (1986).
and Kosack (1973) and Piore (1979), who argued that the economic growth of post-war Europe was founded upon the exploitation of migrant workers, with little concern for their welfare or the development of their origin countries. Castles and Kosack (1973: 8) went as far as to say that labour migration was a form of development aid donated by the poor to the rich countries of Europe.
The nature of the debate on the relationship between migration and development changed around 2000 when the phrase ‘migration–development nexus’ gained popularity in academic and policy circles (Van Hear and Sørensen 2003).
Why the ‘migration–development nexus’ gained popularity in the early 2000s
First, there was an understanding that international migration had accelerated, diversified and, above all, globalised since the 1980s, in what Castles and Miller (1993) famously defined as the ‘Age of Migration’48.
Second, as a direct consequence of migration’s globalisation, it became clear that migrants retained strong transnational ties to their home countries, and more particularly their home communities. These ‘backward linkages’ endured after many years, even decades, of migrants’ residence in destination countries, sustained by return visits, the sending of remittances and, as the IT revolution progressed, by cheap phone calls, the Internet, Skype etc. New empirical research, including that reviewed in later sections of this chapter, demonstrated some positive developmental effects of migration on home regions, although not all outcomes are beneficial.
And third, there was a new groundswell of debate on migration and development at the international institutional and policy level. This became evident from the mid-2000s in arenas such as the Global Forum for Migration and Development, the High-Level UN Dialogues on Migration, and the increasing recognition of the developmental potential of migration for origin countries in successive EU policy documents.
Several authors (Faist 2008; de Haas 2010, 2012; Gamlen 2014) have configured the migration–development debate as a theoretical pendulum which has repeatedly swung between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios over the past fifty or so years. The optimistic scenario rests on the so-called ‘triple-win’ outcome, whereby migration is said to be ‘good’ for the receiving country, the sending country, and the migrants themselves.
This is how it goes. The destination country receives an extra supply of ‘free labour’
whose costs of upbringing and education it has not had to bear. Coming from poorer countries with low incomes and high unemployment, such labour is willing to work for below-average wages in a range of undesirable jobs which are rejected by the local workforce. The presence of these productive workers boosts economic efficiency and overall competitiveness, adds to aggregate consumer demand and, provided that their work is registered and formalised, migrant workers contribute more to the tax revenue
48 This book has come to be regarded as the standard text on contemporary global migration, rea-ching its 5th edition (Castles et al. 2014).
than they take out in welfare demands (as we saw in section 3.3). They also contribute, at least for a time (until they return-migrate or grow old), to the rejuvenation of Europe’s ageing population. The source country sees reduced unemployment, receives substantial remittances and benefits from returning migrants bringing back capital, training and work experience from abroad. Even if migrants do not return, they may channel their investment to the home country. And thirdly the migrants are ‘winners’, as they escape poverty and unemployment, receive higher incomes (which are usually worth even more in the country of origin due to lower living costs), improve their life-chances and those of their families, and gain new experiences and perspectives (known as ‘social remittances’
– Levitt 1998) through living and working abroad.
The pessimistic scenario presents a range of negative outcomes which are the flip-side of the arguments set out above. For the receiving country, there is the risk that immigrant workers may drive down wages and displace native workers, whilst the fiscal burden may turn negative if they stay long-term and bring their families. At a time of recession and economic restructuring, immigrant workers usually post higher unemployment rates than native workers. For the sending country, emigration is socially and demographically selective, leading to a haemorrhage of ambition and talent, which may take the form of a brain drain. Cumulative migration leads to a depopulation of peripheral countries and regions, whose economic decline is only cushioned by an over-reliance on remittances, whilst returnees may find it difficult to reintegrate, both socially and in terms of finding jobs. For the migrants, there are inherent risks and dangers in migration, especially if they are classed as ‘irregular’. They may suffer exploitation, discrimination, racism and de-skilling; their physical and mental well-being may be damaged by doing jobs that are dangerous, dirty and demeaning (the so-called ‘3D’ jobs); and they may have to endure long periods of separation from family and loved ones.
De Haas (2012) and Gamlen (2014) trace four phases of alternating optimism and pessimism through the analogy of recursive pendulum swings:
• optimism during the 1960s and early 1970s, based on the encouragement of European mass migration to achieve ‘balanced growth’ and a ‘new equilibrium’ between capital and labour that fosters development at both destination and origin, in the latter setting through ‘remittances and return’;
• pessimism during the later 1970s and the 1980s, based on the ‘asymmetrical growth’ hypothesis, whereby migration, rather than achieving a ‘new equilibrium’, fuels greater inequality between origin and destination areas, creating the dependency of the former on the latter in what some saw as a structurally ingrained core–periphery relationship (eg. Seers et al. 1979);
• neo-optimism from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, reflecting, at a theoretical and ideological level, neoliberal development thinking and, at an empirical level, new and detailed research which identified positive development impacts of remittances and of transnationally engaged migrants and diaspora members;
• neo-pessimism in the last few years, reflecting scepticism about the realism and durability of the neoliberal confidence that migration can
‘deliver’ development (Skeldon 2008); a growing critique of the ‘mantra’ of remittances, based on conflicting research results and the questionable morality of making migrants ‘responsible’ for developing their home
countries; and renewed concerns about loss of human capital and productive potential – both ‘brain drain’ and ‘brawn drain’ (Gamlen 2014).
Clearly there is much ambivalence, even confusion, over the nature of the relationship between migration and development. Understanding the migration–development nexus is bedevilled both by conflicting empirical evidence and by competing theoretical and ideological positions. Does underdevelopment cause migration, which then leads to further underdevelopment in a vicious cycle, as the migration pessimists argue? Or does migration, born out of underdevelopment, lead to development for the benefit of all – the optimists’ virtuous cycle? Perhaps it is time to stop the swinging pendulum and look at some solid empirical evidence.