Introduction:
An interesting dilemma confronts the human civilization in the current postmodern age. From the dawn of time, human beings have constantly been moving from place to place (the earliest man wandered out of Eastern Africa well over 100,000 years back). However, human civilization now stands at a crossroads. Policymakers (especially in the West) have to relook at immigration policies, and decide whether increased global migratory movements should be promoted or contained.
Mobility across regions and geographies allows us to search for greener pastures. The “search for something better” still remains the fundamental cause for most people to move from place to place. This migration, which can be both within State boundaries or from State to State, is as embedded in human civilizations as any other natural social phenomenon has been.
In our analysis, we focus on the voluntary migration of people. This entails the deliberate omitting of the migratory trends in forced labour. We do this because of two reasons – the first being the fact that ever since the forced African migration to provide labour in America, there have been no significant movements on a large scale in a short period of time. Secondly we want to abstract away from moral concerns behind migratory patterns both on account of the sending and the receiving country, because this is a subject for a different set of analyses altogether.
Today, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new global era, with nations facing non- traditional human security issues such as those associated with energy, food, demographics and environment. How we respond to such challenges – is ultimately going to shape our future. In this paper, we discuss the reasons and patterns of migration. We also analyze the traditional and non-traditional concerns that migrants, employers and States have while dealing with the issue of geographic mobility, and present our opinions on solutions for the new century.
To pre-empt our conclusions, we think that human mobility has a much more important role to play in this globalized world than policy makers acknowledge. To confront the aforementioned non- traditional security threats; global policy needs to shift, in order to allow freer movements across boundaries; in a sort of human arbitrage to mimic modern day financial markets. This in turn will create efficiencies of human capital – a much needed medicine for current global imbalances.
Why Move:
In our view, there are essentially three reasons why people move; philosophical – psychological factors, socio – economic factors, and political factors. These together form a complicated matrix of influences that determine why migratory flows are the way they are today.
Philosophical-psychological factors are relevant today because people are increasingly moving from place to place because of personal preferences. These preferences are formed as the result of both exogenous and endogenous factors. The common consensus in ‘migration psychology’ is that the decision making process is of primary importance in the voluntary movement of people[i]. This may seem obvious at the outset, but is crucial and should not be omitted from such an analysis.
The decision making process relies upon both external and internal constraints, and might not always lead to a maximization of utility. For instance according to behavioral theory the relative ‘instability of intentions’ in comparison to attitudes has often resulted in direct attitudinal influences on behavior (Liska, 1984) Thus migration cannot be looked at as a purely utility driven process. And indeed we do find that there has been a moderation in migratory patterns over the past few decades. Increasingly humans have made themselves comfortable wherever they are; and labour market conditions are perhaps as significant as lifestyle conditions.
The second important factor influencing movement – socio-economic factors, are widely studied by labour economists. The oldest school of thought suggests that people move from place to place in search of better incomes[ii]. Sir John Hicks argued that “differences in net economic advantages, chiefly differences in wages are the main causes of migration”. That is, wage differentials form the basis for the related decision making process. We feel that this is a narrow and incomplete insight on human preferences related to migration. Although migration today is sometimes driven by relative wage differentials, we do not believe that it is a necessary condition. The rapid urbanization in the developing world in countries like India, China and Brazil is testament to this desire to exploit wage differentials between urban and rural areas (albeit many times migrating rural workers find that they would have gained higher utility by not moving at all, and instability of intention leads to less than optimal utility gains).
A newer stream of thought suggests that relative economic disparity is the main driver of migration[iii]. That is, members of a relatively more deprived group might prefer to move to a relatively less deprived group even if this means that absolute income is lower in the shift to the new group. This theory is also complementary to the behavioral aspects of migration. It accounts for dynamics within the family in a unique way, suggesting that migration is not necessarily an assertion of independence by the younger generations in a family, but rather, is a form of resource optimization[1].
Another new tendency that is creating an additional dimension to this discussion is the ‘new media’ and web 2.0. It has been argued that a characteristic of mass communication as we know it today has extended the availability of information across space and time[iv]. That is, through the use of modern technology, new technical media is able to bring information to masses that are possibly far removed in both the dimensions (in space due to physical distance from the point of origin, and in time due to time lag between production and dissemination of the information from the point of origin). Eminent media scholar John Thompson has written that “By enabling individuals to communicate across extended stretches of space and time, the use of technical media enables individuals to transcend the spatial and temporal boundaries characteristic of face to face interaction. At the same time, it enables individuals to reorder the spatial and temporal features of social organization, and to use these reordered features as a means of pursuing their objectives”.
The decoupling of space and time has led to interesting consequences for related decision making. Human beings no longer look at their immediate neighbours to compare existing relative disparities. The concept of “despatialized simultaneity” is an impulse that must lead to a paradigm shift in the way man perceives the world through the lens of space and time (Nowotny 1994). That is, the concept of ‘now’ has been delineated from the point of origin or locale, giving us an objective view of time and histories rather than a subjective one. Thus there is a sort of “mediated rationality” in the decision making process.
The third and perhaps most controversial reason for movement of peoples across regions and countries is political environment. Of course whether or not political asylum seekers claim legitimate political concerns every-time is another matter (and one that causes great concern in many countries, especially in Europe , which are used to receiving many asylum seekers). An oppressive political environment can take various forms. Brutal oppression can be brought about by political uncertainties and feudalistic institutions. Through the course of man’s history, human rights violations by government/government controlled institutions have repeatedly found their counterpoint in the form of dissident groups who choose to use aggressive tactics to overthrow the oppressors. Civil war scenarios that result from this are perhaps the greatest movers of people across borders in large masses within a short period of time apart from a direct war between two or more States.
Whether to term conflict induced movements as voluntary or not is a mere technicality. What is important is that the decision to move is part of a behavioral process of decision making, whereby relevant constraints dictate that movement is beneficial in some way. Analyzing all the existing theories that explain why people move, this behavioral undercurrent in all of them is hard to ignore. And indeed it is the case in most Marxist or world systems, that behavioral analysis has been ignored all together.
Who Moves:
Perhaps the most prominent pattern of movement is that people tend to move from areas of lower development to relatively better developed areas. That is, people tend to move to places with better living standards than the place of origin and hence the difference between human development at destination and at origin tends to be significant (three quarter of international movers move to countries which are higher on the Human Development Index than the country of origin)[v]. This coincides with what we termed “in search for something better” in the previous section.
The second major pattern of movement is that most of it happens within states rather than internationally. Recent UNDP figures estimate that there are about 740 million internal migrants in the world, compared to 214 million international migrants. The reasons for this are twofold; firstly it is clear that it is more expensive to travel internationally than within State boundaries, and secondly existing policy restrictions are stringent. A behavioral reason could also be contributing to this pattern - people are less keen to make a decision to move to a completely different socio-cultural environment from the place of origin if the incentive is not strong enough.
The third and perhaps the most intuitive pattern is the veritable normal distribution[vi] of the probability of migration plotted against per capita income. According to the Human Development Report (2009), people with the least per capita income are also the least mobile. This is ironic since the people who have the most to gain from moving to a more developed region are highly immobile, and are condemned to make a living in less than optimal environments. This is a welfare reducing phenomenon in the context of the global economy and one which needs closer examination by policy makers. As per capita income increases, so does mobility, up until a point and thereafter it decreases again. The probability of migration peaks at per capita incomes of close to $15,000 (according to World Bank indicators, no African country has a per capita income above this – and the Human Development Report states that only 3% of Africans live in a country that is different from where they originate).
This last pattern of the profile of people who move is helpful to understand why there is such a policy bias internationally towards highly skilled labour (in terms or the receiving country). The H1-B visa issued by the United States United States and Western Europe opened their borders to a considerable amount of low-skilled labour migrants. The changing dynamics of global trade and sharp jumps in commodity prices (especially energy) lead to the change of policies across the developed world after a highly liberalized framework post World War 2[vii]. We discuss the implications of this in the context of the globalized world in the next section.
Globalization, Business Cycles and the Migrant:
One of the founding fathers of development economics, Simon Kuznets, proposed that all countries follow a predestined inequity cycle in the process of economic growth. The cycle begins with high economic inequality in society, when physical capital is the main mechanism of growth, and those that save and invest in this are better off than the rest. As the development cycle continues and economic growth increases, there is then a trickle down effect, due to investment in the economy by those that have benefited in the initial phase of the cycle. As a result economic inequality decreases steadily and this whole cycle which leads to transformation from developing to developed economy, is in the shape of an inverted U. This is known as the Kuznet’s curve, and in the case of the American economy, Kuznets noted that the peak of economic inequality was reached in 1890, and thereafter started to decline and stabilized after 1920.
However, Kuznet’s conclusions on the American economy have failed to hold true after the OPEC oil supply shocks of the 1970s. This period of time, when the famous ‘Nixon Shocks’ led to the discontinuation of gold backed currency, also was a period when the American economy was battling with inflation led by a spike in energy prices and unemployment at the same time. This ‘stagflation’ lead to the reversal of the Kuznet’s curve as inequality once again started increasing. This has also been termed the “great U turn” by economists[viii], and many of the erstwhile OECD countries also followed this trajectory in terms of increasing economic inequality. A 2009 UNDP report highlights that the United States
For policy makers in the West, it is increasingly difficult to justify this increasing inequity between the rich and the poor in their countries. This has resulted in finger pointing at the usual suspect – immigration. Although in terms of percentage of the world population, international migration has been stable at close to 3% over the past few decades[x]; the overall volume of immigration has been increasing due to the population explosion that the world has undergone during the same time. USA Mexico , and most immigrate illegally by crossing over the border into the Southern states like California and Texas
At the outset, it is not counterintuitive to assume that hoards of unskilled immigrants can cause a skew in income inequality though there is no empirical way to establish causality. A recent study has suggested that in the case of low skilled Mexicans immigrating to USA, the extra supply of labour is absorbed by changes in skill intensity within narrow industries, without significant impact on the overall wages (except in the case of the existing uneducated/drop out workforce)[xiii]. Furthermore, since the strict policy regimes in place in most of the developed world have clearly favoured highly skilled immigrants for over four decades[xiv] ; the argument can be reversed as the turn in the inequity curve has occurred simultaneously (while it should have further stabilized due to implementation of biased policies towards letting in the highly skilled). In the current world scenario, dominated by free market neo liberal ideologies, globalization has made nations truly interdependent (and the countries that are not sufficiently integrated in the globalized market framework of shared risk and increased trade are left on the periphery). There is constant political rhetoric about increased cooperation, free trade etc and at the same time a reversal of the post World War 2 liberalization agenda for migration is followed by the developed world.
Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” back in 1942, referring to the destruction of old technologies by new, better technologies, thereby promoting human progress and innovation[xv]. The actualization of this process has brought human civilization to the point that it is at right now. It has predicted the way companies and industries operate within the new paradigm of globalization, where they have to be at the competitive edge in order to survive. The consequence of this has been the rapid introduction of technologies in formerly labour intensive processes such as manufacturing. This in turn has resulted in a veritable sectoral shift in the demand side for labour intensive jobs and immigrants (from manufacturing to services). Countries in the West no longer require low skilled workers in droves in order to work in factories and mills, and the emphasis for employment growth has now shifted to the service sector. This has further incentivized policy makers in the West to adopt stringent policies that favour only the highly skilled worker.
Another product of creative destruction has been the increasing emphasis on productivity. For example, the 2007-2008 global financial crises demanded a lot of changes in the productivity and efficiency with which private sector companies in the Western world operate. The companies which were able to make the appropriate changes have survived and are probably much more efficient, closer to operating according to an optimal utility framework than before. This emphasis on productivity has meant that the workers that are not absolutely essential are without jobs in the West. In such a situation, migration of workers across borders, were it to be barrier free, would mean that workers would move from low productivity areas to high productivity areas in a form of labour arbitrage. This would improve labour productivity and overall efficiency in the global economy[xvi].
As for the question of whether only the receiving countries would gain or whether there would be mutual gains between the sending and receiving countries, it would be useful to remember that most of the gains from migration would largely be caught by the migrants themselves, which would be shared with their families in the form of remittances. There would be no clear winners or losers, as the welfare gains would be observed in a global context rather than a regional context.
Migration and Non Traditional Threats:
Demographic threats are one of the more pronounced non traditional threats to global welfare. While the threat represents itself as overpopulation (putting a strain on resources) in the developing world, it is the lack of population growth that is a threat to advanced developed countries. According to a recent study, the median age of the population of the world is projected to increase from 26.6 years in 2000 to 37.3 years on 2050[xvii]. This “acceleration” in ageing is set to affect the developed world in an adverse way. The remarkable gains in the life expectancy (from about 70 years to 78 years in the United States and close to double that in Japan
In countries like Germany and Japan, peak populations have already been reached, as the decline in births have more than offset the increases in life longevity[xviii]. Without a growing workforce, there is a real need for immigrant workers. Germany
Figure: The cumulative probabilities of reaching a proportion 60+ of one third or more for the world and selected world regions by calendar year:
Source: Lutz et al., “The Coming Acceleration of Global Population Ageing”
The second big non traditional threat is in the form of environmental challenges. It is no secret that climate change has lead to a rise in the global surface temperature and global mean sea level. Although there is a lack of evidence to support the claim that climate change has already lead to a shift in migratory patterns (Salehyan, 2005:2), this is can be put down to the fact that the effects of climate change have not been very severe up till now, and may not be for another decade. The Stern Review Report on Climate Change predicts (in its conservative estimate) that there is a very real potential for additional mass migration of 150-200 million people by 2050 (Stern, 2007:77). The report observes that “climate change will lead to hundreds of millions more people without sufficient water or food to survive or threatened by dangerous floods and increased disease”. Furthermore severe draught and flood risks are already changing migratory patterns[xx]. Low lying flood prone high density areas like those in Bangladesh
Under this sort of scenario, both regional and international migration are surely going to be important and people will increasingly start to incorporate climate change and its consequences into their decision making process. The question of why move, will have an added – fourth dimension, and we are of the opinion that policy makers need to be suitably prepared for humanitarian interventions and the integration of ‘climate refugees’ in the future. Furthermore, resource shortages are additional concerns that are likely to effect the decision making process of individuals contemplating migration. The unabated rise in commodity and food prices seems to be a long term trend going forward, and fresh water shortages have already caused significant shifts in migratory patterns around the world[xxi].
Conclusion:
The meta-narrative of human evolution can be traced through the perspective of migration. From over a hundred and fifty thousand years ago when the earliest man started his journey out of erstwhile Ethiopia, to the migration from the Iberian peninsula to the colonies in the Americas, to the great African migration of slaves, the human journey and socio-economic transformations have greatly been influenced by the migratory phenomenon. It is only in the last few decades that the slow down of migration (in terms of percentage of the world population) has occurred, simultaneously with the spread of globalization.
A majority of international migration takes place between countries that are either linked geographically such as the US and Mexico (or are sufficiently close to each other), and between countries that share other established socio-political/economic linkages such as the member nations of the European Union. In both cases, labour tends to flow from relatively low productivity to high productivity areas, enhancing overall global welfare. However, migration can solve a lot more inefficiencies than it is today. With existing imbalances caused by structural mismatches wreaking havoc in the global economy, we feel that it is the perfect time for policymakers to reform immigration policies – especially in the developed world.
A lot goes on behind the decision to migrate. The human decision making process is pivotal to understanding the dynamics of where people move and why. We have argued that this cerebral process has been greatly influenced by the new media, and that people now make decisions with a “mediated rationality”. The implication of this is that migrants are increasingly aware of the prevailing environments in their point of origin and destination. Voluntary movements by people searching for “something better” are increasingly sieved through the perceptive realities of the migrant, which are in turn shaped by the new media.
Need based migration is sure to increase in the coming future, with the increasing lack of resources, impact of climate change and other non traditional threats. This is going to lead to unpredictable consequences, whereby certain nations are going to feel greater sustained immigration pressures than others. We wish to highlight the fact that this need based migration should be treated as a global burden rather than a local one to enhance global welfare. Countries should promote the process of multilateral dialogue on this issue and resolve themselves to sharing the burden when the time comes. The recent global financial crisis has provided a blueprint for the modalities of cooperation on financial/fiscal issues. Such multilateral cooperation and experience sharing can be mimicked, with emphasis on resolving issues of mass need based migrations to combat non-traditional threats and increase global labour efficiencies.
References:
[1] One can consider the case of a typical student who travels away from family to get education and then goes on to seek jobs in a more opportune environment, and then returns some of his/her earnings in the form of remittances, thereby optimizing the utility gained by the family as a whole
[i] See: Fawcett, J.T., “Migration Psychology: New Behavioral Models”, Population and Environment, Vol. 8, No. ½, Migration Intentions and Behavior: Third World Perspectives, 1984 – 1985.
[ii] See: Sjaastad, L.A.
[iii] See: Stark, Oded and Tayloy, E.J., “Relative Deprivation and International Migration”, Demography, Vol. 26, No. 1, 1989.
[iv] See: Thompson, John, “The Media and Modernity – A Social Theory of the Media”, Cambridge University
[v] UNDP Human Development Report, 2009
[vi] The most common probability distribution in statistics
[vii] The United States
[viii] See: Alderson, Arthur S., and Nielson, Francois, “Globalization and the Great U Turn – Income Inequality trends in 16 OECD countries”, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 107, No. 5, 2002.
[ix] Source: “Business Week”, October 16, 2009
[x] UNDP, Human Development Report, 2009.
[xi] The Foreign –Born Population: 2000. Washington , DC
[xii] See: Nandi et al., “Access to and Use of Health Services Among Undocumented Mexican Immigrants in a US
[xiii] Card, David and Lewis, Ethan G., “The diffusion of Mexican Immigrants During the 1990s: Explanations and Impacts”, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2007.
[xiv] See: Castles, Stephen, “Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization”, International Migration Review, vol. 36, No. 4, 2002.
[xv] In his book titled “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”.
[xvi] See: Hanson, Gordon H., “The Economic Consequences of the International Migration of Labour”, UCSD and NBER, 2008/.
[xvii], Lutz, Wolfgang, Sanderson, Warren and Scherbov, Sergei, “The Coming Acceleration of Global Population Ageing”, Nature, Vol. 451, 2008.
[xviii] See: Cooper, Richard N., “Global Imbalances: Globalization, Demography and Sustainability”, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2008.
[xix] European Union free movement of workers principles require that all Member State citizens have the right to solicit and obtain work in Germany free from discrimination on the basis of citizenship according to the Treaty on European Union Article 39.
[xx] Black, R., Coppard, D., Kniveton, D., Murata, A., and Skeldon, R., “Demographics and Climate Change: Future Trends And their Policy Implications for Migration”, Working Paper (T-27), Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalization and Poverty, University of Sussex
[xxi] See: Widgren, J., “International Migration and Regional Stability”, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs), 1990.
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