Labour migration and tourism mobilities: Time to bring sustainability into the debate

Abstract

Migration and tourism are interconnected forms of human mobility, similar but different. It is impossible to draw neat boundaries around the two because they constantly intersect, sometimes within one and the same individual. Tourism and migration often fuel each other, thereby raising two interesting questions that are rarely asked, namely ‘What would tourism be without migration?’ and ‘What would migration be without tourism?’. In significant ways, sustainability is directly related to the ‘mobility’ aspects of tourism-related labour. However, in tourism studies, research on mobility often focuses merely on tourist movements. In general, there has been little detailed examination of the mechanisms that comprise and (re)produce the border-crossing movements of tourism labourers. If there is little attention to tourism-related labour mobilities, considerations related to the sustainability implications of worker mobility are highlighted even less often. Indeed, despite the anthropocentric focus of sustainability as a concept, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the aspect of social sustainability. As the COVID-19 crisis shows, when it comes to the nexus between migration and tourism, the current and future challenges are huge.

摘要

迁徙和旅游是相互联系的人类流动形式, 相似但不同。要在两者之间划清界限是不可能的, 因为它们时常交叉, 有时可归为一类, 有时一个人既迁徙又旅游。旅游和迁徙经常相互推动, 因此提出了两个很少被问及的有趣问题, 即“如果没有迁徙, 旅游会怎么样?” 以及“如果没有旅游, 迁徙又会怎么样?”在很大程度上, 可持续性与旅游劳工的“流动性”直接相关。然而, 在旅游研究中, 对流动性的研究往往只关注于游客的流动。总体而言, 对于组成和(重新)生成旅游劳工跨境流动的机制, 几乎尚未进行详细的考察过。如果很少注意与旅游有关的劳工流动, 那么就更不经常凸显与工人流动可持续性有关的考量。事实上, 尽管可持续发展是一个以人类为中心的概念, 但令人惊讶的是, 很少有人关注社会可持续性层面。新冠肺炎危机表明, 就移徙和旅游之间的关系而言, 当前和未来的挑战都是巨大的。

Keywords:

• Mobility
• migration
• tourism
• labour
• sustainability
• resilience
• inequality
• COVID-19

关键词:

• 流动性
• 移徙
• 旅游业
• 劳动力
• 可持续性
• 韧性
• 不平等
• 新型冠状肺炎

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article is based on a keynote speech I gave for the ‘Nexus of Migration and Tourism: Creating Social Sustainability Symposium’ at VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, Vietnam in September 2018. I thank Long Hong Pham and his team at VNU for the invitation and Jaeyeon Choe from Bournemouth University in the UK for facilitating the contact, the intellectually stimulating exchanges and the pleasant company. As the revision of the article happened in the middle of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, reflections relating to COVID-19 were added at that stage.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noel B. Salazar

Noel B. Salazar is Research Professor in Anthropology at KU Leuven, Belgium. He is co-editor of Tourism Imaginaries (2014) and author of Momentous Mobilities (2018), Envisioning Eden (2010) and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on tourism and mobility. Salazar sits on the editorial boards of, among others, Journal of Sustainable Tourism and International Journal of Tourism Anthropology. In addition, he is past chair of the IUAES Commission on the Anthropology of Tourism and serves as an expert member for the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN), the ICOMOS Cultural Tourism Committee (ICTC) and the UNITWIN-UNESCO Network ‘Culture, Tourism and Development’.