Migration in a turbulent time: perspectives from the global South

We have seen unrest and turmoil in various regions in the world over the past decade. International migration is one of the common elements in all these. In some regions, we see increasing migration as a cause of the unrestful situation like in the Europe and North America. In other regions, we observe migration as an outcome of social and political disturbance such as in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Of all discussions about migration, however, the political consequences drew greater attention, perhaps, because of the recent refugee crisis in Europe.

The United Nations, in its International Migration Report 2017 states that more than six out of every 10 international migrants reside in Asia or Europe. While a majority of the world’s international migrants live in high-income countries in the North, this report recognizes that nearly 22 million, or 84%, of all refugees and asylum seekers live in the low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa. Besides, other organizations find increasing migration between countries in the global South. For instance, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that Asian countries including the Middle East received more immigrants than Europe or North America between 2000 and 2015. It also recognizes Saudi Arabia as the second largest destination country of migrants after the United States. That is, a lot has been going on with international migration in the Global South, which can add to available knowledge about migration in the traditional destination countries in the Global North. The international conference on migration that was organized by the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and Qatar University and collaboration with the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on the Sociology of Migration (RC31) was an effort to contribute to migration literature by inviting migration scholars studying international migration in the Global South.

At the center of academic interest in migration is the link between migration and development. International migrants generate a huge flow of what is known as remittance- money that the migrants end home. The World Bank estimated a total of $601 billion in migrants’ remittance in 2016, $441 billions of which went to developing countries (WB, 2016). This was more than three times the amount of official development aid. In addition, migrants held more than $500 billion in annual savings, which––together with migrants’ remittance––offered a substantial source of financing for projects that could improve lives and livelihoods in developing countries. Consequently, the United Nations declares June 6 of every year as the International Day of Family Remittance to recognize the contribution of migrants’ remittance to development in their origin countries. Recognizing international migration as a critical concern for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants on 19 September 2016, in which UN Member States agreed to implement well-managed migration policies. They also committed to sharing more equitably the burden and responsibility for hosting and supporting the world’s refugees, protecting the human rights of all migrants, and countering xenophobia and intolerance directed towards migrants.

International migration involves crossing state-borders, which essentially engages the state. The discourses of migration and development, particularly the dominant New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM) perspective, focuses on the migrants and their household as rational actors interested in maximizing their economic interests through remittance (Lucas & Stark, 1985). This economic-centric discourse conceives migrants and their household as the primary actors in the processes of migration leaving the state aside as a determinant. The idea of the state as secondary in studying migration also comes from the post-nationalist claim of declining sovereignty of the state giving way to global norms (Soysal, 1994). Against this backdrop, Zolberg (1999) articulated the decisive important of the state and called for more attention to the role of the state in migration. Other migration scholars followed through and demonstrated how the state, especially at the destination, exercised control over migration (Hollifield, 2004; Munck, 2008; Massey, 1999). The discretionary power of the state is most obvious in how it regulates cross-border population movement through visa restrictions. As Neumayer (2006) illustrates, the destination state effectively extends its border into the sending countries in an attempt to prevent unwanted entry and potential overstaying of the foreign visitors by asking the sending states and the airlines to cooperate in enforcing the visa restrictions. We see this also in how some of the most popular destination states, such the United States and some European countries administer their visa-processing differently for different third world countries. Besides, the state extended its border control inside the country by deploying measures of identifying undocumented migrants and deporting them, and thereby, exhibiting its increasing control over migration (Salter, 2004).

The state’s control is also documented and theorized in how it regulates the employment, earning and settlement of the migrants by conferring on the migrants different types of legal status entitled with particular rights, and lack of others. For instance, the destination state decides between permanent residents, temporary worker, or short-term visitor among the foreigners upon entry. By looking at the migrant workers in South African mines and the US agriculture, Burawoy (1976) argues that the state allows the migrant workers to enter in the production sites leaving their families back in their home country and confers a temporary status that allows them to stay as long as they are employed. While the migrants choose to come to the mines and agricultural fields to work by themselves, their separation from family and temporary status is by no means based solely on their individual choice, but is determined and maintained by the state’s deliberate initiatives. The role of the destination state in migration and remittance is most explicit in what is known as the ‘guest-worker program’. Walzer (1983) conceptualizes this program as a mechanism through which the destination state attracts foreign workers by making their entry easier, but only for a certain period after which they must return. Besides, the state contains them in certain sectors of the labor market by attaching them with particular employer, housing them in worker’s colonies at the outskirts of cities and restricting their mobility in the labor market. Finally, the state denies them the right to bring family and settle permanently (pp. 56–57). All these initiatives of the destination state make it clear to the aspirants about what type of legal rights they would enjoy, what kinds of job they would do, and how much they would earn before they make their migration decision. Moreover, the state takes measures to prevent settlement in case any temporary migrant attempts to; for instance, Taiwan deploys a system of surveillance on the migrants in which the job-brokers and employers are held responsible to restrain the migrant workers from job switching and overstaying (Tseng & Wang, 2013). Shipper (2002) also finds a similar system in Japan where the state places the migrant workers at the bottom of its hierarchically organized labor market and contains them there in collaboration with the employers and Yakuza (underworld lords). Furthermore, the state creates a generalized perception among the migrants of strict immigration control by frequent raids for undocumented migrants, strict security checks and asking for documents to such an extent that migrants do not plan to overstay in spite of their intention to do so (Mahmud, 2014; Seol & Skrentny, 2009).

Besides the political dimension of migration in which the state functions as a decisive determinant in the migration process, scholars explore the social dimension of how migrants navigate through an unfamiliar environment in their new destination and among unfamiliar residents. As scholars recognize, migrants eventually fall back to others in similar situation, that is, the co-ethnic migrants as well as to those the migrants left behind at home country. Upon arrival in the destination country, the migrants find themselves as outsiders among a native majority population and have to negotiate their presence and participation in social life. This has been theorized in what is familiarly known assimilation theory expounding the social mechanisms of the emergence, maintenance and/orerosion of social boundaries between the migrants and the native population (Brubaker, 2001). While assimilationist scholars find migrants eventually break in the social boundaries by finding ways of incorporating themselves into the native mainstream population (Alba & Nee, 2003), the transnationalist scholars emphasize migrants’ capability to establish and maintain cross-border connections simultaneously (Basch, Glick-Schiller & Blanc, 1994). Both perspectives recognize the ability of the migrants to effectively negotiate with the structural forces including the state in finding their own place in the destination country as well as sustained connections to their origin country. One of the consequence of migrants’ settlement abroad and their transnational engagement in their origin country is the development potential of migrants’ remittance and transnationalism. In addition to their remittance as an alternative development fund, these migrants facilitate information sharing, technology transfer, foreign direct investment and so forth that together enhance their origin country’s economic growth.

The papers included in this special issue shade light on the debates and issues in current migration literature with empirical evidence from the Global South. Hideki Tarumoto (2018) offers an empirical case of the resilience of the state in maintaining its sovereign authority over its border and control on migration against international pressure, domestic pressure from civil society and grassroot groups, the fear of depopulation and the economic return how Japan, an industrialized and liberal democratic country. Tarumoto explains Japan’s success in restricting the number of refugees it accepts to a few hundred by discussing the mechanism of Japanese immigration regime. In a social and political context characterized by mono-ethnic nationalism, Japan’s ministry of Justice, which oversees its immigration, uses a multilevel citizenship system to keep foreigners, immigrants and refugees in the outer boundaries while the inside ones are reserved for citizens. A person’s location within these boundaries determine his or her status and rights in the country. Those who have been approved to stay in Japan have gone through a rigorous and lengthy process, their shockingly small numbers are coupled with the fact that they are granted a residency status, not citizenship as the Japanese government has long ago pledged that Japan will have a homogenous population.

Japan’s success in maintaining an extremely restrictive immigration regime is rather an exception that the rule as Sarausad (2018) demonstrates in her paper on migrants from the Philippines in Thailand. As a member of the ASEAN, Thailand allows citizens of other member countries visa-free entry including those from the Philippines. This significantly reduces Thailand’s capacity to regulate these migrants as they creatively find loopholes within the Thai immigration control by straddling between ‘tourist’ and ‘migrant’. While Thai authorities determine varying length of stay for these people by classifying them as tourist or migrant, these people continuously defy this attempt by adopting different coping and bending mechanisms including negotiating border crossing, using different entry points to avoid being caught by immigration officials, and traveling to another country (even if it was for one night) then coming back to Thailand. They use all these legal loopholes effectively to refrain from illegalizing their status in Thailand and rebranding them as migrants instead of tourists. While few are caught by the immigration authority and got blacklisted, and eventually become illegal migrants, a majority successfully overcome the regulations by effectively liquefying the border and thereby demonstrating migrants’ agency.

Shum’s (2018) ethnographic study on the African migrants in Hong Kong is an excellent empirical example of the power of migrants’ agency. Labeled a ‘minority within a minority’, African migrants and refugees are frequently discriminated against by Hong Kong Chinese, even if they fluently speak the local dialect. Some are even denied job opportunities solely based on their skin color. In this paper, Shum documents the innovative way in which members of the African community engage, interact and integrate with the host community through the expression of their African culture. Instead of only learning about the host community; they take a step further to teach about their culture as well. He recognizes that African music helped these migrants make more friends from the host community and enabled them to not only preserve their connection to their homeland, but also to proudly express, promote and teach about their culture in a constructive way, thus increasing their visibility while reducing intolerance and fighting stereotypes. Shum concludes that playing djembe drums and music is an effective tool for integrative exchange, and that integration should take the various actors into account rather than only focusing on the diaspora community.

Migrants’ efforts, however, may fall short, and even resisted by the host society if their respective countries do not go along well as we find Anastasopoulos (2018) observes among Germans in Greece. In this paper, Anastasopoulos explores how German immigrants experienced their national identity being stigmatized in Greece in the wake of increased dissatisfaction and even resentment towards Germany, which was manifested in the form of discrediting German national symbols following Greece’s debt crisis. Examining the German’s identity awareness at three levels- being German, being German in Greece, and being deemed German by Greeks- the author recognizes that these immigrants were refused, accepted or the interviewee was indifferent about it. Besides, the destination state’s immigration policy, while sometime failing to strictly enforce regulations on the migrants, causes long-term effects on the migrants and their off-springs once they permanently settle in the destination country. As Lee notes (2018), the immigration system of the US entails a few statuses that differ massively in their entitlements, job opportunities, rights, economic trajectories, restrictions and legal protection. She finds that the Legal Permanent Residents (LPR) are more likely to have own a home, have relatives who are US citizens, and higher education compared to those who enter on a temporary status. Children whose mothers enter on a temporary status are more likely to fall in the lowest income categories and hold blue collar jobs compared to those whose mothers enter as LPRs.

One of the celebrated aspect of migration is its developmental impact for the origin countries in the Global South, which is the focus of the last paper in this issue. In this paper, Matallah (2018) explores FDI flows to the South Asian countries through which migration indirectly affects inequality in South Asia, and explicates how good governance can effectively reduce remittance-led inequality in the region. She presents quantitative evidence in support of the theory that migration displays a significant positive impact on FDI inflows by paving the way for unrestrained FDI flows from developed destination countries to South Asian countries of origin. She observes an increase in the stock of immigrants originating from South Asian countries subsequently increasing FDI flows from their destination country to their country of origin by activating social networks, which reduced foreign investors’ information asymmetry and uncertainty. Moreover, she notes that many South Asian immigrants invested in their native countries, utilizing their human and physical capital brought back from host-countries. On the critical side, she recognizes support for the theory about migration exacerbating inequality of South Asian countries. However, presents data supporting the fact that good governance and FDI together can reduce inequality and thereby promote development in these countries.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Michael Eweres, Zahra Bababr, Yousef Daoud, Rasheed El-Enani, Raed Habayeb, Abdullah Saleh Baabood, Hassan Ali and Sultan Barakat for their support and contribution before and during the conference. Without their support, this conference would have not been successful. Amal Khayat worked with us as a research assistant during the preparation of this SI, and we highly appreciate her contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI) [grant number MRF 01-01] and Qatar University.