Globalisation and Migration

Franck Düvell, Globalisation, Migration and policy response, Talk, University of Koc, Istanbul, 6/10/04

Globalisation and Migration:

Emerging dilemmas and policy implications

The following thoughts result from ten years of researching and discussing human global geographic mobility, namely illegal immigration and high-skilled migration, in Europe; the European and international politics of migration control and the integration and civic participation of immigrants. And because researchers are often asked, after having presented their findings, ‘what can be done about these phenomena’, and ‘how can we respond just and fair’ I also got involved in issues of political philosophy.

When we, Bill Jordan and I (Jordan and Düvell, 2002), began researching the live and work of Polish and Turkish immigrants our team took a typical Euro-, even country-centric approach, our interest was to study the interaction between mobile individuals and the institutions of the host country, the UK, and my colleagues with whom I collaborated in Germany, Italy and Greece applied a similar approach. Only when looking at the interviewees’ accounts we began to appreciate the wider picture. In fact, our migrant interviewees often listed several countries where they have already been living and working or where they have relatives. Some individuals literally argued that it is not the country that matters, but the opportunities. Instead, our interviewees illustrated a specific global appeal. We found that we could not simply interpret and frame such accounts within the traditional and convenient concepts of nation states, national labour markets but had to accept that the nation state as a unit of analysis has become increasingly inappropriate.

The core problem emerging has been the relation between the concept of nation states as the dominant version of social organisation, and the geographically mobile individual.

Bellow, a number of theses and thoughts are drafted which came out of the authors research and which will be discussed in more debt in a forthcoming new book, a comparative volume on illegal immigration in Europe.

First, some features of global economic integration are emphasised.

Second, the emergence of global labour markets will be elaborate.

Third, the political dilemma emerging from this will be sketched.

Fourth, and finally, it will be referred to concepts that have the potential to be productive in addressing the dilemmas of global mobility.

1. Main features of globalisation

The main characteristics of globalisation are defined as ‘the elimination of obstacles of free trade, global economic integration (Stiglitz), ‘increasing political, economic, and social interdependence among nation states’ (Kritz and Zlotnik, 1992), increasingly porous borders, unimpeded border-crossing stream of goods, services, capital, knowledge and continuously increasing international migration in terms of numbers and in terms of countries involved. Powerful driving forces are international businesses that move capital, goods and technologies, but also people across borders. The World Trade Organisation’s Modus 4 policy, which involves short-term migration of service deliverers, the GATS agreement further encourages such tendencies. We can observe the emergence of a 'Global Delivery Model' that leverages talent, manpower and infrastructure to any part of the world (Murty, 2003). The OECD anticipates that ‘as business goes global, and product cycles shorten, companies need to be able to move more people – and more types of people – around more countries for shorter periods and at shorter notice’.

Additionally, countries, scarce of natural resources who lag behind in industrial development, and who have nothing to offer on the global trade markets deliberately concentrate on the training and trade of manpower, as for example India, Bangladesh, Jordan and the Philippines.

What emerges, is a kind of just-in-time migration (Düvell, 2002), echoing models of just-in-time production. Accordingly, an OECD study (2002) suggests that since the early 1990s permanent skilled migration is decreasing, whilst temporary skilled migration is on the rise. Voices critical of brain drain must note this much more positive version of brain exchange.

According to these features, one can identify three major patterns of relationship between globalisation, labour and migration:

(case 1) businesses move to where (standard) qualification workforces are available;

(case 2) a: highly qualified workforces are moved to where the demand is;

b: scarce professions and workforces are moved to where the demand is;

(case 3) a: highly qualified or highly demanded workforces move autonomously,

b: standard qualified or unqualified workforces move autonomously.

One important difference in these cases is that between those who are deliberately moved by political or businesses forces and those who move autonomously. The second difference is whether or not this takes place within legal or illegal processes and structures.

It can be observed, that at present, all states are potentially a sending country, transit country and receiving country, namely either simultaneously on in successive historic periods. Only two examples, the traditional sending countries of labour migrants to northern Europe, Spain, Portugal and Greece, are now all immigration countries. Turkey and Poland, for a long time emigration countries are now simultaneously emigration, immigration and transit countries. Today, virtually any country displays features that lead specific individuals to seek their luck abroad, whilst, in the same time, displays features that are an incentive to people from other countries. Traditional ideas of clearly distributed push and pull factors or clearly distinguishable sending and receiving countries have to be deconstructed.

In terms of numbers, from a nationally biased perspective, that is only taking into account migration across state borders, all main sources give a figure of roughly 175 million migrants worldwide, or 3 per cent of the global population. And illegal migration is according to UN figures, the fastest growing form of migration. In my view, this is grossly misleading. Taking into account short-term migration, rural-urban migration and in particular migration within the huge territories of China, India and Russia, produces figures close to one billion people, a sixth of the world population. That is a much more realistic idea of human geographic mobility.

2. The emergence of global labour markets

Economic integration, porous borders and increased migration have lead to the emergence of transnational, and even global labour markets. When I interviewed a representative of the UK's leading business association, the Confederation of British Industries, to discus matters of international migration and recruitment, it was clearly pointed out, that

‘We want to promote flexible and mobile workforce, we want employers within the UK to have the right and the ability to within reason employ the best people from wherever they are in the world, that's going to be the reality of the internet with it's global reach’ (CBI, interview, 20.6.2000).

The idea revealed here perceives the world as a single market for labour from which to draw the resources, knowledge and skills required.

The infrastructure of such labour markets consists of globally active recruitment agencies, headhunters and the internet, all with a global reach. Other elements are migration channels within transnational businesses where staff moves within a company but across international borders. But also the emergence of transnational communities and informal agencies play major roles.

As a result, globalisation has ruptured the embeddedness of labour markets in society and nation states and de-politicised labour market processes. And from the employees' perspective, globalisation requires labour to become much more mobile in order to either follow the movement of businesses or to go where the demand is.

One characteristics of globalisation is the mobility of business, and many industries, such as textile and manufacturing, have been outsourced to where the labour is. On the other hand, there are also immobile industries, which cannot be moved abroad, such as services, construction, agriculture, and because these are often rejected by indigenous workforce, rely on migrant labour. In summary, globalisation involves both, a shift of employment from industrialised to industrialising economies and simultaneously ashift of employees from industrialising countries to the industrialised economies, both on an increasing scale. Therefore, globalisation and the emergence of global labour markets create new migration systems, new migration networks, and new migration channels. Migration is inherent to, and a characteristics of globalisation.

3. The Emergence of a global dilemma

From the context I have been drafted, a number of dilemmas emerge.

A stage of global economic and political integration has now been reached in which the ‘globalisation of production is creating a widening asymmetry in the world market-place: on the one hand, there is an unprecedented volume of capital mobility and technology transfer across borders. On the other hand, labour mobility is subject to a myriad of restrictions’ (Mehmet et al., 1999: ix). In this light, there would appear to be a paradox at the core of globalisation. Economists are deeply divided over the question whether a neoliberal agenda should combine ‘free trade’ with ‘freedom of movement of people’ (Schultz, 1978), or whether migrations instead need to be restricted (OECD, 1998). It has even been suggested that the economic crisis at the end of the 20th century (James, 2001) or the depressing situation of the Third World (Hamilton and Whalley) has to do with the lack of a liberal migration policy. Expressions of this paradox can be heard in the contemporary philosophical debate about whether or not there is a right to freedom of movement (Carens, 1992; Schwartz, 1995).

Meanwhile, as a matter of fact, migration movements have forced their way through these barriers and restrictions, partly in response to labour market demands, partly following autonomous agendas. The Wall Street Journal (2004) It has also been has recently shownelsewhere, that the 7-fold increase in the US immigration control budget has corresponded with a doubling in the amount of undocumented migration into the US, and so the purpose and value of this increase has been questioned. Many scholars have come to the conclusion that the ‘efficiency of immigration control measures is declining’ (Cornelius 1994: 4), that borders are ‘beyond control’ (Bhagwati, 2003) or have unintended and even opposite effects (Engbersen, 2001), for example the criminalisation effect, as criticised by UN sources, or the deaths of undocumented immigrants, criticised as unacceptable consequences of immigration controls (United, 2003).

Not only does the ‘globalisation of migration’ means that basically any region or country of the world is, in one way or another, affected by migration processes, but it can also be observed that countries that receive migration, either by way of transit migration or by being a ‘final’ destination, also host considerable numbers of undocumented immigrants. Neither the countries that rely on strong external controls, the UK and the US, nor countries that rely on internal controls, such as Germany and the Netherlands, seem to be successful in ‘stemming the flow’. No systems seem to work very well.

The reasons for this are complex. Anthropologists argue that humans from walking age are principally geographically mobile and ‘are a migratory species’ (Davis, 1974; Kubat and Nowotny, 1981; Massey, 1998). From a historical perspective, migrations of all kinds are a continuum (Hoerder, 2003), which continuously changes the composition of communities and societies and its cultures, on both, sending and receiving ends (Castles, 2000). And economists point to what they think of as inescapable ‘push and pull’ mechanisms (Todaro, 1989) or ‘irresistible economic, demographic, and technological forces’ (Pritchett, 2003:2). In other words, labour markets require specific workers, markets for services demand specific deliveries, and people, as economic agents, move where they hope to increase their return from economic activities, and improve their life prospects. But states are not prepared to accept such movements.

The tension that result from such as constellation is one whereby states are confronted with two most powerful forces, the demand of free markets and the aspirations of individual actors. And the harder states try to enforce immigration restrictions, the more is migration driven underground. The ‘combination of restrictive immigration policies and expanding migratory pressure has produced rapid growth in the stock of undocumented aliens’ in many countries (Djacić, 1997: 97). According to Lomnitz (1988), informal activities, networks and parallel systems of supply have to be understood in relationship to the state. She suggests that inefficiencies, malfunctionings and shortcomings of state interventions result in a scarcity of goods or services, in our case labour, which provokes informal activities. Sassen (1999) too explains informal employment as being the result of the gap in the provision of affordable goods and services, and adds to this a consideration of the inefficiencies of formal markets; others (Pfau-Effinger, 2003) add that undocumented immigrant labour is a direct consequence of their exclusion from formal employment. And Pritchett (2003) blames ‘immovable ideas’ confronted with irresistible migration forces for these developments.

These contradictions, failures and shortcomings lead to a migration dilemma that involves anthropological, economic and political aspects. This ‘migration dilemma’ has been seen as the result of the coincidence of ‘unstoppable migration flows’, strong incentives, ‘porous borders’ and the fact that ‘enforcement to keep out all illegal immigrants [is] impractical’ (Johnson and Fitzgerald, 2003: 5). Kettle additionally (2004) identifies ‘liberal dilemmas about solidarity and diversity’. Taran (1994) concentrates on the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of forced migration being met with increasingly closed borders. In terms of the Tocqueville theorem (1831/1956)[i], the exclusion of immigrants seems, paradoxically, to undermine the otherwise expansionary logic of democracy. I apply the concept of a dilemma as it is developed by game theory. It characterises a situation of fundamental conflicts between two ideal groups of actors; in this case, the conflicts between the sedentary populations, represented by the nation state, and the mobile populations. Such a conflictual case seems to be to the disadvantage of both groups: rising enforcement budgets, possible labour market bottlenecks, a threat to social coherence, decreasing democratic control and ethical shortcomings on the one hand; deprived, brutalised and de-politicised migrants on the other hand.

4. Problem solving approaches

Six major policies can be identified: military intervention; large-scale deportation; laissez faire practices; regularisation schemes; pro-active measures and managed migration. None is without concerns and none is satisfactory.

Military interventions are ethically questionable, unrealistic at least in liberal societies, and looking at Mediterranean experiences shows that the militarisation of migration control does not stop illegal migration because most usually enter on some sort of a visa, hence entry is legal and only stay or employment is in violation of the regulations.

Concepts of enforcement policies, such as removal, deportation or return must be tested in the light of an estimated population of several million undocumented migrants in Europe. Mass deportations, raids, numerous collection centres, and countless aeroplanes or trains full of deportees equally seem to be unrealistic options.

Laisser faire or undeclared de-facto toleration policies, that is what we have in Europe, both often result from ‘gaps’ (Cornelius et al., 1994) between legislation and implementation, respectively the impracticality of migration regulations.

Regularization schemes, as practiced in most EU countries, are a re-active option. They are usually designed to be a one-off policy, but usually have to be repeated after a while because migration continues. They have the potential to relieve in a pragmatic fashion an urgent social problem, but do not offer a durable solution (DeBruyker, 2000; Garson, 2000).

Pro-active measures by some nation states, such as opening legal migration channels, as tried in the UK, are a promising policy, as these often manage to reconcile individual aspirations with market mechanisms and institutional goals and integrate mobile populations.

On the international stage, visions of ‘orderly migration’ and ‘migration management’, as held for example by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) have gained attention and prominence. My analysis, unfortunately, suggests that this is, as yet, rather a euphemism. Present drafts of modern migration management, may that be Ghosh’ (2000) ‘New International Regime for the Orderly Movement of People’, Straubhaar’s (2000) ‘General Agreement on the Movement of People’, or Veenkamp’s (2003) vision of privately sponsored ‘People flows’ have in common, that they repeat many of the traditional ideas of immigration policy. These are, for example, the unilateral emphasis of the interests of the receiving countries; political or economic selection mechanisms which will inevitably involve to exclusion processes of migrants that are perceived unwanted; the involvement of restrictive elements; and the exclusion of human agency from the policy and decision making processes. Consequently, the principle conflict would continue to exist.

In trying to escape the migration dilemma, research suggests to apply the methodology of reframing. Looking at migration one could ask whether migrants too have legitimate interests to be taken into account in migration policies? Is there something that could be done about those legislations and administrations that lead to the irregularisation of migrants? Could it not be that the problem lies with the receiving societies and its institutions, which do not seem to be prepared and able to integrate permanent and temporary newcomers? One may even ask, what can be done with a world where so many people are forced to search in other countries for better opportunities?

In order to discus possible answers, five variables are listed along which the migration dilemma could be addressed:

1. One is the anthropological continuum of human mobility analysing it as a normal anthropological behaviour. It seems misleading to perceive migration as a deviation from the norm of sedentary lives thereby representing a problem. This calls for an appropriate policy that seeks to manage instead to confront human geographic mobility. By changing perspective, one could, in principle, ask if it would not be possible to facilitate the movement of people and manage it in an orderly fashion, since it does not appear possible to restrict the movement of people.