Towards an Emigration Study: A South Perspective[1]
(DRAFT)
Xiang Biao
The study of international migration is so far mainly a study of immigration. Except a few cases, such as emigrations from the Philippines, South Korea and Mexico, little attention has been given to countries of origin. Research projects are predominantly motivated by concerns of receiving societies, funded by agencies in destination countries, and based on data collected on the receiving side. Despite the increasingly popular notion of “transnationalism” which emphasises that migration process should be examined in both the sending and receiving contexts, countries of origin come to the picture more as a background than the focus. Central to the literature of transnationalism is the concern of how emigrants and their home communities interact after people left (e.g. how emigration affects sending societies, particularly by means of sending back money, information and ideas) rather than how people become emigrants, how emigration emergences as a desirable and feasible choice of life, and how this process intertwines with other social and economic phenomena. Gardner and Osella (2003: vi) have pointed out that: “[i]ndeed, there has been a startlingly northern bias in much research which, whilst focusing largely upon the places which ‘receive’ overseas migrants and where diasporic communities are constituted… generally has little to say about the places which they leave behind”. While places left behind are under-researched, even much less has been done on how people are emigrating from the home place’s point of view. More fundamentally, the transnationalism literature focuses on migration process itself rather than broader social changes of the sending society. This point became particularly clear once one compares the discussions on emigration to that on immigration: it is almost “natural” for immigration research to link migration to larger issues of the receiving society such as employment, cultural coherence and political solidarity, but emigration is hardly treated in the same way and is rarely examined in relation to the sending society’s welfare (with the exception of discussions on “brain drain”).
Why an emigration study?
The knowledge gap in migration study consequent of the immigration-bias became particularly salient in the beginning of the 21st century at least for five reasons:
First, it is often ignored that change in emigration patterns formed one of most fundamental developments in the international migration regime in the last decades, arguably more than the shift in immigration policies. Zolberg (2001: 11) argues that
one of the major changes in the world at large is the liberalization of exit; this is true not only of the former Communist countries, nearly all of which maintained draconian prohibitions on exit – except for groups considered ‘undesirable’, or on hose behalf western countries obtained special treatment – but, more importantly, of the entire postcolonial world. It is often forgotten that prior to independence … the movement of European colonial subjects to their respective metropoles was severely restricted, and this was even more true for movement to foreign states, which required obtainment of a passport. The sense of ‘crisis’ undoubtedly is attributable in large part to the fact that the liberalization of exit world-wide shifted the burden of control on potential receivers.
Based on a review of immigration policies over the last decades, Massey (2003) points out that Western immigration policies since WWII were based on the assumption that the communist world would work assiduously to prevent emigration from occurring in the first place. When this assumption collapsed, the immigration policies and particularly the policies on political refugees cannot sustain any more. In-depth understanding of the new emigration dynamisms are therefore urgently needed in order to form realistic views of on-going international migration and to devise effective policies.
However it is wrong to think that emigration has always been neglected. Emigration in fact dominated the writing of the early history of modern migration. The entire colonial history is to a great extent a history of emigration, including “active/primary emigration” from Europe to the colonies and “passive/secondary emigration” from Africa and Asia of slaves and indentured labour. It was only after WWII did the narrative of international migration become immigration focused. This shift from one extreme to the other in fact reflects the continuity of the power structure of the world: at the early stage the West was the centre and therefore West-originated emigrations formed the defining force of global population mobility, while in the nation-state era the West (though geographically not identical to the old West) as receiving countries remain dominant and world migration is subject to its decisions of admission or rejection.
But this power structure faces serious challenges now, at least in the field of migration. Facilitated by the unprecedented advances in communication and transport technologies, migrants are more able than before to circumvent government regulations and develop their own strategies of mobility. Kearney (1995) suggests that the world capitalist system has entered a phase of “implosion”. As opposed to the earlier explosive outward movement of capitalism’s power from the core to periphery, now the periphery is actively making inroad to the core and changing it, as exemplified by the so-called “Caribbeanisation of New York City” as a result of the large numbers of Caribbean immigrants (cited in Kearney 1995: 554). Though the word “implosion” may overstate migrants’ capacity, it is clear that the early emigration-focused narrative as a reflection of the explosion of world capitalism and the immigration-focused narrative corresponding to the nation-state system are both insufficient.
“Implosion” is far more than migrants’ physical moving in. Based on their global ethnographic study of Fujianese migrants from southeastern China, Pieke et al (2004) see globalisation as a process where different social and cultural forces compete with each other at a global stage, and globalisation in their case is as universal as it is Chinese. The “Chinese globalisation” is fundamentally part of the social and economic change undertaking in China, and the global mobility of the Fujianese is only one manifestation of this among many others. From this point of view, how the Fujianese enter a particular country (the moment of immigration) is not as important as how emigration is constructed as a choice of life and how mobility is coordinated through widespread yet home place centred networks. Therefore, focusing on immigration in the narrow sense without understanding emigration from the emigration society’s view, we are set to lose sight of some profound changes in the global society and the dynamisms of “implosion”.
Second, there is an increasingly popular sense from the early 1990s that international migration has became supply-side driven and receiving countries can do little to protect their own interest. Words such as “influx” and “invasion” are commonly used in describing immigration; and a new term, “Invasian”, flagged in newspaper headlines in New Zealand to alarm the “invasion” by Asian immigrants. An influential book by the well-known professor in international relations, Myron Weiner (1995), The Global Migration Crisis, brings home the widespread sense of crisis among Western countries. This is despite the fact that the current scale of emigration from developing countries is literally negligible compared to emigration from Europe in its industrialisation era: between 1846 and 1924, Britain exported nearly half of its demographic growth and about 41 per cent of its entire population of the year 1900 (Massey 2003: 2, 18). For India and China, their current emigration rates are also much lower than theirs during the period from 1850 to WWI.
Even worse, the fear turns emigration into a highly politicised issue. A recent report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) of the United States blatantly accuses some emigration countries for their insidious motivations (NIC, 2001: 30):
The United States will remain vulnerable to explicit or implicit threats by foreign governments to use illegal and especially mass emigration as leverage in bilateral relations or to reduce political pressures arising from domestic policy failure… China is capable of facilitating the efforts of substantial numbers of potential emigrants” [to gain benefits from the United States].
Apart from China, the report also mentioned Cuba and Haiti as countries that may use emigration as a political tool though no evidence was given how these countries could possibly do it. It seems that history has gone a full circle: while the Carter administration set more freedom to emigration from the Soviet Union as a precondition for granting it the most-favoured-nation status in the 1970s (Brzezinski 1983: 416), now a number of European countries are considering to withdraw their official development aid to countries who are deemed not cooperative enough in curbing irregular emigration. In January 1979, on Deng Xiaoping’s landmark trip to the United States, Carter urged Deng to be flexible on emigration from China, Deng asked back: “We’ll let them go. Are you prepared to accept ten million?” (Brzezinski 1983: 407) Whereas the restriction of emigration and Deng’s answer were then seen as evidence for China’s indifference about human rights, now the perceived large-scale emigration are used as proof for China’s bad human rights situation (e.g. Chin 1998 and various press reports and Western official documents on Chinese illegal migration). Obviously the public in immigration countries need to be informed whether this fear and the politicisation have their grounds in the reality of the sending side.
Third, related to the fear, a few Western countries have attempted to link sending countries’ control over emigration with development aid and even foreign policy in general: countries perceived not to do enough in controlling illegal migration would be punished through these means. This stance was explicated by various EC documents and speeches by some European leaders, most notably Tony Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. The European Union (2002) has formally stated that:
The European Council considers it necessary to carry out a systematic assessment of relations with third countries which do not cooperate in combating illegal immigration. That assessment will be taken into account in relations between the European Union and its Member States and the countries concerned, in all relevant areas. Inadequate cooperation by a country could hamper the establishment of closer relations between that country and the Union.
Emigration through irregular means has become almost a standard topic for discussion during high-level official visits by Chinese leaders to Europe. However, it is far from clear whether it is realistic to expect governments of developing countries to control “illegal emigration” effectively in the short-term and whether this pressure would create social problems far more severe than irregular emigration itself in developing countries.
Fourth, there are also more constructive initiatives to link emigration management to development which again requires detailed knowledge on emigration in order to make these programmes sustainable. As early as in July 1991, the G-7 nations called for international organisations to explore ways to accelerate “stay-at-home development”: to encourage would-be emigrants to stay home. Along this line, some European countries have proposed the notion of “co-development”. France's Inter-ministerial Mission on Co-development and International Migration held a conference in July 2000 that defined co-development as combining immigration control efforts with efforts to bolster “stay-at-home development” in migrants' countries of origin. Some co-development programmes grant migrant communities abroad an official role in helping build up home country’s economy (see Vitorino 2000; European Union 1999).
More recently, some receiving countries, particularly those in Europe, further acknowledged the importance of the “partnership with the countries of origin” in devising migration policies (Commission of the European Communities, 2000). This has been experimented mainly in the form of bilateral agreement and multilateral consultation. For example Italy and Albania have signed an agreement on labour migrant quota, control of illegal migrants, and related development aid. The European Union High Level Working Group on Asylum and Migration was set up in 1998 to enhance the cooperation among EU countries as well between receiving, sending and transit countries in controlling migration. So far the Group has selected five emigration countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Somalia and Sri Lanka) to explore cooperation in three integrated categories: foreign policy, development assistance, and migration and asylum (European Union High Level Working Group on Asylum and Migration 1999). This is intended to be “a first attempt by the European Union to define a comprehensive and coherent approach targeted at the situation in a number of important countries of origin or transit of asylum-seekers and migrants.” (ibid) Sweden created the post of State Secretary for Development Cooperation, Migration and Asylum Policy which reflects the recognition that migration happens mainly outside of Sweden and the issue should not be left to the ministry of interior affairs as most European countries do (see Olesen 2002: 134).
International agencies have also been active in promoting this approach. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has been advocating for a “cluster approach”, referring to the practice to bring groups of sending, transit and receiving countries to work together in a coordinated manner. Concrete examples include the Forum for Dialogue on Migration in the Western Mediterranean, also known as the “5+5 Dialogue”, participated by Algeria, France, Italy, Libya, Malta, Mauritania, Morocco, Portugal, Spain and Tunisia: five immigration and five emigration countries, thus the name. The main activities of the programme include regular and informal consultation to exchange experiences of successful practices. Apart from these, there are the Manila Process on irregular migration in Asia Pacific, the Budapest Process to prevent irregular migration in the wider European region, and the Peubla Process which aims to protect the southern border of the United States by enhancing cooperation among countries in South and Middle Americas.
Although the approach is laudable, a quick survey reveals that specific measures along this approach have not been very successful. For example the French-Mali agreement, a flagship “co-development” programme, requires France to pay US$3,600 to each unauthorised Malian migrant to return, and to provide loans to Malians who returned to set up businesses. But the Malians with French loans faced difficulties once running out of the loans because of their lack of track records and local connections in Mali which are crucial for getting additional support back home (S. Martin et al 2002). The bilateral agreement between Italy and Albania is now in a fragile state as Italy failed to grant Albania quotas for migrant labour in 2002 as agreed on earlier. The dialogue between Mexico and the United States on migration had raised high expectations, but was shelved after the 9/11 attacks (for a brief review of these bilateral initiatives, see S. Martin et al 2002).