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Migration and Development: The Flavour of the 2000s

2012; Wiley; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1468-2435.2012.00758.x

1468-2435

Birgitte Mossin Brønden,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

In Hans Christian Andersen's tale "The Emperor's New Clothes", the emperor decides that he has to go through with the procession – showing off his purportedly magnificent clothing – even after an innocent child cries out that the emperor has not got anything on. For quite some time he continues to parade stark naked as noblemen of wisdom maintain that the clothes are magnificent for various reasons … The fairy tale obviously reminds us to make use of our critical senses. It also reminds us that interests sometimes overrule the ability of even the wisest to provide much-needed sharp observations. To this, we add that in order to be constructive and make evidence-based policy recommendations, one must be ready to deconstruct first. Over a decade has elapsed since the issue of migration and development surged to the top of the international development agenda and gained the attention of both policymakers and academics. The "discovery" of the positive role that migration could play in development centred on the potential of migration to deliver remittances to the global South. Thus, in the early 2000s the World Bank, other donors and a range of development actors took a "renewed"1 policy interest in the migration–development "nexus", a notion introduced in a Special Issue of this Journal in 2002 (Sørensen et al., 2002).2 Since then, donors have attempted to "make migration work for the poor in the global South"3 and/or to manage migration better through combined policies that include aid policies, immigration policies in the broad sense, border enforcement initiatives and other aspects of external relations with countries of origin. At the other end, developing countries' governments have directed new attention towards "their diasporas", 4 although often merely wooing them rather than seriously including them. Over the years, the interest has been reflected in the work of institutions ranging from the Global Forum on International Migration and Development to local-level diaspora associations. Additionally, analysis and discussions of the migration and development nexus have appeared in a plethora of reports, books and articles that, importantly, include the discourse regarding the migrant as a transnational agent in development. This discourse was based on the insight into the transnational lives of migrants that migration increased the possibilities for migrants and their families to live transnationally and adopt transnational identities. This discourse had come into migration studies earlier, through the work of Basch and her colleagues (1994) and Vertovec (1999), and included the notion of social remittances or the transfer of human capital and social ideas and practices, in which the work of Levitt (see, inter alia, Levitt, 1999, 2001a,b) became important. Another part of the picture is that, throughout the decade, the migration and development nexus has been scrutinized and looked upon critically by acknowledged experts in the field who have continued the critical and cautious (when it comes to the intersection with policy recommendations) approach connected to the original coining of the term by Sørensen et al. (2002). These readings of the migration–development hype have, not least, questioned the basis of policy interest in the field and the premises of conventional wisdom on migration and development at each point in time (Glick Schiller and Faist, 2009). Currently, it is argued by several critical observers – among them, Skeldon (2008) and Glick Schiller and Faist (2009)– that the appealing magic of migration–development policies that purport to be able to bring about "win–win–win situations", where the migrant, the sending country and the receiving country all have a positive outcome has, in reality, served as a façade for a range of other purposes stemming from a North-driven agenda. To mention some of these, migration–development initiatives have been criticized for being used: as the human face of neoliberalism (de Haas, 2010); as a sort of diffraction, or relegation, of more extreme ideas regarding how to stem migration, floating in the interior politics of a donor country (Sørensen, 2010); and as a carrot in the EU's bargains with transit countries (Lavenex and Kunz, 2008). Others have pointed out that the resources put into migration–development policies in the 2000s are actually rather marginal in comparison to how much talk there has been about them in the donor milieu (see, e.g., Bakewell, 2008). A decade after this surge of interest started, we find it pertinent to ask where "we"– referring to the international development community, broadly defined – stand today with regard to the migration and development nexus. What has come out of this wave of interest, the policy/practice debate and the critique it has raised? Knowing that the nexus has been variously described as unsettled and, later, as "hype" or a panacea for development, we wonder whether its history can be likened to the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes". However, not even the most critical researcher would say that there is nothing to the interlinkages between migration and development, or even that policymakers should not take interest in the migration–development nexus; the emperor is not entirely naked. Nevertheless, the critique suggests that the clothes are not as magnificent as certain agenda-setting men and women (or rather institutions) of wisdom maintain they are, or were proclaimed to be at the outset. All this begs the question of whether this is yet another story of one of the trends in the international development community that dip in and out of fashion. Our main objective is not to cry out that the emperor is naked. Rather, we hope to use a lucid and critical examination of the actual migration and development nexus to answer the following questions: What new perspectives on migration and development ought the international development community to take into consideration today? What are the possible avenues for future policy-making in the migration–development field? We seek to contribute to a progressive amplification of the insight into the nexus with subsequent improved policies. With this in mind, we convened a conference at the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen in January 2011, under the title "The Migration Development Mantra: Retained, Rejected or Reinvented?" We invited scholars who had written extensively on migration and development, together with practitioners who had worked with the migration–development agenda and had insights into the political process connected to the migration–development nexus. We challenged them to address the questions, taking into account how shifting "background policy developments" such as, for instance, transforming geopolitical concerns and changing national policy environments (re-nationalizing endeavours to ensure a so-called "national coherency") have affected the nexus. The conference embraced very different prisms and examples. The meeting was prefaced by two statements from the UN Special Representative on Migration, Peter Sutherland, who underscored that "the sustained focus on migration and development creates a political space in which governments can focus on the positive aspects of migration" and referred to evidence that "Migration is contributing to the fight against the greatest scourge we face – poverty." It also included a presentation by the Dutch consultancy HIT Foundation that had, at that point in time, under the heading of a circular migration pilot project (as part of the Dutch Migration and Development portfolio and in cooperation with the World Bank), initiated a controlled temporary migration programme designed with the clear objective of fulfilling labour needs in the Netherlands and ensuring return and reintegration of the migrants involved (the programme was later abandoned, with the official explanation that it had been too difficult to implement). But, overall, the conference actually bore the impress of several critical perspectives regarding the migration and development mantras. Among these, the contradictions inherent in notions of migrants as both agents of development and as potential threats to host country security were highlighted. The presentations and discussions from the DIIS conference provide the backbone for this Special Issue. Herein, the authors discuss various aspects of the migration–development discourses currently floating among development actors and shed light on the questions raised above. Hein de Haas reminds us that migration and development is anything but a new topic. The debate about migration and development has swung back and forth like a pendulum between optimism and pessimism in the postwar period. He points out that these shifts are rooted in deeper ideological paradigmatic shifts, and that that recent views celebrating migration as self-help from below are partly driven by neoliberal ideologies that shift the attention away from structural constraints. Thereby, his paper goes hand in hand with Sørensen's paper, which – later in the issue – explores the nexus between migration, development and security, and alludes to a need to redirect the gaze from individual migrants to structural problems. 5 Migration and development cannot be seen in isolation from wider issues of global power, wealth and inequality. The simplistic ideas and assumptions among development actors about the relationship between migration and development that appeared in the optimistic phase of the 2000s make up what Mossin Brønden and Vammen, in their paper, argue can be characterized as an "international buzz". Examining how two donor countries have approached the nexus in recent years in the context of the buzz, they add to a description of "where the international development community stands today regarding migration and development policy". They take particular interest in looking empirically at the ways in which it has been feasible to work with migration–development links taking into account various interests and the national political climates regarding development aid and immigration policies. The theme of whether the buzz or the mantras have a tendency to dip in and out of fashion is taken up by de Haas, as well as Mossin Brønden and Vammen, with the suggestion that we might be past the peak of interest in migration and development – a suggestion that had previously also been made by Skeldon (2008). This points to the necessity of avoiding repeating the same mistakes – especially to avoid oversimplification. All the evidence points to the complexity of the migration–development nexus, and the implications of the studies and insights already out there must be more seriously taken into account. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater – the reaction of those whose high expectations have been disappointed should not be allowed to rule. Only time will tell, however, if the High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development planned for 2013 and/or individual nation-states and international organizations will endow the migration–development debate with renewed impetus and keep it on the international agenda. Currently, situations such as the one following the Arab Spring keeps migration firmly in the loop of public attention, although with a strong securitized and migration management twist. Two authors deconstruct particular aspects of the migration–development discourses floating among development actors and problematize various parts of the dominant paradigms, opening up a more insightful way of thinking about policy in the field. Sørensen scrutinizes the pairs migration–development and migration–security, and she points out that only by seriously considering (a) the intersection between rising poverty and insecurity levels in the South, (b) the continuous demand for cheap labour in the North, and (c) border enforcement initiatives that knowingly increase the costs and mortal risks of migration can the migration–development nexus become more than a mantra for the actors involved. Ronald Skeldon questions whether circular migration – one of the central concepts in vogue in policy circles currently – can be clearly identified as a particular type of population mobility. He examines the antecedents of the idea of circulation and the consequences of circular migration for human welfare, in order to critically scrutinize the role of policy intervention in connection with circular migration and discuss policy options. In 2008, Castles and Delgado Wise pertinently asked what people in the South thought about international migration trying to redress the balance, by initiating a South–South dialogue on migration and development. The focus of this issue is a discussion of the North's approach to migration and development but, inspired by Castles and Wise, the picture is nuanced through the paper by Hansen that takes up the difficulties faced by poor developing countries to effectively formulate and implement migration–development policies. He argues that current Tanzanian remittance and diaspora policies are not based on knowledge of transnational practices but, rather, on general notions of the phenomena that are circulated among powerful international development institutions. He also points out that the optimism among some Tanzanian government officials in fact collides with other policy considerations of the same government. Finally, the tendency of policymakers broadly to regard migration as a phenomenon that can and should be managed and controlled is notable across the papers in general. De Haas, Vammen and Mossin Brønden, Skeldon and Sorensen all direct attention to the need to address migrant rights, and the need for legal channels for higher- and lower-skilled migration and for integration policies that favour socio-economic mobility of migrants and avoid their marginalization, if real development outcomes are to be obtained in countries of origin. The Special Issue is rounded off by a cross-cutting commentary reflecting on the state of the art of migration and development by Glick Schiller, which brings the papers together in a discussion about current and future directions in the field. A common theme across the papers is that migration is a recurring phenomenon. The understanding of migration as a key aspect of the social transformation affecting all parts of the world today must continue to be the basis of thinking on migration governance internationally and on migration and development. This conclusion in particular calls for migration and mobility patterns in any given developing country to be part of the background knowledge necessary for any development policy. The understanding of the migration and development nexus is still essential for the implementation of development policy, and there are both thorough studies and insights and pertinent policies out there. Thus, we need to ensure that the emperor's wardrobe is updated – that it is neither discarded nor overrated, but worn with open eyes.