2.3 What does inclusive growth add to our understanding of migration and development?

In Week 1, we looked at the general idea of IG; this week, we have been looking at the complex linkages between migration and development. In this section, we want to bring these two aspects together by looking at migration and IG together.

IG contains elements of different theories, but is more in what de Haas would call the pluralist camp: it seeks to combine social and cultural factors with economic ones, and to give us a more nuanced understanding of the levels and geographical factors that link migration and development outcomes.

Let’s start by revisiting the MIAG framework that you looked at in Week 1. Take a minute to refresh your memory of the framework, which seeks to capture the interplay of economic and non-economic factors for well-being outcomes.

Figure 2.3 MIAG framework.

In the rest of this week, we are primarily concerned with the outcomes for IG, whereas in Week 4 we focus more on the red part of the framework at the bottom of Figure 2.3, which relates to the policy implications. The challenge we need to consider is how we combine the economic and non-economic factors in researching and analysing migration. The following activity involves hearing from various migration experts reflecting on how they have attempted to grapple with these issues. Then the following two activities give you the opportunity to look at real data to get hands-on experience of trying such an analysis for yourself.

Activity 2.4: Linking migration and IG

Timing: Allow approximately 30 minutes

This activity involves watching Videos 2.2–2.5, which include extracts from a webinar that took place in November 2021. The webinar brought together world-leading experts on migration and development and was structured as a conversation rather than discrete presentations. They are:

As you watch, reflect on the following questions and identify the issues where the speakers agreed and differed:

  1. What did the speakers think we should look at when considering the linkages between migration and development?
  2. What mechanisms did the speakers identify that link migration and development outcomes?
  3. What is the appropriate geographical framing for looking at migration and development?
  4. In broad terms, what did they feel should be done to enhance the contribution of migration to development?
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Transcript: Video 2.2 Theme 1: How are migration and development linked?

Dilip Ratha:
Migration is integral to development. It’s integral in the sense that these two are not separable, and it’s for the simple reason that, if by ‘development’ we mean somebody doing or someplace doing better than other people or other places, there would be mobility. And by the way, that goes the other way around: if somebody is doing worse, or some place is doing worse, than other people or other places, there will be also movement appropriately. So, migration is integral to development, and if we don’t allow that process to work – that people are able to move – then some people are getting hurt in a big way. And the community as a whole is hurt also, in a big way, but we don’t know by how much.
Oliver Bakewell:
From our perspective, they are fundamentally intertwined. Without migration mobility, there is going to be no change in development. But at the same time, development, social change, will affect the way people move. The two things are completely intertwined. I do tend to see migration mobility perhaps as more fundamental – it’s just such a basic part of human life. And you can talk to the demographers, and one of the confusing things to them is people are born, then they move around the world, and then they die somewhere else. And that’s what we do as human beings.
Heaven Crawley:
MIDEQ stands for ‘Migration for Development and Equality’, and I suppose it kind of captures what we see as being the relationship, in a sense, which is that we see that migration has the potential to contribute towards development, but also towards equality. And so at the heart of the way in which we’re looking at these issues is this relationship. Not just between migration and development, but rather between migration and inequalities and equality in the context of development, because there’s no necessary, linear or simple relationship between migration and development, as we know, and as you’ve talked about. So our focus of our work in MIDEQ is really specifically on south–south migration.
Dilip Ratha:
People say that the root causes of migration, the fundamental drivers of migration –poverty, inequality, unemployment, all the bad things – that’s a developing country problem. And the rich country problem is integrating all these people and trying to keep the flows minimal, so that the social contract between the state and the people in the rich countries is not somehow undermined. That dichotomy is failing. That dichotomy – I mean, recently you had the truck driver issues in the UK, the whole supply chain issue globally, it has a lot to do with migrants and migratory flows. And I think both rich countries, as senders of migrants and recipients of migrants, is very much true. The same way for poor countries, I think the issue of integrating immigration or dealing with challenges posed to native-born workers by foreign-born workers is very, very tangible as well. So, truly migration is a global development issue.
Heaven Crawley:
If we were to talk about the inequalities that underpin that, we’d have a very different conversation. And part of that conversation would be how global capitalism is working, and how it’s exploiting, both within the periphery and outside, to its own advantage. With the consequences to the human beings that are involved. So I think a conversation about inequality takes us to a very different place in terms of how we think about this conceptually, but also politically.
Dilip Ratha:
The really big question that we have not been able to address, either as a research community or in the World Bank: this whole issue of the social contract between the nation states and the people. If a country suddenly has a lot of migrants and the population increases the share of the new people – if that exceeds half of the population, in a democracy they would have the power, right? So who does a nation belong to? Who does the nation state belong to? Or this whole question of nation and state being connected – are they really connected or should they not be connected anymore?
Oliver Bakewell:
The trouble with much of our analysis of development – especially that coming from development studies – is it pays far too little attention to people’s movement. We conceptualise development in a rather static way. We are thinking about states, the development of states. And as Dilip was suggesting, when a lot of people move to a new place, it raises all sorts of questions. What does the state look like now? What is the nation? How do we measure the success –the change in development of that place – if people are coming and going from it? States or geographical regions as containers of development, I think maybe is quite problematic.
End transcript: Video 2.2 Theme 1: How are migration and development linked?
Video 2.2 Theme 1: How are migration and development linked?
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Transcript: Video 2.3 Theme 2: What mechanisms link migration and development?

Heaven Crawley:
An instinct might be to say, ‘Well then, people shouldn’t be allowed to migrate, because you’re creating inequalities’ – but that fails to take note of the really important point, which is that it’s the better off people that migrate in the first place. I mean, we know from almost every context where we work in, that where people are living in extreme poverty with no resources, those are not the people who are able to move.
Oliver Bakewell:
Cross-border trade is really, really important. One of the casualties, if you like, of the way that we are talking about migration – so often it comes into discussion about borders and about how we manage what goes on at borders. I’m thinking of the cross-border movements I’ve seen on Zambia, Angola, but also in between Sudan and Ethiopia, where the day-to-day crossings are vitally important for people’s livelihoods.
They’re sanctioned and enabled by the border officials who are there – but there’s no paperwork, necessarily. It’s completely informally done, but it’s recognised and accepted. And I think that’s one of the dangers of trying to work out how those sorts of informal institutions of cross-border trade can be sustained in the face of this concern about regularising, controlling, taking the fingerprints, and all that stuff of the well-managed border.
Heaven Crawley:
We do that through the kind of construct of a migration corridor that’s used by others – including Dilip, I know – because what we’re interested in is not just the impact or the consequences of migration in the countries to which migrants go, but also the two-way flows, the relationships, between countries of origin, if you like, and countries of destination. Because I’m sure we’ll hear more from Dilip about remittances for example, but those flows are more than just remittances.
Dilip Ratha:
Big news is that remittances are no longer small change. Since 2015, if you excluded China from the group of low- and middle-income countries, remittances are now larger than both official development assistance, official aid, and foreign direct investment that goes through all the multinational companies together – meaning remittances are larger than both ODA and FDI together. On average, remittances from the north – so that means high-income OECD countries – was about four times the average size of remittances coming from the poorer countries.
Then the real interesting question in dollar terms here is the values are higher – but in terms of impact on poverty, which one is better? And I kind of think that south–south migration might have a deeper impact on poverty reduction. But then there are other links, like trade tourism, investment skill transfers, technology transfers, philanthropy and then impacts on values. And of all of them, and I say that with having searched for tangible things about all other things, but I have not found a lot other than anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes.
Heaven Crawley:
Migration is really just a consequence, often, of other things, including inequalities. So we’re really interested in how inequalities drive migration, potentially, but also how migration can itself help to reduce inequality. So, for example, we know that migration can reduce inequalities and contribute to development through remittances, through the exchange of opportunities for education, the transfer of other things – but it can also increase inequalities by, for example, accelerating those differences within communities.
For example, our research is showing that within southern Ethiopia, the remittance transfers back are actually creating inequalities in the region where most migrants come from. Some communities, some families, can access healthcare, education, employment opportunities, businesses, that others can’t. And so there’s inequalities being generated or reinforced in countries of origin as well as the countries to which migrants travel. There are flows of knowledge, ideas, relationships, interactions, culture, music – there are multiple different ways in which these flows take place.
End transcript: Video 2.3 Theme 2: What mechanisms link migration and development?
Video 2.3 Theme 2: What mechanisms link migration and development?
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Transcript: Video 2.4 Theme 3: Over what geographical scales do we study migration and development?

Heaven Crawley:
Migration, as we know, is embedded in the context in which it takes place: in the social context, the political context, the economic context, and the relationships between those different dimensions. And so to look at migration, I would argue – as somebody who works in migration, this might seem a little odd – but I would say that the biggest problem with migration research is that it focuses on migration.
Oliver Bakewell:
My viewpoint is: the movement within Africa, it’s another continent like all the others, and there’s not necessarily such a huge difference. So rather than looking at African migration as a special thing, many things about the movement, like these questions of integration: there’s fascinating things going on where the majority of people, migrants from Africa, move to other parts of the continent. There’s virtually no integration policies across the continent.
Heaven Crawley:
There’s much that we could and need to know about migration itself, but it’s ultimately embedded in context – and those contexts are incredibly different. And you know, what happens at different ends of the corridors also is very different. So you can’t presuppose that, even if you had forms of movement, forms of experience of migration that are similar, the consequences will be different – because they’re embedded in entirely different contexts.
We mustn’t sort of, well, reduce the south to being singular in its experience, or Africa. I mean, we’re talking about a continent that’s as big as four of the main continents on the planet. The complexity and the diversity of that migration is huge, absolutely huge. And only by understanding that diversity, I think, can we really get to what’s going on. We have, if you like, the kind of core and periphery of north and south, but we also have cores and peripheries within the south, within the north – and indeed within both sets of countries.
Dilip Ratha:
The other thing is – again, Heaven alluded to that – south–south migration is larger than south–north migration. And in Africa, 70% of the cross-border migration is within Africa. And the developmental links, particularly through remittances but in other ways, are actually broken in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa. So you had the migration – south–south migration and international migration – very, very significant in terms of size and in its importance to the economies and to households, to people. But developmental links are actually fragmented, disrupted, ruptured because of policy, and there should be many low-hanging fruits there to harvest.
End transcript: Video 2.4 Theme 3: Over what geographical scales do we study migration and development?
Video 2.4 Theme 3: Over what geographical scales do we study migration and development?
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Transcript: Video 2.5 Theme 4: What policy responses might we imagine?

Dilip Ratha:
National boundaries are lines in the sand that we have drawn and winds of change will blow them away. We know that, right? But that is not being talked about. That is why we have the conflict constantly, and that’s why it seems like us versus them and all sorts of issues. So it becomes very difficult and I think I know by raising that issue I make the whole issue very intractable.
So then we kind of do what we are more able to do, which is focus on a few issues, bringing the whole challenge down to a few practical issues, and then try to sort them out. So go more the bottom-up way rather than the top-down way. I think that makes sense.
Oliver Bakewell:
The borders do matter. People are crossing them and they’re crossing them in ways which aren’t necessarily regulated by states. That doesn’t mean they’re not regulated, but states don’t necessarily have the laws in place, the policies. But people still move and it’s accepted as local conventions which enable that to happen.
Heaven Crawley:
It’s not that there has to be a policy solution for everything. There is a tendency – particularly in migration, I think – to think we need policies for everything. And a lot of things, a lot of the problems that are created in the migration world, are caused by policies. We know that, in terms of preventing people from moving across borders, returning, people become trapped. The fact that they’re not able to do what they would choose to do, they have to be constrained within these policy frameworks that are often very artificial, and as others have said, designed as much I think to appeal to an internal audience as much as an external one.
Oliver Bakewell:
There’s a whole sort of set of incentives to develop policies which look good internationally. I often have great doubts about how far many large parts of the state actually buy into that, and buy into those concerns and interests. Because there’s so many other interests on migration about business interests, about people moving back and forth, people need the labour, the trade. And if you try to follow too much of the policy, especially when you’re talking about the borders – we’re not talking about airports, we talking about the land borders. The resources you’d need to make it look like European, well-managed migration – come on, we could do something better with development money than invest in that!
Dilip Ratha:
At a more practical level, what can we do? On facilitating remittances we can do a few things, very easy to do, but then we get into the whole issue of the Homeland Security type or interior affairs ministries of every country in the world, every country in the world. So I’m not saying it is only UK or US, it is also India and Nigeria and Mexico. Everywhere in the world.
The interior ministry and the treasury ministry and the development ministry don’t get along. I mean, you know, that’s why they are there as separate entities. So that also is there. I feel it very much in my work on a day-to-day basis. So even small things, like introducing fintech and recognising that small remittances are not money laundering, is very difficult.
The other sort of broad-brush message that is dawning on me more recently is that we have been thinking about addressing root causes of migration by creating employment, reduce poverty, all the good things – and that’s a win-win. Of course we should reduce poverty, of course we should share prosperity, and migration is the best way of sharing prosperity – absolutely the best way.
So I had a meeting with a World Bank president once, and he asked, ‘What can we do about reducing poverty?’ And I said, ‘How fast do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘You want to reduce world poverty in one year? Open up the borders. You will see. Just open up the borders all over the world.’
Heaven Crawley:
The problem with the policies, of course, is they almost always are quite similar. Even in Africa now, you have quite similar policies to those that we’ve seen in the Global North over recent years. So I think is really a point about the interrelationship between migration and the spatial context, but how that’s being flattened out if you like, by the political debate and how the inequalities underpinning it are also being flattened out because people aren’t talking about them. They’re only talking about the kind of physical manifestation of those inequalities, which is, in many cases, the movement of people.
When you talk about exploitation of people in labour markets in many different contexts, part of that exploitation comes from the fact that they’re migrants, but part of it comes from the fact of their irregularity or uncertainty, or the lack of longevity around that status. Many of the inequalities that we’re seeing are not intrinsic to migration, but a reflection of the policies that are put in place to manage it, or the absence of those policies – when I’m talking, for example, about the lack of status and the lack of rights that migrants have in many contexts.
A lot of the work that’s been done around access to justice and rights for migrants is rightly oriented towards the employment sphere, but that’s hardly the only one that matters. They also have aspirations in relation to education for themselves and their children, access to healthcare – there are multiple other ways in which people feel they have injustices in the migration experience.
Oliver Bakewell:
I agree with Heaven that, actually, we need to move a lot of the focus away from migration. It’s – again, as both Dilip and Heaven have suggested – it’s often seen as a problem to be managed and addressed. I think in terms of policy and practice, moving that focus will probably be very helpful. But as analysts, I think we still have a lot more work to do in terms of understanding how migration filters through into the way we conceptualise the world, conceptualise processes like development.
So it’s try to understand – so rather than focusing on migration as something to be tackled, it’s an underlying process. It’s there, and how do we bring that into our analysis of the things, the politics, the sociology, the economics of the world that we see around us?
Heaven Crawley:
Basically, you need to create more, what you might call safe and legal pathways to migration. You know, people become illegal because there are no other opportunities to leave. It’s very straightforward. And the demand, because of reasons of demographic change and otherwise, is very high for that movement to happen, including to Europe. It’s really about the political will to do it.
I mean, I’ve personally, after sort of 30 years of this, come to the conclusion that, as much as anything, we need to get that evidence to different people. Not to politicians and policy-makers, but to groups of interested parties who have potentially not had nothing to do with migration in the past, but are interested in issues of social justice and injustice, and can mobilise around some of these issues – not in a way that focuses on migration, but focuses on inequality and in social injustice for large numbers of people who are being marginalised, including, but not exclusively, migrants.
So I think mobilising from the bottom up right now is probably the best way that we can try to do that, and by getting our evidence to those people and engaging them in that process, really.
Dilip Ratha:
I think the policy message has to shift from addressing root causes to putting up with migration means that we need to move away from keeping this issue in the south and say, ‘Let’s look at south–south migration, let’s look at only addressing the problems there,’ to sort of look at ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘Hey, what can we do to live with migration?’ I think we need to do that.
End transcript: Video 2.5 Theme 4: What policy responses might we imagine?
Video 2.5 Theme 4: What policy responses might we imagine?
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Discussion

The discussion was broad-ranging and jumped from quite focused and ‘tangible’ issues (like remittances) to very important global issues that have no obvious focus, such as climate change and the future of the nation state. All the speakers agreed that migration and development are closely intertwined, and saw mobility as central to development processes rather than something ‘wrong’ that needed to be managed away.

An interesting point raised by Dilip Ratha was that migration researchers may focus on something tangible or smaller-scale because it is manageable in terms of analysis or in recommending policy actions. As people who have done this for much of their professional careers, the speakers were not arguing that this was the wrong thing to do, but they were insistent that we must also look at the ‘bigger’ picture. For Dilip, one of these bigger issues was what he called the social contract between people and the state. He argued that nation states are somewhat artificial constructs, yet they exert a powerful force on all our lives even as they create huge contradictions and tensions as a result. We have inter-state conflicts, migrants are often stopped from moving by national borders and forced into illegality as a result, or ‘citizens’ may feel their nation is being swamped by migrants who are at the same time delivering vital services. He said that things like climate change showed the limitations of thinking in terms of territorial states because many powerful forces don’t operate by such logics.

Heaven Crawley usefully framed the links between migration and development as about inequality; she even argued that the issue is not the migration aspect but the inequality aspect. Inequality can drive migration and migration in turn shapes (in)equalities. If we take this view, she argued, then we need to understand what creates inequalities in the first places – such as capitalism – but equally to acknowledge that migration can only ever impact on these inequalities to a limited degree. At one point she discusses the point that only the better off migrate and that the really poor and the really rich rarely migrate, because the poor can’t afford to and the rich don’t need to. In this way, she also linked more focused issues of migration and inequality to much wider challenges around the ways in which capitalism creates winners and losers.

This insight about migration, inequality and development also opened a point that all speakers agreed upon about migration and development being a two-way process that links the different locations where migrants are living and where they are ‘from’. Heaven mentioned remittances and Oliver mentioned cross-border trade. This two-way set of flows also meant that we have to focus on the local contexts where migration is occurring.

The speakers also agreed that ‘development’ was much more than financial flows, like remittances. Dilip mentioned the ‘intangible’ aspects that people only discussed anecdotally, while the other speakers also mentioned things like skills, values, beliefs, etc. that are part of these two-way flows. It was interesting that researchers may focus on more tangible aspects like remittances and investments because they can be ‘counted’, whereas intangible aspects – like women’s equality – is harder to pin down and so gets relatively ignored.

Running through various discussions were important questions of scale and geography. All speakers noted that south–south migration is important, and that international migration is not just about south–north flows. Heaven also noted that ‘the south’ is not homogenous, so we must avoid talking in too general terms – which brings us back to the question of context being important. Another interesting aspect to this was an issue raised by Oliver about whether Africa was somehow ‘different’. His argument, echoed by the others, was that migration in, to and from Africa raises similar questions to other migration flows. He echoed Dilip in arguing that some of this is about the nation state and how well migrants are ‘integrated’ into their host societies; no country anywhere in the world has dealt with this well.

There was much discussion around policies and actions that respond to these migration and development challenges. We will return in more detail to this in Week 4 of this course, but some of the speakers’ provocations are worth noting here:

  • The first issue relates to the normality of migration. If we accept that migration is part and parcel of all development, then it should be encouraged. Policymakers and international organisations should do more to facilitate mobility, but this runs into the logic of the nation state system, which seeks to limit and control movement. This is one of the biggest tensions in the world today.
  • All agreed that there’s only so much that policy can achieve, and that we should not feel we need a policy for everything – Dilip talked about addressing more ‘tractable’ issues. Policies also tend to look similar and do not address contextual issues, and the speakers raised the issue of whether the audience for these policies are domestic constituencies or in fact international institutions, such as donors.
  • Heaven picked up on this to say that migration is always politicised and used by vested interests to make some political capital – for example, they may ‘blame’ migrants for some inequality, whereas the inequality was deep-seated and existed irrespective of migration.
  • Similarly, when discussing climate change and migration, commentators often see the problem as one of climate migrants coming to the Global North to escape poverty and ecological change, whereas the real problem is excessive consumption of goods, which generate greenhouse gases. In this case, migrants become the targets of political debate and so divert attention from the actual causes.

While these experts have many years of researching migration, we all have our own experiences and expertise. On these matters, as with all the social world, there are no unequivocally ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ opinions. So, you may wish to reflect on whether you agreed more with one or more of the speakers and, if so, why? There is no ‘correct’ answer. All standpoints are valid, and it is up to you to justify your own position using ideas and evidence.

From the activity, you can see that these experts tend to agree on a number of things that are central to our framing of migration and IG:

  • the intertwining of migration and development
  • development encompasses many tangible and intangible aspects
  • migration creates two-way flows so we have to understand multiple contexts
  • south–south migration is very important
  • addressing the development challenges associated with migration may mean addressing ‘big’ structural issues rather than home in on migration as ‘the problem’.

In different ways, the speakers also raised methodological challenges about how you research these things, which we now turn to.

2.2 How do we conceptualise migration and development?

2.4 Analysing migration and inclusive growth data: quantitative