Abstract
The migration-development nexus has been the focus of attention for migration scholars and economists since the 1970s, with changing degrees of optimism and pessimism about the potential impact of migration on the development of societies of origin (de Haas, 2010; Gamlen, 2014). Eckstein and Najam’s edited volume highlights how migrants’ impacts may be of an economic, but also political, social or cultural nature, where the effect of contributions is contingent not only on migrants but also on the structural conditions for productive investments that states are able and willing to provide. In the 2000s the global perspective on the migration-development nexus had largely been positive, a reflection of increasing volumes of registered remittances, and interest from global actors such as the World Bank, and the UNDP with its 2009 Human Development Report on Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development. While the former takes a more optimistic view of the potential role of migration for development, Eckstein and Najam’s collection presents a sobering story detailing the differentiated and at times problematic dimensions of the migration-development nexus.
While the question of migrants’ impact on origin societies is universal, the diversity of global migration makes comparison complicated, including comparison across different societies of origin and destination, types of migration, or temporal scales. Several chapters discuss cases of high-skilled migration, foregrounding the positive economic impacts of, for example, Indian IT experts and Chinese overseas investors, but simultaneously underscoring how there is little positive economic impact in the origin context of, for example, Indian doctors or Brazilian return migrant business investors. These case studies point to how economic impact in origin societies can be tangible and significant, given particular contexts. But it also illustrates how, for substantial proportions of global migrants, development (here largely understood in terms of economic impact) remains intangible, and of varying significance at the macro-economic level.
The volume presents an interesting collection of in-depth and highly relevant case studies of migrants’ impact on origin societies, from profiled experts, including in Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Turkey, China, India, the Philippines, Morocco, and Mozambique, as well as in the US context, and to some extent also European destinations. The focus of the volume is explicitly on migration from the Global South to the Global North, although it is acknowledged that global migration patterns are diversifying, and that the picture from the early 2000s has changed a decade on, in particular with the rise of the BRIC economies.
While migrants’ impacts are acknowledged to transcend the economic sphere, with regard to migrants’ impacts in the social sphere, a largely bleak picture is painted in chapters tackling gendered dimensions of female emigration from the Philippines, the effect of returned gang members in Central America, and the dire consequences of migration for family left behind in HIV-affected regions of southern Africa. However, some important contributions are made in terms of demonstrating the ways in which ‘social remittances’ may both be positive and negative for development impact, and that these flows are not unidirectional but rather are exchanges between migrants and non-migrants, integrated in broader transnational ties.
The impact of migration on development in origin societies – economic, but also social and cultural – is seen to be multidimensional, and the different case studies demonstrate that the consequences of migration on different involved actors, at various scales from individual to state, are often contradictory. Migrants’ impacts on origin societies are, in this volume, as in much of the literature, acknowledged as enmeshed in broader processes of social transformation. As such, the relative weight given to structure and agency becomes an important question, where the volume’s main theoretical contribution perhaps leaves some questions unanswered. For instance: to what extent can states control and manage people’s economic and social transnational ties, which are often with their own family and kin? These are the types of connections where the volume of potential impact on origin societies is unquestionably largest: migrant remittances, and what is termed ‘transnational philanthropy’. While states have limited scope to affect migrants’ impacts, there is arguably all the more reason why research should contribute to developing policy measures which are targeted and realistic, with regard to maximizing migrants’ positive development impacts.
While the introductory chapter provides a valuable synthesis of knowledge on migrants’ impacts on origin societies, it falls a step short of moving the field further with regard to theory development. This is a challenge resulting from its all-encompassing approach, in drawing together all the context-specific contributions, which becomes an almost impossible task. This is arguably also related to the valuable effort which is made in the book as a whole to integrate both macro-level perspectives on states’ roles, e.g. in trying to attract remittances, but also to include micro-level perspectives on migrants as individual rational actors, e.g. in strategic migration decision-making, even when this may involve irregular status. The potential for bridging these scales, however, to some extent remains unfulfilled. Simultaneously, this is a challenge for scholars of migration and development in general, the resolution of which hinges on speaking across not only geographic contexts but also disciplinary and methodological divides. As such this volume relates directly to recent efforts by geographers, on the one hand focusing on the roles and rationales of emigration states (see e.g. Gamlen, 2008, Collyer, 2013), and on the other hand in diaspora and development research, advocating a view of diasporas as communities of practice (Page and Mercer, 2012), thus advancing one way of bridging the structure-agency divide in research on the migration-development nexus.