SOCIOECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF TEMPORARY LABOUR MIGRATION IN INDIA

Temporary labour migration has rarely been studied at macro level despite its high prevalence in India. Drawing from the recently available Indian National Sample Survey (2007–08), this paper aims to study the basic differentials between temporary and permanent labour migration at the national level and examines the socioeconomic determinants of temporary labour migration at the state level. The study shows that temporary migration is seven times larger than permanent migration, and is largely a rural phenomenon dominated by rural to urban migration. A regional pattern in temporary labour migration is evident in the low-income Central and North Indian states. Low economic, educational and social status significantly induces temporary labour migration in contrast to permanent labour migration. As such, temporary labour migration appears to be a survival strategy of the rural poor in India.     

Migrant mothers,left-behind fathers: the negotiation of gender subjectivities in Indonesia and the Philippines

The distinct feminization of labour migration in Southeast Asia – particularly in the migration of breadwinning mothers as domestic and care workers in gender-segmented global labour markets – has altered care arrangements, gender roles and practices, as well as family relationships within the household significantly. Such changes were experienced by both the migrating women and other left-behind members of the family, particularly ‘substitute’ carers such as left-behind husbands. During the women’s absence from the home, householding strategies have to be reformulated when migrant women-as-mothers rewrite their roles (but often not their identities) through labour migration as productive workers who contribute to the well-being of their children via financial remittances and ‘long-distance mothering’, while left-behind fathers and/or other family members step up to assume some of the tasks vacated by the mother. Using both quantitative and qualitative interview material with returned migrants and left-behind household members in source communities in Indonesia and the Philippines experiencing considerable pressures from labour migration, this article explores how carework is redistributed in the migrant mother’s absence, and the ensuing implications on the gender roles of remaining family members, specifically left-behind fathers. It further examines how affected members of the household negotiate and respond to any changing gender ideologies brought about by the mother’s migration over time.     

Child Trafficking: ‘Worst Form’ of Child Labour,or Worst Approach to Young Migrants?

This article presents a critique to the human trafficking discourse in relation to child migration, based on data obtained from the anti‐trafficking community in the Greater Mekong Sub‐region combined with an analysis of secondary material. It also presents a set of qualitative accounts of migration at a young age from Lao PDR and Thailand. On this basis a more theorized, grounded and nuanced perspective on child labour migration is developed. This situates child labour migration historically, embeds it within overarching processes of rural transformation and accounts for young migrants’ agency in the social process of migration, the latter shedding light on the social production of exploitation in relation to young migrants.     

Inter-regional migration and social change: a study of South East England based upon data from the Longitudinal Study

"Data from the [Office of Population Censuses and Surveys] Longitudinal Study are used to trace the social class effects of migration between the South East region and the rest of England and Wales in the period 1971-81. The analysis begins with the migration streams into and out of the South East of those people who were in the labour market (including the unemployed) at both census dates. The paper then proceeds to an analysis of the migration streams of those who entered or left the labour market between 1971 and 1981. Finally, the effects of the migration streams on the social class composition of both the South East and the rest of England and Wales are summarised. The results are interpreted in the light of debates about change in the British urban and regional system."     

The good migrant: Everyday nationalism and temporary migration management on New Zealand dairy farms

Migration regimes that prioritise temporary and restricted work status have become increasingly prevalent globally. Temporary migration schemes that prioritise labour market flexibility, skills assessment and a reduced social burden, insert both legal and social stratification into the workplace and community through the restricted rights and future pathways available to migrants. Our contention in this paper is that in addition to their economic rationalities, such stratifications also take shape around governmental and popular articulations of nationalism that support and justify the differential inclusion of migrants as labour. In order to explore this intersection between nationalism and temporary migration management we focus on dairy farming in New Zealand, a key export industry that is often closely tied to national futures and identities, yet has come to rely on the presence of a substantial labour force of work visa holders who have limited rights and only very narrow pathways to longer term residence. We draw on interviews with people holding work visas, employers and intermediaries to draw attention to the way national stereotypes are created, accepted, and used to legitimise workplace inequalities within temporary migration schemes. National stereotyping had significant impacts on workplace hiring queues and segmentation, with key migrants, host communities and immigration practices commonly ignoring or downplaying the significance of the socio-cultural assumptions on which national stereotypes rest. This account demonstrates the need for greater understanding of the socio-cultural basis of ostensibly economically oriented migration regimes, the legitimation of stratification and the role of identity in negotiating temporally constrained labour migration.     

“Who is not an agent here?”: The Collateral Damage of Anti-Trafficking in Nepal

In this paper, I explore how the diverse labour migration practices of people who challenge their state’s restrictive policies produce a form of stigma that extends from people to the places where they reside. Drawing on the findings of Participatory Action Research (PAR) conducted in Nepal, I demonstrate how people residing in one such place attempt to undo stigma by adopting diverse practices amidst restrictive anti-trafficking and migration policies. I reveal a novel practice of prospective labour migrants negotiating and receiving money from their choicest mobility facilitators to assist their unauthorised labour migration. This exchange of money potentially criminalises prospective labour migrants, their family members, unlicensed and licensed recruitment agents, community leaders, anti-traffickers, government officials, hotel owners, transport service providers, and airport immigration officials as traffickers. Underscoring the collateral damage of anti-trafficking in Nepal, I assert that the exchange of money to facilitate unauthorised migration expands the remit of criminalisation of citizens as “traffickers”.     

A comparative study of Caribbean return migration from Britain and France: towards a context-dependent explanation

"The currently dominant element in the labour migration from the Caribbean to Britain and France is a return flow of migrants. This paper focuses on the migrations from the Commonwealth and the French Caribbean to Britain and France respectively. While these migrations are historically similar in origin, subsequent differences in the colonial and immigration policies of Britain and France have resulted in divergent migration trends and experiences. New sources of data are drawn on in this comparative study of return migration to the Caribbean, providing up-to-date information on the size and demographic characteristics of the returnee populations. Equally important to this study is the section of the migrant population who are likely to remain in Europe. The authors argue that a comprehensive model of labour migration would need to incorporate the non-return situation in its dynamic entirety."     

Gender and Global Labour Migrations: Incorporating Skilled Workers

Female labour migration has increased in the past two decades, and has become more complex and interconnected, attracting considerable attention from researchers and policy makers. Earlier debates on the relationship between production and reproduction have resurfaced in a period of changing configurations of welfare states; contemporary theorisations of global labour migration are now paying attention to the role of women in the reproductive sector. However, much of the literature has focused on migrants who enter the lesser‐skilled sectors, in particular domestic labour. In this paper we argue that the migration of women into skilled sectors of the labour market, especially in health, alters our understanding of the role of migrant women in social reproduction. Migrant women are present in multiple sites and spheres of reproduction beyond the household and recognising the different ways in which they are incorporated into globalised labour markets challenges simplistic representations of migrant women and draws out a fuller appreciation of their contribution to social reproduction and welfare in the First World.     

两代流动人口在城镇定居意愿的代际延续和变化——基于福建省的调查

本文利用一项福建省流动人口抽样调查资料,对两代流动人口在城镇定居意愿的差异进行了深入考察。结果表明,新生代流动人口在城镇的定居意愿虽已发生不同于第一代流动人口的变化,但在整体上仍延续了前者的特点而未发生从循环流动向在城镇定居的根本性转变。同时,两代流动人口在城镇的定居意愿除受到户籍制度的限制外,还受到流动人口在以劳动密集型行业为主导的次级劳动市场高度集中、就业不稳定、社会保障水平低、在城市的生存能力有限等状况的制约。这些结论对制定符合流动人口实际的相关政策具有重要启示。     

Tracing the future of migrants’ labour relations. Experiences of institutionalised migrant precarity in Denmark and Greece

Restrictive migration laws, fracturing of citizenship and neoliberal labour markets intertwine with persistent migration flows to produce migrant precarity in the European context. This article examines the institutionalisation of precarious and unfree labour conditions for migrants in Denmark and Greece, through the enactment of laws and policy initiatives. The article situates itself in a literature regarding migrant precarity and its institutionalisation, unfree and informal labour and the production of immobility, which points to their interrelation as a constitutive element of modern European economies. In both cases, we can identify a retrenchment of rights and likewise the cases indicate that a fractured citizenship is instrumentalised in producing various types of immobility. The article concludes that despite differences between the European North and South we can identify a situation of unfree labour characterised by a lack of real or acceptable alternatives, within a setting of coercive geographies.     

'Help! The Poles are coming': Narrating a contemporary moral panic

In the years and months prior to the May 2004 enlargement of the European Union, transitional periods of two to possibly seven years were imposed upon free movement of labour for immigrant workers from new (Eastern European) member states by a majority of ‘old’ member states. This article aims to scrutinize fear of mass migration from new member states by examining where (ir)rationality and political opportunism meet in the perception of this particular flow of labour migration as a cause for contemporary moral panic. To this purpose, the article starts with embedding the notion of fear of mass migration in literature on moral panics, risk society and the ‘othering’ of economic migrants as strangers and folk devils. By means of a case study narrative of the decision‐making process on the free movement issue in the Netherlands, it is subsequently demonstrated that ‘politics of fear’ are deeply rooted in the uncontrollability of mobilities of an unknown magnitude and an uncertain impact on, for instance, domestic labour markets. Beyond rationalizable concerns of job loss, however, labour migrants from new member states are also feared as threats to borders of morality and identity in Western European societies. The narrative's results are placed within a wider context of current boundary drawings with regard to migration in the enlarging European Union.     

Making labour mobile: Borders,precarity, and the competitive state in Finnish migration politics

This article explores how the multiplication of labour migration categories relies upon strategic territorialisations of borders to differentiate between workers' nationalities, worksites, and skills in Finland. We argue that for certain categories of workers, migration policies encourage workers to become mobile in ways that make them more precarious. We analyse worksites that show the different ways that labour is made mobile: the internationalization of higher education; Finnair's labour outsourcing and offshoring practices; and the recruitment of forest berry-pickers from Thailand. We first trace contentious migration politics in Finland, revealing conflicts over labour protections, universal labour rights, the state's obligations to create employment, economic competitiveness, national identity, and the precarisation of work. We show how practices of legal, procedural, and spatial differentiation particularise the conditions of work and argue that, even for skilled workers, the strategic territorialisation of borders works to differentiate between workers and work sites. This differentiation works to make labour mobile in multiple ways and, due to the selective territorialisation of labour protections, the political geographies of migration in Finland tend towards the precarisation of labour for skilled and unskilled workers alike.     

Three problems without a solution: the militant research conundrum and the social condition of migration

Abstract

The article deals with the relation between research and militancy considering migration as a total social fact, employing different theoretical tools coming from the autonomy of migration theory, migrant labour studies and postcolonial critique. By posing to the reader three problems without a solution, the article frames the main features of what the author calls the migration and militant research conundrum. The essay briefly defines the three problems as the problem of the researcher, the problem of militancy in migration research and the problem of politics and migration. The article argues that if it is true that migration is a social relation mediated by different statuses/documents/definitions in the transnational space, it is thus fundamental both for the researcher and for the militant to critically analyze what does it means to be part of this social relation in postcolonial capitalism conditions. The institutional racism produced by different authorities, from the States to international assemblages, and the transnational labour market must be taken into account. Therefore, in order to address the migration and militant research conundrum in a productive manner, it is crucial to understand the specific position of the militant and the researcher vis-à-vis the materiality of rule and the larger political dimension of migration.     

The role of recruitment agencies in imagining and producing the ‘good’ migrant

This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices that affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular, this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers to the UK from Latvia. The research described in this paper is based on interviews with recruitment agencies, employers and policy makers carried out in Latvia in 2011. The analysis results in a schema of the ‘filtering’ processes that are enacted to ‘produce’ the ‘ideal’ migrant worker. An important original contribution of this paper is that it details how recruitment agencies, in not only engaging in the spatially selective recruitment of labour from certain places but also drawing socially constructed boundaries around migrant bodies, play a key part in shaping migration geographies both in sending and destination countries.     

Unfree Again: Social Reproduction,Flexible Labour Markets and the Resurgence of Gang Labour in the UK

Abstract: The reproduction of human insecurity in contemporary capitalist societies is linked to the need to “produce” labour at a price that permits the realisation of surplus value, and crises of social reproduction (both generalised and specific). In this paper I use a social reproduction lens to focus on the example of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK. I look first at the gang labour system, its evolution, and processes and institutions of regulation. The paper then examines the ways in which the gang labour system sheds light on interrelationship of relations of production and reproduction, processes of class formation, and how the power of supermarkets and the political imperative to keep food costs down, which are related to patterns of migration and racialisation, privilege the reproduction of some workers over others. This in turn signals the need to engage with the role and significance of unfree labour in contemporary economies.     

From national inclusion to economic exclusion: ethnic Hungarian labour migration to Hungary*

ABSTRACT. Over the past fifteen years, Hungarian nationalists have been redefining membership in the Hungarian nation to include all Hungarians in the region, irrespective of citizenship. This deterritorialised notion of the nation has been given increased discursive and institutional legitimacy. But ethnic Hungarians from Romania who have gone to Hungary in search of work have not discovered national unity. Rather, the vision of national inclusion preferred by elites has been met by the reality of economic and national exclusion engendered through labour migration. The migrants' national self‐understandings have taken shape not in accordance with the wishes of nationalist elites, but rather in response to the economic imperatives of labour migration. Rather than deducing the salience of national unity from its political privileging, the purpose of this paper is to explain how national disunity is experienced, constituted and reproduced in the context of ethnic Hungarian labour migration.     

Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio,Manila

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance‐dependent, migrant‐sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted.     

Migrant masculinities: Bangladeshi men in Singapore's labour force

Although there is a growing body of scholars who have examined the reproduction and experiences of masculinities, research on the experiences of migrant men remains relatively limited. While I continue to draw upon insights from these scholars of both migration and gender, my data show that there remains considerable potential to contribute to this research field, in particular, analysing the reproduction of masculinity through a class lens. Drawing upon migrants' own narratives and notions of class by Bourdieu, I examine how Bangladeshi men make sense of their labour migration to Singapore, particularly after they fall out of work. Their responses are not only based upon instrumental calculation, but are also powerfully shaped by a complex set of normative gendered formations that can further constrain them.     

Globalisation and regulation of citizenship—Filipino migrant workers in Japan

This paper examines the state’s contradictory roles in globalising its workforce and transforming its regulatory capacities, and the implications these changes have for the human and citizenship rights of an increasing number of migrant workers. We investigate foreign workers’ protection and rights at both ends of the migration chain by using the specific examples of the Philippines and Japan. The discussion identifies areas for greater activism and mechanisms for the promotion of the rights of migrants from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. First, the highly aggressive role of the state in globalising labour markets is theoretically discussed. The paper then examines the role of the Philippine state in labour export and the implications of its embrace of neo-liberalism for its capacity to strongly pursue migrant worker welfare. The contradictory positions of the state in promoting globalisation, on the one hand, and discourses of human rights for migrant workers, on the other, are highlighted. In the Japanese case we examine the role of the state in both regulating and restructuring its labour market, and the structural dependence placed on the legal and illegal importation of migrant labour. Despite this dependence, we reveal the contradictory positions held within Japan’s state apparatus which result in a deliberate marginalisation of migrant workers. The important role of NGOs in disseminating information to migrant workers about their rights in Japan is highlighted. We explore the relationship between the individual and the state in the context of globalisation through the discussion of citizenship as a negotiated concept. We then examine the changing reality brought about by globalisation processes in terms of responsibility towards the protection of any worker (regardless of passport) but also with regard to activism on behalf of migrant labour. Finally, we emphasise the important future role to be played by NGOs in making the needs and rights of globalised workers more broadly recognised and attended to at both local, national and transnational levels.     

Turning the Tide? Why Development Will Not Stop Migration

Restrictive immigration policies and the militarization of external border controls by the US and the EU have failed to significantly curb immigration from Latin America and Africa. Rather, they have led to greater reliance on increasingly risky and costly irregular migration and have paradoxically encouraged permanent settlement. A commonly presented ‘smart solution’ to curb immigration is to address the perceived root causes of migration through increasing aid or liberalizing trade with origin countries. Recently, policies to stimulate remittances and to promote temporary and circular migration have also been advocated as enhancing home country development, so that these forms of migration become a medicine against illegal and permanent migration. However, besides the limited scope and credibility of such policies, empirical and theoretical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development increases people's capabilities and aspirations and therefore tends to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in emigration, at least in the short to medium term. Under unfavourable conditions, trade, aid and remittances can be complements to, rather than substitutes for, migration also in the longer term. At the same time, demand for both skilled and unskilled migrant labour is likely to persist. Trade, aid, return migration and remittances are no short‐cut ‘solutions’ to migration, and sustained immigration therefore seems likely.