Inequalities And Migration

The ‘migration-development’ nexus has emerged as an important area of both research and policy over the last ten years. However, most of the interest has focused on the potential that migration holds for poverty alleviation. Relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between migration and inequality, particularly on inequality as a consequence of migration. This is unfortunate, given that inequality is emerging as an important area of inquiry within development studies. This edited collection explores the relationship between migration and inequality in Africa, Asia and Latin America by taking into account economic and social inequalities. While the focus on inequality as opposed to poverty is in itself original, the book offers additional points of interest. First, it combines chapters on internal and international migration, thereby challenging the current focus in the migration literature that focuses almost exclusively on cross-border migration. Internal migration greatly outnumbers cross-border moves. Yet policy-makers as well as most studies focus on cross-border international migration. We are only just beginning to unravel the relationship between internal and cross-border migration. Second, the theme of inequality complements the existing focus in the migration-development nexus on issues of poverty. Third, the chapters focus on both economic and social inequalities, often combining an analysis of different types of inequalities. The book also covers governance and migrants’ rights; gender and intersectionality; and health. The chapters in this edited volume make an original contribution to debates on the migration-development nexus as well as the literature on inequality, which often tends to focus on economic measurements of inequality at the expense of including a thorough analysis of social inequality.

In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, relentlessly caught up in questions of security, humanitarian crisis, and cultural “problems,” this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality. Taking an innovative approach, Mirna Safi offers a fresh perspective on how migration is embedded in the elementary mechanisms that shape the landscape of inequality. She sketches out three distinct channels which lead to unequal outcomes for different migrating and non-migrating groups: the global division of labor; the production of legal and administrative categories; and the reconfiguration of symbolic ethnoracial groups. Respectively, these channels categorize migrants as “type of workers,” “type of citizens,” and “type of humans.” Examining this intersection across the U.S. and Europe, she shows how studying international migration together with inequality can challenge nationally established paradigms of social justice. This timely book will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in the sociology and politics of migration, ethnic and racial studies, and social inequality and stratification.

This book presents contributions from leading international scholars on how environmental migration is both a cause and an outcome of social and economic inequality. It describes recent theoretical, methodological, empirical, and legal developments in the dynamic field of environmental migration research, and includes original research on environmental migration in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, China, Ghana, Haiti, Mexico, and Turkey. The authors consider the implications of sea level rise for small island states and discuss translocality, gender relations, social remittances, and other concepts important for understanding how vulnerability to environmental change leads to mobility, migration, and the creation of immobile, trapped populations. Reflecting leading-edge developments, this book appeals to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and policymakers.

Migration and the mobility of citizens around the globe pose important challenges to the linguistic and cultural homogeneity that nation-states rely on for defining their physical boundaries and identity, as well as the rights and obligations of their citizens. A new social order resulting from neoliberal economic practices, globalisation and outsourcing also challenges traditional ways the nation-state has organized its control over the people who have typically travelled to a new country looking for work or better life chances. This collection provides an account of the ways language addresses core questions concerning power and the place of migrants in various institutional and workplace settings. It brings together contributions from a range of geographical settings to understand better how linguistic inequality is (re)produced in this new economic order.

This book examines negotiations on migration in the Mediterranean. It argues that migration is a bargaining chip which countries in the South use to increase their leverage versus their counterparts in the North. This proposition opens up new understandings reframing relations of inequalities among states.

Migration, Health and Inequality highlights recent developments in the areas of migration, human rights and health from a range of countries. Looking at diverse health issues, from HIV to reproductive and maternal health, and a variety of forms of migration, including asylum-seeking, labour migration and trafficking, it offers a range of linkages between migrant agency, transnationalism and diaspora mechanisms and looks at the impact of migrant health on those communities that are left behind.

This book explores connections between poverty and migration in the context of the expansion of neoliberalism in Europe. The last decade has witnessed a massive movement of people in response to rising inequalities as a result of political changes and economic reforms implemented across the continent. As people seek new opportunities, movement itself becomes part of the process of generating new inequalities. The chapters in this volume provide vivid examples of local participation in such global processes.

Migration from and within Africa, just like migration elsewhere in the world, often generates anti-immigrant sentiment and ignites heated public debate about the migration policies of the destination countries. These countries include South Africa as well as others outside the continent. The countries of origin are also keen to minimize losses through "brain drain" and to capture resources such as remittances. Increasingly, international organizations and human rights advocates have stressed the need to protect the interests of migrants themselves. However, while the UNDP's 2009 Human Development Report talks of "win-win-win" solutions, in practice it is the perceived interests of destination countries that enjoy the greatest attention, while the rights of migrants themselves are afforded the least. Yet migration is not just an issue in itself: it also points to structural inequalities between countries and regions. Managing migration and protecting migrants is too limited an agenda. Activists and policymakers must also address these inequalities directly to ensure that people can pursue their fundamental human rights whether they move or stay. It is not enough to measure development only in terms of progress at the national level: development must also be measured in terms of reductions in the gross levels of inequality that now determine differential rights on the basis of accident of birth.