MIGRATION, POPULATION AND POVERTY - A CEIFO RESEARCH PROGRAMME
CEIFO, the Centre for Immigration Research at the University of Stockholm, has initiated a theoretical and empirical project on South - North migration and the immigration control policies of industrialised countries.
Background and social relevance of the research programme
The issue of international migration has reached the top of political agendas in industrialised countries and in international organisations. Many prognoses of future large scale migration are motivated by the fear of receiving countries in the North of not being able to control the flows. Simple pictures, however, all too often replace realistic scenarios in forecasting migration. African "resources for catastrophes" (most often referring to sub-Saharan Africa) are usually mentioned as grounds for future "mass emigration" to Europe. Average population growth is 3 per cent annually. On top of imperfections in the labour market and in the overall economy, the labour force is growing rapidly, partly due to increasingly more women aspiring to employment, and additional millions of jobs will be required. The concept of "jobless growth", has been use by UNDP to describe the labour market in developing countries. Economic growth has not been paired with an expansion in employment opportunities.
South to North migration has increased during recent years, but not nearly as much as could be expected given prevailing theories. The main puzzle for students of international migration and development is perhaps not that this migration has increased so much, but that it has not increased much more. Emigration from Africa to Europe or America has so far been relatively small compared to emigration from Latin America, the Middle East or South/South-East Asia. Most of the emigration from Africa has originated in the Maghreb region and not in sub-Saharan Africa.
The size of a country's future population and labour force is fairly predictable, but the number of people who will migrate is far more unpredictable. Equally unpredictable are circumstances such as political instability or upheavals, oppression and war, religious and ethnic conflicts, ecological disasters, desertification and famine, which all may contribute to migration and refugee flows. Often several of these circumstances are intertwined which make it increasingly difficult to differentiate between voluntary and involuntary categories of migrants.
These and many other preconditions of migration may have broad implications and shall be part of our empirical study. There is thus a practical and policy relevant dimension of this project, namely to study the relationship between intercontinental migration and economic development, and thereby to improve our possibilities to make assumptions about future South to North migration.
A research programme with three projects
Within our first part project, the theory study, we are systematising and evaluating social science literature on international migration within several disciplinary traditions (anthropology, economy, geography, political science, sociology). Our aim is to improve existing theoretical frameworks to explain present and potential migration flows. The particular focus is on the initial phases of migration from the South.
The second, empirical, part project shall be developed as a joint undertaking between CEIFO, UAPS and other researchers in Africa. The project will benefit from the theoretical studies established in the first project. It will focus on the conditions under which international and intercontinental migration starts, grows and takes various directions in selected regions of sub-Saharan Africa. An equally important focus will be the counter-question - why international migration does not occur, despite seemingly favourable prerequisites.
In the third part project, we will study the immigration control policies of countries in Europe, their economic, humanitarian etc. costs, and their impact on international migration. Policies of European receiving countries are at present obstacles to immigration, but may in other periods encourage labour migrants. Control and regulatory policies in receiving countries in the North have a considerable impact on the size and composition of immigration from the South, and represent a third important dimension in our research programme.