Can migration change the world for the better?
The standard rap on migration in well-intentioned circles in the global North seems to have been split between two camps: those who believe that migration is completely bad, because it changes cultures in the South while adding to the number of people who are over-consuming in the North, and those who think it is mostly bad, but okay in small doses as a means of creating a multicultural society.
But what if migration, properly conceived, could be crafted into a powerful force for good?
Already, remittances -- the money sent home from the two hundred million people who have migrated from the Global South to the North, often intending to return home -- may prove to be, as we're remarked before, one of the most important levers for creating the conditions for sustainable development. As the NYT puts it in a really terrific magazine story titled "A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves.",
About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest. While some migrants go abroad with Ph.D.’s, most travel ... with modest skills but fearsome motivation. The risks migrants face are widely known, including the risk of death, but the amounts they secure for their families have just recently come into view. Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does. ...In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the G.D.P., including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).
Why do they head North? Many are pushed by desperation, but many more are lured by the desperate and growing need for young laborers created by the aging of the developed world. Throughout most of the developed world (and increasingly in some middle-income countries), populations would already have leveled out (or even begun dropping) if immigrants didn't keep arriving: what's more, given the longevity booms most in developed countries are seeing, the percentage of elderly people in their populations would be manifestly a crisis were immigrants not here to add their taxes to retirement funds and provide the care-giving aging populations demand. Immigration is not only beneficial to most developed nations, it's necessary.
Which doesn't mean that those of us in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan have resolved all our issues with the latest waves of new arrivals to our shores. Quite the contrary: anti-immigrant tensions run high all across the Global North, and we're still figuring out how to build truly multiethnic 21st century communities. (I personally believe that our ability to truly embrace multicultural, global identities is right up there with spreading transparency as one of the forces that will decide the fate of our democracies.)
But even if we can live up to our ideals here in the North, much work remains to be done to both protect the rights of migrants while they're abroad and make sure that the money they send home creates as much positive change as possible.
The Philippines, for instance, has created an Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, a government agency which advocates for and promotes participation in the global migrant workforce. But this may be a place where distributed, collaborative approaches, like that of Witness, tempered by the lessons learned blogging under oppression, might make a huge difference. (Facilitating the activism of expatriates -- though far riskier -- might make even more of a difference: after all, a great number of revolutionary democrats (e.g., Gandhi) cut their teeth and built their movements while living as expatriates, and a great much of the world desperately needs both civic reform and better reform tools)
With the right incentives, expatriate workers are much more likely to send more money home, and to use official means for doing so, reducing the drain of corruption and organized crime. They may even be more likely to voluntarily contribute to public works and community projects -- indeed, expatriate philanthropy has become a huge force for change in countries like India and Nigeria.
But finding better ways to connect migrants with the financial services they and their families and business partners back home need is key as well, many experts say. Particularly promising is the idea of productizing remittances -- sending goods instead of money.
But a whole host of other innovative financial services might make migrants' checks home both more effective and more frequent, from micro-finance banks to micro-insurance, even meso-financial investment opportunities. Creating such new services will require a pretty rapid case of redistributing the future, helping nations to develop not only the proper laws and proper policies, but even the proper software.
Now, imagine this: imagine all these enterprising, ambitious people, and all the money they send home (and all the institutions with which they interact to send it) being bent towards even more beneficial ends, becoming better, longer levers for really remaking the nations from which they're traveled into places of prosperity and sustainability. Imagine deciding to make migrant labor truly worldchanging.
Maybe we need to start to rethink migration, not in the light of the discussions we've had in the past (huddled masses and all), but in the light of a 21st Century, globally-intertwined society. Migrants, though they may be looking to better themselves, ought perhaps to be seen (here in the Global North) as our partners in creating the prosperity we expect; and we ought to perhaps regard our interactions with them as the best opportunity we have for global diplomacy and sustainable development. Indeed, I wonder if what we need most of all isn't a new social compact -- one which recognizes the necessity of migrant labor in maintaining the economic prosperity of the North, and seeks to directly and explicitly make the exchange a fair one, useful to both sides. That kind of honesty and fairness seems pretty far off today, I'll admit, but I think it's ultimately a pretty essential component of a world that works, and perhaps it's time that we started advocating for it.
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