Editorial
| Author | Howard Duncan |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12322 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
Editorial
By anyone’s reckoning, 2016 was a difficult year for us in the migration field. Deaths among those
crossing the Mediterranean set yet another record. While many countries further tightened controls
over their border, the number of displaced persons reached an all-time high of over 65 million.
Anti-immigrant forms of populism continued their march through many Western democracies lead-
ing to the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union and putting in doubt the elec-
toral success of the political mainstream throughout much of Europe. The election of Donald
Trump as the US President was to a certain extent on the basis of his promises regarding much
tighter immigration control. Terrorist attacks provided horrific bookends to the year and filled much
of the shelf space in between.
But not all was dire. Many countries willingly engaged in resettling Syrians driven from their
country by the relentless fighting, and the efforts of community groups such as in Germany, Swe-
den, Austria, and Canada to help the refugees stand out for their generosity of spirit. The interna-
tional community, in 2016, took major institutional steps with regard to migration, not only
through the references to migration in the Sustainable Development Goals and in the report of
Habitat III, but in the work undertaken at the General Assembly, in particular the launch of a two-
year process to establish a Global Compact on safe, orderly and regular migration. We watch in
hope that 2017 will offer us greater calm.
In this first issue of 2017, International Migration will turn away from the exceptionally dire
events of last year to look at some of the regular and continuing basics of migration, namely the
benefits that migrants can offer to their homelands and to their hosts. In featuring articles along
these lines, we join the international community in its calls, within a political environment that
tends only to highlight dangers claimed to arise from migration, to recognize the benefits of migra-
tion for host and homeland alike and to note that, through attentive management, migration and
migrants offer significant opportunities for societies. The key is management; few would argue that
un-managed or out-of-control migration is universally of value. We begin with the contributions
that migrants make to their homelands, starting with Koff’s examination of the relationship between
diaspora philanthropy, an understudied phenomenon, and securitized migration regimes, finding that
the latter can be in conflict with the former. There are lessons for policy coherence in this. Petreski,
Petreski, and Tumanoska look carefully at the link between the receipt of remittances and the level
of household vulnerability, finding initial strong correlations that, however, diminished with refine-
ments in the study’s methodology. Contrary to common fears, Urama, Nwosu, Yuni, and Agueg-
boh find that the receiving of remittances does not affect the homeland labour supply in the case of
Nigeria, with the exception of those who are self-employed in agriculture as well as teenagers and
the elderly.
Historically, scholars have paid more attention to examining the many benefits of migration to
host societies than to those reaped by homelands and to looking at barriers standing between
migration and those benefits. We begin with the trade enhancements of migration. Tadesse and
Dr. Howard Duncan, Executive Head, Metropolis, 1120 Dunton Tower, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,
K1S 5B6, E-mail: howard.duncan@carleton.ca, Phone: 1-613-520-2600 (ext. 3106)
doi: 10.1111/imig.12322
©2017 The Author
International Migration ©2017 IOM
International Migration Vol. 55 (1) 2017
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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