Inequality, globalisation and the governance of migration.
| Author | Hampshire, James |
| Position | INEQUALITY |
We live in a profoundly unequal world. The latest data from the World Inequality Lab shows that the richest 10 per cent of the global population takes 52 per cent of global income, while the poorest half takes just 8.5 per cent. Wealth disparities are even more pronounced: the richest 10 per cent of the world's population owns 76 per cent of all wealth, while the poorest half owns almost no wealth at all, just 2 per cent of the total. (1)
We also live in a world in which the right to cross international borders is unequally distributed. International migration increased from about 2.9 per cent of the global population (153 million people) in 1990 to 3.4 per cent (258 million) in 2017, but behind this trend lies a growing differentiation between those who can migrate and those who cannot. For the wealthy, it has never been easier to move to another country; but for most of the world's population, living in low- and middle-income countries, opportunities to migrate to rich countries are scarce, and have become more so in recent decades.
The economist Branko Milanovic estimates that more than half a person's income is determined by the country in which they are born. (2) One way to overcome the effects of this 'birthright lottery' is to migrate to another country. (3) Yet the ability to move is itself determined by the lottery, both in terms of the legal opportunities to migrate and access to the capital that motivates and enables people to move. As we will see below, over the last few decades, global inequality has increased, driven mainly by growing inequalities within rather than between countries. At the same time, immigration policies in rich countries have become increasingly selective and stratified. The conjunction of these two developments has produced a system of migration governance which enforces and reproduces global inequality.
Migration and inequality
The decision to move from one country to another is often a response to economic inequality. People tend to migrate from countries where there are fewer economic opportunities to ones where there are more. This tends to mean from poorer to richer countries. Not all economic migration fits this description--for example, a corporate executive moving from one rich country to another, or 'expatriates' who have relocated from richer to poorer countries--but most economic migration involves people moving to countries that are richer than the ones they came from. Thus, international migration is shaped by aggregate inequalities between countries.
Even the kinds of migration that are not legally defined or conceptualised in terms of economic factors, such as family and forced migration, often have economic dimensions. Wealthy countries tend to be more stable and secure, so people fleeing civil war and conflict often arrive at their borders seeking refuge from low-income countries. Family migration, which is the largest type of migration to rich countries such as France and the United States, is a form of secondary movement shaped by earlier patterns of economic migration (and may itself have economic motivations).
If migration is clearly shaped by economic inequalities between countries, the relationship between global inequality and migration is complex, and not always well understood. For example, although most people migrate from less to more economically developed countries, South-South migration--that is migration between countries in the Global South--now involves slightly larger numbers than South-North migration. (4) In other words, more people migrate between developing countries than from developing to high-income countries. Policy has a lot to do with this, as I will discuss below.
Most international migration is not between countries with the largest income and wealth gaps; in other words, not from the poorest to the richest countries. While the highest levels of immigration per capita are to rich countries, the highest levels of emigration are from middle-income countries. Poor countries tend to have relatively low rates of emigration and immigration. Furthermore, in any given country it is not the poorest members of society who are most likely to migrate.
A simple reason for this is that migration requires resources: money to pay for a passport, visa and ticket, if travelling with the authorisation of the destination country; smugglers' fees and bribes if migrating without authorisation. International migration is also driven by various forms of non-financial capital, especially education and skills, which tend to increase as a country becomes richer: aspirations to migrate and the potential returns to migration increase as people acquire education and skills. Once migration has begun, the formation of transnational social capital--connections between migrants and those in the country of origin--facilitate further migration. These cumulative causation effects help to explain why there are well-established migration corridors linking countries.
Development economist Michael Clemens has shown that there is an inverted-U relationship between emigrant numbers and real income per capita: emigration from a country whose GDP is less than $8,000 per capita tends to increase as per capita GDP grows, until it reaches that level, after which it begins to decrease. (5) Economic growth up to this point drives emigration by increasing the population with the aspiration and resources to migrate; beyond that point, increases in income create opportunities in the country of origin that begin to reduce emigration. The tipping point roughly corresponds to the mid-point in the World Bank definition of an upper-middle-income country.
An important implication of this is that in low- and...
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