Migration and Mobility: The European Context

Migration and Mobility The European Context

Edited by Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

Migration and Mobility

This page intentionally left blank

Migration and Mobility The European Context Edited by

Subrata Ghatak Professor of Economics School of Economics Kingston University

and

Anne Showstack Sassoon Professor of Politics School of Social Science Kingston University

Editorial matter, selection and Introduction © Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon 2001 Chapter 2 © Subrata Ghatak and Vincent Daly 2001 Remaining chapters © Palgrave Publishers Ltd 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–92036–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Migration and mobility : the European context / edited by Subrata Ghatak, Anne Showstack Sassoon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–92036–8 1. Emigration and immigration. 2. Labor mobility. I. Ghatak, Subrata, (date) II. Sassoon, Anne Showstack. JV6032 .M53 2001 304.8’4—dc21 2001021726 10 10

9 09

8 08

7 07

6 06

5 05

4 04

3 03

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

2 02

1 01

Contents

List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on the Contributors

x

Introduction Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

1

1 The Age of Mass Migration: What We Can and Can’t Explain Tim Hatton

11

2 East–West European Migration: Questions and Some Answers Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

30

3 The Economic Impact of Labour Mobility in an Enlarged European Union Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

49

4 Migration and Citizenship: Why Can Birds, Whales, Butterflies and Ants Cross International Frontiers More Easily than Cows, Dogs and Human Beings? Bob Sutcliffe 5 Civic Nationalism, Civic Nations and the Problem of Migration Philip Spencer 6 Political Asylum in Germany and Britain Liza Schuster 7 Freedom of Movement: the Common Travel Area between Ireland and Britain and the Treaty of Amsterdam Elizabeth Meehan 8 Gendering Migration: the Case of Southern Europe Floya Anthias v

66

83 109

124 146

vi Contents

9 Women’s Work and Contemporary Migration Flows Annie Phizacklea

168

Index

182

List of Figures 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2

European migration, 1846–1920 Country of emigration Country of immigration Employment and real wage after migration Employment and output after migration with perfectly flexible wages Employment and output after migration with wage rigidity The socially optimal level of migration and Eastern wage flexibility η E The socially optimal level of migration and Eastern human capital HE The ratio of men to women in different migrant groups United States: Hispanic population as percentage of the resident population (1990 census)

vii

13 33 34 43 53 54 57 58 71 72

List of Tables 1.1 Gross emigration rates from European countries, 1850–1913 1.2 Italian gross emigration rates by compartimento, 1882 and 1912 3.1 Foreign nationals (nationals of Central and Eastern European countries) in thousands, in selected European OECD countries, latest available year 1996 3.2 Winners and losers under migration: static and dynamic aspects 4.1 Countries with estimated levels of emigration and immigration as a percentage of their population, c.1990

viii

15 21

50 62 74

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank Karen Heath, Debbie Meridu-Camporeale, Valery Rose, Leigh Wigham and Leigh Wilson for their administrative and copy-editing assistance. They would also like to thank Oxford University Press and Jeff Williamson for permission to use material from T. J. Hatton and J. G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

ix

Notes on the Contributors Floya Anthias is Professor of Sociology and Head of Sociology at the University of Greenwich, London. She has published extensively in the area of ethnicity, gender, migration and Cypriots in Britain. Her published work includes two recent books, Into the Margins: Migration and Social Exclusion in Southern Europe (co-edited with G. Lazaridis, 1999) and Gender and Migration in Southern Europe (2000). Her latest book, The Social Division of Identity, will be published by Palgrave. She is currently writing a book on young Asians and Cypriots in Britain, and researching into exclusion and citizenship in relation to self-employment practices amongst women and minorities in Britain. Vince Daly is Head of the School of Economics at Kingston University and academic director of its M.Sc. course in Business and Economic Forecasting. Prior to this collaboration with Subrata Ghatak, his previous research and consultancy projects have been in the arena of applied economics. Subrata Ghatak is Research Professor of Economics and the Director of Graduate Research Studies in Economics at Kingston University in England. Before that he was Reader in Economics at Leicester University and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Florida (USA) and Guelph (Canada). He has also taught in London and Nottingham Universities and the University of East Anglia. He has acted as a consultant to many international agencies including the UN and the World Bank, and has written eight books and contributed numerous articles in leading international economic journals including Economic Journal, Journal of Public Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Empirical Economics, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Applied Economics, Journal of Development Studies, European Economic Research and Indian Economic Review. Tim Hatton is Professor of Economics at the University of Essex. He is the author of numerous articles on labour markets in history. His research includes the analysis of employment, unemployment, earnings and poverty using historical surveys of households and individuals. He has also worked extensively on the determinants and effects of international migration in the nineteenth century. He is co-author (with Jeffrey G. Williamson) of The Age of Mass Migration (1998). x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

Thomas Krichel is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Surrey. His early research examined theoretical and empirical issues arising from economic and monetary union in Europe. More recently he has been working on fiscal policy under endogenous growth. He has published in Economics Letters, Applied Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Economic Journal and others. He founded the NetEc project at http:// netec.mcc.ac.uk/NetEc.html in 1993, and since that time has been a leader in the implementation of the electronic communications research in the discipline. In 1997 he founded the RePEc project that aims to build a distributed relational literature system for the discipline. Paul Levine has been a Foundation Fund Professor of Economics at the University of Surrey since 1994. His general research area is in open economy macroeconomics with a particular focus on policy design, international policy coordination, growth and questions to do with credibility. Other research interests include the arms trade and regulation. He has numerous publications in leading economics journals including the Economic Journal, The Journal of Economic Theory, The European Economic Review, The Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, The Journal of Monetary Economics and Oxford Economic Papers. He is co-author with Professor David Currie of Rules Reputation and Macroeconomic Policy Coordination. His other activities include Visiting Professor at the Regulation Initiative, London Business School, and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Elizabeth Meehan is Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Professor of European Social Policy in the School of Politics at The Queen’s University of Belfast. Her research interests and publications cover women’s rights in the US, the UK, and the EU; citizenship in the EU and the UK; Northern Ireland and the EU; and British–Irish relations in the context of membership of the EU. Annie Phizacklea is Professor of Sociology at Warwick University; her current research interests are in migration, globalisation and gender. Her forthcoming book with Sallie Westwood, Trans-nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (2001) reflects these concerns. Anne Showstack Sassoon is Professor of Politics in the School of Social Science and the European Research Centre at Kingston University. She has taught in Canada, Denmark, Finland and Italy. Amongst her publications are Gramsci’s Politics; Women and the State, and most

xii Notes on the Contributors

recently Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect (2000). Liza Schuster is T. H. Marshall Fellow, Sociology Department, London School of Economics. She completed her doctoral research, a comparison of British and German asylum policy and practice, at Southampton University in 1998. She has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, to which she has contributed a comparative article considering asylum policy in seven European States. She is researching the factors, actors and dynamic processes that shape migration, citizenship and integration policies in Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Philip Spencer is Head of the School of Combined Studies and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Kingston University, where he lectures on Russian and Eastern European Politics. He is working on a broad study of nationalism and national identity in collaboration with Howard Wollman of Napier University, Edinburgh, to be published by Palgrave. Bob Sutcliffe is a teacher of development economics who has worked in the UK, the USA, Nicaragua and Cuba. He now teaches at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao and works with the development institute HEGOA.

Introduction Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

In the literature on migration, it has been said that international and internal migration has been a fact of life throughout the ages. People move, individually and collectively, for a variety of reasons that could be economic, social or political, or a combination of all of these. Although some may argue that economic reasons are the dominant causes behind internal and international migration decisions, there is no question that social and political factors also play a crucial role. The chapters in this book demonstrate that the causes and consequences of migration are so complex that they are best understood in an interdisciplinary framework. They bear testimony to the fact that decisions to migrate are based on many different types of socio-economic and political factors. As Tim Hatton writes, ‘the economic forces underlying mass migration have often taken a back seat to social, cultural and even political aspects’. In Chapter 1 (‘The Age of Migration: What We Can and Can’t Explain’), Hatton asserts the importance of economic and demographic forces in driving European migration in the period from 1850 to 1913. Drawing on earlier work he has done with Jeff Williamson and by using new data and methods, Hatton sheds additional light on the main economic causes driving mass migration. He analyses emigration rates by comparing migrants with non-migrants. He also isolates the systematic forces common to all by looking across countries. Further, his intertemporal analysis captures the effects of economic and demographic conditions. The conclusions confirm some of the existing findings and challenge others. Hatton shows with careful analysis of historical data that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that mass migration really took hold, and that it did not become a flood until the 1880s: ‘The only 1

2 Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

comparable intercontinental migration has been that of black slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean’. Leaving aside cases of forced migration, falling transport costs, rising family resources, and the increasing attraction of the recipient countries led to voluntary mass migration from Europe, particularly by young adults. Clearly, labour market conditions at home and abroad played a significant role in driving migration. However, some moved to avoid religious and political persecution. Others were driven out by famine or by revolution. Nevertheless, rational economic decision making, counting carefully the costs and benefits, explained much of mass migration and its various features. Within different countries, regional variations in migration can be associated both with levels of economic development and with patterns of landholding and agricultural tenure. Hatton also argues that the issues related to the choice of destinations and return migration are underresearched areas in migration studies. In their chapter ‘East–West Migration: Questions and Some Answers’ (Chapter 2), Ghatak and Daly point out the differences in labour productivity and welfare measures in the operation of the labour markets in Eastern and Western European countries. Clearly, such differences could account for emigration from the East to the West. In theory, migration can be regarded as a major key to economic growth and development. They explain analytically the growth of an economy as a process of labour transfer from a low productivity to a high productivity sector/region. Such a transfer raises total output and real income of the whole society. Thus migration could be ‘welfare enhancing’. They examine different theories of migration, which consider the potential migrant as a supplier of labour ( ‘the labour-flow’ view) or as an investor in human capital (‘the human capital’ view). A third approach, which considers the migrant as a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods, is also analysed (‘the regional amenities’ view). Finally, they discuss the ‘household production approach’ that views the potential migrant as a producer of home-produced commodities. This view emphasises the role of gender where the wife/partner devotes all her time to household production. For a woman working for wages, the income lost from quitting the old place represents a cost of the move. If she is not at work, her migration cost is ‘psychic’. Further, an educated woman enhances the ability to raise household production. The value of her home production at the new location is the benefit of migration while the value of her home production at the old location is the cost of a move. Migration decisions are usually taken by households on the basis of destinations/locations that affect both the shadow prices of

Introduction

3

home-produced commodities and the full income of the family. The overall welfare gains from migration depend on the degree of labour mobility, nature and quality of labour, substitutability or complementarity between domestic and foreign labour and the degree of labour absorption in the labour market (given the labour ‘characteristics’). The net impact of migration will be dictated by the real wage flexibility in the recipient country. Inter alia, the greater the wage flexibility, the greater will be the welfare gain (measured by a rise in aggregate output). Two other issues also deserve special attention in future research: the issue related to gender and the impact of uncertainty on migration decisions, that is the option value of waiting since the cost of migration could be irreversible. The fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s, the eastward expansion of European capital and the flow of political and economic refugees have simply highlighted the need for sober interdisciplinary research of the impact of migration in Western European countries. In their chapter ‘The Economic Impact of Labour Mobility in an Enlarged European Union’ (Chapter 3), Krichel and Levine discuss three important issues: 1 the economic effects on host and donor countries of migration from a less developed Eastern European bloc to a more developed Western European Union, both in terms of the levels and the rate of economic growth; 2 the possible need for migration controls; 3 the ultimate winners and losers from migration. Krichel and Levine are mainly concerned with the economic rather than the political or social impact of immigration. They use the standard Harris–Todaro (H–T) model of migration. It assumes that the migration decision is based on the maximisation of expected income in the light of the wage gap between Eastern and Western Europe and the probability of being unemployed. They point out that, within the European Union (EU), opening of borders has not yet led to mass migration. Within Europe, ethnic (mainly within Germany), regional and transit migration dominates labour mobility. They also argue that, in the original H–T model, urban wages are fixed, but rural wages are flexible. The potential migrant maximises her/his expected income taking into account the probability of being unemployed after migrating which, according to H–T, is one minus the unemployment rate. Urban unemployment provides the equilibrating mechanism to limit the flow of migrants. The

4 Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

H–T model predicts that the rate of migration rises as the wage gap rises and urban unemployment falls. However, they argue that, unlike the H–T model, within the whole of Europe, neither bloc is characterised by labour market clearing. Also, between Eastern and Western Europe there are vast differences in the physical and human capital. Drawing on Levine’s recent work, and assuming perfect wage flexibility, they calculate output gains and losses in the two different blocs of countries to measure overall welfare effect. In the absence of wage flexibility, welfare gains will be a lot smaller. Their calculations of winners and losers ignore the irreversibility of migration decisions and the option to wait. In the face of uncertainty and irreversibility in the private costs of migration, a potential migrant from the Eastern bloc will be far more conservative in her/ his decision to migrate. Note that the crucial parameter that determines the extent of welfare gains is the semi-elasticities of wages with respect to the unemployment rate. Finally, they assess the impact of migration on growth within the new endogenous growth theory and discuss whether regional migration increases or decreases income inequalities. The final welfare effects of migration can be divided into static effects from changes in wages and the terms of trade, and the dynamic effects from higher growth. The chapter by Sutcliffe (‘Migration and Citizenship: Why Can Birds, Whales, Butterflies and Ants Cross International Frontiers More Easily than Cows, Dogs and Human Beings?’) raises a number of interesting points. First, he highlights the fact that migration is frequently viewed as both exceptional and undesirable and therefore theories are produced in abundance to explain the phenomenon: ‘No one seems to think it is necessary to explain why people stay where they are.’ It is curious that the authors of human rights resolutions at the United Nations (UN) support some aspects of the freedom to move while remaining silent about others, for example the right to arrive in another country. Further, migration is treated as abnormal because it is generally assumed that everybody will want to stay in her/his own place. Sutcliffe complains that migration – a mechanism through which human beings, like birds, try to meet their needs, to better themselves – is too often deplored or ignored. Sutcliffe reminds us that while labour migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth century occurred between more developed parts of the world, migration after the Second World War mostly took place from the poor to the rich countries. A legal change in a number of countries like the USA and Australia during the 1960s tried to abolish a large element of racism in previous legislation and pave the way to

Introduction

5

a greater flow of migration from Asia and Africa. Thus the national and ethnic variety of present-day migration is striking and contrasts with that of the nineteenth century. He points out that since all governments restrict immigration, the number of potential migrants must be larger than the actual migrants. However, Sutcliffe reminds us that one of the things that restricts migration is poverty itself, as migration is costly. The relaxing of migration controls could reduce some of the costs. It is important to note that, unlike during the nineteenth century, none of the major countries of immigration are open. Moreover, in almost all such countries, political forces are at work to curtail immigration. He argues that the perpetuation of present migration regimes will undermine and devalue the citizenship of everyone, not just the people who migrate: ‘This is a fundamental contradiction of a world which advocates global liberalism except for its inhabitants’. The solution, Sutcliffe contends, lies in liberalising immigration laws and making it easier to acquire citizenship. Philip Spencer comes to a similar conclusion in his chapter ‘Civic Nationalism, Civic Nations and the Problem of Migration’. Citizenship, based on national frames of reference, defines those who are included and those who are excluded. Even when migrants are permitted to enter and to remain, their legal and social status is constrained if they are not citizens, and social exclusion can derive from their being defined as ‘other’ by nationalist discourses. Drawing on research on nationalism and national identity, Philip Spencer argues that the issue of migration cannot be understood with reference to the distinction that is often drawn between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ forms of nationalism. Those nation states, such as France, which are often seen as models of a civic form of nationalism, may be as exclusionary as those, such as Germany, which are supposedly ethnic nation states. He examines the problematic intellectual origins of this distinction, which has historically been much less clear-cut than might appear, and suggests that the evolution of citizenship policies, for example in Britain or the United States, is more complex than much of the literature suggests. ‘This’, he writes, ‘has to do with the way in which the category of the national has taken precedence over that of the citizen’. Indeed, nationalism, of whatever kind, has continued to pose problems, he maintains, for arriving at just or rational solutions to the problem of migration. Despite recent promising attempts, informed by internationalist and cosmopolitan ideas, to put forward new transnational forms of citizenship as political and legal counterparts to trends towards globalisation, the continuing grip of nationalism at a number of levels should not be underestimated. At

6 Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

the same time, he points to ‘the need for and desirability of forms of citizenship no longer tied to or located in a national frame of reference’. By no means taking for granted that these forms will be developed, he indicates the possibility that ‘alternative ideological frameworks to nationalism, the mobilisation of internationalist movements and the development of alternative sources of authority’ may be able to ‘challenge the powers of nation states, civic or ethnic, to regulate migration and the nationalist assumptions which underpin such regulation’. No question more dramatically challenges processes of inclusion and exclusion, the boundaries of nation states, and the regulation of migration than that of political asylum. In her chapter ‘Political Asylum in Germany and Britain’, Liza Schuster compares the policies of two countries that appear very different to reach the conclusion that real dissimilarities in their political structures and geopolitical positions, which should not be underestimated, can mask current trends in policy and law which are in several respects leading to convergence. She discusses the way in which asylum seeking has been constructed as a problem concerning, for example, protection of welfare provision, since those who are granted asylum are owed particular obligations, and she criticises the racist nature of many of the lines of demarcation between those who are deemed acceptable and those who are not. ‘States’, she writes, ‘create refugees, both by driving them from their states of origin, but also by definition’. The need to be seen, as sovereign states, to be able to control their borders is not lessened by being restricted to those from outside the European Union. Comparing the positions of political parties and governments in the two countries with regard to changes in the law, in the context of growing popular disillusionment with the political process and the constraints imposed by democratic elections, she points out how the issue has been exploited to create scapegoats. ‘However vulnerable universal values have become, however often they are trumped by particular demands of the demos,’ she concludes, ‘they still have a significant role to play in ameliorating the worst effects of states’ narrow interests, because they act as a scale against which states’ behaviour can be measured’. Borders regulate migration, but in a differentiated way. There are examples of borders such as those within the European Union or those between the Nordic countries, which are relatively permeable for certain groups of people while also serving to exclude others. Countries within the EU have had different policies with regard to the lifting of border controls, not only for contemporary geopolitical reasons but because of long-standing pre-existing interstate relationships. Elizabeth Meehan’s

Introduction

7

chapter, ‘Freedom of Movement: The Common Travel Area between Ireland and Britain and the Treaty of Amsterdam’, examines Ireland’s choice to maintain the Common Travel Area (CTA) rather than at present to lift border controls by joining the Schengen Agreement. She goes on to consider different scenarios whereby Ireland might change its position. On the basis of a close examination of government documents from 1922 to the present, she disagrees with the view that the Common Travel Area is – or ever in fact was – a mark of neo-colonial dependency while also discussing how it could have been construed in this way. She says that the priority given to maintaining the Common Travel Area is significant for two strategic reasons. The first has to do with Northern Ireland, while the second concerns ‘the resilience of Ireland’s independence, both in terms of its historical relationship with the UK and its use of the EU as a means of escaping from that relationship’. Before considering the conditions which might lead to the current priorities being reconsidered, she analyses the history of the Common Travel Area, and what are known in EU parlance as ‘flanking measures’, from the points of view of the two governments, in its first phase, from 1922 through the early years of the Second World War, and then as it was re-established after the war. She argues that it is ‘a kind of precursor to the EU conception of free movement’ and that the ‘whole history of the scheme is characterised by valued administrative cooperation and mutual assistance’ despite controversy. Examining the reasons given for avoiding internal while maintaining external checks, she also traces changes in patterns of travel between the two countries, trends in trade, and the issue of asylum seekers and illegal immigration. She discusses the strategic significance of aspects of the Belfast Agreement as they may affect rethinking the CTA and the relationship of the two countries to each other and to Schengen. Elements of the Treaty of Amsterdam may, she argues, ‘encourage a reconsideration of how best to promote pragmatic interest which, in turn, might impinge upon ideological preconceptions’. The impact of belonging to the EU should not be underestimated in the relationship between the two countries as it ‘has provided the context for the maturing of Irish–British relations which has contributed so greatly to cooperation over Northern Ireland’. She concludes that it is in the context of a ‘relationship of interdependence, not dependence’ between the Irish and British governments in which ‘future discussion of common or divergent interests in the CTA’ will take place. This is likely to have an impact as well on future policy towards EU policy on border controls.

8 Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

A relatively recent development in the policies of most countries towards immigration concerns going beyond the assumption that it is men who migrate and women who follow their husbands. Yet legal changes to take gender out of the regulation of migration can serve to mask the different realities for men and women. Mainstream approaches to migration, from whatever theoretical perspective, as Floya Anthias argues, tend to be gender-blind. In her chapter ‘Gendering Migration: The Case of Southern Europe’, she maintains that women ‘have been particularly affected by transnational global processes and are an increasingly important component of new migrations, especially to Southern Europe’. Taking account of gender, however, is not just a question of focusing on women migrants, but of analysing gender processes and discourses within various communities as well as their effects on the identities of both men and women. Use of gender as an analytical category needs to avoid homogenising women, she writes, and also to consider the ‘diversity of experiences and positionings of men and women in the migration process’. Discussing a wide range of literature on transnationalism, globalisation and exclusion, she points out how ‘the European framework provides different instances of ethnic and racist practices’ while Southern Europe, traditionally an area which has exported migrants, is now receiving increasing numbers from outside the EU. She outlines trends towards diversity within this migration accompanied by its feminisation. ‘Women migrants’, she writes, ‘are more often than not a main source of family support and see their role in terms of a family strategy’. She examines the gendered work done by women migrants, including domestic service and in the entertainment industry linked to sexual services. She also points out the divisions which develop between different groups of women, as women migrants often free women in the receiving countries to take paid work outside the home. Yet, even when the work undertaken is deskilled compared to what they might have done before, she stresses that women migrants must be seen as active social agents rather than as victims of global processes. As with other chapters in this book, she sees the issue of citizenship as crucial in providing both legal guarantees and social protection. Undocumented workers, so many of them women, are particularly vulnerable because they ‘can be confined to the least desirable and lowest paid jobs within the large unregulated sector of many Southern European countries’. Economic exploitation goes hand in hand with racism, while the ‘European project’, she argues, ‘is dedicated to containing migrant populations as well as reducing the number of people that might eventually

Introduction

9

have to be recognised as having legal rights to some form of citizenship’. Questions of legal status, economic and social exploitation, and racist practices in host countries are also raised by Annie Phizacklea. Yet, in her chapter ‘Women’s Work and Contemporary Migration Flows’, she, too, refuses to view women migrants as victims but rather as active social agents. In so doing she shows the role of intermediary institutions in the migration of women. The recent growth of female migrants, particularly from parts of Asia and Central Europe, has coincided with the rising demand for labour in specifically female-dominated sectors such as domestic work and the ‘entertainment’ industries. The decision to migrate cannot, however, simply be explained in terms of the neo-classical theory of wage-gap or neo-Marxian theory of collective decision making by households. Women migrate for a variety of structural reasons, for example poverty, civil war, debt, patriarchal structures of the society, domestic violence and so on. Some may migrate to raise their standard of living. Hence, it is necessary to ‘combine accounts of structural context with situational, micro-level understandings in a gendered way’. Migration of women can be a primary source for labour exploitation and source of value. Since the concept of a ‘household’ can take different forms in different countries, it can never be a good unit of analysis. Thus, the role of social networks and institutions linking agents across time and space, she suggests, are an important focus of migration research. These social networks often involve friends, relatives and households. Migration occurs through these networks, as they reduce the costs and risks of migration and raise the expected returns. Many formal and informal institutions in developing countries have also aided the flow of female migration because it is regarded as ‘good business’. Thus, many institutional agents lure women from poor countries by offering them work as ‘domestic workers’ or waitresses in Western Europe, parts of the Middle East and North America. In reality, many migrant women end up in the sex industry of the more affluent countries. The demand for migrant women in the sex industry can be explained by the fact that they are cheap, available with few legal rights and more easily exploited. A variety of analytical approaches in the chapters in this book reveals both the complexity and the wider significance of an increasingly important phenomenon in Western European countries that links these societies to a wider world. Whatever the combination of reasons for migration, and however the discourse on it may be manipulated for political reasons, it remains a challenge for policy-makers, academic analysis and European societies. Tightening border controls and stricter

10 Subrata Ghatak and Anne Showstack Sassoon

welfare regimes in some host countries may constrain further the movements of human beings, but lower birth rates and other factors, in the context of complex demographic, social and economic realities, provide the possibility for the contribution of migrants to these self-same societies to be recognised and their needs placed alongside others on political agendas. Whether this in fact happens is open to question.

1 The Age of Mass Migration: What We Can and Can’t Explain Tim Hatton

Introduction International migration has been a fact of life throughout the ages. But it is mass migrations that have changed the course of history and that hold a special fascination for social scientists and historians. None more so than the migration from Europe to the land-abundant, labour-scarce regions of the New World during the nineteenth century. In the century after 1820 some 55 million Europeans sought a new life in another continent and this experience has spawned a large literature. This rich literature spans a wide range of different approaches to the fundamental questions of who migrated, when and, above all, why and with what effect. Studies vary in scope, period, time and place, but they have increasingly become focused on specific streams of migrants, the communities they left behind and those they entered. These studies have greatly enriched our understanding of the characteristics of migrants and their specific circumstances.1 But the economic forces underlying mass migration have often taken a back seat to social, cultural and even political aspects. Research at the micro level on the particular, and sometimes the peculiar, group or community has been purchased at the cost of the economic and demographic fundamentals that more anonymously, but just as surely, drove the migrant flow. In a recent book, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact, Jeffrey Williamson and I have reasserted the importance of these economic and demographic forces in driving European emigration in the period from 1850 to 1913. By utilising new data sources and methods, we attempt to shed new light on the economic fundamentals driving mass migration. This chapter draws heavily on material from the first half of the book, the part that deals with the causes of mass migration. 2 11

12 Tim Hatton

Our approach is quantitative and comparative. By analysing emigration rates we compare migrants with non-migrants; by looking across countries and regions we can isolate the systematic forces common to all; and by looking over time we can assess the effects of changing economic and demographic conditions. What follows highlights some of the main findings of our study. The results confirm some of the existing findings and challenge others; in some cases we have only partial answers and in others new questions are raised. Such questions call for further analysis with better data and more sophisticated methods.

Who were the migrants? In the early part of the nineteenth century migration from Europe to the New World was a mere trickle compared with what came later. It was not until after the middle of the century that mass migration really took hold and not until the 1880s that it became a flood. The only comparable intercontinental migration had been that of black slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean. Indeed, it was not until the 1840s that annual (free) European migration to the Americas exceeded the (coerced) African migration, and it was not until the 1880s that the cumulative European migration exceeded the African (Eltis 1983). Some of the early migrants went as indentured servants as one way to secure a passage. Other forced migrants were transported in convict chains, particularly to Australia. Until well into the nineteenth century, the costs were too high relative to the perceived gains for many ‘free’ migrants. Declining costs of passage, increasing family resources, and the growing attractiveness of the destinations would change these conditions as the century progressed. European intercontinental emigration is plotted in Figure 1.1. In the first three decades after 1846, the figures averaged about 300 000 per annum; in the next two decades the figures more than doubled; and after the turn of the century, they rose to over a million per annum. The European sources also changed dramatically. In the first half of the century, the dominant emigration stream had its source in the British Isles, followed by Germany, and joined after 1870 by a rising tide of emigrants from Scandinavia and elsewhere in north-western Europe. European emigration took a sharp upward trend from the 1880s as emigration surged from southern and eastern Europe – indeed, these new streams accounted for most of the surge in the total. It came first from Italy and parts of Austria-Hungary, but, after the 1890s, it swelled to include Poland, Russia, Spain and Portugal.

The Age of Mass Migration

13

1600

Thousands per annum

1400 1200 1000 800

Total Europe

600 400 Southern and Eastern Europe

200

0 1846–50 1856–60 1866–70 1876–80 1886–901896–19001906–10 1916–20 Year (five-year average) Figure 1.1

European migration, 1846–1920

The emigrants in 1900 were certainly different from those in 1800. Early nineteenth-century migrant streams were often led by farmers and artisans from rural areas travelling in family groups, intending to acquire land and settle permanently at the New World’s frontier. In the late nineteenth century, while many still had rural roots, the emigrants from any given country were increasingly drawn from urban areas and non-agricultural occupations. By the middle of the century emigrants from Britain, a country that had already undergone a half-century of industrialisation, were mainly from non-farm occupations (Erickson 1990: 25; Cohn 1992: 385). This trend within countries was overwhelmed by the shift from old emigrant regions, the industrial leaders, to new emigrant regions, the industrial followers. Emigrants were also typically unskilled, partly reflecting skill levels in origin countries, but also because they were young and had limited schooling and training. By the late nineteenth century, emigrants were typically young adults. More than three-quarters of the immigrants entering the United States between 1868 and 1910 were aged 16 to 40 – at a time when 42 per cent of the US population was in this age group. The mover–stayer comparison was even more dramatic for the Old World: those aged 15 to 34 were only 35 per cent of the Irish population but over 80 per cent of the Irish emigrants. The migrant flow was also dominated by men: they accounted for nearly two-thirds of immigrants to the United States and

14 Tim Hatton

for more than three-quarters of the emigrants from southern European countries such as Spain and Italy. The ‘mass’ migrants tended to be single and emigrated as individuals rather than as family groups, although a significant minority were young couples with small children. In short, the migrants carried very low dependency burdens to the New World. These emigrant characteristics also reflect a deeper economic calculus. While the young and single might be more adventurous and enterprising, they also had most to gain from the move. By emigrating as young adults they were able to reap the gains over most of their working lives while minimising the cost of earnings foregone during passage and job search. And by moving as single adults, they were also able to minimise the direct costs of the move. Since emigrants were typically unskilled, they also had little technology- or country-specific human capital invested and hence stood to lose few of the rents from such acquired skills (except language). This characterisation reinforces the premise that labour market conditions at home and abroad were paramount to the migration decision and that most emigrants moved in expectation of a more prosperous future for themselves and their (future) children. While some moved to escape political or religious persecution, and others were driven by revolution or famine, most moved simply in the expectation of improving their economic status in the New World.

What accounts for cross-country differences in emigration? Various theories have been offered to explain patterns of emigration in the late nineteenth century. They draw on perspectives from economics, sociology, demography and geography. One typology divides these theories into four groups (Lowell 1987: ch. 2): structural change and response, which stresses economic modernisation and the demographic transition; economic, stressing the relative income incentive to migrate; innovation and diffusion, which stresses the spread of information through social networks; and rural ecology, which stresses change in the structure of landholding and in farming methods. Despite the contrary assumption often made in the literature, these ‘theories’ are not mutually exclusive: accepting one theory does not imply rejecting the others. One important stylised fact that such theories must explain is this: during the onset of modern economic growth in Europe, national emigration rates often rose, steeply at first from very low levels, rising more gradually to a peak and then gradually falling. This evolution, often seen as a multi-stage process, has sometimes been called the ‘mobility transition’ (Zelinsky 1971). Such patterns have been identified in studies

The Age of Mass Migration

15

of aggregate emigration rates from a number of countries (Akerman 1976; Hatton and Williamson 1998: ch. 3). There was certainly a wide variety of emigration rates from European countries in the late nineteenth century. Table 1.1 presents decade-average emigration rates for 12 European countries. The highest overall was from Ireland with an emigration rate of 12 per thousand population between 1850 and 1913. Countries such as Sweden and Norway had rates approaching 5 per thousand over the period from 1870 to 1913; the rates from Germany and Belgium were under 2 per thousand while for France it was close to zero. Furthermore, the long-run trends in emigration differed widely: from the 1860s rates of emigration declined in Ireland, and from the 1880s they declined in Germany and Norway. But almost at the same time emigration rates from Italy and Spain began a steep ascent which was halted only by the outbreak of war in Europe. There have been spasmodic attempts to explain these intercountry differences. Easterlin’s (1961) pioneering study stressed the effects of population growth spilling over into emigration while Tomaske (1971) found little effect of per capita income on cross-country emigration rates. But the further study of comparative emigration rates has been limited by lack of comparative data on some of the key explanatory variables,

Table 1.1 Gross emigration rates from European countries, 1850–1913 (emigrants per thousand population per annum, decade averages)

Belgium Denmark France Germany Great Britain Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden

1850–9

1860–9

1870–9

1880–9

1890–9

1900–13

1.90 – – 1.80 4.83 18.99 – 0.50 – – – 0.51

2.22 – 0.12 1.61 2.47 15.16 – 1.67 – – – 2.52

2.03 1.97 0.16 1.35 3.87 11.28 4.29 2.66 4.33 2.91 – 2.96

2.18 3.74 0.29 2.91 5.71 16.04 6.09 4.06 10.16 3.79 3.91 8.25

1.96 2.60 0.18 1.18 3.92 9.70 8.65 4.62 4.56 5.04 4.63 5.32

2.32 2.80 0.15 0.43 7.08 7.93 17.97 5.36 7.15 5.67 6.70 2.93

Source: Hatton and Williamson (1998: 33). Notes: These figures are for gross emigration and were drawn largely from Ferenczi and Willcox (1929). Where possible, the figures include emigration to other countries within Europe. Data on return migration is somewhat limited, but it is possible to construct net emigration figures for a more limited set of country/decades.

16 Tim Hatton

particularly wage rates, which are often thought to have influenced emigration. Our study of decade-average emigration rates for 12 Western European countries over the period 1850 to 1913 takes advantage of a new database of internationally comparable real wage rates for unskilled workers (Williamson 1995). The database includes the major emigrant-receiving countries and thus it allows us to construct the wage ratios between source and destination countries that are relevant to the migration decision. But these alone cannot explain much of the variation across countries and over time: they must be considered jointly with other variables. 3 Only then can the separate influences of each be identified. The other source country variables are: the rate of natural increase lagged 20 years; the share of the labour force in agriculture; the stock of previous emigrants living in destination countries; and the emigration rate lagged one decade. Although this is a limited set of fairly crude aggregate indicators, together they explain about two-thirds of the total variation between countries and across decades. Our results strongly support the hypothesis that relative wage rates were a key influence on emigration. They indicate that, on average, a rise in the relative real wage (destination to source country) raised the emigration rate in the long run by 1.27 per thousand – a significant effect. However our (inverse) measure of industrialisation, the share in agriculture, exhibits only a weak negative effect – suggesting that, on balance, agricultural populations were less mobile than urban/industrial populations. The effect of lagged natural increase strongly supports Easterlin’s view that the demographic transition drove emigration. Our estimate suggests that half of excess births were manifested in emigration 20 years later – a large effect indeed and one deserving further investigation. In particular, it is important to recognise that this was not the result of a labour force boom pushing down wage rates, since any such effects would be captured indirectly by the wage rate variable. Rather it was a direct demographic spillover into emigration. Both the stock of previous migrants and the lagged migration rate had a positive impact on the current decade’s emigration rate and these effects testify to the persistence in emigration streams that many observers have noted. The migration literature has often highlighted chain migration, sometimes called the ‘friends and relatives effect’, as an important influence. Once established, channels of migration perpetuated themselves through earlier migrants providing prepaid tickets for the passage, providing food and shelter to newly arrived friends and relatives and using social networks to gain access to job opportunities. Evidence from

The Age of Mass Migration

17

the United States suggests that as many as 90 per cent of immigrant arrivals at the turn of the century were travelling to meet a friend or relative who had previously emigrated. The migrant stock captures this effect and our estimate suggests that for each thousand previous emigrants a further 20 were ‘pulled’ abroad each year. Thus, the larger the stock of previous emigrants, the greater would be the flow and that flow would lead to further flows in a cumulative process. Can such estimates help us understand the ‘life cycle’ in emigration which was evident for a number of European countries? By aligning the decades of upswing and downswing for each country we can assess the forces at work in the stylised European emigration transition. Our simulation indicates that, in the upswing, the demographic effect made a growing contribution which, at its peak, contributed a rise of two per thousand to the emigration rate. Similarly, at the peak of the emigration life cycle, the falling share of the population in agriculture and the rising emigrant stock each contributed about one per thousand to the rise in emigration. But as real wages in Europe converged on those in the New World, the narrowing wage gap had a countervailing effect, offsetting the positive effects of the other variables by about two per thousand at the peak. Once the peak was passed, continuing real wage convergence overcame the declining effect of natural increase and the slackening influence of industrialisation and the migrant stock, producing a decline in the typical European emigration rate. The life cycle of emigration can largely be explained by the variables in our model, variables which capture relative wage effects, industrialisation, demographic forces and chain migration. It has sometimes been argued, however, that, at least in the early stages, potential emigrants were constrained by poverty from investing in emigration.4 As real incomes rose with economic development, more of those with the greatest incentives to escape poverty could actually afford the move. We found only limited evidence in favour of the poverty constraint. The real wage in the source country (as distinct from the real wage ratio) had only a weak positive effect. There are two possible reasons for this. First, our sample of (relatively affluent) Western European countries includes those where the poverty trap was least likely to be binding. The inclusion of more countries from Eastern Europe, the latecomers to mass migration, might produce stronger evidence of the poverty constraint. Second, emigration was well established in many of these countries so that the ‘friends and relatives effect’, by lowering the costs of emigration, served to attenuate the poverty trap. Thus the effect of the migrant stock may, in part, reflect the easing of the poverty trap. This helps

18 Tim Hatton

explain why emigration could be so high from a country like Ireland and so low (at least until the end of the nineteenth century) from, say, the south of Italy, an equally poor region. In the Irish case, the great famine of the 1840s effectively ejected a million Irish migrants who formed a substantial migrant stock, particularly in the United States. Thus even the poorest Irish migrant would have benefited from the release of the poverty constraint, and Irish emigration declined as conditions in Ireland gradually improved relative to those in destination countries. By contrast, in Italy the migrant stock was a powerful effect on the upswing of the emigration life cycle. Separate time series analysis for Ireland and Italy confirms that the wage gap effect was stronger in the former and the emigrant stock effect was stronger in the latter (see below).

Accounting for shocks and cycles in emigration Much of the quantitative literature on pre-First World War emigration concentrates on explaining the year-to-year fluctuations in emigration rates. Following the pioneering studies of Jerome (1926) and Thomas (1941), the literature has focused on whether ‘push’ or ‘pull’ forces were the most important determinants of the short-term fluctuations in emigration from a variety of countries. This debate has often been conducted in terms of the size and significance of regression coefficients on variables representing economic conditions in the source country versus those representing conditions in the destination. Using these criteria, the literature has reached no consensus: pull from abroad mattered in some studies while push at home mattered in others. A further issue has been whether it was variations in real wage rates or job opportunities (as represented by indices of production or employment) which mattered most. When both types of variable are included, the job opportunities variables often dominate – and especially job opportunities in the destination country. Much of this analysis was conducted in the 1970s and was critically reviewed by Gould (1979), who pointed to the lack of consistency in the results of different studies. Despite, or perhaps because of, this inconsistency the interest in modelling fluctuations in emigration subsequently waned. One problem with the existing studies of emigration is that they often lack a coherent economic model of the emigration decision, making the results difficult to interpret and evaluate. It is difficult to believe that migration decisions were made with reference only to conditions at home, or only to conditions abroad. Emigration decisions must have been based on some comparison, however approximate, between the

The Age of Mass Migration

19

two. Similarly, while cyclical conditions clearly mattered in the timing of migration, it is difficult to believe that wage rates did not matter, especially in the long run. For our analysis of variations in emigration we developed a model of the migration decision using a simple microeconomic framework. In this framework, potential migrants base their decision on the comparison of future expected income streams at home and abroad (based on past observations). Following Todaro (1969), expected income is the wage multiplied by the probability of employment. Because migrants are risk-averse, and because greater uncertainty attaches to the probability of employment than to the wage rate, the latter takes a larger ‘weight’ in the migration function.5 Our model provides a benchmark for the evaluation of the relationship among coefficients attached to different variables in an econometric model of emigration. Rather than test whether each is significantly different from zero, as the earlier studies did, we test the restrictions on their relative magnitudes suggested by the theory. Estimates on annual time series for gross emigration for the UK between 1870 and 1913 strongly support our theoretical priors. We find that wage rates and unemployment rates, both at home and abroad, all matter in the manner predicted. Thus a permanent 10 per cent rise in the foreign to home wage ratio had the effect of raising the emigration rate by 1.9 to 2.4 per thousand population – a result reassuringly similar to that obtained in the cross-country analysis. The effect of a 10 per cent rise in the foreign employment rate (for example a fall in the unemployment rate from 10 per cent to 1 per cent) raised the emigration rate in the long run by between 3.7 and 4.4 per thousand – larger than the effect of an equivalent wage increase and reflecting migrant risk aversion. Changes in the home employment rate had an effect similar to that of the home wage rate – a 10 per cent rise reduced emigration by about 2 per thousand. Finally, the migrant stock, which is also included in the model, had an even more powerful effect than in the cross-country analysis. 6 Can the results from time series be reconciled with the long-run forces identified across countries? Although unemployment or employment rates have powerful short-run effects, they are not trended in the long run and therefore do not drive long-run trends in emigration. However, wage ratios and the migrant stock do have important trend influences. Thus, for Ireland, using a similar model for emigration to that just described, we found that the 17 per cent fall in the (foreign to home) wage ratio between 1876 and 1880 and 1909 and 1913 accounted for 4 per thousand of the decline in the emigration rate.7 Over the same

20 Tim Hatton

period, the decline in the migrant stock contributed a similar amount to the overall decline in the emigration rate. It is more difficult to identify the direct demographic influences on emigration in annual time series because the effects are likely to be diffuse and easily obscured by the short-run volatility in emigration. However, we were able to identify the effect of natural increase lagged 25 years for the three Scandinavian countries. 8 Thus, for example, between 1895 and 1905 natural increase added to the emigration rate 1 per thousand in Sweden, 1.3 per thousand in Norway and 0.3 per thousand in Denmark. Hence the deeper-seated, longer-run forces can be identified, even in annual time series. Given the influence of trend forces in emigration, it is something of a puzzle that annual migration rates were so volatile. Emigration rates often increased or fell by a quarter or even a half in a year or two, only to recover again a few years later. In the time series models much of the volatility is explained by the cyclical employment variables and the equation dynamics. When these effects are excluded the profiles of emigration over time (predicted from simulation) are much smoother. For the Scandinavian countries, volatility is reduced by up to half when we abstract from these short-run influences. But this is itself a puzzle. Given that migration decisions were based on comparing future expected lifetime earning profiles, one might expect that short-run changes, quickly reversed, would have little effect. One reason for the surprising shortrun volatility is the option value of waiting. While it might be worth emigrating today even though unemployment was high in the destination, it would be better still to wait a year or two if conditions were expected to improve. Hence emigrants timed their moves in order to maximise the life cycle benefits overall.

Explaining local variations in emigration An important challenge to any theory of European emigration is whether it can explain differences in emigration rates between regions and localities within the same country. Since national emigration rates are simply an aggregation of local or regional rates, a convincing theory of emigration should be able to account for some of this variation. These differences were large – often larger than between countries. Table 1.2 illustrates the variations among the 16 Italian compartimenti for 1882 and 1912. In 1882 emigration rates varied from close to zero in Lazio to nearly 15 per thousand in Basilicata. These regional statistics hide even greater variations among the 69 provinces: emigration from the province of Belluno was as high as 46 per thousand in 1882. Similar

The Age of Mass Migration

21

Table 1.2 Italian gross emigration rates by compartimento, 1882 and 1912 (per thousand population) 1882

1912

Total Europe Intercontinental Total Europe Intercontinental Piedmont 12.29 Liguria 6.75 Lombardy 6.09 Veneto 12.79 Emilia 3.19 Tuscany 4.21 Marches 0.77 Umbria 0.05 Lazio 0.01 Abruzzi3.56 Molise Campania 4.82 Apulia 0.49 Basilicata 14.72 Calabria 8.29 Sicily 1.08 Sardinia 0.30 Italy 5.62

9.53 1.99 3.77 11.29 2.97 3.48 0.17 0.03 0.00 0.64

2.76 4.76 2.32 1.50 0.22 0.73 0.60 0.02 0.01 2.92

18.97 7.34 15.54 31.82 13.15 15.06 29.40 20.30 13.49 32.27

11.21 2.52 12.17 27.01 9.99 10.11 12.76 16.00 2.03 4.25

7.76 4.82 3.37 4.82 3.17 4.95 16.64 4.31 11.46 28.02

1.21 0.39 0.86 2.12 0.52 0.29 3.54

3.61 0.10 13.86 6.17 0.56 0.01 2.08

20.14 13.54 31.09 33.32 25.06 10.63 20.31

1.65 2.02 1.14 0.91 1.49 5.67 8.80

18.48 11.53 29.95 32.41 23.57 4.96 11.51

variations can be found in other countries. For example, in 1900/1 emigration from Portugal ranged from 0.1 per thousand in Evora to 19.3 per thousand for Ponta Delgada in the Azores. Despite such clear and obvious differences, there is little consensus about how they should be explained (Baines 1994). A number of studies have emphasised differences in the pattern of rural landholding as the key to such variations. For Norway and Sweden, Lowell (1987: 212–16) found that emigration was negatively related to local wage rates, but also positively related to the number of landless labourers and the share of land occupied by large estates. Similarly, for the East Elbian region of Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, it has been argued that the rise of large estates reduced the opportunities for smallholding, converted peasants to wage labourers, and boosted emigration (Walker 1964: 64). A number of studies have suggested that access to land, the availability of other rural employment opportunities and population growth all interacted to determine emigration. In north-west Germany, proto-industrial areas where cottage industry was interlocked with agriculture (especially seasonally) had higher rates of

22 Tim Hatton

natural increase than did other rural areas. They were also vulnerable to factory competition and thus had increasing difficulties absorbing young workers generated by booming birth rates two decades earlier. Thus ‘emigration was highest where there were many agriculturalists but little agriculture’ (Kamphoefner 1976: 182). Some observers have argued that other forces were paramount. In an important article John Gould (1980) argued for what he called the ‘innovation and diffusion’ approach. This suggests that emigration was often constrained in the early years by lack of information and knowledge about the opportunities for emigration. In the innovating areas (often on the coast), contacts with travellers and traders got a stream of emigration started. As knowledge of conditions in destination countries grew, emigration increased and began to spill over into neighbouring localities and regions. This process of diffusion gradually permeated all areas as information spread, so that emigration rates began to converge. The comparison for Italian compartimenti between 1882 and 1912 certainly demonstrates convergence in relative, if not in absolute, terms. At a more disaggregated level, the coefficient of variation in emigration rates among the 69 provinces fell from 1.57 in 1882 to 0.63 in 1912. 9 One difficulty with such a theory is that it is not easy to test since information is not easy to measure. Furthermore, convergence and persistence in emigration rates could be the result of convergence and persistence in underlying forces (other than information diffusion) which influenced emigration. In our study we analysed local emigration rates for two countries: Ireland and Italy (Hatton and Williamson 1998: chs 5 and 6). Looking at regions within a country allows a much richer set of explanatory variables to be used, chiefly from census sources, than is possible between countries. In our study of Ireland we analysed emigration rates from the 32 counties pooled across the four census years, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911. Natural increase (as reflected in family size) and foreign to local wage rates had effects qualitatively similar to those emerging from the cross-country analysis. But other, more subtle, influences also emerged. First, measures of poverty were strongly related to emigration rates: clearly the Irish were escaping poverty and were not constrained by the poverty trap. 10 Second, the proportion of the labour force in agriculture was positively related to emigration, as previous writers have suggested, but the proportion of landholdings less than five acres had a strong negative effect. This suggests that where there were opportunities to inherit (or acquire through marriage or other means) small plots of land, there was much less emigration. Third, we found that, contrary to some

The Age of Mass Migration

23

suggestions, the proportion of Catholics did not raise the emigration rates, but in fact had a small negative effect. While some have seen the oppression of Catholics as an important determinant of emigration, the high emigration rates from regions with the highest density of Catholics were a result of poverty and disadvantage, not of Catholicism per se. Italy represents a tougher test than Ireland for it is here that the innovation and diffusion effects might be expected to matter more. Our database for Italy consists of 69 provinces for the two years 1902 and 1912. Here, too, the effects of lagged natural increase and the foreign to local wage ratio had the expected effects although the latter was rather weak. But the wage index fails to capture the chronic underemployment in agriculture, particularly in the south. This is reflected in the fact that the share of the labour force in agriculture had a negative effect in the north of Italy but a positive effect on emigration from the south. Urbanisation and economic development both tended to reduce emigration, adding to the push from the south as compared to the north of Italy. The structure of landholding also proved to be important. The greater the proportion of owner-occupiers and sharecroppers among the agricultural labour force, the greater the emigration rate. This differs somewhat from the finding for Ireland where smallholdings seemed to induce potential migrants to stay (a point discussed further below). Finally, what of the spread of information and the innovation diffusion hypothesis? The fact that one can explain two-thirds of the (considerable) variation in local Italian emigration rates suggests that it was of marginal importance, at least by the turn of the century. Unfortunately it has not been possible to construct a comparable dataset for earlier years when the diffusion approach might be somewhat more compelling. Although the effects of information are not directly measurable, one corollary would seem to be that education and literacy, by mediating the flow of information, would influence emigration. Our results indicate that the proportion of adults who were literate (only 50 per cent in the south) had no significant effect on provincial emigration rates.11 Overall, the variations in provincial emigration rates can be explained fairly well by economic and demographic variables; it is the interpretation of those effects which is most open to debate.

Some awkward questions: destination choice and return migration Emigration streams from a given country were often dominated by one destination, for example, Scandinavian emigrants went almost exclusively

24 Tim Hatton

to the United States. 12 What determined the choice among alternative destinations is a relatively neglected topic. For emigrants from some regions, moving to another European country was one alternative. Emigrants from Belgium, Poland and northern Italy often took the option to move to a more prosperous neighbouring country. Emigration from Italy within Europe, principally to southern France, Germany and AustriaHungary declined with distance from the industrial centres of these countries, as is illustrated by the emigration rates by compartimento in Table 1.2. We estimated this gradient in our model of Italian provincial emigration and the result indicates that proximity to European industrial centres was important. For this reason alone, the region around Naples would have had an emigration rate 8 per thousand lower than the area around Milan. To some degree this was paralleled by a rising north–south gradient of intercontinental emigration, but it is far from clear to what degree these destinations were substitutes. More difficult still is explaining the choice between different overseas destinations. Given the economic calculus revealed in other aspects of emigrants’ decisions, it is difficult to believe that different destinations were not compared and treated as alternatives. Choice of destination within a receiving country, such as the United States, is associated with measures of regional income, as might have been expected, and especially with the stock of previous migrants to that state/region.13 But choice among countries involves additional factors such as cultural and linguistic affinity with the country of origin. Thus emigrants from Britain and Ireland chose from among the English-speaking British dominions and the United States. Emigrants from Italy, Spain and Portugal revealed much stronger preferences for South American countries such as Argentina and Brazil than did other emigrants from continental Europe. These preferences were sometimes reinforced by policy and/or prejudice towards immigrants in the receiving country – subsidies to some emigrants, restrictions on others. 14 In our analysis of Italian provincial data, we estimated the determinants of choice among three destinations: Argentina, Brazil and the United States. Relative wages across destinations had the expected effects (favouring the high-wage destination), but this substitution effect was relatively small. Choice among these destinations seems to be influenced more by ‘emigration traditions’ favouring one destination over another.15 As emigration from Italy grew so the prominence of the United States as a destination increased. But this shift occurred only gradually despite the substantial wage gaps favouring North America over South America. Much of the growth of emigration to the United States came from the

The Age of Mass Migration

25

southern part of Italy where emigration traditions to South America were weakest. Thus, when new streams of emigration arose, such as those from southern Italy at the turn of the century, economic advantage carried more weight. This effect overwhelmed what might seem to be the more obvious logic of destination choices by region. Thus migrants from the north of Italy continued to favour South America over North America despite their urban backgrounds, while the rural southern Italians migrated in increasing numbers to the urban United States.16 While most European emigrants were permanent settlers, there were mounting flows of return migrants. By the end of the century about a third of European migrants to the United States were returning, usually after a few years. Increasing destination wages relative to transport costs and falling transport costs contributed to the trend. But the upward trend in return migration owes most to the changing country composition of emigrants – particularly the growing share from southern Europe. 17 Many of these emigrants intended to return to their country of origin and to use their accumulated savings to marry and set up home, and often to start farms and businesses. In such cases the outward flows were more male-dominated than where permanent settlement was the goal. While return migration strategies are not well understood, one thing is clear: differences in rates of return migration are associated more with the country of origin than with the country of destination. Thus high rates of return migration among southern Europeans at the turn of the century applied equally to those emigrating to North and South America. Cultural differences may account for some of the cross-country differences in return migration. There may also have been vintage effects: countries which entered mass migration early did not develop such strong traditions of return migration. But such differences between countries have been little studied. What evidence there is suggests that family and social structure and patterns of landholding lay at the heart of return migration. The comparison between Ireland, where return migration was relatively unusual, and Italy, where it was common, is instructive. In our analysis of county emigration rates from Ireland, we found that where smallholdings predominated there was less emigration. By contrast, in Italy, small ownership and sharecropping was associated with high emigration – particularly to the United States. This is consistent with the view that, for Italians, emigration was more often seen as a means of acquiring or accumulating land or property (see Cinel 1991). This emigration, particularly to the United States, can be seen as part of a strategy which involved migration and remigration, often by several family members, rather than as the product of

26 Tim Hatton

overoptimistic expectations followed by disillusionment with life in the New World. But why these strategies differed across time and place is still not fully understood.

Conclusion International migration was one aspect of the growing globalisation of the world economy in the late nineteenth century. Its contours and characteristics have been widely studied and it has given rise to a large literature. In The Age of Mass Migration we elaborate on the economic and demographic causes of this surge of migrants to the New World. The results of our analysis demonstrate that rational economic decision making lay at the heart of mass migration and can explain many of its features. Variations over time and between countries can be explained, at least to a first approximation, by the economic environment in which such decisions were taken. Within individual countries, regional variations can be linked both with indicators of economic development and with patterns of landholding and agricultural tenure. But there remain questions about precisely how and why these translated into different emigration intensities within and between countries. Patterns of destination choice and return migration remain the least well understood aspects of the global integration of labour markets. Deeper insight awaits further study of life cycle decision making in the context of different patterns of demographic change, family and social structure, and asset accumulation.

Acknowledgements This paper originated as a presentation given at the conference on ‘Migration and Mobility: The European Context’ at Kingston University on 26–7 April 1999. It is based almost entirely on material from Hatton and Williamson (1998). I am grateful to Jeff Williamson for allowing me to reproduce the results of our joint work. Any errors of interpretation are mine alone.

Notes 1. The most useful and readily accessible short survey is that of Baines (1991). The volume edited by Vecoli and Sinke (1991) contains a number of valuable country studies in the social history tradition.

The Age of Mass Migration

27

2. Specifically, this chapter summarises the findings of Chapters 2–6 of the book. The economic impact of mass migration on source and destination countries, the other major focus of our research, deserves separate treatment and is reserved for another occasion. 3. The correlation coefficient between the emigration rates in Table 1.1 and the relevant decade-average real wage ratio is –0.20. The correlation with net emigration rates (where these can be calculated) is somewhat higher, at −0.39. 4. See, for example, Faini and Venturini (1994) for evidence for Italy. 5. The model is derived from a logarithmic utility function and assumes that future expected values of the wage and of employment probabilities are related with geometric lags to past values in an adaptive process. This gives the following model for migration (see Hatton and Williamson 1998: 61–3 for the full derivation): Where m is the emigration rate, w denotes wage rates and e, employment rates abroad (f) and at home (h). The terms in the lower line of the equation (with parameters ε) are the costs ofmigration as reflected by the migrant stock (MST) and a time trend for falling transport costs. The last term is the lagged dependent variable arising from the adaptive expectations process with parameter λ. In the upper line of the equation, the fraction 3/2 reflects the greater weight given to the empolyment terms as a result of employment uncertainty (arising from the concavity of the utility function). The coefficient γ allows for lower uncertainty to attach to home employment as compared with abroad. Thus it could range between 1 (equal uncertainty with abroad) and 2/3 (no uncertainty). Further dynamics are added to the estimating question to reflect the option value of waiting. See Hatton (1995). 6. The long-run effect of an increase of 1000 in the migrant stock is to draw a further 80–90 migrants abroad each year. This is much larger than the effect obtained from cross-country estimation and is probably the result of using annual rather than decade-average data. 7. Between 1876 and 1880 and 1909 and 1913 the migrant stock abroad relative to home population fell from 59 per cent to 49 per cent. This may seem surprising in light of the high rates of emigration and falling home population. It reflects the diminishing contribution to the migrant stock of the famine and post-famine cohorts of emigrants as well as the subsequent decline in emigration due to improvements in Irish living standards (see O’Rourke 1995). 8. The studies of Quigley (1972) and Larsen (1982) also find some evidence of a demographic ‘push’ in the context of time series for Sweden and Denmark respectively. 9. Baines (1994: 532) has argued that convergence was not universal among regional emigration rates in different continental European countries. Clearly, in some countries where emigration was relatively well established, the information diffusion hypothesis would have less force. Thus, across the 32 Irish countries, the coefficient in emigration rose from 0.31 in 1881 to 0.71 in 1901, falling back to 0.41 in 1911. 10. The measures of poverty used are the proportion of hte county population in receipt of poor relief and the proportion of housed classified as third and fourth class (generally one-roomed cabins).

28 Tim Hatton 11. It might be argued that literacy would also have another effect in the opposite direction: those with more country-specific capital would be less likely to emigrate. In fact, no positive effect of literacy on emigration emerged in our study of Ireland – a country where information effects were unimportant. 12. Between 1870 and 1913, 90 per cent of Danish, 97 per cent of Swedish and 98 per cent of Norwegian intercontinental emigrants went to the United States. 13. The most useful study, which analyses the intended destinations of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island at the turn of the century, remains that of Dunleavy and Germany (1978). 14. Thus, for example, subsidised passages were offered to British immigrants to Australia and to (northern) Italian immigrants to the state of São Paolo (Brazil). Non-British emigrants to Australia were discouraged until after 1945 under the so-called ‘White Australia policy’. 15. This term has been used by Kero (1991) in the context of emigration from Finland. 16. This apparent anomaly has attracted the attention of historians – see Baily (1983) and Klein (1983). 17. Baines (1994: 535) has argued that the differences between ‘old’ and ‘new’ emigrant countries is not as sharp as sometimes believed. To some extent the rates of return migration depend on the methods of measurement. But the evidence from the United States in the few years before 1913 suggests that there was still a higher propensity to return among recent immigrants from southern Europe than among those from the countries of north-west Europe who were more likely to settle permanently.

References Akerman, S. (1976) ‘Theories and Methods of Migration Research’, in H. Rundblom and H. Norman (eds), From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Baily, S. L. (1983) ‘Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and New York’, American Historical Review, 88: 281–305. Baines, D. (1991) Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Baines, D. (1994) ‘European Emigration, 1815–1930: Looking at the Emigration Decision Again’, Economic History Review, 47: 525–44. Cinel, D. (1991) The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cohn, R. L. (1992) ‘The Occupations of English Immigrants to the United States, 1836–1853’, Journal of Economic History, 44: 289–300. Dunleavy, J. A. and Gemery, H. A. (1978) ‘Economic Opportunity and the Responses of Old and New Immigrants in the United States’, Journal of Economic History, 38: 901–17. Easterlin, R. (1961) ‘Influences in European Overseas Migration before World War I’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 9: 33–51. Eltis, D. (1983) ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons’, American Historical Review, 88: 251–80.

The Age of Mass Migration

29

Erickson, C. (1990) ‘Emigration to the U.S.A. from the British Isles in 1841: Who were the English Emigrants?’, Population Studies, 44: 21–40. Faini, R. and Venturini, A. (1994) ‘Italian Emigration in the pre-War Period’, in T. J. Hatton and J. G. Williamson (eds), Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850–1913 (London: Routledge). Ferenczi, I. and Willcox, W. F. (1929) International Migrations (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research). Gould, J. D. (1979) ‘European Intercontinental Emigration: Patterns and Causes’, Journal of European Economic History, 8: 593–679. Gould, J. D. (1980) ‘European Inter-continental Emigration: The Role of “Diffusion” and “Feedback” ’, Journal of European Economic History, 9: 267–315. Hatton, T. J. (1995) ‘A Model of UK Emigration, 1870–1913’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 77: 407–15. Hatton, T. J. and Williamson, J. G. (1998) The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York: Oxford University Press). Jerome, H. (1926) Migration and Business Cycles (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research). Kamphoefner, W. D. (1976) ‘At the Crossroads of Economic Development: Background Factors Affecting Emigration from Nineteenth Century Germany’, in I. A. Glazier and L. De Rosa (eds), Migration Across Time and Nations (New York: Holmes and Meier). Kero, R. (1991) ‘Migration Traditions from Finland to North America’, in R. J. Vecoli and S. Sinke (eds), A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930 (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press). Klein, H. S. (1983) ‘The Integration of Italian Immigrants into the United States and Argentina: A Comparative Analysis’, American Historical Review, 88: 306–29. Larsen, U. M. (1982) ‘A Quantitative Study of Emigration from Denmark to the United States, 1870–1913’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 30: 101–28. Lowell, B. L. (1987) Scandinavian Exodus: Demography and Social Development of 19th Century Rural Communities (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press). O’Rourke, K. (1995) ‘Emigration and Living Standards in Ireland since the Famine’, Journal of Population Economics, 8: 407–21. Quigley, J. M. (1972) ‘An Economic Model of Swedish Emigration’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 86: 111–26. Thomas, D. S. (1941) Social and Economic Aspects of Swedish Population Movements (New York: Macmillan). Todaro, M. P. (1969) ‘A Model of Labor Migration and Urban Unemployment in Less Developed Countries’, American Economic Review, 59: 138–48. Tomaske, J. A. (1971) ‘The Determinants of Intercountry Differences in European Emigration, 1881–1900’, Journal of Economic History, 31: 840–53. Vecoli, R. J. and Sinke, S. M. (1991) A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press). Walker, M. (1964) Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Williamson, J. G. (1995) ‘The Evolution of Global Labor Markets since 1830: Background Evidence and Hypotheses’, Explorations in Economic History, 32: 141–96. Zelinsky, W. (1971) ‘The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition’, Geographical Review, 61: 219–49.

2 East–West European Migration: Questions and Some Answers Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

Introduction The economics of migration has demonstrated that there are significant differences between labour markets and real wages in West (WEU) and East European (EEU) union countries (see Ghatak et al., 1996; Hatton and Williamson 1998; OECD, 1997). For instance, social welfare measures providing unemployment, insurance, pension rights and other income support benefits are now much less in the EEU in comparison with the WEU countries. Such differences in labour welfare measures can lead to major behavioural differences in the operations of labour markets. Unemployment may be disguised in the EEU as the marginal (extra) productivity of many jobs (for example, in agriculture and the service sector) may be zero or close to zero. Note that such ‘disguised unemployment’ is not welfare enhancing in the aggregate as observed employment contributes little to the aggregate output or real income. Second, labour markets in the whole of Europe are marked by substantial differences in real wages and incomes. Of major importance are questions regarding the sources of these differences in real wages. One obvious source is difference in labour productivity. But there are other unanswered questions. Are these real wage differences the product of high competitive market forces? To what extent has the price/wage-setting behaviour of large firms or governments contributed to such differences? Each probability underlines a different set of policy prescriptions. Most of the writings on migration, including the seminal contribution of Harris and Todaro (1970) and Todaro (1969), focus on the real wage differences as the main motor behind labour migration. A related feature of European labour markets is the contrast in techniques of production. Even within the EEU countries, some sectors use highly 30

East–West European Migration

31

capital-intensive techniques while others use quite backward technologies. Clearly, the existence of such a phenomenon highlights the need for a debate concerning the choice of appropriate technology for EEU economies (see Sen 1964). It also poses the question as to whether the EEU workers in low technology sectors will migrate between technologies or between countries. Finally, a major feature of some EEU countries is relatively low levels of education in comparison with WEU countries, particularly in the field of market economics, business, law and advanced science. Given the relative scarcity of ‘human capital’, one should expect high rates of return to agents for investment in human capital. These high rates of return do not seem to exist, for example, in Poland – an EEU country which is supposed to poorly reward its highly educated manpower. For this reason, the question naturally arises: what is the correlation between education and migration? While many have focused on the macro-economic issues like real wage differences, the probability of finding a job, real wage flexibility and benefit payments, the main motivation of writing this chapter is to emphasise the microcharacteristics of immigrants, labour market behaviour (prompted by economic, political and sociological forces within the host countries) in the light of the enlargement of the Western European Union and its possible eastward expansion with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The other motivation lies in emphasising the need for undertaking interdisciplinary research to enhance our understanding of the welfare impact of migration within a larger European Union (EU). The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 outlines the policy debate in Europe and asks some basic questions. Section 3 summarises the economic theories of migration and welfare. In section 4, we describe the need for developing a microbased, interdisciplinary approach to understand and evaluate the costs and benefits of migration. The final section concludes by setting out a future research agenda for analysis of the causes and consequences of European migration.

European migration: the policy debate A number of factors contributed to the current policy debate on East– West European migration. For instance: 1 The enlargement of the Western European Union and the subsequent relaxation of internal border controls to allow free mobility of labour within Europe.

32 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

2 The eastward expansion of the European Union with the possibility of full membership of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic of the EEU within the next decade. 3 The declining and ageing population in Europe. The migration policy debate has received additional attention with the rise of neo-Nazi movements in some Western European countries, particularly in France and Germany. Some of the major questions asked in this context are as follows: (a) (b) (c) (d)

Who are the migrants and do they rob our jobs and lower our wages? What will be the size of the flows? Do immigrants live off our social security systems? How do we measure the welfare of the ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ countries? (e) How well do immigrants perform in the recipient country? (f) How does the process of ‘social assimilation’ or ‘exclusion’ take place? (g) How does the political system help or hinder the welfare of the immigrants and the host country? (h) How do we analyse the problem of ‘illegal’ immigration and political asylum and refugees and can we explain return migration? (i) To what extent is migration a gendered issue? Many researchers have contributed to the different aspects of the debate. But, so far, few have tried to investigate the issues in migration from a broad sociopolitical and economic angle. In what follows, we will first discuss the economics of migration and welfare and then draw attention to some of its limitations.

Economics of migration and welfare In dualistic theories of economic growth and development (Lewis 1954; Ghatak 1995), migration is regarded as a key to economic growth. Economic growth is explained as a process where labour is transferred from a low productivity to a high productivity sector, thereby increasing total output and real income of the whole society. Thus, labour migration is regarded as a welfare-enhancing mechanism (see Figure 2.1). The gains from factor mobility (for example, labour) within an enlarged EU can be shown with Figure 2.1. Assume factors are homogeneous and the initial availability of the factor Qa in country A and Q b in country B.

East–West European Migration

33

Price

P*

MPA PA

Quantity

Q *A Figure 2.1

QA

Country of emigration

The total supply of, say, labour, is Q A + Q B which is fixed. The gain from employment of an additional unit of factor (i.e., MPL) varies with the quantity of labour, Q. This relationship is shown for countries A and B respectively by MPA (see Figure 2.1) and MPB (see Figure 2.2). Without factor – that is, labour – mobility between A and B countries, the MPL in country A is PA (employing Q A); in B, the MPL is higher and thus PB > PA. In country B, employment is Q B. If a unit of labour moves from A to B, its MPL would rise from PA to PB. Thus, it is incentive compatible for a factor to move from A to B until MP in the two countries is equalised at P*C. Here, a quantity (Q A − Q*A) in Figure 2.1 (equal to Q*B − Q B in Figure 2.2) has moved to country B, raising factor supply in B from Q B to Q* B. The total gain from factor mobility is shown by the difference in MP for each unit of the factor, aggregated for all units moving to country B. This is shown in Figure 2.2 by the shaded area ≡ ½ (PB − PA ) (Q*B − Q B). East–West European migration: some ‘stylised facts’ Interestingly enough, East–West European migration was a major feature of labour mobility in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (Hatton and Williamson 1998). Such migration occurred in the following stages:

34 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

Price

PB P*

MPB PA

Quantity

QB Figure 2.2

Q *B Country of immigration

1 In stage one, two different types of migration occurred: (a) European mass migration to the New World, particularly to the USA and Canada; (b) massive internal migration from the rural to the major urban areas in search of better life. 2 The next East–West migration within Europe was the direct consequence of the Second World War. The treaties of Yalta and Potsdam led to the uprooting of many Germans, Poles and many Eastern European people. The Cold War and the Iron Curtain halted most of the East–West migration. Even so, about 13.3 million people migrated from the East to the West (Fassman and Munz 1994). More than 75 per cent of such migration between 1950 and 1993 can be classified as ‘ethnic migration’. 3 The fall of the Iron Curtain led to a significant rise in East–West migration. Besides this, political and war refugees migrated from former Yugoslavia (see also Chapter 3 of this book). Migration Explaining rural to urban labour migration and evaluating its consequences are important for understanding economic development. Urbanisation certainly seems to be a concomitant of economic growth.

East–West European Migration

35

The countries with higher per capita income also have larger proportions of their population residing in urban areas. For the most part, this urbanisation has been viewed as desirable. For example, in dualistic theories of growth and development, migration is seen as a key to economic growth. Development is seen as a process where labour is transferred from a low productivity, rural sector to a high productivity, urban sector thereby increasing output as a whole. This view is strikingly illustrated in the dualistic growth models. The views of migration which are most consistent with dualistic models view the potential migrant either as a supplier of labour or as an investor in human capital. These two views and the research which they have generated will be outlined in this section. A third approach which views the migrant as a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods will also be sketched. Finally, a new approach which views the potential migrant as a producer of home-produced commodities will be outlined. These four views will be classified ‘the labour-flow’ view, ‘the human capital’ view, ‘the regional amenities’ view and ‘the household production’ view respectively. The labour-flow view In labour-flow models, migration is viewed as being labour’s response to regional labour market disequilibrium. To illustrate this adjustment process, consider a simple production function with two inputs, labour and capital. Furthermore, assume each input is paid its marginal product. Let MPL and MPK be the marginal products of labour and capital in a region where labour is relatively abundant and let MPL′ and MPK′ be the marginal products for labour-scarce regions. Assuming normal inputs, where the marginal product of a factor is positively related to the quantity of the other factor employed, MPL < MPL′ and MPK > MPK′. If only real returns are important, equilibrium exists when factors of production receive the same real return in each region (that is, when MPL = MPL′ and MPK = MPK′). This equilibrium will be achieved because factors, both capital and labour, will flow to the region where they have the greatest return. As labour flows to the high-wage region, MPL′ will fall (and MPK′ rise) due to the increased supply of workers in the high-wage region. Similarly, MPL will rise (and MPK fall) with the reduction of workers in the low-wage region. Capital should, of course, flow in the opposite direction to labour, reinforcing these changes in factor prices. This adjustment will continue until real regional wage differentials are entirely explained by regional wage and capital rigidities and the resulting unemployment or by moving costs.

36 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

In dualistic development theories, the labour-flow model, in its simplest form, can be stated as M = â(w − s), â > 0,

(1)

where M represents net rural to urban migration, w is the real urban wage rate, s is the real rural wage rate (typically assumed to be at subsistence), and â is a scalar which represents imperfect information, moving costs and artificial barriers which restrict the speed of adjustment. If w falls as the size of the urban labour force rises (that is, if labour and capital are substitutes and if the labour force grows more rapidly than the capital stock) then migration will fall through time as the urban–rural real wage differential narrows. Indeed, the eventual narrowing of real wage differentials is a major prediction of the model. The apparent failure of real wages to narrow has generated much empirical research and several innovations. It is important to properly define the real wage rates in the model. In general, it is thought that the costs of living are higher in urban areas than in rural areas. Hence, nominal wage rates are expected to be higher in cities. In terms of equation (1), M = 0 when w = s. Since w and s are real wage rates, the nominal wage rate in equilibrium (that is, when w = s) is higher in the urban area. These wage rates should of course be made occupation- or skill-specific in order to obtain the relevant comparison. One influential view of why real regional wage rates may not converge was stated by Myrdal (1957). Regional differences in skill or education may be self-perpetuating because higher-skilled and better-educated individuals are the most likely to migrate out of depressed regions. If this education is largely paid for by those living in the depressed region, the exodus of the most skilled persons will further impoverish the region, resulting in higher out-migration in the future. Myrdal presented this drain of skilled persons as an example of a vicious cycle. Another explanation for the failure of urban–rural real wage differentials to narrow concentrates on employment differentials that can occur when labour markets fail to function perfectly. Union or government restrictions on hiring, restrictive land tenure laws, discrimination and high wage policies of governments, private employers or unions may be a cause of such failure. In early dualistic models it was assumed that there is no unemployment in the urban sector and no observed unemployment in the rural sector. Rural workers simply shared jobs and could be transferred to the urban sector without cost. Later models introduce urban unemployment. Potential migrants must look not only at the wage rate they would earn if employed but must also look at the probability they

East–West European Migration

37

will be employed. In the Harris–Todaro model, the probability a potential migrant will be unemployed is assumed to be the proportion of urban workers who are currently unemployed. This assumption allows equation (1) to be rewritten as M = â(δ w − s),

(2)

where δ = 1 − u, and u is the unemployment rate. Hence, δ is the employment rate and δw is real expected urban wage income. This simple equation (2) has many implications for trade theory and public finance as well as for labour economics. For the moment, consider the implications of equation (2) for regional wage differentials. If δw − s > 0, labour will flow into the urban area, lowering δw. Note that it is not necessary that wage rates be flexible in order for δw to fall. The equilibrating mechanism might be a rise in unemployment. δw will continue to fall until δ w = s. Hence, migration may not necessarily cause regional wage differentials to narrow. Another notable feature of the model is that job creation may increase both the number of unemployed workers and the rate of unemployment. Suppose the labour market is initially in equilibrium, in the sense that δw = s with w and s fixed. The creation of urban jobs will initially increase δ, resulting in more rural to urban migration in response to the increased probability of employment. Equilibrium is restored when rural workers move to the urban area for each job created. The unemployment rate in the urban market returns to its former level with both more urban workers and more rural workers unemployed. However, the unemployment rate in the economy as a whole rises because the high unemployment urban sector increases in relative importance in the economy. The Harris–Todaro model suggests two ways of lowering unemployment rates. Urban jobs could be made less attractive or rural jobs could be made more attractive. For example, a fall in the urban wage rate would make urban jobs less attractive. A fall in w would reduce δw and workers would leave the urban area. Consequently, δ would rise (unemployment would fall) offsetting the fall in w. Similarly, a rise in traditional, rural income, s, would lead to an increase in δ as urban workers moved to the rural area. If a decline in w is thought to be undesirable, policy could be directed at improving the traditional, rural economy as the best way of reducing urban unemployment. The Harris–Todaro migration model, like the labour-flow model from which it is derived, views migration in a narrow context where net migration occurs as a response to opportunities to earn higher income.

38 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

The model is an aggregate model where aggregate migration responds to regional variables. It does not directly address the question of why some persons move and others stay. The next model to be discussed does address the question of who moves. Migration is viewed as an investment decision. Investment costs involve returns over time. These costs might properly be thought of as including a period of job search in the urban area. Recent migrants may be much more likely to be unemployed than established residents. Hence, unemployment, and the resulting temporary loss in income, might be better viewed as investment required to earn higher future income. The migrant might, then, be properly viewed as an investor in human capital and not simply as a supplier of labour. The human capital view In the human capital view of migration, migration is viewed as an investment decision like any other investment decision. Costs are incurred in anticipation of future gains. Central to the investment decision is the identification of the costs and returns from migration. Here it is argued that persons or families look at the net present value ( V ) of a move. Net present value is given by n

V =

∑ ( yt – δ ) ⁄ ( 1 + r )

t

–C

(3)

t=1

where yt = δ t w is urban income, r is the rate of time discount, and C is the cost of moving. Note that in equation (3) the costs of moving are assumed to occur before the move. The wage rates are assumed to be constant. However, expected income is different for each year because the probability of unemployment is assumed to depend upon time. Note that if δt is constant and if C = 0, then the model collapses to the labourflow model in equation (2). The expected duration of the initial job search and not the average regional unemployment rate becomes the crucial unemployment variable. Equation (3) suggests that migration is discouraged by high costs of funding a move. Also, the use of V begs the question of access to borrowing/lending institutions (Ghatak and Levine 1994). The explicit treatment of migration as an investment decision provides a further explanation of why regional wage differentials may narrow. The costs of a move must be covered by the discounted differences in income. The human capital model moves away from the aggregate labourflow model to an emphasis on individual decisions. Persons or families

East–West European Migration

39

with a positive net present value from migration move. Those with a negative net present value stay. Empirical studies concentrate on determining the characteristics of individuals or families that make them prone to migrate. These characteristics are introduced to the studies in terms of how they are thought to influence the costs or benefits of a move. Age, education, marital status, occupation, sex, employment status, income and the number of children are all characteristics which have been included in studies of migration because they are thought to systematically influence the costs or benefits of a move. Regional characteristics such as average employment rates and average income and the distribution of that income have been included in human capital models as affecting the expected costs or benefits of a move. In terms of policy, one of the more important variables is education, which is thought to lead to more migration. Migrants are risk takers, as are any other investors, and education may both reduce risk and enhance the ability of a person to bear risk. Education will reduce risk to the extent that it represents general human capital, enabling the person to adjust to a wider variety of occupations and lifestyles. Education makes it easier to bear risk because it represents higher lifetime wealth, enabling the person to bear a temporary loss in income. Within the context of dualistic development views, rural education is encouraged partly because it is thought to increase rural to urban migration, resulting in a better allocation of resources. Non-monetary, psychic costs and benefits may also be included in the model. Caution should be exercised, however, when dealing with these psychic costs. For example, persons may be reluctant to leave friends, relatives and the comfortable lifestyle of their birthplace. This reluctance is a psychic cost. Other persons may be eager to escape the restrictive lifestyle of their birthplace. This eagerness is called a psychic benefit. The persistence of regional wage differentials might be explained in terms of psychic costs, while the higher mobility of some subgroups of people may be explained in terms of psychic benefits. However, unless relative magnitudes of the costs and benefits can be independently assigned, the explanation is not testable. The regional amenities view The regional amenities view concentrates on migration as a decision to purchase regional amenities which are not available at the original location. These amenities include public goods such as education, roads, water supply and sewerage. They also include physical aspects of the

40 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

region such as climate and private goods which are not available at other locations. The consumer pays for the availability of these amenities through taxes, to pay for public goods, and land rent. As consumers move to a region to purchase amenities, land rent rises and will continue to rise until households are in equilibrium. Hence, migration is seen as equilibrating both the labour market (as in the labour-flow view) and the land market, with the emphasis on the land market. Regional wage differentials are still viewed as a key determinant in explaining migration. Wage differentials determine the quantity of market goods and services which a person can purchase. The greater the difference in real income, the greater the quantity of market goods which can be purchased and the greater the level of utility, ceteris paribus. Externalities in consumption, however, may create regional differences in the variety and kinds of market goods which are available. For example, the variety of movies shown in an area depends on market size. In addition, locations differ in terms of the availability of non-market public goods and non-produced regional amenities. Much of the recent literature on migration in developed countries has focused on the migrant as a consumer of non-market regional amenities. One hypothesis that has received some attention is that as a society becomes more prosperous, regional amenities will replace pecuniary motives in the migration process. Regional amenities are assumed to be luxury goods, which are not purchased at low income. Expenditures on these goods rise as a proportion of income once income rises above some critical level. Since the EEU countries are by definition low-income countries, this hypothesis implies that regional amenities will not play an important role in the migration of people in the EEU countries. One question of concern is how to account for regional amenities in the migration investment decision. Should enhanced regional amenities enter in the migration investment decision and be counted as a gain from migration? If urban lifestyles are attractive per se then equation (2) should be rewritten as M = â(δ w − s + a), where a represents the psychic net return from urban amenities. High urban unemployment would then partly be the result of the attractiveness of urban living. We can suggest a simple answer to the question of how to count urban amenities. These amenities are already reflected in the differences in rent on land. In other words, land in desirable locations costs more than in undesirable locations. Since differences in land costs are perhaps the major cause of differences in the costs of living, potential migrants are faced with paying for these regional amenities in the form of higher living costs. In aggregate, the value of regional amenities may be largely

East–West European Migration

41

cancelled by increased living costs. Hence, aggregate migration can only be explained by regional amenities if the availability of regional amenities has not yet been reflected in land costs. Furthermore, differences in living costs might play little role in migration because they are offset by the value of regional amenities. Consequently, the analysis of investment in migration can concentrate on differences in expected income. There is reason to believe that regional amenities do, however, play an important role in the EEU countries. Urban areas offer a lifestyle which is often not available in rural areas. As a country develops and incomes rise, families can be expected to shift their consumption patterns. As income rises, families generally choose to have fewer children and to increase expenditures per child. This was interpreted in terms of choosing a higher quality of children and a lower quantity. Some of these expenditures on children involve health and educational amenities which are more readily available in urban areas. Hence, as education and income rise, families will tend to migrate to areas which have lower costs of raising higher quality children. The household production view In the regional amenities view, tastes play an important role in determining migration. Tastes are thought to vary with the life cycle and with education. Educated persons are thought to have a taste for areas with better schooling, cultural surroundings and more diversity in lifestyles. The household production view of migration can be most sharply contrasted with the other three views by considering a nuclear family where the wife devotes all of her time to household production. Such a wife plays no basic role in the labour-flow, human capital and regional amenities approaches other than that she adds to the costs of a move. For a wife working for wages, the income lost from quitting at the old location represents a cost of the move. Unless she works, her contribution to moving costs comes largely through influencing psychic costs. For example, no economic role is attached to differences in the level of education of wives unless their education is translated into actual earned income or into differences in the tastes of their family. In contrast, in the household production approach, the education of the wife specialising in home production can be given a concrete interpretation. Education enhances the ability of the wife to produce commodities. The value of the wife’s household production at the old location is a cost of a move. The value of her home production at the new location is a benefit of a move or she may get a job in the new location.

42 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

Employment and the level of market earnings of the wife are usually thought to be negatively associated with moves of the family to a new labour market. The reason for this negative relationship is that these earnings are assumed to be difficult to transfer. In many instances household production may also be difficult to transfer. For countries where wives seldom work for wages, household production is important in the migration decision. To a considerable extent, food is prepared, clothing is made and repaired, and both children and the elderly are cared for in the home. In addition, a large proportion of the goods consumed by the family is produced in the family’s own garden or earned in the informal sector where remunerations are seldom reported. These activities may be costly to transfer. Consider the choice between living in an urban area with readily available urban amenities or in a rural area that allows for close contact with relatives and friends. In the urban area, the shadow prices of educational activities and of recreational activities might be low, while the shadow price of contacts with friends or relatives could be high. If the family lives in the rural area, the family could produce commodities associated with urban amenities by occasionally making trips to the urban centre for educational, recreational and health services. However, the costs of these trips to the city would increase the costs of producing urban amenity commodities while living in the rural location. Living in an urban area might greatly reduce the costs of urban-related commodities. Hence, location will affect both the shadow prices of home-produced commodities and the full income of the family. In Figure 2.3, we explain the efficiency gains in a perfect world without barriers to labour mobility. Hamilton and Whalley (1984), using a general equilibrium model, have shown that such mobility could be a substantial part (about 6 per cent) of the world GDP (gross domestic product). In Figure 2.3, we show the pre-migration labour market in the Eastern and Western Europe. Due to access to superior technology, better organisation and human capital, MPL in the West is higher than in the East, as shown by the positions of the MPLW and MPLE. Real wages are higher in the West (Ww) in comparison with East (WE) as shown on the vertical axis of Figure 2.3. In Figure 2.3, we show that after migration of labour from the East to the West, equilibrium real wage is now W. The welfare gains are equal to ≡ KED (West) + EDCJ (migrants); loss for East ≡ FGJ = EJC. Thus the net overall gain = EKDC. Incidentally, Hamilton and Whalley (1984) estimate this area for global perfect labour mobility. Clearly, the size of the gain will depend on the degree of labour mobility, nature and quality of labour, substitutability

East–West European Migration

43

Real wage = MPL

K WW

F

E

W

D

WE

C G

MPLW

J

MPLE

0 Figure 2.3 1999)

H

A

B

Employment

Employment and real wage after migration (adapted from Levine,

or complementarity between domestic and foreign labour and the degree of labour absorption in the labour market given by the real wage flexibility. Inter alia, the greater the wage flexibility in the host country, the greater would be the welfare gain (Ghatak et al. 1996; Levine 1999). Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s, an increasing number of immigrants have been arriving with neither the support nor the consent of the Western European countries. Such migration is now part of a new ‘normality’. It consists of ethnic minorities, political and economic refugees and new labour migrants. The socio-economic features of the new East–West migrants, the estimation of the potential migrant flows, the careful analysis of the socio-economic impact of such migration and a comparison of the political reactions in Western Europe should be the main items of a future research agenda within an interdisciplinary framework. A simple but strict political insulation policy through

44 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

tough border controls is no substitute for a sober welfare-enhancing migration policy. To implement such a policy, we need to undertake both the macro- and micro-analysis of migration. We have already discussed the macro issues of migration and welfare. At the micro level, we need to concentrate on the following issues: A

Characteristics of migrants (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

B

age, sex, household size and marital status education, experience and skill nationality and political status (i.e. legal, illegal) self-selection in observable features

Determinants of flows (i) desire, e.g. unemployment rates in the East; wage gap; differences in cost of living; location-specific public goods amenities, schools, hospitals, etc.; previous migration and cyclical factors. (ii) ability to migrate would depend on distance; liquidity constraints and access to credit and finance (Ghatak and Levine 1994); immigration policies within the host countries; and absorptive capacity of the recipient countries.

C

Migration decision

As regards decision to migrate, the following four factors deserve special attention: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

individual vs. household role of women asymmetry of information the option value of waiting

Needless to say, factors (ii), (iii) and (iv) are very under-researched areas. D Welfare effects (i) Destination country: on labour markets; on immigrant workers and government budget constraints; the process of assimilation. (ii) In origin country: on wages and employment; composition of labour and ‘backwash’ effects; remittances and their effects on employment.

East–West European Migration

45

Gender and migration Possibly because of its concentration on labour market issues, and within this no consideration of gendered roles for the suppliers of labour, much of the economic analysis of migration has not felt the need to explore gendered questions. In consequence this literature has possibly dealt arbitrarily with questions such as whether individuals or families migrate, whether migrating individuals retain family membership, whether migrating families retain citizenship of the home country, whether we should expect to observe seasonal or temporary migration and whether the migration decision is likely to impact on intrafamily relationships. It could be argued that such gender-neutral analysis has implicitly accepted Becker’s (1981) ‘unitary’ model of the family, in which all economic decisions are made by an altruistic household head, presumed male. In such a world the household head will presumably identify the most advantageous labour market and make this a basis for the family’s migration decision. However, even in such a world the altruistic family head might need to compare the pros and cons of relocating the entire family or merely one or more of its labour market participants. As Agarwal (1997) points out, many authors have found Becker’s approach (to understanding a household’s economic decisions) to be relatively futile. Again, the possibility exists that the concentration on labour market issues implicit in this approach (see Becker 1965) is partly to blame. A broader perspective on individuals’ endowments (as in Sen 1981) might include, for example, non-earned income and land entitlements and find these to offer a richer basis for understanding the aspects of a migration decision. The current theoretical support for analysis of within-family decision formation is essentially game-theoretic. Family members continually recontract, choosing between co-operation and conflict; individuals possess fall-back positions such as reconstructing their role within the family and, at the extreme, leaving it; such fall-back positions constitute ‘threats’ within a game-theoretic approach to bargaining but the threats are not all credible in all instances. ‘I’ll divorce you if . . .’ is not credible when bargaining over small matters. In such an analysis the relative bargaining strength of family members is crucial to the outcome, and Agarwal gives a list of relevant factors, which is paraphrased here as:

• ownership of and control over assets, e.g. arable land; • access to income-earning opportunities; • access to communal resources;

46 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly

• access to informal social support systems; • access to support from formal structures (state and non-governmental organisations);

• social norms. One salient feature of this list is that all factors may be sharply redefined by migration and that therefore migration is a nexus for the reconstruction of gendered roles within a household. Thus, for example, even if male and female parents are both individually advantaged by migration with respect to every factor listed, migration could dramatically alter relative bargaining strengths and so it is not immediately obvious that we should expect to observe migration as a family. Versions of migration in which initially only one parent migrates or in which one parent permanently becomes a migrant worker, and which parent that might be, become easier to understand.

The value of an option to migrate Admitting uncertainty over future income streams not only modifies the standard conclusions about migration flows, but also suggests a need to reconsider whether the standard welfare analysis (summarised in Figure 2.1) is an adequate basis for evaluating the benefits of free movement of abour. To put the argument briefly, an open borders policy can be viewed as giving agents an option to migrate should this ever seem their best decision. Thus the valuation methods developed within the finance literature for valuing those instruments that give their bearer an option to trade commodities or securities may also be appropriate for evaluating the welfare gains that follow from giving agents the option to migrate (see Burda 1993). The most immediate implication of such an argument is that the option to migrate is valuable to a local agent not only when the local expected real wage is below that of the destination country but also when wages in one or both countries are so highly variable that, even though their relative levels do not currently trigger migration, there is some chance that they might do so in the future.

Conclusions In conclusion, we should emphasise that the overall economic welfare of migration will depend on the following critical factors:

East–West European Migration

47

1 the degree of labour-market flexibility/wage rigidity in the host country; 2 the nature of social and political absorption of the immigrants; 3 role of taxes/subsidies/controls; 4 nature and impact of trade and aid flows; 5 pattern of convergence of economies; 6 the in-depth analysis of the implications of migration within the new theory of endogenous growth. (Barro and Martin 1995; Aghion and Hewitt 1998) As regards future research on migration under uncertainty, it should be noted that migration as financial options can be purchased by payment of a premium to an options trader. The options trader acts like an insurer, bearing the risk that the option will be exercised. Options are risk-shifting devices. The following questions clearly arise: what risks are being shifted by an ‘option to migrate’? Who is bearing those risks? Options markets equilibrate when the premium is set at a marketclearing level. What is the premium in the case of migration policy? Maybe it is allowing migration in the reverse direction? This might make free migration a risk-pooling activity for the two countries. The option-pricing mechanics are relatively straightforward for a binomial option, that is, an option on a security whose future value is either ‘high’ or ‘low’. The analysis of uncertainty in Ghatak et al. (1996) is essentially binomial (job vs. no job) and so might be an appropriate starting-point for rehearsing the mathematics involved.

References Agarwal, Bina (1997) ‘“Bargaining” and Gender Relations: Within and Beyond the Household’, Feminist Economics, 3, 1: 1–51. Aghion, P. and Hewitt, P. (1998) Endogenous Growth Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Barro, R. and Martin, X. S. (1995) Economic Growth (New York: Mcgraw-Hill). Becker, Gary (1965) ‘A Theory of the Allocation of Time’, Economic Journal, 75: 493–517. Becker, Gary (1981) A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Burda, M. (1993) ‘The Determinants of East–West Migration’, European Economic Review, 37: 425–61. Fassman, F. and Munz, S. (1994) Migration Focus (Paris: OECD). Ghatak, S. (1995) An Introduction to Development Economics (London: Routledge).

48 Subrata Ghatak and Vince Daly Ghatak, S. and Levine, P. (1994) ‘Migration with a Borrowing Constraint’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, December: 19–38. Ghatak, S., Levine, P. and Wheatley Price, S. (1996) ‘Migration Theories and Evidence: An Assessment’, Journal of Economic Surveys, 10, 2: 159–98. Hamilton, B. and Whalley, J. (1984) ‘Efficiency and Distribution Implications of Global Restrictions on Labour Mobility’, Journal of Development Economics, 14: 61–75. Harris, J. R. and Todaro, M. (1970) ‘Migration, Unemployment and Development: a Two-Sector Analysis’, American Economic Review, 60: 126–42. Hatton, T. and Williamson, J. (1998) The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Levine, P. (1999) ‘The Welfare Economics of Rural to Urban Migration’, Journal of Population Economics, 12: 23–43. Lewis, W. A. (1954) ‘Economic Development with Unlimited Supply of Labour’, Manchester School, 22 November: 139–91. Myrdal, G. (1957) Economic Theory and the Underdeveloped Regions (London: Duckworth). OECD (1997) Rapid Reports (Paris: OECD). Sen, A. (1964) Choice of Techniques (Oxford: Blackwell). Sen, A. (1981) Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Stark, O. (1991) Migration of Labour (Oxford: Blackwell). Todaro, M. (1969) ‘A Model of Labor Migration and Urban Unemployment in Less-Developed Countries’, American Economic Review, 59(1): 138–48.

3 The Economic Impact of Labour Mobility in an Enlarged European Union Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

Introduction The possibility of East–West European migration waves within a more liberal immigration regime has received considerable attention from policy makers and concern has been expressed about the economic and political impact. The political dimensions of migration are important, and they are explored in other chapters of this book. This chapter focuses narrowly on the economic issues. From the perspective of an economist, the migration decision based on the maximisation of expected income, the existing wage gap between Western and Eastern European countries, and a probability of employment in the West at least as good as in the East suggests large group of potential migrants. This chapter assesses the short-run and long-run economic impact of a laissez-faire migration between the regions, and assesses who are the winners and losers and the possible need for migration controls. The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 examines recent migration trends from Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union (EU) (in fact mostly into Germany). Section 3 focuses on the short-run impact of migration from a less developed East into a more developed West. This section draws on Levine (1999) and emphasises the importance of labour market flexibility in the West for realising economic gains from migration. Section 4 is concerned with the long-run and reviews some recent papers that study the effect on both transitional and long-run growth of migration between undeveloped and developed regions. Section 5 concludes the paper. 49

50 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

Recent trends in Central and Eastern Europe An important part of migration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is the repatriation of ethnic minorities. The most important ethnic migration movement is the movement of ethnic Germans from Poland, Hungary and the CIS countries to Germany. These outflows had already started in the 1980s but intensified in the 1990s. Table 3.1 shows total numbers of foreign nationals from the CEE countries (CEECs) in selected OECD countries. However, the opening of borders has not yet led to mass migration into the West. In fact the inflows into the West have declined, despite continued liberalisation of movements of persons. The current flows of East–West migration are to a large extent explained by past migration flows that have established communities. Polish and Romanian groups are particularly successful in migrating to the West and have large communities already established. At the time of the overthrow of the communist regimes many observers feared a rapid increase in Central and Eastern European migration to the West, in particular to Western Europe for economic reasons. The dismantling of exit visas and the general issuance of passports allowed workers to migrate to high wage and low unemployment areas in the West. However, the majority of workers who considered migration exercised their option early. Therefore, migration flows increased until 1991, but they have declined since. For example, the migration of Romanians into Germany has been negative since 1993. However, ethnic conflicts in the region continue to be sources of actual and potential

Table 3.1 Foreign nationals (nationals of Central and Eastern European countries) in thousands, in selected European OECD countries, latest available year 1996 (except for Austria for which the year is 1991) AT Bulgaria Former CSFR Hungary Poland Romania CIS Former Yugo. % of immigrants

3.6 11.3 10.6 18.3 18.5 2.1 198 50.7

Source: SOPEMI (1998).

DK

5.3 1.1 2.6 32.2 17.4

FI

0.4 0.7 17.0 4.0 29.9

DE

HU

IT

SE

36.0 29.6 55.7 283.4 100.7 54.3 1297 24.4

1.5 3.7 0.1 4.3 61.6

27.4 31.7

2.9 15.9 3.8

14.9 60.4

94.6 14.0

36.6 11.2

CH

4.6 3.5 4.4

305.0 23.7

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

51

migration. Note that until 1996, the last year for which data for most countries is available, the number of refugee and asylum seekers has declined. Most CEECs are now considered safe; any asylum application by nationals of these countries will be rejected. This is another reason why the number of permanent migrants to Western Europe has declined. The number of temporary migrants has increased in the Western countries that border CEECs, in particular Germany and Austria. In addition many CEECs have set up programmes of temporary migration to allow nationals access to human capital that is not available locally. The CEECs have also changed their nationality code to allow former citizens to return to the country. Some CEECs like Hungary and the Czech Republic are likely to have now a positive migration balance. 1 For the most part it appears that this immigration is regional. In recent years migration flows from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Siberia into Poland, from the Baltic States into Russia, from Russia and Estonia into Finland all can be described as ethnic return migration. Therefore CEE has become a regional migration pole. A more recent trend that contributes to the emergence of a regional migration pole is the increase in transit migration. These are mainly flows within the CEECs but also, from outside, of migrants who hope to illegally enter a Western European country. Poland and the Czech Republic are particularly affected by this trend because of their common border with Germany. Some transit migrants use Hungary to reach Austria and a small number try to move to the Scandinavian countries via the Baltic states. Many attempts at transit migration fail and some transit migrants stay to work in the informal sector of the transit country. There are, of course, no figures on how widespread the problem is. There have been attempts at international collaborative efforts – between the destination countries and the transit countries – to control the problem. Between 1994 and 1996, Bulgaria, the Baltic countries, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia presented their candidature to access the European Union. The population of these countries is over 100 million, which is about 30 per cent of the current EU countries. The control of migration flows that could arise is a major challenge for the integration process and free movement of persons may have to be introduced gradually.

The short-run economic impact The pioneering work on the migration decision and its impact on the donor and host regions was undertaken in a LDC (lesser developed

52 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

countries) rural–industrial context by Harris and Todaro (1970), henceforth H–T. They offer a macro-economic model comprising a developed urban sector and an undeveloped rural sector, in which wages were rigid for the former, but flexible for the latter. The potential rural-to-urban migrant then maximises her expected income taking into account the probability of being unemployed after migrating which H–T assumed to be one minus the unemployment rate. In this set-up urban unemployment provides the equilibrating mechanism to limit the inflow of migrants. The H–T analysis yields predictions that the rate of migration increases as the urban–rural wage differential increases and the urban unemployment rate decreases. It is clear that an analysis of East–West European migration differs from the H–T framework in a number of respects. First, European migration takes place largely between industrial regions which are characterised by apparently huge differences in physical capital per worker. Second, neither bloc is characterised by labour market clearing, unlike the H–T case of a market-clearing rural sector. Indeed there is likely to be higher unemployment in the donor than in the host country. Third, human capital considerations are of crucial importance: the impact of highly skilled, well-educated workers on the West will be quite different from that if their skills turn out to be lower or irrelevant. Levine (1999) develops an H–T-type model2 of East–West migration in which labour market imperfections prevent market clearing in both blocs. The model applies to the short-run in the sense that the capital and prices are fixed. Wages are allowed to respond to labour market pressures. The model encompasses two extremes of perfectly flexible wages with full employment on the one hand, and the H–T scenario where the wage in the host country is fixed, on the other. Before reviewing the findings of this paper it is instructive to first consider the opposite extreme to H–T: the case of perfectly flexible wages. Perfectly flexible wages Consider two blocs, East and West. To keep things simple assume that the regions produce the same composite output and the labour force is equal. Capital of both the physical and human variety are given and are higher in the West. Both average and marginal output per worker is therefore higher in the West. Figure 3.1 shows what happens when migration from East to West occurs. The Eastern workforce (fully employed by assumption) falls from OA by an amount HA, increasing the Western workforce by the same amount AB = HA. The area under the marginal product of labour (MPL) curves gives total output and the

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

53

Real Wage = MPL

K

WW L

F

W

E

D

P

WE

M

O

G

H

C

J

A

B

Employment

Figure 3.1 Employment and output after migration with perfectly flexible wages (Levine, 1999)

MPL(West) is higher than its Eastern counterpart MPL(East) because physical and human capital is higher in the West. Ignore for the moment human capital differences; then 1 unit of Eastern labour is equivalent to 1 unit of Western labour. Output then rises by an amount KDBA in the West and falls by an amount FJAH = ECBA in the East. The net increase in output is therefore given by the shaded region KDCE. The real wage falls in the West and rises in the East. If there are costs associated with migration and migrants maximise income net of costs, migration will cease before wages are equalised. Figure 3.1 shows the case of factor price equalisation where migration costs are zero and migration leads to equal wage rates. The winners are the migrants and Western capitalists; losers are the original Western workers and Eastern capitalists. Figure 3.1 assumes that human capital per worker is the same in the two blocs. If this is not the case, however, and the Eastern migrant has a lower skill level than the Western indigenous worker,

54 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

there is a further effect: the MPL(West) curve shifts downwards thereby reducing the net output gains from East–West migration. Migration with wage rigidity The general case of some wage flexibility which encompasses the two extremes we have discussed is illustrated in Figure 3.2 (taken from Levine 1999). The labour supply curves (which, following Layard et al. 1994, we refer to as the ‘bargained real wage’ or BRW curves) and the labour demand curves (the marginal product of labour, MPL) are shown for the two blocs. Upward-sloping BRW curves are consistent with a number of theories of wage determination, including the monopoly union model, bargaining, and efficiency wage theories. OA is the total labour force in East and West prior to migration (assumed to be equal). As a result of migration equal to HA = AB, with some real wage flexibility, the BRW (West) shifts to the right and employment rises by WW. Similarly the BRW (East) shifts to the left and employment falls by EE. The welfare implications of East–West migration – which we analyse in more detail in the next section – can be assessed by comparing the increase in Western output HJWW with the decrease in the East FGEE.

Real Wage = MPL

BRW (West) BRW (East)

H J

F

G MPL (West)

MPL (East) O Figure 3.2

EE WW

H

A

B

Employment

Employment and output after migration with wage rigidity

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

55

We have illustrated the case where WW, EE and the real wage flexibility in the two regions are about equal. Then the net output gains are positive; in general, however, the output effects are crucially dependent on the degree of real wage flexibility in the two labour markets. Figure 3.2 assumes that human capital per worker is the same in both blocs and subsequently there is no drop in the average post-migration human capital in the West. If, however, migration lowers the average human capital in the West the MPL (West) curve shifts downwards, thereby reducing the net output gains from East–West migration. The migration decision Assume that the potential migrant is risk-neutral and faces uncertainty over the possibility of employment in the West. Assume that the latter decreases as the unemployment rate increases. Denote by Cp the private costs per period of migration; this includes the transport cost to the West, the cost of language training, searching for a job, and more generally a monetary evaluation of the inconvenience of living in a foreign country as opposed to be living at home. Let pW be the probability of employment in the West, wW the Western wage rate and bW the income of the unemployed. Then the expected income after migration is P W WW + (1 − pW)b W + CP. Migration will then continue until in a migration equilibrium this expression equals the expected income in the East, i.e., pW wW + (1 − pW)bW + CP = pE wE + (1 − pE)bE.

(1)

The unemployment rates East and West, as in the H–T model, then act as an equilibrating mechanism that limits migration and stabilises postmigration workforce in the two regions. A wave of East–West migration increases (decreases) the unemployment rate in the West (East). This reduces the expected income differential until the migration equilibrium, equation (1), is reached and migration ceases. Factors which will reduce the size of the migration flow are: high private costs of migration, unequal treatment of immigrants in the Western labour markets and unequal access to unemployment income support. However, these calculations ignore the irreversibility of the migration decision and the option to wait. From the ‘new investment theory’ of Dixit and Pindyck (1994) we know that the migration equilibrium in an environment of exogenous uncertainty, coupled with irreversibility in the private costs of migration, will make the potential Eastern citizen far more conservative in her decision to migrate. These

56 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

considerations will lead to lower migration flows than that predicted by equation (1). The welfare analysis of migration Consider a mythical utilitarian social planner concerned with Europe’s total GDP net of the costs of migration. This implies a social welfare function of the form S(M ) = YE + YW − M(CP + CS )

(2)

where M is the number of migrants, YE and YW denote output in the two blocs and Cp and Cs are private and social costs per migrant respectively. Then the mythical social planner, by maximising S(M) with respect to M, chooses an optimal migration rate and with it an optimal allocation of Europe’s workforce between East and West. Two results are then obtained in Levine (1999): result 1 tells us that the fundamental theorem of welfare holds for migration. This implies that once the mythical central planner has made the socially optimal choice, it is not possible to improve the welfare of one bloc without reducing the welfare of another block. Result 2 sets out the necessary and sufficient condition for laissez-faire migration to exceed the social optimum. Result 1 Under full wage flexibility and in the absence of externalities the laissezfaire migration rate is socially optimal. Result 2 With wage rigidities in the two blocs laissez-faire migration is excessive relative to the social optimum if and only if dL dL dS -------- = W E ---------E + W W ---------E < C P + C S dM dM dM

(3)

at the laissez-faire migration equilibrium. In equation (3) the first term is the marginal decrease in output in the East with respect to the migration level; the second term is the marginal increase in output in the West. The combined left-hand side of the inequality is the difference between the two shaded areas in Figure 3.2. The right-hand side of equation (3) is the marginal cost both private (internalised by the migrant) and social (the externality not internalised by the migrant).

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

57

An interesting possibility immediately arises from Result 2. A combination of high real wage flexibility in the West, low flexibility in the East and low migration costs (private plus social) can lead to laissezfaire migration being below the social optimum. This leads to a large increase in employment and output in the West alongside a low employment and output loss in the East. We pursue this case further in numerical simulations to which we now turn. The laissez-faire and social optimum outcomes: numerical results The crucial parameters that determine the extent of welfare gains are the semi-elasticities of the wage with respect to the unemployment rate in the two blocs, η E and η W and the ratio of Eastern to Western human capital HE/HW . In Figures 3.3 and 3.4, the Western elasticity and human capital per worker is set at η W = HW = 1. The sizes of the two workforces are assumed to be equal and normalised at unity. Figure 3.3 graphs the social welfare function S(M ) against the migration rates for three values of the Eastern elasticity, η E = 1.0 (the benchmark value) and two alternatives η E = 0.75 and η E = 0.5. The migration level M therefore

1.27

SO LF

ηE = 0.5

1.265 1.26

SO

S(M)

LF

ηE = 0.75

1.255

SO

1.25

LF η = 1 E

1.245 1.24 1.235

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

M Figure 3.3

The socially optimal level of migration and Eastern wage flexibility

ηE (SO = social optimum; LF = laissez-faire)

58 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

1.27

HE = 1

1.26 1.25

S(M)

1.24

HE = 0.9

1.23 1.22 1.21

HE = 0.8

1.2 1.19 1.18

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

M Figure 3.4 capital HE

The socially optimal level of migration and Eastern human

becomes a migration rate. Social costs of migration are ignored throughout this section, thus understating the need for immigration controls in the West. However, the costs of immigration controls are also ignored, which tips the balance in the opposite direction towards laissez-faire. When the model is calibrated using η E = 1.0, the socially optimal migration rate is around M = 0.25 compared with the laissez-faire equilibrium M = 0.28. For this case there is a clear case for immigration controls. But the two cases where wage flexibility is greater in the West, η E = 1.0, 0.5 as opposed to η W = 1.0 illustrate the possibility alluded to above that laissez-faire migration can be too low compared with the social optimum. Figure 3.4 examines the robustness of this result by relaxing the assumption that the level of human capital is the same in both blocs. From a large number of numerical simulations undertaken we report the case η W = 1.0, η E = 1.0 and values H E = 1.0, 0.9, 0.8 and HW = 1.0. For these quite small differences in East–West human capital levels the

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

59

social optimum falls below the laissez-faire migration level even for the low real wage elasticity η E = 1.0 in the East. These results suggest that if Eastern underdevelopment originates in part from lower human rather than physical capital, then laissez-faire migration will lead to excessive levels of migration, even from the narrow economic perspective of this chapter, and the need for some form of immigration controls.

Migration and growth A vast theoretical and empirical literature has emerged since the 1980s, which has transformed the way economists think about growth. The pioneering research was Romer (1986) and Romer (1990). New growth theory contrasts with the earlier neo-classical or old growth theory of Solow (1956), which invoked exogenous technical change to explain sustained long-term growth. By contrast the focus of the new endogenous growth (EG) theory is on how the consumption and savings decisions of households, the investment decisions of firms, and public policy in various forms, determine long-term growth. Whilst the neo-classical model could be described as a model with long-run growth, the new literature offers a number of possible models of long-run growth. The EG literature can be usefully be divided into two broad strands: the first builds on Romer (1986), is closest to the classical tradition and emphasises capital accumulation as the engine of growth, with capital broadly defined to include human and physical components. In the second broad strand of the literature, following Romer (1990), the discovery of new goods and of new processes provides the engine of growth. Research and Development (R & D) activity provides blueprints for these innovations and a feature of this literature is the attempt to understand the economic forces that drive R & D. This section reviews three papers that draw upon this literature in order to assess the impact of migration on growth. The first two papers, Mountford (1997) and Faini (1996), use models in the neo-classical tradition where migration affects transitional growth, but long-run growth is exogenous. The third paper, Lundborg and Segerström (1998), studies migration in the context of an EG model driven by R & D activity. A standard argument is that migration lowers the growth in the source economy when the highly skilled workers emigrate. Mountford (1997) addresses this question, using a model where human capital is crucial to transitional growth. The amount of human capital in any period depends on the decision of households to acquire education. The prospect of higher wages through emigration stimulates the

60 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

acquisition of human capital and therefore enhances growth. This effect can be stronger than the direct effect of emigration. The direct effect of migration is to reduce growth because there is a reduction in the supply of skilled labour and a decline in aggregate demand. A brain drain may therefore actually enhance growth in the source economy. Faini (1996) is more concerned with whether migration increases or decreases inequality between regions. He develops a two-region model of migration. The population in each region is modelled through a twoperiod overlapping generations model. Consumers are endowed with a unit of labour in youth only. In each period of her life, a consumer i derives utility from a consumable good that is interregionally traded. Consumption is multiplied by a parameter θ i ≥ 1 which depends on the location of the consumer. If she migrates, θ i falls to 1. This introduces a cost of migration. θ is allocated between individuals according to a Pareto distribution. The fraction of the young that will decide not to migrate can then be written as a function of the ratio of wages in the two regions only, with the added convenience of a constant elasticity ε. There are two sectors of production. Production in the non-traded intermediate commodity depends on the capital stock in that sector only with a constant elasticity φ. Returns to scale are increasing if φ > 1. Firms take the cost of capital as given, but compete in the output market in a Cournot fashion. Production in the traded sector depends on labour, capital and the non-traded intermediary. Since the latter is produced at increasing returns to scale, endogenous growth is possible, but Faini confines the analysis to parameter values for which there is only transitional growth. The capital stock is composed of the traded commodity but adjustment costs prevent perfect capital mobility between regions. The interest rate is exogenous and coincides with the discount rate of consumers. Capital depreciation is complete. Assume initially that the labour force is identical, but that the initial capital stock is not the same. First consider the case without migration. In each region the rental rate is a negative function of the installed capital stock. Therefore the relative rental rate declines when the relative capital stock increases in the North, leading to an inflow of capital to the South. The model is stable and regional convergence occurs. Now assume that there is labour mobility. The relative rental differential depends negatively on the relative capital stock as before, but it also depends positively on (1 − φ.) ε. Therefore if the degree of labour mobility is sufficiently high and the returns to scale in the intermediate sector are sufficiently strong, then the model diverges.

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

61

Lundborg and Segerström (1998) examine a quality-ladder model of economic growth based on a North–South model in Grossman and Helpman (1991: ch. 12). In such a model, growth is driven by improvements in product quality. In each period, firms engage in an R & D race to become the quality leader by hiring R & D workers. A firm that wins the race becomes the only producer in that period. All firms stay in the R & D race, and every leading firm will be replaced by another. Any firm’s probability of becoming the leader depends positively on its own R & D effort and negatively on the aggregate effort made by all firms. Since all firms are identical, they all make the same R & D investments and face the same probability to become the product leader. The world is made up of two regions called North and South. The high-quality products of the North are called ‘high-tech’, only Northern firms can produce them. The products of the South are called ‘low-tech’. The Northern firms could produce them, but they will not do so because production of high-tech products is more profitable. Consumers spend a fixed part of their expenditure on commodities of each region. They benefit from the innovation in both regions through falling commodity prices, therefore the rate of growth of real expenditure is identical in both regions. Southern welfare levels are a constant fraction of Northern welfare levels. There is a constant incentive to migrate. Consider first what happens when some Southern consumers/workers die. To start with this means a reduction of consumer expenditure in the South.3 Therefore demand and production of Northern commodities falls and the relative wage of Northern consumers falls. This leads to a fall in Northern expenditure. The fall of expenditures leads to a fall in the growth rate because there are reduced incentives to invest in R & D. All these circumstances reduce Northern welfare. Southern welfare is affected negatively by the fall in growth rate, but it is affected positively through the increase in the relative wage. As far as workers – who receive labour income – in the South are concerned the latter effect dominates the former in simulation evidence presented by the authors. As far as capitalists – who own the stock value of firms – in the South are concerned the growth effect dominates. Now consider the effect of migration from the South to the North. An R & D worker is assumed to be more productive in the North than in the South, therefore the growth potential in the world economy increases when labour moves to the North. We also have the effect of a population decrease in the South, as discussed in the previous paragraph. In addition we have the impact of the labour supply increase in the North, which puts further pressure on the wages in the North. Firms

62 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

in the North and South increase R & D expenditure. But in simulations the resulting increase in growth is not sufficient to make migration beneficial to Northern consumers. Northern workers are worse affected than Northern capitalists. Southern workers benefit from migration; the incentives to migrate are reduced. Thus the welfare effects of migration can be divided into static effects from changes in wages and the terms of trade, and dynamic effects from higher growth. Static distributional effects are as the previous section – Northern workers (excluding new immigrants) and Southern capitalists lose and Northern capitalists, Southern workers and migrants gain. Workers North and South gain from increased growth, but Northern capitalists can lose because more R & D activity intensifies competition and squeezes profits. Table 3.2 summarises these results on winners and losers. It should be noted that the whole analysis hinges on the absence of capital mobility. If capital mobility is introduced, the results could be very different. The net effect of migration is naturally sensitive to parameter values and to the specification of the model. In a rather different North–South (or East–West) model Chui et al. (1998) set out a North–South trade model with changing patterns of trade in which the South can progress through a number of stages of development. Their model again draws upon Grossman and Helpman (1991), but instead of EG being driven by quality ladders, they follow Chapter 11, and adopt a model with expanding varieties of goods, developing it in a number of important directions.4 They introduce a second factor of production, skilled labour, and include a ‘traditional’ low-technology sector in both regions. They then allow for the South to differ from the North in three ways. First it is less efficient at adopting the technology available on a worldwide level. Second, the speed with which the South learns from the North is less than that in the opposite direction. Third, its endowment of human capital is less than that in the North. These three differences, together with the degree of patent protection enjoyed by Northern firms (all exogenous in the model), give rise to four stages of develop-

Tables 3.2

Winners and losers under migration: static and dynamic aspects

Groups

Static effects

Dynamic effects

Northern workers Northern capitalists Southern workers Southern capitalists

Losers Winners Winners Losers

Winners Losers Winners Winners

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

63

ment in the South as possible equilibria: specialisation in the traditional sector; a stage where the South in addition copies Northern innovative goods producing ‘product cycles’; a third stage where the South begins to innovate in its own right and finally a stage in which the South, like the North, only innovates. Although Chui et al. do not examine migration in the context of this model, we can point out two channels through which migration will increase growth and strengthen the dynamic effects. First they find that North–South trade results in much larger North–South wage differentials for skilled than for unskilled workers. The former will therefore tend to migrate in larger numbers. A high proportion of them will find their way into R & D activity, enhancing growth. Moreover, if Southern R & D involves copying the reduction in this activity will encourage innovation in the North further. This reasoning suggests the possibility that the pessimistic conclusions of Lundborg and Segerström are not robust to the specification of their model, but clearly this is an important area for further research.

Conclusion This chapter first examined the short-run economic effects of moving to a liberal migration regime in Europe, drawing upon Levine (1999). Although our results would generally indicate that for two regions with the present large differences in GDP per head, the socially optimal level of migration is far less than that under laissez-faire, a combination of high-wage flexibility in the West, low flexibility in the East and an inefficient technology for controlling immigration can lead to the surprising possibility that laissez-faire migration is too little and no immigration controls are necessary; indeed subsidies may be necessary to encourage migration! Although we should not take this scenario too seriously, not least of all because social costs of migration and distributional issues are ignored, it does highlight the need for more research to be directed at the emerging labour markets in the Eastern European countries and at the technology of immigration control. The literature on growth and migration is quite recent and limited. Our conclusions on this aspect must therefore be tentative. The ‘newtrade, new-growth’ literature has established that efficiency gains from free trade become magnified many times when the more efficient allocation of resources leads to growth as well as level effects. One must expect that factor mobility leads to a similar effect. However, the theoretical new-growth literature has yet to be matched in size and clarity by

64 Thomas Krichel and Paul Levine

its empirical counterpart. As we can see in the discussion of North– South growth models based on quality ladders or expanding varieties, we need to narrow down the range of competing growth models from which to choose before we can begin to assess the effect of migration on growth and draw policy conclusions.

Notes 1. This is difficult to know because of a lack of reliable data. 2. Ghatak et al. (1996) provide a survey of and extensions to the H–T class of models. Krichel and Levine (1999) extend H–T to allow for some wage flexibility. 3. It is not clear in the paper what happens to the wealth of the dead consumers. 4. A previous paper involving the same authors, Currie et al. (1999), develops a more primitive model of stages of development with only one factor of production and no traditional sector.

References Chui, M., Levine, P. and Pearlman, J. (1998) ‘Winners and Losers in a North– South Model of Growth, Innovation and Product Cycles’, Discussion Paper in Economics, University of Surrey. Currie, D., Levine, P., Pearlman, J. and Chui, M. (1999) Phases of Imitation and Innovation in a North–South Endogenous Growth Model (Oxford: Oxford Economic Papers). Dixit, A. K. and Pindyck, R. S. (1994) Investment under Uncertainty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press). Faini, R. (1996) ‘Increasing Returns, Migration and Convergence’, Journal of Development Economics, 49: 121–36. Ghatak, S., Levine, P. and Wheatley Price, S. (1996) ‘Migration Theory and Evidence: an Assessment’, Journal of Economic Surveys, 10, 2: 159–98. Grossman, G. and Helpman, E. (1991) Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). Harris, J. and Todaro, M. (1970) ‘Migration, Unemployment and Development’, American Economic Review, 60: 126–42. Krichel, T. and Levine, P. (1999) ‘The Welfare Economics of Rural to Urban Migration: the Harris–Todaro Model Revisited’, Journal of Regional Science, 39, 3: 429–47. Layard, R., Blanchard, O., Dornbusch, R. and Krugman, P. (1994) East–West Migration: The Alternatives (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT). Levine, P. (1999) ‘The Welfare Economics of Immigration Control’, Journal of Population Economics, 12: 23–43. Lundborg, P. and Segerström, P. S. (1998) ‘The Growth and Welfare Effects of International Mass Migration’, FIEF Working Paper Series, the Trade Union Institute for Economic and Social Research, Stockholm.

Economic Impact of Labour Mobility

65

Mountford, A. (1997) ‘Can a Brain Drain be Good for Growth in the Source Economy?’, Journal of Development Economics, 53: 287–303. Romer, P. (1986) ‘Increasing Returns and Long-run Growth’, Journal of Political Economy, 94: 1002–37. Romer, P. (1990) ‘Endogenous Technical Change’, Journal of Political Economy, 98: S71–S102. Solow, R. M. (1956) ‘A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 70, 1: 65–94. SOPEMI (1998) Trends in International Migration (Paris: OECD). Straubhaar, T. and Zimmerman, K. F. (1992) ‘Towards a European Migration Policy’, CEPR Discussion Paper 641.

4 Migration and Citizenship Why Can Birds, Whales, Butterflies and Ants Cross International Frontiers More Easily than Cows, Dogs and Human Beings? Bob Sutcliffe

It is easier to get into space than to get into Spain. Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jojoka, after waiting for three days for a visa in the Spanish consulate in Tetuan (1998)

From up here you can’t see any frontiers. Pedro Duque, first Spanish astronaut in space (1998)

Migration as deviance The advent of the internet has turned research into a new form of serendipity. You decide to work on something, you do a search on the internet and you begin a journey full of surprises through the 1 million or so documents which Yahoo! tells you are relevant to whatever it is you are searching for. And that is just what I did when a few years ago I started working on migration. My first search term was simply ‘migration’. I was, but should not have been, surprised to find that the first few hundred or maybe thousand of the documents offered me were about birds. A team of social scientists appointed by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population recently produced a book about human migration which, as far as empirical social science is concerned, is the state of the art, and a good starting point for anyone embarking on a study of human migration. It begins with the observation that ‘Like 66

Migration and Citizenship 67

many birds, but unlike most other animals, humans are a migratory species’ (Massey et al. 1998: 1). This appears to be difficult to accept. If, in Europe at least, you ask an audience, ‘Who is from immigrant stock?’, usually a minority of hands goes up. But 40 000 years ago there were no humans in Europe. We are all migrants or the descendants of migrants. I think it is fair to say, however, that migration is recognised by ornithologists and by the general public as an essential part of the life and nature of birds in a way that it is certainly not in the case of human beings, either by the public, by politicians or social scientists. Quite the contrary, and I shall argue in this chapter that as often as not migration tends to be regarded as something which is both exceptional and undesirable. The bias starts at the most basic level in the search for some theoretical foundation for the debate. Social scientists produce theories of migration because it is seen as an exceptional act which needs explaining. No one seems to think it is necessary to explain why people stay where they are – presumably because this is thought of as so normal as not to need any theories. Much of social science is like that. For instance, there are numberless theories of the causes of homosexuality (including, inevitably, the ‘gay gene’) and of crime; but I am not aware that there is a single theory of heterosexuality or of law-abiding behaviour, simply because what is deemed normal is not regarded as being in need of explanation. As medicine studies disease much more than health, so the social sciences tend to study phenomena perceived as deviance. And that is true, among other things, of migration. From a rather different point of view this tendency is also visible in efforts to produce universalist social rules, as in theories of justice, human rights and neo-classical economics. Visionaries of these fields habitually tremble when international frontiers come into sight; they tend to assume that the world is already one country or to limit their theories to single countries. Egalitarian theories of justice have been enunciated for national societies but their extension to the world as a whole has been much more difficult. The drafters of various internationally accepted declarations of human rights (such as the UN Universal Declaration of 1949) walk a tightrope when they support some aspects of freedom to move (the right to a nationality, to a passport, to travel freely inside the country of citizenship, and the right to leave the same country freely), but are silent about others (there is no right to arrive in another country, only a right to leave your own). It is true that a number of theoretical economists, applying neo-classical competitive principles, have argued that free immigration would speed up factor price equalisation and vastly

68 Bob Sutcliffe

increase efficiency and size of the global product. But the elders of this church have been very wary of supporting freer international movement and some of them (for instance, Herbert Simon and Gary Becker) have specifically made it an exception from rules which they seem ready to apply to almost everything else (Briggs 1996). The assumption that migration is abnormal is also tied up with another assumption: that everyone in the world has a ‘place’, usually the country in which they were born, and that it is natural and desirable that everyone should stay there and not move to some other place. This is combined with the assumption that almost everyone will want to stay in their own place, partly because they do not want to be separated from their national culture, and hence that virtually all migration should be seen in some way as forced and not voluntary. An enormous amount of the social science literature about development at least implicitly makes this assumption. Development is seen not as a feature of individuals or families but of geographically stationary communities, usually nations. Textbooks in development – and indeed international – economics have been slow in reflecting contemporary international migration. And often, when the subject has been discussed, the conclusion has been that the arrival of migrants has pathological consequences in the receiving country (social tensions, crime, violence, excessive cost and so on) and that their departure has pathological consequences in the country which they leave (the brain drain and so on). Heaven knows how many thousands more academic articles and theses have been written about economic aid than about the flow of emigrants’ remittances. Yet for many years the value of the latter has exceeded the value of the former by a considerable margin. This is the financial aspect of the growing phenomenon of the multinational family, a subject which is as undercommented on as the multinational corporation is overcommented. In short, I am complaining that migration, a process through which human beings, like birds, try to meet their needs, to better and liberate themselves, is too often deplored or ignored.

Mass migration: then and now The Age of Mass Migration is the title which Tim Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson appropriately gave to their illuminating book about European migration to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hatton and Williamson 1998). As we sit here, more books with rather similar titles are being published about migration today (for instance,

Migration and Citizenship 69

Castles and Miller 1998). Is the parallel apt? How similar and different are today’s migration and the earlier one? It is frequently said that nearly 2 per cent of the world’s population live in countries of which they are not citizens. Is that a lot or a little? It is known that 20 million people have been forced to flee from their country of citizenship, and another 35 million are believed to be displaced within their country of citizenship. That figure is large, clearly much too large. It is a symptom of a very sick society. But it may not be so exceptional in modern history. A recent history of the development of refugee law during the interwar years argues that as a percentage of the population there were more refugees during the 1920s than today (Skran 1995). Then, they were disproportionately in Europe; now they are disproportionately in Africa. What about migrants who are not regarded as refugees? The admittedly very rough figures suggest that there may be up to 80 million people who today live outside the country where they were born, or of which they are citizens. In absolute numbers, this is more than in Hatton and Williamson’s ‘age of mass migration’. But since then the world’s population has more than quadrupled. As a proportion of the world population it is doubtful if there are as many people who have migrated today as at the beginning of this century. In 1910 the number of foreign-born people in the United States alone amounted to about 14 per cent of its own population, in other words about 1 per cent of the world’s population. The global total must have been considerably more than twice this number. Certainly there are few countries today whose demography and economy are as much affected by migration as were the main sending and receiving countries (such as Italy and Ireland, the USA and Argentina) a century ago. But there are some: in the case both of sending and receiving countries they tend to be countries with relatively small national populations (Luxembourg, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers, some Pacific and Caribbean islands). Few countries today have had such a large and sustained out-migration rate as Ireland in the nineteenth century. The absolutely most numerous emigrant population today is probably that from Mexico. At present the number of Mexican-born people living in the USA is equal to nearly 2 per cent of the population of the USA and about 7 per cent of the population of Mexico. The number of Turkish citizens who are German residents is less than 3 per cent of the population of Germany and a little more than 3 per cent of the population of Turkey. In the case of Mexico, and also to some extent of Turkey, there is not a high rate of naturalisation of the immigrant populations: in the

70 Bob Sutcliffe

USA because the immigrants do not seek it; in Germany because the receiving state does not grant it. And there is much reverse migration in both cases, resembling the Italian more than the Irish case in the nineteenth century. This means that the numbers of migrants at any one time does not adequately illustrate the social and economic importance of the migration. While Mexican-born residents in the USA amount to no more than 7 per cent of the Mexican population, it is important to remember that, in the words of Douglas Massey, 20 percent of all Mexicans aged 15 to 64 had made at least one trip to the United States, and 41 percent of all household heads had done so. We likewise found that 60 percent of all Mexican household heads had at least one immediate family member with US experience and 25 percent had an immediate family member living in the United States. Likewise, 67 percent had at least one member of their extended family with US experience and 61 percent had an extended family member living north of the border. All told, 81 percent of Mexican household heads knew someone with US experience, and 73 percent had some friend or relative living in the United States. (Massey 1998) The significance of this kind of migration cannot be grasped merely through a snapshot of the number of migrants at any given moment. Hatton and Williamson observe that one of the characteristics of the nineteenth-century migration to the USA was its male majority: 64 per cent of migrants entering the USA between 1851 and 1910 were men (Hatton and Williamson 1998: 11). There is still a male majority among migrants, but it is almost certainly smaller. Some forms and locations of migration are almost exclusively male (construction and other workers in the Gulf); but migration is playing an increasing role in forms of work largely done by women (especially domestic labour and the sex and entertainment industry). And in a number of the developed receiving countries (including the USA) women are a majority of legal immigrants, a feature related to the fact that famility reunion is the most important avenue of legal migration. Some examples showing the great diversity of sex ratios in contemporary migration are given in Figure 4.1. There is another respect in which there may seem to be a big qualitative difference between the mass migration from Europe to the USA in the nineteenth century and the mass migration of today. For the former was a migration from relatively more developed parts of the world to another of the more developed countries of the time, although a large proportion of the migrants came from the poor parts of the more

Migration and Citizenship 71

Percentage of men 0

Pakistani workers in the Gulf (1990)

100

Moroccans in Germany (1990) Moroccan workers in France (1990) Turkish workers in Germany (1990)

Immigrants from the South to Germany (1985–9) World population 50

50 Regular immigrants from the South to USA (1990–2)

Immigrants from the South to the UK (1985–9) Immigrants from the South to the UK (1990) Polish workers in Sweden (1990) Immigrants from the Philippines to Denmark (1990)

Immigrants from Thailand to Denmark (1990)

100

Asian domestic workers in Europe (1995) Percentage of women

0

Figure 4.1 The ratio of men to women in different migrant groups (adapted from Sutcliffe 1998)

developed world (Ireland, Southern Italy, Eastern Europe and so on). Today, however, European migration to the USA is a very small part indeed of international migration. Ninety or more per cent of the migrants come from countries regarded as developing as opposed to developed

72 Bob Sutcliffe

countries. A legal change in a number of receiving countries (the USA and Australia in particular) during the 1960s abolished the large element of racism in previous legislation and opened the way to immigration from all continents. And immigrants now come from an enormous number of countries, far more than in the mass migration of the nineteenth century. Most of the countries from which today’s migrants set out were colonies in the nineteenth century and, apart from slavery and indentured labour, emigration from them was banned by the colonial power. Mexico is an exception: a major redrawing of frontiers left many Mexicans on the US side of the border, and since then numerous social and economic forces have conspired to make this border a more than usually porous one, something which can be seen in Figure 4.2, which maps by county the percentage of people of Hispanic origin (mainly Mexican-born) in the resident population of the United States. The national and ethnic variety of present-day migration is very striking and seems to contrast with that of the nineteenth century. Perhaps that is an exaggeration in that it is unwise, especially today, to underestimate the sense of ethnic difference between European populations. What some observers argue, however, is that the receiving countries (the USA in particular) are now less of a melting pot for immigrants than in the

10 20 40 60 80

Figure 4.2 United States: Hispanic population as percentage of the resident population (1990 census)

Migration and Citizenship 73

previous epoch of migration. Today there is a greater tendency for immigrant populations to maintain their language and culture in the country of settlement and even to build ethnic economic enclaves. We should not accept that argument too readily since it is frequently used as a weapon against immigrant communities and is, therefore, subject to possible distortions. Modern migrations (the plural seems more appropriate than the singular) are nothing if not diverse and complex. Some idea of this, as far as the nation of origin and destination are concerned, is given by estimates of the proportion of emigrants and immigrants in national populations, summarised in Table 4.1. The percentage of emigrants appear in the columns and the percentage of immigrants in the rows. It is clear from this table that most countries are either not very much affected by migration (the bottom right-hand box) or are countries which participate in world migration almost exclusively either as sending or as receiving countries (the bottom row and right-hand column respectively). The 21 countries where immigration is most important (boxes marked with*) do include neither the USA nor the UK. The countries which are most affected by emigration (boxes marked with*) are mostly countries affected by wars and/or are very small countries. A few countries are important both as sending and receiving countries: Somalia and Paraguay (affected by political upheavals in the regions) and the Dominican Republic (where large-scale emigration to the USA is matched by major movements of migrant workers from Haiti). Other countries which have significant emigrant and immigrant flows are Burkina Faso, Bolivia, Sudan, Botswana, South Korea, Egypt, Tunisia, Poland and Jordan. This table, therefore, shows something of the very complex migration patterns which now exist for a few countries. This might be said to be an age of mass migration in a more potential sense: the large number of migrants who exist in the modern world would presumably be larger if it were not for the fact that all governments restrict immigration. If they did not then clearly there would be more movement, but it is very difficult to predict how many frustrated migrants live in poorer countries. Of course, one of the things which restricts migration is poverty itself since migration can be costly. The relaxing of migration controls would reduce some but not all of the costs. It has been shown that some migration control laws have perverse effects and actually increase migration (Massey 1998). Many supporters of these controls, however, seem to believe the pro-immigration character in Leonard Bernstein’s well-known dialectical song ‘America’, who says that ‘Everyone there will have moved here’. But she was wrong. Although

Countries with estimated levels of emigration and immigration as a percentage of their population, c.1990 >10%

% Emigrant/ % Immigrants

6–9%

>10%

1–5%

*Jordan

6–9%

*Somalia, Paraguay

Dominican Poland Republic

1–5%

*Burkina Faso, Bolivia

Sudan, Botswana

South Korea, Egypt, Tunisia

<1%

*Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Chad, Mozambique, Lesotho, Liberia, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Belize, Surinam, Cape Verde, various Caribbean and Pacific islands

Angola, Guinea, Cuba, Ireland, Lebanon

Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia, Guinea, Bissau, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey

<1%

*Canada, French Guyana, France, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Australia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Gambia Malaysia, Thailand, Malawi, Congo (Brazzaville), Ghana, Togo, Senegal, Germany, Belgium, UK, USA, Argentina Bangladesh, India, Iran, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Dem. Rep. Congo, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Benin, Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Venezuela, Costa Rica All countries not mentioned elsewhere

Source: Segal (1993: 128–31) Note: In the text Mexico is said to have a rate of emigration of 7 per cent of its population. In this table it appears in the category 1–5 per cent. The figures in the table are for an earlier date.

74

Table 4.1

Migration and Citizenship 75

Puerto Ricans enjoy free entry to the USA, net migration from the island has come to an end (US Bureau of the Census 1999). And in recent years there has been net migration from Britain to the Caribbean. Contemporary migration is in absolute quantities larger than in the previous age of migration, in relative quantities not much less, potentially larger still and more widespread in terms of the countries involved. Some more differences emerge when we look at some of the ways in which the present migration is categorised.

Dangerous dichotomies Looking at a number of the dichotomies which are used to describe contemporary migrations may help us to see the differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration and to warn us of the perils of migration vocabulary. Perhaps the most commonly encountered is the dichotomy between forced and voluntary migration. Most refugees in the world today are driven to migrate in circumstances in which they really have no alternative other than death. In these circumstances forced migration has a very clear and unambiguous meaning. But in other circumstances it may be very difficult to say when a person is forced and when he or she is not. A number of writers about migrants who do not qualify as refugees have tried to insist that nearly all migrants, or at least those that are being studied, are really forced migrants, forced in this case by hunger and poverty rather than by ethnic cleansing or extreme repression. Migration is thus seen as another undesirable consequence of underdevelopment and imperialism. On the other hand, neo-classical economics tends to discuss migration entirely in terms of individual choice (maximising income or security) and never sees any element of obligation. For most migration I would say that these extremes distort the question. The majority of today’s migrations are, as Tim Hatton says about nineteenth-century migration, some kind of combination of push and pull factors. To some extent the relatively new distinction made between political and economic migrant parallels the one made between the forced and the voluntary migrant, the forced being equivalent to the political and the voluntary to the economic. Such a distinction can only have some validity in relation to the original motive for migration. Even these motives are often a mixture of political and economic factors. And once migrations arrive at their chosen or accidental destination the distinction dissolves almost completely since all migrants must be in a sense both political and economic. Once they are resident in a new country

76 Bob Sutcliffe

they need to survive, to find work, welfare, housing and so on, independently of the original cause of their migration. And like everyone else they need civil and political rights. The distinction, therefore, is not a very useful one to social scientists. But it is being increasingly used in the political debate about migration in the receiving countries, and in a strange and contradictory way. Political migrants are in principle characterised as helpless victims who deserve help. Economic migrants are increasingly portrayed as selfish, grasping people, only out to get more money. The distinction has therefore been made into a moral one between good and bad migrants. This is a very curious distinction in view of the fact that it is frequently made by exactly the same people (politicians and social scientists) who preach the virtues of the free market, including the need for workers to be flexible, and whose answer to unemployment is to get ‘on your bike’, like Norman Tebbit’s dad, and look for work. What is virtuous in people of one’s own nation is deplorable, it seems, in foreigners. But the moral distinction between good (political refugees) and bad (economic migrants) has been shifting. Since the virtual end of communist governments the idea of political refugees in the West has largely gone out of fashion. Since nearly everywhere there are now free markets and free elections it is virtually impossible to be a ‘genuine’ political refugee. Hence we frequently hear that aspiring political refugees are not in fact genuine but ‘bogus’, being really just more economic migrants. This makes the economic migrant an even worse character than before. It is bad enough to be an economic migrant in the first place, but worse to lie about it and pretend to be persecuted. The figure of the authentic political refugee has all but disappeared from the debate. And that is partly because, despite the rhetoric, everyone knows that it has become virtually impossible for a genuine refugee legally to reach the country of potential refuge, except through as yet unblocked loopholes. The next commonly heard distinction is also closely connected with the previous one, but on the surface it is much more objective. It is that between legal and illegal migrants. It might seem that nothing would be simpler, but of course it could. In the first place migration law is extremely unclear in most receiving countries and, for this reason and others, its application is extremely slow. Hence it is very difficult to say for certain whether many people who migrate do so legally or illegally. Second, from the point of view of the migrant him- or herself, life is not very different if you are legal or illegal. Both categories of people in most receiving countries suffer the same constant suspicion that they are illegal and are thus harassed by the authorities. Both have to spend

Migration and Citizenship 77

a large amount of time maintaining their ability or right to stay in the receiving country. And there is a tendency, especially marked by the US Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, for legal migrants to have no more rights to such things as welfare benefits than illegal migrants. The number of illegal migrants may be growing for several reasons: there may be a growing demand for migration, there may be an advance in the networks which help people (sometimes but not always cynically and fraudulently) to migrate illegally (secret transport, forged documents and so on). But by far the most important reason is that legal migration is being made increasingly impossible because of changes in the immigration laws of receiving countries. The person migrating without recognised papers, often referred to in the press and by politicians simply by the neo-noun ‘illegals’, has become the most reviled figure of all in the migration debate, worse even than the bogus refugee; but the figure has been largely created by changes made by the receiving countries themselves. Only one route remains open in most countries for legal immigration: the reunion of families. In the US, 64 per cent of legal immigrants are in that category, and in Britain 80 per cent are (SOPEMI 1997). This situation is, of course, in marked contrast to the mass migration from Europe to the USA in the nineteenth century. Then, the main receiving country, the USA, maintained a policy towards virtually all European countries of the open door. Almost any European who could afford it and was willing to take the risk was legally able to migrate to the USA. Today none of the major countries of immigration are open. Quite the contrary, immigration is legally controlled by a massive bureaucratic apparatus which did not exist anywhere in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in all countries of immigration important, often dominant, political forces are trying to curtail immigration. There is no prospect at present of an open door policy in any country of the world. NO VACANCIES notices are going up all over the world. Up to now I have looked especially at the ideological barriers being raised against migration. But the physical and bureaucratic apparatus designed to enforce immigration control is immense. In a world in which ‘decontrol’ is routinely advocated in nearly all fields, the movement of human beings across borders is a gigantic and universal exception. Once again this is a construction almost entirely of the twentieth century and its new conceptions of the nature of the nation state. I have never seen a study which tries to estimate the supposed costs and benefits of maintaining this enormous apparatus; its justification seems to be taken for granted. To give an example, it was recently revealed that the Spanish

78 Bob Sutcliffe

government planned to invest an extra $166 million (equivalent to about 15 per cent of the annual aid budget) on improving the equipment of the Civil Guard coastal patrols against illegal immigration. The assumption that frontiers should be inviolable penetrates deeply into the social sciences. A significant amount of recent research and publication is either directly commissioned and financed by governments in developed receiving countries or closely reflects their preoccupations. Even when it is not, it still reflects a concern with researching the causes and modes of migration, with an emphasis on controlling and reducing it. In a brilliant recent article revealing the palpable absurdity and perverse results of present US migration policy towards Mexico, Douglas Massey ends with a series of recommendations as to how to control it more effectively (Massey 1998). The story of how the human being got its travel documents and restrictions has still to be definitively told. But I feel sure that it will look as implausible as many of the other Just So Stories.

Citizenship To illustrate my next point I need to quote a few remarks made by professional social scientists about old people and disabled people: ‘How much do old people cost the American public?’ (title of an article) ‘The net cost of handicapped people is $65 billion’ (quotation from article) ‘Disabled people are often uninsured and underinsured . . . constitute a disproportionate share of the total number of uninsured persons in the nation. . . . The cost of medical care of these disabled people is passed on to the taxpayer and strains the financial stability of the health care community. . . . As a result the costs of medical care for the disabled is staggering’. (quotations from an article) ‘The decline in the quality of the current generation of the elderly’ (title of article) ‘This chapter and the next bring data to bear on whether old people are a burden on, or a benefit to, younger people by ways of the public coffers’ (introduction to chapter of book)

Migration and Citizenship 79

‘Numbers, origins, economic value and quality of technically trained disabled people in the US’ (title of article) ‘How much do the elderly really cost? What do the elderly really take from and give to the public coffers?’ (quotation from article) ‘Are the new elderly less educated than the old?’ (quotation from article) ‘The real issue is not: do the disabled do economic harm? But: what good do they do? Do they do something for able-bodied people, something which they could not do for themselves. And here there is agreement among economists: No.’ (quotation from internet article) I hope that you will agree with me that these quotations are horrifying. In fact, they are surely unacceptable in academic discourse. It is rare, I think, for a category of people to be evaluated in relation to the rest of the community in this way, although perhaps it happens in the case of such categories as trade union members. But I think we would all be surprised to read the quotations above. You may think that I have made them up. Well, that is an exaggeration: I have, however, doctored them in a small way. All of them are quotes I have found in my researches in which the word ‘immigrants’ appeared in the place of ‘the elderly’, ‘old people’ and ‘disabled people’. It is in fact a very common methodological device in the literature to say that the maxim in evaluating immigration is the welfare of the existing residents of the receiving country. And it is by no means only the enemies of further immigration who use this methodology. It is the defining question of the well-known book by Julian Simon, who until his recent death was a prolific market-friendly economic writer in favour of more immigration to the United States (Simon 1989). I maintain that it is another way in which the discussion of immigration is loaded against the immigrant and against immigration. The interests of immigrants are thus put on a lower plane than the interests of citizens. In this way I think that immigrants are singled out as an especially undervalued category of people; neither in law, nor in many discourses, are they counted as citizens. Citizenship is an attribute greatly prized by the democratic ideologies which at present dominate the world, at least nominally. Through citizenship people acquire a bundle of rights (judicial, material and economic); and citizens are nominally privileged because governments supposedly act to improve their welfare and security. If in practice this

80 Bob Sutcliffe

is not 100 per cent true, at least it is true enough to mean that where a significant part of a resident population do not enjoy citizenship then a situation of discrimination exists. When citizenship is a real privilege then residence and non-citizenship have a real price. So societies based on an ideology of some level of equality become unequal. And in enforcing, by the only means possible, the law which excludes some from legal residence the societies are forced to exercise force against persons whose only crime is being in a certain place. This situation is contradictory and unsustainable. Several governments in the European Union have recently had to radically rethink the enforcement of immigration laws after the death or injury of an allegedly illegal immigrant in the course of forcibly expulsion. And many people who are denied the right to asylum are not forcibly expelled but carry on in a kind of limbo, illegal but tolerated. It seems almost certain that the perpetuation of present migration regimes, not to mention their hardening, will at length undermine and devalue the citizenship of everybody, not just the people who migrate. This is a fundamental contradiction of a world which advocates global liberalism except for its inhabitants. As South African apartheid has, politically at least, crumbled, global apartheid has tended to intensify. At one stage in my internet surfing I decided on a more refined search. I asked for ‘migration, Mexico, United States’. In about equal numbers I received documents about human beings, grey whales and monarch butterflies. The two latter species perform a wonderful annual migration – the grey whale between Alaskan and Mexican Pacific waters and the monarch butterfly between the USA–Canada border and Mexico. Monitoring the arrival of the monarchs from the south each spring has become something of a naturalists’ and schoolchildren’s cult in the USA. The common feature of the internet sites about the whales and the butterflies is that their migration is regarded as something positive and obstacles, such as environmental problems, are denounced. The sites about the migration of human beings have a much more mixed attitude, with probably a majority devoted to asserting the need for more control. To cut what ought to be a long argument short, I think that the answer to this contradiction is simply to go in the opposite direction. Instead of restricting immigration and widening the gap between the rights of citizens and non-citizens, we should liberalise immigration and narrow the gap by increasing the rights of non-citizens. In practice this means fewer frontier controls, more rights of all to welfare benefits and participation in all aspects of economic life, the control of discrimin-

Migration and Citizenship 81

ation, easier rights to acquire citizenship. In other words, the recasting of citizenship as a more transnational attribute, more portable across borders. That may look like an unattainable ideal. And I have argued myself that there is a trend at present in the opposite direction. But the picture is not all bleak. The practice of different countries, even within the EU which has tried to co-ordinate its immigration policies (in private meetings of ministers, rather than EU meetings which can be investigated by the European parliament), there is a wide variety of national practices. A major step towards my goal would be gained if all countries implemented present or recently past best practice in all the areas of immigration policy. As with most aspects of Utopia, the germ of this one, in spite of everything, already exists. Also, not all present plans for changes in immigration law are restrictive. The new German government is liberalising immigration law for Turkish residents, even if the reform is less radical than the one they originally envisaged. The way immigration is studied and written about by social scientists also has a major role to play in the transnationalisation of citizenship. We should be more ornithological in our approach to immigration, regarding it as a natural characteristic of our species. We should write more from the point of view of those who move to meet their human needs and less from the point of view of those who try to control them. I have little time to mention the other species in my title. Pets and farm animals are perhaps subject to even more frontier controls than human beings. This is their hard luck for leading such human-dependent lives. Late in his life John Steinbeck set out on a trip around the United States with his dog. The result is the splendid book of essays Travels with Charley (Steinbeck 1997). At one point he hits on the idea of taking a short-cut, passing through a small tract of Canada. The Canadian border guards advise him not to enter because he will have problems getting the dog back into the USA. So, without entering Canada, he returns to the USA. This time the US border guards (who saw him pass and then return from the Canadian frontier post) stop him, declare the dog to be an illegal immigrant and subject Steinbeck to a long interrogation. The experience leads him to a passionate soliloquy against the abuses and absurdity of state bureaucracy. I still have not mentioned the ants. They stand for the numerous species (including flies, mosquitoes and rats) which must make literally billions of frontier crossings every day without arousing special attention from the authorities. They face no barriers, they need no passport and at the other side of the border they have equal rights with other members

82 Bob Sutcliffe

of their species. Human beings will be better off when they have attained these aspects of the position of the ants.

References Briggs, Vernon M. Jr (1996) ‘International Migration and Labour Mobility: the Receiving Countries’, in Julien van den Broeck (ed.), The Economics of Labour Migration (Cheltenham and Brookfield, Vt: Edward Elgar). Castles, Stephen and Miller, Mark J. (1998) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan). Hatton, T. and Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1998) The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Massey, Douglas S. (1998) ‘March of Folly: US Immigration Policy after NAFTA’, The American Prospect, 37 (March–April): 22–33 (http://epn.org/prospect/37/ 37massfs.html). Massey, Douglas et al. (1998) Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millenium (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Segal, Aaron (1993) An Atlas of International Migration (London: Hans Zell). Simon, Julian L. (1989) The Economic Consequences of Immigration (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell). Skran, Claudena (1995) Refugees in Interwar Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press). SOPEMI (OCED) (1997) Trends in International Migration: Annual Report 1996 (Paris: OECD). Steinbeck, John (1997) Travels with Charley (1962; London: Arrow). Sutcliffe, Bob (1998) Nacido en Otra Parte: un ensayo sobre la migración internacional, el desarrollo y la equidad (Bilbao: HEGOA). United States Bureau of the Census (1999) http://www.census.gov/population/ estimate /puerto-rico/prmunnet.txt

5 Civic Nationalism, Civic Nations and the Problem of Migration Philip Spencer

Introduction It is often argued that there is a clear distinction between two fundamentally different and opposed kinds of nationalism: one civic, the other ethnic; the one open and inclusionary, the other closed and exclusionary. 1 This distinction is, however, problematic in a number of respects, particularly when we come to consider the regulation of migration, where nation states which are often seen to be essentially civic in character have worked within a largely nationalist frame of reference with particular conceptions of national identity, which may be as exclusionary in their own way as those of supposedly ‘ethnic’ nation states. The origins of this are conceptually problematic, whilst ‘civic’ nation states do not consistently abide by their own putatively democratic and inclusionary norms. It has been argued by some (Soysal 1994) that the tensions this has produced, and the contradictions which may have been exposed, may be and indeed are being resolved by the emergence of a new form of transnational citizenship, particularly in Western Europe, but this may be to underestimate the continuing grip of nationalism, not only in its ethnic but also in its civic form. All forms of nationalism, however they differ, it can be argued, partake of an exclusionary logic, requiring the construction and perception of variously defined others as in some way unwelcome, in some sense feared, in some measure to be denigrated. More open and inclusionary approaches to citizenship are likely sooner or later to run up against this logic, in some shape or form, at some level or another. If real and sustained progress is to be made, it will be suggested, alternative conceptions of political association and membership need to be articulated and grounded in a more confident and assertive internationalist or cosmopolitan frame of reference. 83

84 Philip Spencer

Civic versus ethnic nationalism The distinction between civic and ethnic forms of nationalism is now widespread in the literature. In his popular work on nationalism, for instance, the writer and broadcaster Michael Ignatieff offers the following definition of the first kind: ‘civic nationalism maintains that the nation should be composed of all those – regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, language or ethnicity – who subscribe to the nation’s political creed. This nationalism is called civic because it envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values’ (Ignatieff 1994: 3–4). The nation here is a political construct of some kind, formed somewhere and somehow as a political association conferring political and legal equality, rights and obligations on its (willing and consenting) members. In the ethnic model, by contrast, the nation is generally understood to be pre-political, a product of ancestry, something one is born into, a given, a fate rather than any kind of choice. In this ‘second brand of nationalism’, nations are ‘“communities of fate” bound together by seemingly objective qualities, such as history, language and culture and often, by connotation, blood ties. Rather than free associations . . . they [are] historically determined entities based on ancestry’ (Jenkins and Sofos 1996: 15). This distinction may then be applied to particular nations. In his influential work, for instance, the American theorist Rogers Brubaker analyses differing conceptions of nationhood in France and Germany along these lines, seeking to show how they have informed the construction of different definitions of citizenship over time, that there are ‘distinctive and deeply rooted French and German understandings of nationhood [which] have remained surprisingly robust’ (Brubaker 1992: 3). The distinction between a French and a German model of nationalism of course long pre-dates – and is by no means confined to – Brubaker’s work. It can be found, for instance, in the seminal work of Hans Kohn, where it is couched in terms of a contrast between a ‘Western’ or political and an ‘Eastern’ or cultural type of nationalism (Kohn 1965). Indeed more generally, it may be seen as only the latest in a long run of efforts over the years to distinguish between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ form of nationalism. Many if not all of these distinctions are, however, difficult to sustain or apply when scrutinised more closely,2 and although the civic–ethnic formulation is more persuasive than many others in some ways, it too runs into difficulties, particularly when we consider it in relation to issues of citizenship and migration.

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

85

Germany and the ethnic model Germany is, as we have noted, often taken to be the prime European example of the ethnically based nation. Here, it is argued, nationality has always been defined essentially in ethnic terms. Writers such as Herder and Fichte in their various ways asserted the importance of culture, of language and of deeply entrenched roots binding people together across time and space (Hughes 1988: 24–6). Germans are essentially those born of German ‘stock’, to German parents. German nationality is inherited, passed on biologically, a function of blood rather than residence, of fate rather than choice. Thus, as Gerd Knischewski puts it, whereas in the ‘French model’ it was the universalist declaration of the citizen-state which became the dominant characteristic of modern political nationality (Staatsburgernation), the ‘German model’ stressed the particularistic characteristics of an ethnic community of common origin and descent (Volksnation) which revealed itself in the national spirit (Volksgeist) and its language, culture (Kulturnation) or even landscape. (Knischewski 1996: 126) The emergence of a unified German nation state, made up of Germans according to ethnic nationalist criteria, is, however, difficult to track with any great certainty and is at best a relatively recent phenomenon. After all, a German nation state only came into existence in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war. Somewhat paradoxically then, given the apparent importance in this model of the past, of roots, of history, it is a nation which is rather more modern in many respects than its civic rivals to the west. Perhaps more significantly, when we look at the basis on which membership of this nation was constructed, ethnicity was not in fact the sole grounds. It was certainly not made up of only or all ethnic Germans. Not only were there a significant number of Danes, French, Poles, Jews, Italians and others inside this new German nation, but quite a large number of supposedly ethnic Germans found themselves on the outside, particularly the 10 million or so Germans so identified in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This led, for instance, to the poet Grillparzer, a leading advocate of German ethnic nationalism, reproaching Bismarck for having created an empire by dividing a Volk (cited in Evans 1997). As Brubaker puts it: ‘In 1871 Germany became a national state and acquired a national citizenship. Yet on the ethnocultural understanding of nationhood, the Bismarckian state and its citizenship were only imperfectly national’ (Brubaker 1992: 52).

86 Philip Spencer

The national basis of the new state then was actually a source of some confusion, compounded to a degree by the fact that the different states which had come together to form the new nation had differing rules of access (Halfmann 1997). In an effort to resolve this, a law was introduced in 1913 (over 40 years after the founding of the new nation) which sought to assert the rights of all with supposedly German blood to German citizenship. It is this law which has impressed so many observers, since its assertion of the primacy of ethnicity is not only so forthright but has also apparently remained a constant term of reference in all subsequent legislation. Although they gave it an extreme and particular inflection, in essential respects the Nazis did not break with this principle. The removal of citizenship rights from Jews was presented and accepted as flowing from broadly the same logic. Importantly, however, after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the establishment of a supposedly new democratic federal republic, the primacy of the ethnic principle was not challenged.3 Instead there was in some ways a massive reassertion of its centrality, as huge numbers of supposedly ethnic Germans migrated to the Federal Republic and were accorded citizenship on this basis. These included displaced persons, refugees, those expelled from neighbouring countries, resettlers, as well as East German citizens able until 1961 to cross over without hindrance into the West (Munz and Ehrlich 1997). It has been estimated that something like 10 to 12 million people migrated to West Germany on this basis in the 15 years after the end of the war. Of course, this movement has to be understood in a particular and wider post-war European context of expulsion, flight and family separation. Nevertheless, given the numbers and the material conditions of West Germany at this time (rebuilding itself, with extensive American help, from the devastation of war and defeat) it is worth noting, as Mary Fulbrook has pointed out, how the West German state was able to accord citizenship unproblematically to such migrants, and how West German society was able to integrate them without major tensions or outbreaks of mass discontent (Fulbrook 1996). On the other hand, although the scale, concentration and acceptance of this migration seem impressive, it needs to be put into a broader historical context. Migration of one sort or another has always taken place both into and (just as importantly) out of this part of Europe. As Bade has noted, ‘throughout German history, the movement of people across borders . . . has not been the exception but the norm’ and has taken all kinds of forms or been precipitated by all kinds of factors, from labour to flight to forced migration (Bade 1997: 2). It was not migration per se which caused problems, since it did not, even in the straightened

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

87

circumstances of post-war Germany, but how that migration was perceived, or constructed in the national imagination. For there was then to be a striking contrast between this massive post-war migration and the only slightly later migration of others, not ethnic Germans, recruited as an alternative supply of cheap labour particularly from southern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called guestworkers or Gastarbeiter. These migrants were viewed in a quite different light. It was first assumed that their stay would be only temporary and hence the issue of citizenship did not even arise. Even when this proved an illusion, as many settled and had families, no serious effort was made to offer them citizenship. On the contrary, all kinds of obstacles were put in their way, involving stringent residence, housing, income and language requirements, which cumulatively made it almost impossible for even the most determined to acquire citizenship. The difference between the two migrations was striking, not to do with matters of scale but with political perception and consequent treatment by the state. In the context of conventional distinctions between different kinds of nationalism, there was then a second, perhaps more acute paradox. For it was at precisely the moment in history when Germany as a nation state was most anchored in the West, when (West) Germany became a recognisably liberal democratic polity like its neighbours, that the ethnic criterion for nationality was most fully deployed. This was stimulated perhaps in part by ongoing resentment at the division of Germany, a division which it was insisted was only temporary. Nevertheless, it is striking that it was under a democratic republic that the ethnic principle of German nationality became more of a magnet than ever before (through the ‘Heim ins Reich’ policy), whilst more and more people who lived, worked, had children, were born, grew up and were educated in Germany had markedly inferior rights within this very polity. Unlike ethnic Germans, these migrants were not to be citizens, not allowed or enabled to participate or be represented in politics, whilst being the target, of course, of discrimination in a whole host of other ways in political, social and economic life (Castles et al. 1984). This immense contradiction was largely, and for many years, buried in the repeated official assertion that Germany was not a country of immigration, reinforced by a policy switch after 1973 which aimed to stop any further non-ethnic immigration. Neither the assertion nor the policy change, of course, could alter the reality that large numbers of non-ethnic migrants were by now effective permanent residents, nor indeed that migration was continuing (Martin 1998). What they did, however, was to provide a basis for the continuation of a quite effective

88 Philip Spencer

political myth, subscribed to for many years on almost all parts of the political spectrum, that Germany was, always had been and would always remain an ethnically homogeneous state. A serious gap then grew up between official assertions and declared policy on the one hand and reality on the other, a gap made altogether more problematic by the dramatic collapse of communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. The sudden disintegration of the East German state and its wholesale incorporation into the Federal Republic dramatically altered the terms of the hitherto buried if barely contained debate. There was immediately a massive influx of ethnic Germans, not only from East Germany but also from Poland, Russia and other parts of the disintegrating communist system, particularly once the democratic revolution had been overtaken or defeated by nationalism (Spencer and Wollman 1997). On the other hand, the sizeable community of the growing non-ethnic German population still remained without citizenship. One set of migrants was accorded full citizenship, sharpening the continuing denial of the same rights to arguably more deserving others (Wilpert 1993). At the very moment when the triumph of democracy over ‘totalitarianism’ was being celebrated then, the principle of political equality was in some ways further distorted. This contradiction was accompanied by, if not expressed in, appalling waves of violence then unleashed against Gastarbeiter and asylum seekers (Bjorgo and Witte 1993), largely played down in official circles. There were, however, further and interesting complications. For as much as hostility was heightened towards non-ethnic Germans, it also increasingly emerged against some ethnic Germans, exposing some of the hollowness of the ethnic criterion itself. Now it appeared (in contrast to the immediate post-war period) that ethnicity was not a secure category, that there were significant cultural differences between West German Germans and some of their newly arrived fellow Germans, thus generating among ethnic German nationalists what Rathzel has called a struggle between two racist discourses, an older genetic one and a newer so-called cultural one, with the latter more exclusionary than the former (Rathzel 1995). Anxieties thus generated also led to the imposition of restrictions on prospective ethic German migrants from Eastern Europe (Aussiedler), requiring the filling in of questionnaires before arrival and tests to demonstrate a German ‘heritage’ (tests, incidentally, which in 1997 were failed by 30 per cent of those forced to take them!) (Martin 1998: 24). These were, of course, by no means the only restrictions. A major debate blew up in this context over asylum seekers. Provision in the Basic Law in this regard had been generous, for a very good reason. In

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

89

an effort to re-establish in the post-war period some kind of legitimate claim to nationhood, it had been agreed to make a very open commitment to those fleeing from political persecution. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism, however, there appeared to be a dramatic rise in the number of those applying, leading to accusations that immigration was being pursued through the back door. Again, in an effort to allay panic, restrictions were imposed, requiring applicants to apply for asylum in countries they were passing through rather than in Germany, making it extremely difficult for anyone to succeed in obtaining asylum there. Yet it was precisely the liberal nature of the original provision for asylum which, in signalling a clear break with the past, had served to hide to some degree other more problematic continuities. If the liberalism of this provision was revoked, yet the ethnic basis of citizenship continued to operate to deny rights to so many, what kind of nation was Germany now turning (back?) into? By now, a major debate had finally erupted over citizenship and nationality, as these contradictions became more and more acute. Barbieri (1998) has identified at least five different positions in this debate but, at the risk of simplification, it may be helpful to focus on the three main ones associated respectively with the Christian Democrat Union/ Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) (then) governing coalition on the right; the Free Democrats (FDP) in the political centre; and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens, soon to form the new government, on the left. The former sought by and large to maintain the increasingly problematic status quo, insisting that ethnic nationalism remained central, that Germany therefore remained a country of no immigration (although Kohl actually had this claim removed from the 1998 election platform). The FDP argued for a quota-based immigration policy. The SDP and the Greens argued that, in return for the restrictions accepted on asylum, a more open approach, loosening the ethnic basis of nationality, had to be taken to citizenship, particularly by allowing for dual nationality, although at least one leading figure on the left (Otto Schilly) also appeared to argue against further immigration on the grounds (more familiarly articulated on the right) that the ‘boat is full’ (Martin 1998; Migration News, August 1998). The victory of the Red/Green coalition in the elections did not, however, lead to a straightforward implementation of their proposals, which were significantly watered down in March 1999, as the arguments of the right continued to resonate (Migration News, May 1999). It appears that many in Germany, faced with or having inherited such a complex and contradictory situation, in which ethnic nationalism

90 Philip Spencer

has played a large but not consistently overriding role, are looking outside Germany and elsewhere in Europe for a solution. If ethnic nationalism now causes difficulties, and if the certainties it once promised are no longer so clear, is there not an alternative kind of nationalism that is at once both more acceptable in a democratic context and can provide a more coherent and consistent basis for policy? Given that Germany is so fully integrated into Western Europe, so central to the European Union, can it not abandon its ethnic nationalism and adopt the civic kind supposedly developed and adopted in France and other Western nation states (Weil 1996; Joppke 1998)? However, whilst there may be no cause to regret the crisis of the ethnic model in Germany (although given the resistance shown on the right to efforts to abandon it, it may be unwise to celebrate its demise prematurely), it is by no means clear that a coherent, rational or just civic alternative does in fact exist in France or elsewhere in Western Europe, for reasons to which we now turn.

France and the civic model The idea of a civic rather than ethnic form of nationalism is often held to have originated in France at the time of the Revolution, and the principles laid down then to have been most fully developed and articulated in that country. The French Revolution, indeed, is often taken to be the defining moment at which a specifically modern nationalism came into existence (Llobera 1994), a moment in which people and nation were formed as one, with the nation as an essentially political association, constituted by the people. As the Abbé Sieyes put it at the time (in his famous pamphlet outlining the demands of the Third Estate against the aristocracy and monarchy), ‘all public powers without distinction are an emanation of the general will, all come from the People, that is to say the Nation. These two terms ought to be synonymous’ (cited in Schwarzmantel 1991: 31–2). Among the key theorists who then helped to develop the idea of a civic nationalism were two nineteenth-century historians, Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan. Michelet was the first great chronicler of the Revolution, whilst Renan for his part was the author of a famous and still widely cited text on nationalism (‘What is a Nation?’), whose central argument was explicitly articulated in opposition to what he took to be the German model (Renan 1994). When we look more closely at both of these writers, however, it is hard to sustain a clear-cut contrast between two radically different conceptions of the nation, one ethnic and German, the other civic and French. In an incisive analysis of the work of both of these writers on

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

91

this topic, Tzvetan Todorov has shown how the contrast between an ethnic and supposedly German set of ideas and a French supposedly civic set does not stand up to close scrutiny. As he argues, ‘the image that Michelet seeks to give France belongs to the purest ethnocentric tradition, which consists in attributing superlative qualifications to one’s own group, without attempting to justify them’ (Todorov 1993: 217). For Michelet, France is ‘the pilot ship of humanity’, ‘the history of France [is] that of humanity’, France is the ‘moral ideal of the world’. 4 Other nations are grossly inferior and depicted in overtly racist terms. Thus the Germans are characterised by ‘the inherent barbarism of their race’, Russia is a monster, England a bloated giant whilst ‘the Jews . . . operate everywhere, but they are rooted in the country of gold’ (cited in Todorov 1993: 214–18). Renan’s arguments are equally problematic in related ways. Whilst he did claim famously that ‘a nation is the actual consent, the desire to live together . . . [and that] the existence of a nation is an everyday plebiscite’ (Renan 1994: 17), much of his argument is underpinned by romantic and determinist assumptions, often of a more or less explicitly racist character (Sternhell 1991) and informed by ideas of the spirit and tradition more often associated with supposedly German ethnic nationalism (Silverman 1992: 20–1). If the intellectual origins of the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism are problematic, the allocation of citizenship within and by the French civic nation has also not been straightforward. Much has often been made of the way in which the French Third Republic in particular developed a form of civic nationalism supposedly capable of assimilating and integrating migrants in ways excluded by a narrower, closed, ethnic form of nationalism. What is less often discussed is the political context in which this civic nationalism emerged and the nationalist framework, of the left as much as the right, within which conceptions of citizenship were framed and by which they were driven. Renan himself was writing with a particular set of concerns uppermost in his mind: the recent loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in the wake of the latter’s military victory over France in 1871. As Weil amongst others has noted, Renan’s arguments could be used as the basis for a critique of Germany’s annexations, to provide a rationale for why the people of those regions should be considered (and consider themselves) part of the French nation (Weil 1996). This was a period of considerable national humiliation, when the experience of defeat fuelled nationalism on the left as much as on the right. If they had different solutions, different projects for the nation, what both left and right aimed for was its revival, the reassertion of its power, and, not least,

92 Philip Spencer

revenge over the Germans. For the French left, as much as the right, had by then its own obsession with national unity, was committed not only to the notion but to the forced construction of a homogeneous nation. The French state in the Third Republic, under governments of both right and left, had then to take great care and devote considerable resources to ensure that French became the common, dominant language, that a particular understanding of French history was taught to all, that French territory was seen as eternal, that a common culture was imposed on all living under its sovereignty. This was a major undertaking, whose scale should not be minimised. As Tombs points out, ‘to take only language: official reports show that in the 1870s standard French was a foreign language for about half the population . . . [and] language was far from being the only form of diversity’ (Tombs 1996: 306). It was then only as a result of a massive and sustained effort on the part of the central state5 that so many peasants and others could have been turned into Frenchmen, as Weber put it (Weber 1976), ready not only to take revenge on the Germans for the humiliation of 1871 but also of course to extend the imperialist power of the French nation state over so many others through colonial conquest (the plebiscites so dear to Renan, of course, not being for everyone).

Ius soli and ius sanguinis It is in this context that we need to look in particular at one core distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism that has major implications for migration. Civic nationalism appears on the surface to be more open and more inclusionary than its rival. The civic conception of the nation stresses the significance of choice, of association if not participation, membership of a political community. In the ethnic model, on the other hand, the emphasis is on descent, on birth, if not biology, on membership of a cultural community. This has implications for the rules which may be formulated to define who can and cannot be a member of the nation. Civic and ethnic conceptions of the nation may then be associated with different legal principles, with the principles of ius soli and ius sanguinis. However, if conceptions of German citizenship have been primarily articulated in terms of the latter principle (although not without difficulty, as we have seen), is it the case that the history of France as the model civic nation reveals a clear and consistent application of the former? The answer to this question is at best ambiguous, for a number of reasons. To begin with, we have to note that ius sanguinis is also used by all

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

93

civic nations. As Mertes has pointed out, ‘ius sanguinis is a rule in most places in the world; children of American parents, for instance, are citizens of the United States even if born abroad. Ius soli and, of course, naturalisation, are additional ways of conferring citizenship’ (Mertes 1996: 27). In the French case, as Brubaker acknowledges, citizenship law has always been based to some degree on the principle of ius sanguinis, supplemented with significant elements of ius soli, even as he insists that France and Germany represent polar cases on the grounds that French citizenship law includes a substantial territorial component, whilst German citizenship law contains none at all (Brubaker 1992: 81). Perhaps more seriously, the process by which ius soli came to complement ius sanguinis in France raises almost as many questions as it answers. As Weil has shown, ius soli was not an achievement of the Revolution, the moment when the civic nation was supposedly founded, but had indeed been rather strongly associated with feudalism, with the ancien régime. Under Napoleon indeed, it was felt ‘that birth within the borders of the country was not enough to guarantee the loyalty of the children of those foreigners born in France’ (Weil 1996: 77), whereas those with blood ties could be more relied upon to defend the nation against its enemeies. Only much later, in the Third Republic, was this changed and the principle of ius soli readopted. However, it is important to locate this shift again in its context. The Third Republic came into existence as a result of a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Prussia, whose victory inaugurated a new and powerful rival nation state, the German Empire. This defeat was, as we have noted above, the source of considerable resentment, focusing attention on the importance of a powerful and large army which could defend France against its enemies and perhaps reverse this humiliation. As Withold de Wenden has argued, this placed what was seen to be an unfair burden on existing French citizens, whilst raising questions and concerns about the presence on French soil of residents who were not French citizens (Withold de Wenden 1994: 87). Giving these residents French citizenship, on the principle of ius soli, could also make them eligible for military service. The issue of military service was certainly a focal point for the new nationalist project, with the army functioning, as Tombs puts it, ‘as a giant mixer, the “school of the nation” . . . men from different regions were deliberately mixed and posted away from home . . . near universal military service was adopted, not only for military reasons but also in the hope of creating a sense of patriotism and certainly providing a practical course in spoken French’ (Tombs 1996: 309). Together with

94 Philip Spencer

the construction of a national educational system (so central to Ernest Gellner’s (1983) influential modernist theory of nationalism), it was part of what Brubaker acknowledges as a rigorous state-sponsored programme of socialisation, a sustained process of ‘moral and civic indoctrination’ (1992: 109), producing national citizens, instilling nationalist loyalties where they did not spontaneously exist. This was not quite the unequivocal resolution of a conflict between two fundamentally different principles that it has sometimes been made out to be. When the law on citizenship was revised in 1889 to incorporate ius soli, it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a compromise. (This was true at other levels too: as Noiriel has shown, it was also a compromise between a number of quite specific interests, many of which it is difficult to think of in particularly civic terms. Many of those, employers for instance, pushing for ius soli at this time had quite narrow and temporary concerns.) What made the compromise possible, and what was of greater long-term significance than the precise details of the legislation, was the way in which the national interest was now identified on all sides as supreme, how the national frame of reference became hegemonic, how society, as Noiriel puts it, now became nationalised. In his view, the decade of the 1880s was a ‘moment fondateur’ in this regard, a period in which there was a critical rupture with earlier more universalist principles, derived from the most radical period of the French revolution (Noiriel 1988). Prior to this, the notion of the foreigner was imprecise, to do more with locality than with nation. 6 Certainly the presence on French soil of those who did not have French nationality was not previously a cause of acute public concern. When France went to war with Prussia in 1870, for instance, Napoleon III did not think it necessary to intern or expel Germans from French territory, a decision which would have been unthinkable in 1914. Similarly it was only now that refugees turned from being a local concern to a preoccupation of the central state, identified not merely as a burden on the local purse but as a matter of national security, requiring extensive bureaucratic surveillance (Noiriel 1993: 80). If the French right was focused on the ius sanguinis principle, and could thus be seen to adopt a form of ethnic nationalism, the left’s defence of ius soli was equally nationalist in ways that were to have potentially serious longer-term consequences. As Brubaker shows, the discourse of the left was saturated (as was Michelet’s and Renan’s, of course) with assumptions about the superiority of France, of French history, of the French language, of French culture. Those now accorded French citizenship on the basis of ius soli were expected to assimilate to

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

95

something given in its own way, to adapt and adjust, to embrace a national identity that was presented to, if not forced upon, them. It is relatively easy to point to the overtly exclusionary objectives of right-wing nationalism in France, where a whole host of movements have sought over the years to expel variously identified aliens. These have included, inter alia, Italians (in the nineteenth century), Jews (in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), refugees (especially this century), and more recently immigrants particularly from Africa. The nationalism of the left, however, has not been without its own difficulties. For whilst republicans were able to mount a successful defence of the rights of man in the Dreyfus affair and to contain (for a while) the virus of antisemitism, the French left’s assimilationist nationalism became increasingly problematic in the longer term.7 As Silverman has argued, from a political angle it may appear initially egalitarian – even universalist – but in its assumptions about culture it is particularist and intolerant (Silverman 1992). If they are to become members of the French nation, immigrants must assimilate to a given, dominant, national culture. This has had a number of consequences. Amongst other things, it has led to a tendency in that same culture to render immigrants in some degree invisible in the depiction of the nation’s identity. Thus, as Noiriel notes, there is very little recognition of the impact or scale of immigration in Braudel’s highly influential work on the history of France (Noiriel 1988). At the same time, the particular ways in which the French state has in reality sought to regulate immigration in the supposed national interest, and the rather dubious criteria which have informed such judgements, are easily buried. De Gaulle, for instance, often seen as a champion of republican values, agreed to ethnic quotas which were designed to discriminate against black immigrants (Noiriel 1988). Racist views of this kind are not of course confined to the elite, republican or not, but powerfully influence dominant conceptions of national identity, even though, as Hargreaves points out, these ‘ethnicised categories against which French images of national identity are constructed are seriously at odds with both the de facto participation of immigrants and their descendants within French society and with their own sense of belonging’ (Hargreaves 1995: 159). It has not been easy for the French left to meet the challenge of such sustained ethnic nationalism, effectively mobilised in more or less overtly racist forms by movements of the far right, by asserting in any straightforward way the principles of a civic nationalism. Rather, what has been required is a move beyond the sacrosanct categories of the national itself, a reinterrogation of some fundamental principles. In

96 Philip Spencer

fact, as Catherine Lloyd has shown, the anti-racist movement of the 1990s in France has been impelled to develop along precisely these lines, articulating a demand for a ‘new citizenship’ which is not rooted in terms of nationality so much as in participation on an equal footing in the polity, in the economy and in society. The focus of this movement, driven from below, with a strong emphasis on local action, has been on both formal and substantive rights, to security, to housing, to education, to employment, to political representation and participation. Its demands had to be and have been articulated in universalist and increasingly internationalist terms, as the anti-racist movement has challenged and critiqued the inherently ambivalent notion of a French national identity (Lloyd 1998). All of this has led in recent years to a sharp conflict over citizenship and nationality, which has in many ways transcended the old divide between a French right and left each adhering to their own particularist conception of the nation. In resisting the persistent efforts of the right to revise French citizenship in an ethnic direction, anti-racist republicans in France then have had to go both back and forward: back to the universalism of the most radical phase of the French revolution (the 1793 Declaration of Rights); and forward to a conception of citizenship decoupled from nationality altogether (Lloyd 1998; Withold de Wenden 1994).

National identity, immigration and citizenship: the British case Similar issues arise if we turn to a brief consideration of the British case, although here the pull of an exclusionary nationalism has been rather more effective. Ius soli in Britain was a product not of a political decision but typically (given the absence of a written constitutional tradition) of common law and precedent and, as Cesarani has pointed out, citizenship laws have developed in a confused and uncertain manner, tied up with shifting definitions of national identity (Cesarani 1996). These have varied over time, depending in good measure on who or what at any particular point in time has been perceived or feared as a dangerous other. Indeed, as Robin Cohen has argued, this national identity may have been shaped to a significant extent by exclusionary measures taken to reject or eject those deemed not to fit the prevailing definition. Over time, those so proscribed have included former French allies, Jews (more than once), Lombards, Hansards, Flemings, Calvinists, Catholics, Spanish agents, continental revolutionaries, Germans, Gypsies, Bolsheviks, and (especially since the war) black commonwealth citizens.8 Here, as he notes,

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

97

the Other is a shifting category. . . . Who becomes the alien, who the Other, who has to be feared, despised and deported, varies greatly. But all are victims of a nasty version of the old game of ‘pass the parcel’ [which] gets dumped into the lap of that group that the Self, or more exactly the defining agents and agencies of the British identity, most need at that time to distance themselves from and repulse. (Cohen 1997: 372–3) The formulation of the appropriate categories to define who is and is not British has not been easy. At times, it has involved more or less overt racism, as both Miles and Cesarani have argued (Miles 1987; Cesarani 1996). The attempt to racialise national identity is certainly discernible in a number of legislative initiatives from the 1905 Aliens Act, deliberately constructed to keep out Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe, to the legislation of 1962, 1968, 1971 and 1981, the last of which, Cesarani argues, ‘exceeded all previous legislation by abrogating the principle of ius soli. . . . Such legislation exposed the racialised character of British nationality, reflecting the bitterly polarised and at one extreme, racist understanding of British nationality in the mid-1980s’ (Cesarani 1996). This understanding was often obscured, if not hidden, as policy makers struggled with the difficulties of formulating a coherent policy on migration in the aftermath of Empire. It had, after all, been the riches of Empire and the ideology of ‘mother country’ which drew or encouraged many to come to Britain in the first place. As Kathleen Paul has argued, this produced a fundamental contradiction between what was initially a formally inclusive legal nationality policy and an informal, exclusive construction of national identity (Paul 1997). The resolution of this conflict over time and in sometimes halting stages involved, as she has shown, the construction and pursuit of quite distinct strategies in relation to at least four designated groups. In the immediate post-war period, despite a domestic economic crisis and a labour shortage, white UK residents were encouraged to migrate to designated parts of the Empire. At the same time (and in sharp contrast with the treatment of Jews fleeing persecution from Germany in the 1930s), quite major efforts were made, at considerable cost, to recruit and integrate Europeans from refugee camps. Alongside this, in a more ambivalent way reflecting the tensions of a desire in the wake of independence to both define them as still British but also alien, Irish migrant workers were both recruited and accorded citizenship, whilst being at the same time subjected to sustained discrimination. Finally, in the wake of an immigration encouraged for economic reasons (cheap

98 Philip Spencer

labour being the uppermost consideration), black migrants from the colonies (particularly from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent) were identified as a major problem, requiring a complex but ultimately drastic revision and retraction of citizenship. A succession of acts were passed (in 1957, 1962, 1968, 1971 and 1981) which, as Paul puts it, ‘transformed British citizens into immigrants and immigrants into coloureds’ (Paul 1997: 169). This racialisation of national identity, which as Rich argues ‘drew on deep traditions of nativist reactions’ (Rich 1990: 106) had the effect of effectively ‘controlling the migration of subjects of colour, while allowing white subjects to migrate at will’ (Paul 1997: 180). It is difficult to interpret this complex and tortuous history as the expression of a coherent civic nationalism, given the discrimination and systematic inequities which appear to have marked successive revisions of citizenship, or to have a great deal of confidence in the civic character of a nation that has felt impelled to define itself by keeping out so many others on such apparently uncivil grounds. As in France, the correlate of a racialised immigration policy has been a structural racism that pervades the institutions not just of the British state but British society (Solomos 1993). This is not accidental, of course, for, as Sarah Spencer amongst others has pointed out: ‘immigration policy is interlinked with and shapes the way in which former immigrants are treated . . . . If the policy excludes or discriminates against a particular group, it implies that they are undesirable’ (Spencer 1991: 9).

Immigration, national identity and the nation state What this limited discussion of the supposedly civic nations of France and (more briefly) Britain suggests is that the invocation of national identity which lies at the heart of even civic nationalism runs up against a serious difficulty when migration occurs, as it has so often down the centuries and as it continues to do so. For what immigration in particular does is to pose a critical set of questions to any form of nationalism, what Baubock has called ‘the question of collective identity; who are we and who belongs to us?’ (Baubock 1994: 7). Immigration raises questions about who may be included and who must be kept out, and so about the composition and character of the nation; about who may have or claim rights and who may not, and so about the nature of the polity itself. Migration into civic nations may have periodically been welcomed, indeed organised, if perceived to be in the national interest (often for cheap labour), but care has usually been exercised to

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration

99

ensure that immigrants were of the right type, that their entry would not subvert the existing, dominant vision of national identity. Otherwise, immigration has been constructed as a problem, purportedly of numbers, of security, of culture, but perhaps most fundamentally for national identity itself. Insofar as nation states, even civic ones, then accord or deny citizenship on this basis, they may run into serious difficulties in arriving at a coherent, rational or just approach to issues of migration. For, as Briggs has pointed out, ‘in a world of nation states, immigration control is a discretionary act of government. Regulation is thus directly linked to sovereignty over a particular land area’ (Briggs 1996: 3). If Smith is then right that the civic model of the nation is ‘in the first place, a predominantly spatial or territorial conception . . . [that] such nations must possess compact, well-defined territories’ (Smith 1991: 9), then it would appear that actually civic nations may be driven to control migration as much, if not more so, than ethnic ones but perhaps no less arbitrarily. In their extensive survey of contemporary migration, Boyle, Halfacre and Robinson perhaps unwittingly draw attention to a critical slippage here. They begin by arguing that ‘the civic conception of the nation has clear implications for migration . . . . Unregulated immigration poses a major threat to such a nation, since it implies a loss of control over who can and cannot become citizens’. It may then indeed be the case, as they say, that ‘modern civic nations have little choice other than to become committed to selectivity in international migration’. At the same time, as they then note, however, ‘such a policy serves to bolster national self-identity and homogeneity, through the admission of certain ethnic, racial and religious groups and the exclusion of others’ (Boyle et al. 1998: 156). The line between civic and ethnic nationalisms seems to become especially blurred at this point, if indeed the argument is not becoming circular. Civic nations, it seems, have to control migration in order to maintain their territorial integrity. However, attempts to control migration are framed by and in turn reinforce dominant conceptions of identity which turn out to have a significant ethnic component, precisely what was supposed to distinguish ethnic nations from civic nations in the first place. This, it has to be said, seems to have been the case for many civic nations, inside and outside Europe, from the outset, or at least once they began to formulate an international set of controls on migration in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was, after all, democratic states which led the way in developing rules for the control of immigration – France in the 1880s, Britain in 1905, although it can be argued

100 Philip Spencer

that it was the USA which in some respects was the pioneer in this area (Cohen 1992; Noiriel 1993). In any event, as Zolberg has shown, the adoption of what he calls the zero-baseline ‘contributed to the naturalisation of nativism, that is of a cultural construction whereby national societies are viewed as self-contained population entities with a common, homogeneous ancestry . . . [so that] immigration came to be regarded as a pathogenic disturbance’ (Zolberg 1997: 315). In fact, in order to justify such regulation, supposedly civic nation states have been driven over time to engage in a whole set of mystifications, denying their own responsibility for migration, manufacturing representations, making arbitrary distinctions, and erecting a host of barriers and gates over and through which people may (or more usually may not) pass. Yet migration is not exactly a new phenomenon as far as nation states, often held up as models of a civic kind, are concerned. Something like 11–12 million people were forcibly ‘exported’ from Africa from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, whilst between 1820 and 1930 55–65 million left Europe, mostly for the USA (another ‘model’ civic nation for some writers). It might perhaps be objected that, for much of this time, neither France nor Britain had yet become fully civic nations. The European imperialism which dictated much of this migration seems to have continued, however, for quite some time after whenever the democratic transformation, which is supposed to have made these nations civic, may be dated in either case.9 Since the ending of the European empires, there have been massive movements of people, including the return of settlers to Europe, and the controlled immigration of non-Europeans as cheap labour, leaving aside the havoc caused by the British state on the Indian subcontinent that led to partition (Boyle et al. 1998). What is new, and arguable, is the perception that there is a huge, permanent, insatiable, natural demand for migration, rather than particular sets of circumstances, various combinations of quite identifiable ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, many if not all of which involve the actions of civic nation states themselves. What are even more arguable are the related assumptions, often fostered in the politics of civic nations, that immigration is some kind of zero sum game (Hammar 1990: 105) both for nation identity and resources, that migrants can only be loyal to one ‘homeland’ and that they become an instant drain on the resources of the state they are allowed to enter. It is assumptions of this kind perhaps which have helped to generate the frequent, if not essentially arbitrary, effort to distinguish between different ‘applicants’ for admission, between legal and illegal immigrants, between economic migrants and political refugees, between voluntary

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration 101

and forced migration. These distinctions are not only conceptually problematic (Lucassen and Lucassen 1997), but are liable to lead to civic nation states breaking their own norms and engaging in the systematic abuse of human rights. The transformation of refugee status over the past century, as refugees have become the focus of extensive surveillance and policing by supposedly civic nation states, has been particularly striking. As Noiriel’s analysis of the French case shows, ‘national egoism’ has become the main factor in the formulation and implementation of asylum policy throughout the modern world, with the lead often being taken by civic nations (Noiriel 1993).10 At the same time, such discriminatory policies have led to a contradictory state of affairs with regard to citizenship within civic nation states, involving distinctions between fully-fledged national citizens, denizens (or migrants who have stayed despite assumptions to the contrary) and aliens (Hammar 1990; Barbieri 1998; Castles and Miller 1998). There are now citizens of nation states with (at least formally) full rights; denizens who have some rights but none of a political nature; and aliens who have very few, if any, especially when they are incarcerated pending appeal or deportation.

Citizenship and the civic nation Citizenship in supposedly civic nations is thus rather more problematic than the civic model suggests. This, it may be argued, has to do with the way in which the category of the national has taken precedence over that of the citizen. For, despite appearances, citizenship and nationality may be thought of as grounded differently. Oomen has suggested that citizenship is about equality, a category whose internality to a given society is not questioned, whereas nationality (and, he adds, ethnicity) are about kinds of collective identity which raise the possibility of externality. Thus, ‘while nationality and ethnicity as identities are exclusionary and could be inequality generating, citizenship can essentially be inclusionary and equality oriented’ (Oomen 1997: 35). Now of course it can be argued that, in its own various ways, citizenship too is exclusionary. Minors may be excluded on grounds of age; felons on grounds of their failure to observe the laws; tourists on the grounds that they are not staying long enough to take on the burdens that go with the rights of citizenship. It can be argued that any conception of politics implies some sense of bounded space within which political activity can take place, within which people may be citizens. It is not obvious, however, why this space has to be articulated in national terms, why

102 Philip Spencer

the grounds of exclusion have to be based on the idea of nation, on associated conceptions of national identity. The problem is that principles of exclusion from the nation state, even from supposedly civic nation states, are framed characteristically in terms of who is deemed to belong to the nation and who is not, who is wanted by the nation and who is not, who may or may not threaten the nation’s identity, involving a closure which necessarily has effects not just externally (on those excluded), but also internally (on those included) as well as on those caught between nation states, the stateless.

Beyond nationalism? It has been argued in recent years, on the other hand, that there are signs of a shift towards a different basis for citizenship, one no longer grounded in a nationalist frame of reference. According to Soysal, for instance, we are seeing now the emergence of a post-national citizenship, a new model which has been developing throughout the post-war era, based on universal personhood rather than national belonging (Soysal 1994). There is now, she has argued, ‘an intensifying discourse about individual and human rights that is transmitted as global norms and models by a number of inter- and transnational agencies’ (1994: 41). This has resulted in a signal shift in policy towards the large numbers of migrants who have, contrary to expectations, become permanent residents with reunified families. In a survey of a variety of apparently different ‘incorporation regimes’ across Western Europe, Soysal suggests that there is now a growing standardisation and uniformity of approach, involving the granting of ‘an expanding range of rights and privileges . . . blurring the line between citizen and non-citizen’ (1994: 130). The result is that ‘the scope and inventory of non-citizens’ rights is not different significantly from those of citizens’ (1994: 119). There is, in her view, a powerful logic at work here, so powerful indeed that it ‘obliges national states not to make distinctions on grounds of nationality in granting civil, social and political rights’ (1994: 145). At the same time, and importantly, it runs counter to the influential evolutionary schema proposed by Marshall (1950), whereby citizenship rights are developed from the civil to the political to the social within an essentially national frame of reference. 11 It would indeed be encouraging if this were the case, but there remain powerful obstacles in the path of such developments, which it would be a mistake to underestimate. Nation states are notably jealous of their powers to regulate migration, perhaps increasingly so as contradictions

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration 103

appear within the civic nationalist framework and the gap between civic principle and discriminatory practice widens. Even insofar as they have appeared to give up some of these powers and move to co-ordinate policy at a European level, the latter has been articulated within an exclusionary frame of reference, in which the 12 to 13 million nonnationals (that is those who are not already citizens of the nation states that make up the EU) have markedly inferior status (Kostakopolou 1998). European Union citizens who are not nationals of member states do not enjoy a range of rights relating, for instance, to entry, to residence or to full political participation. Even within the ranks of interstate citizens, there is systematic discrimination between the economically active and inactive, designed to prevent the migration and mobility of the latter, discrimination of a kind which significantly the United States Supreme Court specifically attacked as a basic infringement of rights on that continent (Hall 1999). This has led to justified criticisms that the EU is in the process of constructing a Fortress Europe predicated on the same exclusionary assumptions as the immigration policies of its member states (Fekete and Webber 1994; Carchedi and Carchedi 1999). These exclusionary assumptions may be articulated in a variety of ways. The emphasis may be placed on the identity purportedly distinct to a given nation or it might equally well be articulated at another level, in which the project is to defend a European identity of a similar sort. Feldblum has suggested that we think about this, not so much in terms of differences of principle as of different strategic responses of a nationalist kind. The first she labels neo-nationalist, whilst suggesting that ‘the latter be understood as a reformulating of nationalist ideas where the redrawing of lines around a culturalist and physical Europe ensures the exclusion of non-European foreigners – an exclusion that could no longer be effectively or easily accomplished at the level of the nationstate’ (Feldblum 1997: 11). However, although nation states remain powerful, and nationalism continues to exert a powerful appeal, in both the supposedly civic ‘West’ as well as the purportedly ethnic ‘East’, there may nevertheless be grounds for some optimism. The persistent appeal of older notions of international solidarity may be reinforced by the development of new international norms which may be invoked to challenge the exclusionary activity of nation states (Cassese 1990). Attention is now beginning to be devoted to alternative conceptions of democratic citizenship along cosmopolitan or transnational rather than national lines (Baubock 1994; Held 1995), and involving multiple or tiered membership linking local, regional and global identities and associations (Soysal 1994).

104 Philip Spencer

Interestingly, such arguments may be articulated from a variety of perspectives, feminist (Lister 1997), neo-republican (van Gunsteren 1998), or neo-Marxist (Waterman 1998). At the same time, it can be argued that a new internationalist movement is developing (Waterman 1998), encompassing socialist and feminist campaigns and networks, human rights movements and the growing number of non-governmental organisations independent of, and attempting to monitor, the activities of nation states.

Conclusion The thrust of all of this is to point to the need for and desirability of forms of citizenship no longer tied to or located in a national frame of reference. How successful any of this turns out to be can at this stage of course only be a matter of conjecture or speculation. However, if a more just approach to issues of migration and a new basis for citizenship are to be found, they will surely require the development of an alternative ideological framework to nationalism, the mobilisation of internationalist movements and the development of alternative sources of authority which can effectively challenge the powers of nation states, civic or ethnic, to regulate migration and the nationalist assumptions which underpin such regulation.

Notes 1. This chapter draws on work undertaken for a larger project on nationalism I have been carrying out with Howard Wollman. 2. For a survey and discussion of some of these distinctions, see Spencer and Wollman (1998). 3. In this context, as Fulbrook amongst others has pointed out, it turned out to be ‘in practice easier for ethnic Germans in East Germany to claim rights to citizenship in West Germany if they had documents proving their parents or grandparents had been members of NSDAP, the SS or other Nazi organisations, than if they had been murdered in Auschwitz and all their property and documentation destroyed’ (Fulbrook 1996: 89). 4. Although his thinking is more complex, Durkheim also expressed analogous ideas at times, particularly during the First World War when he insisted that German nationalism was radically different and markedly inferior to French nationalism (Giddens 1986). 5. There are some interesting parallels between this project and that of the German state in the Polish-speaking regions of the Reich at around the same time. A major set of ‘Germanisation’ measures involved amongst other things not

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration 105

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

only an extensive effort to colonise the land, but also to impose German culture (and the German language) on the inhabitants of the region. That this was, as Eley has argued, in large part the initiative of national liberals, may cast further doubt on a narrowly ethnic interpretation of the character of German nationalism (see Eley 1986). As he puts it, until 1889 ‘la perception de l’Autre n’est pas, le plus souvent, fondée sur la definition nationale . . . L’étranger est encore avant tout celui qui n’appartient pas à la communaute locale’ (Noiriel 1988: 278). Noiriel has argued that the defence of Dreyfus was itself predicated, within a fundamentally assimilationist problematic, to some extent on a distinction between French Jews and other Jews. This made it difficult to react quickly to the Vichy regime’s initial selection of ‘foreign’ Jews as a target, so that, when the regime attacked French Jews too, a degree of barbarism had already been accepted (Noiriel 1988). Cohen’s lengthy list also includes illegal entrants and overstayers, as well as drug dealers and even a black Briton who had committed a driving offence! One major writer on the subject (Leah Greenfeld), who sees Britain as the model nation of this kind, dates this back to the seventeenth century, which, however one looks at it, is certainly somewhat prior to the full flowering of the British Empire (Greenfeld 1992). Noiriel has noted how France, the very nation which at the height of the revolution in 1793 proclaimed its openness to all those fleeing from tyranny, became preoccupied with taking more and more measures to restrict entry to refugees precisely when the need became most acute in Europe in the 1930s (Noiriel 1993: 34, 108). Soysal regards this, of course, as a welcome and positive development. There are other writers who have noted the same developments, but who see it in a very different light. Jacobson, for instance, takes a very different view. For him, the erosion of the powers of nation states to determine who may or may not be citizens, which means they no longer have a ‘way of shaping and defining the national community’ (Jacobson 1997: 6), is leading to a devaluation of citizenship itself.

References Bade, K. (1997) ‘From Emigration to Immigration’, in K. Bade and M. Wiener (eds), Migration Past, Migration Future (Oxford: Berghahn). Barbieri, W. (1998) Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press). Baubock, R. (1994) Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration (London: Edward Elgar). Bjorgo, T. and Witte, R. (eds) (1993) Racist Violence in Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave). Boyle, P., Halfacre, K. and Robinson, V. (1998) Explaining Contemporary Migration (London: Longman).

106 Philip Spencer Briggs, V. (1996) Mass Immigration and the National Interest (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe). Brubaker, R. (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass): Harvard University Press. Carchedi, B. and Carchedi, G. (1999) ‘Contradictions of European Integration’, Capital and Class, 67: 119–53. Cassese, A. (1990) Human Rights in a Changing World (Cambridge: Polity). Castles, S. and Miller, M. (1998) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave). Castles, S., Booth, H. and Wallace, T. (1984) Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto). Cesarani, D. (1996) ‘The Changing Character of Citizenship in Britain and Europe’, in D. Cesarani and M. Fulbrooke (eds), Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (London: Routledge). Cohen, S. (1992) Imagine There’s No Countries: 1992 and International Immigration Controls against Migrants, Immigrants and Refugees (Manchester: Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit). Cohen, R. (1997) ‘Shaping the Nation, Excluding the Other: the Deportation of Migrants from Britain’, in J. Lucassen and L. Lucassen (eds), Migration, Migration History, History (Berne: Peter Lang, European Academic Publishers). Eley, G. (1986) ‘German Politics and German Nationality: the Dialectic of Nation-forming in the East of Prussia’, in G. Eley (ed.), From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London: Routledge). Evans, R. (1997) Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification (London: Routledge). Fekete, L. and Webber, F. (1994) ‘Inside Racist Europe’, Race and Class, 29, 3. Feldblum, M. (1997) ‘“Citizenship Matters”: Contemporary Trends in Europe and the United States’, Stanford Electronic Humanities Review, 5, 2. Fulbrook, M. (1996) ‘Germany for the Germans?’, in D. Cesarani and M. Fulbrooke (eds), Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (London: Routledge). Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell). Giddens, A. (ed.) (1986) Durkheim on Politics and the State (Cambridge: Polity). Greenfeld, L. (1992) Nationalism. Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gunsteren, H. van (1998) A Theory of Citizenship (Oxford: Westview). Halfmann, J. (1997) ‘Immigration and Citizenship in Germany: Contemporary Dilemmas’, Political Studies, XLV: 260–74. Hall, P. (1999) ‘European Citizenship – Unfinished Business’, in L. Holmes and P. Murray (eds), Citizenship and Identity in Europe (London: Ashgate). Hammar, T. (1990) Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens (Aldershot: Avebury). Hargreaves, A. (1995) Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge). Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity). Hughes, M. (1988) Nationalism and Society: Germany, 1800–1945 (London: Edward Arnold). Ignatieff, M. (1994) Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: Vintage).

Civic Nationalism and the Problem of Migration 107 Jacobson, D. (1997) Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press). Jenkins, B. and Sofos, A. S. (1996) ‘Nations and Nationalism in Contemporary Europe’, in B. Jenkins and A. S. Sofos (eds), Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge). Joppke, C. (1998) ‘Asylum and State Sovereignty: a Comparison of the United States, Germany and Britain’, in C. Joppke (ed.), Challenge to the Nation State (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Knischewski, G. (1996) ‘Postwar National Identity in Germany’, in B. Jenkins and A. S. Sofos (eds), Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge). Kohn, H. (1965) Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (New York: Anvil). Kostakopolou, T. (1998) ‘European Citizenship and Immigration after Amsterdam’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 24, 4: 639–56. Lister, R. (1997) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave). Llobera, J. (1994) The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg). Lloyd, C. (1998) Discourses of Anti-Racism in France (London: Ashgate). Lucassen, J. and Lucassen, L. (1997) ‘Introduction – Old Paradigms and New Perspectives’, in J. Lucassen and L. Lucassen (eds), Migration, Migration History, History (Berne: Peter Lang, European Academic Publishers). Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). Martin, P. (1998) Germany: Reluctant Land of Immgration (Baltimore, Md: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, Johns Hopkins University). Mertes, M. (1996) ‘Germany’s Social and Political Culture: Change through Consensus?’, in M. Mertes, M. Muller and H. A. Winkler (eds), In Search of Germany (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers). Migration News http:/migration.ucdavis.edu (California). Miles, R. (1987) ‘Recent Marxist Theories of Nationalism and the Issue of Racism’, British Journal of Sociology, 38, 1: 24–43. Mitchell, M. and Russell, D. (1996) ‘Immigration, Citizenship and the NationState in the New Europe’, in B. Jenkins and A. S. Sofos (eds), Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge). Munz, R. and Ehrlich, R. (1997) ‘Changing Patterns of Immigration to Germany’, in K. Bade and M. Wiener (eds), Migration Past, Migration Future (Oxford: Berghahn). Noiriel, G. (1988) Le Creuset Francais: Histoire de l’Immigration X1X–XX Siecles (Paris: Seuil). Noiriel, G. (1993) La Tyrannie du National: Le Droit d’Asile en Europe, 1793–1993 (Paris: