“The number of migrants in the world is increasing, but refugees are diminishing in number.” So says Lisa Pelling from the University of Vienna.
Never before has there been such a large number of people in the world living in a different country to the one where they were born. In total, there are around 200 million migrants, a figure equivalent to the population of Brazil. Only a small number of them are fleeing repression, war and civil war. Most have moved in order to seek work and managed to support themselves. This is the key point in researcher, Lisa Pelling’s description of the global situation for migrants.
“But Sweden is different from the world at large,” stresses Lisa. When it concerns immigration to Sweden, asylum seekers are still a relatively large group, but on a global level they comprise only 9% of all migrants.
Another global trend is the feminisation of migrants. In the past, female migrants largely consisted of the wives of men who were emigrating. But more women than men are emigrating from many countries now. Lisa mentions countries like the Philippines where 60% of emigrants are female. Sectors dominated by female migrant workers are healthcare, home-help, restaurants and domestic service.
“Today for example, there is an enormous number of women moving from Asia to work in hospitals and nursing homes in the US,” says Lisa.
At the same time, there are still industries in which male migrant workers make up the majority. This is true of sectors like building, mining and transportation.
Lisa confirms that around 60% of the world’s migrant workers have moved from one developing country to another.
“But the one country which has received the most people is the US. Around 20% of the world’s migrants live there,” says Lisa, adding immediately that the statistics are unreliable. “They are based on information reported by various countries to the UN. But not all countries have reliable data. There is particularly great uncertainty concerning immigrants with no formal residence permit. Where it concerns the EU, information on the number of paperless migrants varies, but the most common figure is around five million.”
So what is it that brings people to leave their country of origin to look for work? Lisa points out several reasons. One is, of course, poverty and high unemployment in their home country. But she also mentions the fact that some people move in order to get an education. Some of the immigration to countries like South Africa and Argentina is due to this.
According to Lisa, another factor which can drive migration is demography. A number of developing countries have a very high number of young people and thus an excess workforce, whilst the conditions in many industrialised countries are the opposite.
The flipside of migration is what is usually called “brain drain”. This is when developing countries lose qualified people through migration. Lisa says that 40% of those with university degrees in Turkey and Morocco leave those countries. Of the medically trained people from English-speaking countries in Africa south of the Sahara, around half are working in the US or Great Britain.
“Particularly dramatic is the bleeding off of qualified people in small countries. States such as India and China, where the number of qualified people is very great, can manage better.”
But there is also an opposite expression, “brain gain”, in other words countries can benefit from people who have moved to another country returning with new skills and abilities. Migrant workers also send home enormous sums of money to their relatives in their country of origin. The total amount sent back by migrant workers is three times greater than global aid. For a country like Somalia, the money sent back there by Somalis living abroad is of more value than revenues from both aid and export.
“At the same time, the expectation that you will send back large sums of money can make integration more difficult. Migrant workers have low paid jobs. If they also have to send home money every month, there is little opportunity to get a better home or move to a new area. The pressure to send home money means that migrant workers are vulnerable and easy prey for unscrupulous employers. Those migrant workers who are responsible for looking after a lot of family members dare not risk their jobs by getting involved in with a union or protesting against poor working conditions.”
Lisa is particularly interested by what she calls “transnational communities”. This relates to the fact that migration creates new global networks and that people often move back and forth between countries and continents. She stresses that this phenomenon is nothing new.
“Of the great Swedish exodus to America, one in five came back to Sweden. They brought new ideas with them and created a hotbed of new enterprise.”
Lisa believes that many people live in parallel cultural contexts. “They have one identity associated with their country of origin and another with the country where they live. Cheap air travel and the Internet also mean that a person can be in close contact with friends and family in several countries at the same time. It is not just companies which have become transnational, but also many people. The labour movement must become more transnational. An increasing number of people are living their lives in several places at once,” concludes Lisa.
MATS WINGBORG