Migration as Development

Project Information

MADE

Grant agreement ID: 648496

DOI

10.3030/648496

Project closed

EC signature date 13 August 2015

Start date 1 September 2015

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 748 656,25

EU contribution

€ 1 748 656,25

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 5 - MADE (Migration as Development)

Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The relation between development and human mobility is highly contested. While economic development in poor countries and areas is usually seen as the most effective way to reduce migration, other studies suggest that development actually increases migration. The MADE project develops new theoretical and empirical approaches to understand the relation between development processes and migration. By applying a broader definition of development, we examine how internal and international migration trends and patterns are shaped by wider social, economic, technological and political transformations. MADE seeks to delve deeper into how development affects the geographical orientation, timing, composition and volume of both internal and international migration. Thus, we focus on six countries (Brazil, Ethiopia, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, and the Philippines) with different development-migration histories over the 19th and 20th centuries. To fully grasp the effect of these country-wide transformations, we also zoom into a particular area in each of these and explore the local events that have shaped population movements in each setting. This project is scientifically ground-breaking by fundamentally shifting our understanding of how long-term development processes shape migration. This is also relevant for policy by challenging popular understandings of migration as a development failure, and to make more realistic assessments of how future global change may affect migration.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The MADE research team has elaborated a conceptual framework around the concept of social transformation and its relation to the occurrence of many forms of migration over time & space. Our starting point was the conceptual framework of ‘mobility transitions’ presented by Zelinsky in 1971, which links different phases of demographic change & ‘vital transitions’ to specific migration patterns. The MADE conceptual framework extends Zelinsky’s model by drawing on long-standing and new theoretical approaches towards development, social transformation & modernization in order to understand the ways in which these processes have been analysed across the social sciences & in relation to migration. The framework has defined 5 key dimensions of social transformation (economic, political, cultural, technological and demographic) which in turn break into 5 sub-dimensions. This framework constitutes the conceptual backbone of the elaborate methodologies for the country case studies & for the quantitative-comparative studies, and provides an analytical structure for the empirical groundwork of the project.

A number of key insights are emerging from the project. The main substantive insight is the need to rethink migration as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social transformation & development rather than a ‘function’ of push-pull forces or the international income and welfare inequalities. MADE highlights that development, not poverty, drives migration. This is a rather radical departure of common ways of conceiving migration based on push-pull and neoclassical migration models. Evidence generated by MADE corroborates that the fundamental economic, technological, demographic, cultural and political changes associated to modernization tend to increase people’s tendency to migrate. This is because this complex of changes—also known as ‘development’ in parts of the literature—tend to increase people’s capabilities as well as aspirations to migrate. For instance, our paper Formal Education and Migration Aspirations in Ethiopia (forthcoming in Population and Development Review) finds that even completing primary levels of education increases the aspiration to live elsewhere. In another key paper, Social transformation and migration: An empirical inquiry, we corroborate the idea that there is an inverted U-shaped relation between processes of development & emigration. This challenges push-pull models and confirms ‘transition theories,’ which hypothesize that development & social transformation initially tend to boost emigration. Another finding shows that demographic factors only play an indirect role in migration processes. Finally, the analyses also suggest that rural-to-urban migration can be a substitute for international migration in fast growing urban economies.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

To date, research from the MADE project has resulted in over ten articles published in peer-reviewed journals, 18 working papers in the working paper series of the International Migration Institute, and several other outputs. Our core conceptual article, entitle "Social Transformation" elaborates a novel conceptual framework to studying 'big change' across space and time. The paper defines social transformation, its key characteristics in relation to time and space, and its operationalization in 5 dimensions & 25 sub-dimensions. We apply this framework to systematically compare the common trends and distinct-unique features in the migration-development trajectories of our six country case studies. We have now published five within-country case studies applying a 'social transformation perspective' to examine development-migration interactions in Ethiopia, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil and Morocco.

In addition to our country case studies, we have several other quantitative articles that examine the relationship between key development indicators and mobility trends more broadly. In one article entitled '‘Social transformation and migration: An empirical inquiry’, for example, the authors draw on global migration data covering the 1990‐2010 period to corroborate the idea that there is an inverted U‐shaped relation between processes of development and emigration. They also find a robustly negative effect of urbanization levels and urban growth on emigration, suggesting that rural‐to‐urban migration can be a substitute for international migration in fast growing urban economies. In another article, entitled ‘Formal Education and Migration Aspirations in Ethiopia,’ the authors explore expanding education as a core driver of rising migration. They find that even primary levels can increase migration aspirations.

Finally, the MADE team has been regularly engaged in the dissemination of its findings through keynote addresses, guest lectures and presentations at seminars, workshops and conferences.

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