The Dynamics of Migration and Social Transformations

Introduction

In the early twenty-first century many countries in the world are witnessing record levels of immigration. Between 1965 and 2010, the number of people who lived outside the country where they were born has increased from 75 to 188 million (not including the former Soviet Union). About half of these people live in developing countries. Contrary to popular belief the rise in the number of immigrants has not been much higher than the increase of the world population as a whole in the past half century. Not more than 2.8 per cent of the entire world population live outside their country of birth, and may therefore be defined as immigrants (Zlotnik, 1998; United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2009). Nevertheless, the immigrant share in the richest countries of the world, assembled in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has almost tripled in that period, from 4 to 11 per cent. Furthermore, if one includes internal migrants, the numbers mentioned will multiply. Especially in large and populous countries, such as China, India, Indonesia or Brazil, millions of people have been moving from the countryside to the cities. Sociologists and economists would emphasize many similarities between the living conditions of internal and international migrants, but from a legal perspective major differences exist.

Although migration is by no means a new phenomenon, it has been rising steeply on the international agenda lately, and it is likely to remain a ‘hot issue’ worldwide for the foreseeable future. Why is this? Is it because people fear most of all the ‘dangers’ which they do not know? Is it globalization and the idea that immeasurable reservoirs of emigrants may be opened up in developing countries? Is it the feeling that migration has become uncontrollable in an ever-smaller world? Is it a resurgence of xenophobia and nationalism, perhaps in response to growing internationalization? So many factors may play a role in migration that it seems almost impossible to deconstruct and understand the phenomenon fully. In any case, the aim of this chapter is not to provide definitive answers to the [Page 398]questions just mentioned. Instead, it will argue that a major reason for the growing interest in migration is that this is a field in which paradoxes, dilemmas and contradictions prevail. In finding answers to these, sociological insights will be of better help than emotions.

I will explore and analyze three major trends that affect current, and will most probably also affect, future migration in the world. Each of these three trends covers an aspect of migration that is not only rising on the political agenda, but that has also been receiving growing attention lately from social scientists, empiricists and theorists alike. Each of the three is characterized by a number of internal contradictions and therefore is not easy to interpret, even upon closer analysis. This is what is intriguing academics and making politicians uncertain and the general public worried. The three trends are:

• the growth of transnational networks, dating from earlier migration, and leading to a quasi-autonomous perpetuation of that process;
• persistent differences in social, economic and political developments in the world, which add to existing migration pressures;
• the ambiguity of state responses to migration and its effects.

These trends will be analyzed primarily at a macro level, but they have strong implications at intermediate and micro levels as well. Not only because the decision to migrate is nearly always an individual one, but also because a wide variety of institutional arrangements at intermediate levels are likely to affect that decision and its implementation.

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