SO478 - week 3

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These are my notes from October 10 for SO478 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Global inequalities and migration

Readings

Towards a new politics of migration? by Bridget Anderson

Written as a response to Stephen Castle’s 2004 paper Migration Policies Fail, in the context of the EU migration crisis of 2015. I thought this paper was excellent.

• in short: migration policies fail because they are too shallow—they focus on numbers (symptoms!) rather than the root causes of migration
• so much money is spent on border technology, checks/raids, etc (symptoms)
• ofc the private sector manages to extract lots of profit from migration (and policies combatting it) in the meantime
• in the UK, esp among the working class, migrants can be seen as symbolic of a weakened nation state (and thus stronger business, transnational organisation interests)
  • Brexit = political success of a mission to scapegoat migrants
• Philip Hammond, UK Foreign Sec in 2010, quoted as saying that Africans come to the UK because life is better here
  • Anderson correctly points out that the reason life is better in the UK is partly due to resource extraction, pillaging, profits from foreign assets, etc (decolonialisation in name only)
  • goods are cheap in the North at the expense of the South
• anti-migrant rhetoric doesn’t see migration as a structural problem, but rather as the choice of individual migrants (who then pose a threat to the national working class)
  • you also see complaints from “old” migrants about “new migrants”, which has the effect of weakening solidarity and fostering divisions between potential allies :(
• we have to find a way to create solidarity between citizens and non-citizens, instead of dividing based on the perceived scarcity of material goods

Global Inequality by Branko Milanović (chapter 3)

On inequality among countries. basically the same as the paper from last week (mostly methodology)

• we can separate out class-based inequalities from location-based inequalities (at least for the decomposable measures), weighted by population
• 1820s: 20% location, 80% class; by the mid-20th century, reversed (due to colonialism, mostly)
  • citing Bukharin: Second International supported WWI partly because colonial labour resulted in a better life for European workers (due to the huge amount of inter-country inequality)
• now: citizenship premium is very high which (along with, of course, many other factors) undermines the idea that capitalism allocates according to based on “merit” (since it so clearly relies on exogenous factors)
  • citizenship premium for the US relative to Congo (DRC or ROC?) is 93x; for Sweden to Congo, it’s 71x; for Brazil, 13x; for Yemen, 3x (average)
  • if we instead look at the lowest decile: Sweden is 104x, Brazil 9x
  • top decile: Sweden 46x, Brazil 17x (which aligns with what we’d expect)
• we’d expect this to have an impact on migration patterns
  • egalitarian countries should expect more unskilled labour (if people made were informed about relative income distributions and made decisions solely on the basis of that …)
  • ofc, to combat that, developed countries tend to have lots of policies in place to prevent unskilled immigrants from arriving—instead, they tend to get more skilled immigrants (which results in a really pernicious brain drain problem in their country of origin)
• the problem with a lot of our economic tools is that they were developed in an era when the nation-state ruled supreme and don’t take into account the larger global context
  • for example: we rarely think of extending the concept of “equality of opportunity” beyond the confines of the nation-state
  • but now we need to consider migration, and capital flight, etc
  • problems with the Coase Theorem, which Milanovic describes as stating “that we can separate matters of economic efficiency from matters of distributional justice, essentially by relegating the latter to an area outside economic policy”
    • I need to understand the theorem a bit more but it seems like Coase specified various conditions that need to hold for the theorem to apply, and none of these conditions hold in the real world, which he acknowledged? so idk what the point of this theorem is except as a demonstration of how irrelevant a lot of economics work is
  • Q: should we even care about global inequality of opportunity?
    • Rawls said no, focus on rational self-determination, something something moral hazard (assuming citizens choose the fate of their own country)
    • apparently he thought intergenerational wealth was bad, but nationally-acquired advantages were good??? wtf
• tensions of migration
  • citizens can usually (at least theoretically) leave their own country, but may not always be able to enter another
  • globalisation means free movement of factors of production, not of labour
  • the right of individuals to make free economic decisions to maximise personal income vs global barriers preventing this
  • on the concept of development, which usually refers to increasing wages within a country, without acknowledging the possibility of migration (which could have the effect of increasing wages for those from a particular country)
• 230m migrants in the world today (or 3% of pop) if we define it as people living in a country where they were not born
  • ofc, about 10% of this is attributable to the breakup of the Soviet Union
  • 700m (10%, or 13% of adults) WANT to become migrants (estimate I guess)
• Milanovic’s proposals:
  • higher taxes for migrants (incl on remittances to “home” countries)
  • basically he thinks migrants shouldn’t be treated equally under the law, at least for a while (we should codify discrimination rather than allowing it to exist in the shadows)
  • he presents essentially two opens: allow open migration but limit the flow, or, open up borders but add legal discrimination to discourage excessive migration

Strategic Gendering by Saskia Sassen

• on the invisible work of women in households
• sex-trafficking
• feminine industries (esp garments) in developing countries usually result in less worker empowerment, unions
• more women are entering workplace as professionals which results in the “disappearing wife”
• “immigrant women” as an “offshore proletariat”

Lecture

Mostly facts and figures about migration. This lecture was given by Diane Perrons, Professor of Economic Geography and Gender Studies at LSE.

• graph from Milanovic showing country ventiles, Denmark vs Tanzania
  • poorest 5% in Denmark are usually richer than the top 5% in Africa, PPP-adjusted
  • obviously this illustrates the temptation to try to move away
• migrants are 48% female, with men more likely to be economic migrants (as opposed to due to catastrophe): 88% for M vs 44% for F
• if we look at migration between North and South:
  • South-South: 37%
  • North-North: 35%
  • South-North: 23%
  • North-South: 5$
• almost 20% of migrants live in the top 20 largest cities
• economic theories of migration:
  • neoclassical perspective: an individual response to differential wage rates that results in an equilibrating process
    • free movement of factors of production leads to equilibrium
    • factor flows respond to prices
    • labour goes from low to high wages (which is ofc not possible in practice except in a rare few cases)
    • capital goes from low to high returns
  • alternative theories: it’s a disequilibrating process (inequality gets worse)
    • increasing returns to capital
    • colonial legacies (how does this fit in?)
    • brain drain
• on NAFTA: the primary goal was to give US corporations access to the Mexican market (as a place to dump goods)
  • this drove out local producers which reduced the supply of jobs locally
  • which then resulted in increased migration to the US
• a more realistic economic theory of migration would include the following:
  • households may make decisions collectively (not always about individuals)
  • wage differentials are not necessary (like in my case)
  • some members of the household may remain behind if necessary
  • markets other than that of labour are also important
  • the shape of the income distribution & your position in it are also important (it’s not just the raw, PPP-adjusted income)
  • access to social services, geographical features, political stability, etc
• Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory is brought up! I’m a huge fan of Wallerstein and have been meaning his World-Systems Analysis for a while
  • on the formation of the capitalist world market
  • labour flows in the opposite direction to capital
  • follows colonial legacies
  • reinforces uneven development
  • thus policies should focus on international capital/goods flow
• Saskia Sassen: remittances from migrant workers often exceed official development aid (for developing countries)
  • largest recipients of remittances: India and China (just because of population, not per capita)
  • in terms of GDP, it’s Kyrgyzstan, then nepal
• the UN is working on a Global Compact on Migration for 2018
  • one of the action clauses is to reduce inequality within and between countries lol yes sounds good
  • sub-clause: facilitate orderly migration & reduce transaction costs to 3% (right now it can be as high as 7%—I think this includes costs of visas/transportation as well as remittances, relative to salary?)
• domestic work as a gendered form of migration: “global care chain” (term defined by Arlie Hochschild), where the children of a Filipina nanny in the US are taken care of by an even poorer woman
  • results in the erosion of the socioeconomic commons in the South
  • these workers are strategically necessary for the global city to function
  • really, they’re a private means of coping with the global wage gap (individual solution to a structural problem)
• in the EU, the country with the highest proportion of non-nationals is Luxembourg (but that’s just Eurocrats); most countries have very few
  • migrants tend to be disadvantaged, but long-term unemployment stats are lower than those for native-born
  • also second generation tends to do quite a bit better

Seminar

Discussing Milanovic’s proposal on migration. My own take is that by the point you’re talking about migration in terms of numbers and the policies of an individual nation-state, you’ve already made a mistake. You’re already on the wrong level. It’s equivalent to trying to solve climate change by buying slightly more energy-efficient lightbulbs: an individual (in this case, national) response to a structural problem. What we need is a fundamental rethinking of the global economic system and its inequalities; otherwise, migration will keep happening. Setting quotas or imposing penalties or closing borders is addressing the symptoms, and we can’t let discourse on migration be limited to that, otherwise it’ll distract us from the real problem: global inequality.

(My take is probably heavily inspired by a book that I happened to read just a few days prior to the seminar: Slavoj Žižek’s Against the Double Blackmail.)

Someone else brought up an interesting point about the impact of the automation of labour on migration: as more and more jobs go away (at least in poorer countries), there’s more impetus to move to where the jobs still are.

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