Can We “Fix” Poorer Countries to Keep People From Emigrating?
This is episode six of our course Migration 101. In this course, we’ve teamed up with Hein de Haas, one of the field’s leading scholars, to tackle some of the most commonly asked questions related to migration. After watching his videos, you’ll have a fundamental understanding of the realities surrounding today’s debate on migrants and the refugee crisis. We recommend Migration 101 as a primer for other Migration Matters courses.
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PART 6/10 OF MIGRATION 101
Foreign aid programs can improve the quality of life for millions around the world, and we may assume that a higher quality of life at home would prevent a potential migrant from going abroad.
But this is often not the case, Hein explains.
Recommended Reading
For more from Hein on this topic, read Hein’s post Development Leads to More Migration on his popular blog.
See this case study on the history of migration on the African continent from Hein’s book The Age of Migration.
A focus on migration could harm the effectiveness of humanitarian and development policy, argues this new report on the root causes and drivers of migration.
For more on the changing dynamics of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this succinct report from the Migration Policy Institute.
A New Yorker exposé on Filipino care-workers in New York, their middle-income backgrounds, and the relationship between opportunity at home and opportunity abroad.
Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development describes the lack of a correlation between development investment and reduced emigration in this working paper.
Hein de Haas
Hein is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He was a founding member and director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a co-author of The Age of Migration, a leading textbook in the field of migration. You can find more information and free downloads of his publications on his website. He also maintains a blog – we recommend this entry titled “Human migration: myths, hysteria and facts“.
Sign up now for our newest course, A Migrant’s View, here. It’s a bit different than our other courses, focussing on both research about so-called “origin countries” (where migrants and refugees come from) and stories of arrival, waiting, and return. And don’t miss our next course on integration and diversity in Europe! Sign up here to receive the full series once it’s finished.