Behind the research: Kefasi Nyikahadzoi

Over the course of the last 10 years, the Migrating out of Poverty consortium has drawn on the enthusiasm and expertise of many people across the globe. This blog series focuses on the people behind the research, who have kindly shared personal reflections and learning from their experience of working with the consortium.

Professor Kefasi Nyikahadzoi started working with the Migrating out of Poverty with the Centre for Applied Social Sciences at the University of Zimbabwe, coordinating work on the income and remittances theme.

“One of the biggest lessons I learnt is the importance of taking research results back to the communities who provided the data, for validation.  I also learnt how to provide qualitative explanations for emerging trends and patterns in the descriptive statistics. 

We are very proud of the interactions that we had with national and district level stakeholders. Through those interactions, we were able to contribute towards policy designed to improve the welfare of migrant-sending households.”

 The Migrating out of Poverty programme has been a true team effort, and we appreciate the role each individual has played in producing and disseminating the research.

Thank you for all your hard work with the Migrating out of Poverty programme, Kefasi!

Behind the research: Thea de Gruchy

Over the course of the last 10 years, the Migrating out of Poverty consortium has drawn on the enthusiasm and expertise of many people across the globe. This blog series focuses on the people behind the research, who have kindly shared personal reflections and learning from their experience of working with the consortium.

Thea worked with the Migrating out of Poverty programme from 2015-2016 as part of her work with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand, focusing on trafficking, gender and migration, and policy. Thea has just finished her PhD and will soon be starting a position at the ACMS as a postdoctoral researcher.

"The programme was the first research project I worked on after my Masters and was a critical step in deciding to undertake a PhD.   

The biggest lesson I learned from my involvement with the programme was the importance of collaboration across contexts. I'm most proud of bringing together researchers from Bangladesh, Singapore, South Africa and the UK, in Johannesburg in 2016."

The Migrating out of Poverty programme has been a true team effort, and we appreciate the role each individual has played in producing and disseminating the research.

Thank you for all your hard work with the Migrating out of Poverty programme, Thea!

Behind the research: Brenda SA Yeoh

Over the course of the last 10 years, the Migrating out of Poverty consortium has drawn on the enthusiasm and expertise of many people across the globe. This blog series focuses on the people behind the research, who have kindly shared personal reflections and learning from their experience of working with the consortium.

Brenda worked with the Migrating out of Poverty programme for 8 years, in her position as Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute. Brenda investigated a number of themes including remittances and livelihood strategies of Indonesian migrant women as domestic workers in Singapore, and policy dynamics and processes. 

"With its considerable scope across research centers in Asia and Africa, working on Migrating out of Poverty has allowed me to deepen research networks and nurture collaborative relationships with leading experts on migration from a range of disciplines and backgrounds.  

I'm proud to have worked with an excellent team of young, emerging scholars in Singapore as well as international collaborators to extend existing research and tease out comparative approaches to migration and development in Asia and Africa.  

One of the most unique aspects in participating in Migrating out of Poverty has been the concerted effort to produce work that is not only timely and sound but also relevant to stakeholders beyond an academic audience, prompting us to reflect closely on the policy implications of our findings. Policy matters!"

The Migrating out of Poverty programme has been a true team effort, and we appreciate the role each individual has played in producing and disseminating the research.

Thank you for all your hard work with the Migrating out of Poverty programme, Brenda!

Dreaming in Dhaka: a postscript on the Global Forum on Migration and Development 2016

This adapted version of a blog by Kellynn Wee was first published on the Migrating out of Poverty (Singapore) site and is re-posted here to mark the start of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) 2017.

Building on an op-end I wrote with Kuda Vanyoro and conversations with sharp, wonderful colleagues, these are my immediate impressions of the GFMD 2016. (My experiences stem from attending two sessions on labour recruitment and global supply chains, another on migrant diasporas and entrepreneurship, and a final session on developing a gender-sensitive approach to the Global Compact.)

We still tend to talk about migrants as workers first, people second. 

This is a thread that runs powerfully through discussions pre-empting the Global Compact on Migration, and was particularly evident on Common Space Day. We talked about labour markets, push and pull factors, entrepreneurship, skills development and matching, recruitment fee regulations, and how migrants brighten local economies as a justification for their entrance into nation-states, employers, ethical recruitment–all of which are crucial topics–but we talked less about migrants’ changing family dynamics, socio-cultural incorporation and inclusion, intimate relationships, and reproductive rights.

Women aren’t just domestic workers.

This tends to be our default mode when we talk about women in migration. Firstly, this reverts to point #1: we see women migrants, first and foremost, as migrant workers. The second problem is that we have fallen into a familiar narrative of adopting domestic workers as the default ‘worker’, which in no way diminishes the urgency of the issues that surround domestic work, but crowds the spaces that we have to discuss women in labour migration. What about, for example, women who engage in embodied and intimate labour, such as migrant sex workers? This is a trickier and more divisive terrain to navigate, but important nonetheless. The third and most pressing problem is that a gender-sensitive approach cannot and should not be restricted to women as workers. Marriage migrants are a significant migration flow: in Singapore, one in five marriages are between a citizen and a foreign spouse. A foreign wife’s legal status is dependent on her husband and a rising number deals with shocking levels of abuse. Or what about ‘study mamas‘, women who accompany children who migrate to study abroad? We also did not discuss transgender women and queer women, and the specific vulnerabilities that they must grapple with. Will these women make an appearance in the upcoming Global Compact, or our future discussions about migration and women.

The host country plays a powerful role in setting the agenda. 

The candidness of H.E. Shahidul Haque, the Bangladesh Foreign Secretary and this year’s GFMD Chair, was a breath of fresh air. Playing both provocateur and realist, he was forthcoming, reflexive about the mandate of states, and eager to urge civil society to take a leading role in issues of migration in the years ahead. “How about a free, fair, and responsive approach, rather than safe, regular and orderly?” H.E. said at today’s Common Space speech. “The strength of every movement is the people, not the state. Have you ever seen a state lead a transformation?” he said at the GFMD Civil Society Days opening speech.  (It helps that he’s very quotable.) In comparison to last year, I thought this year’s Common Space had a relaxed openness to it, with civil society representatives and government delegates truly interacting, responding, and mixing, not just in the interstices of the conference, but within the formal spaces of the conferences as well.

Moderation and session structures are critical to the quality of the discussions.

Well-moderated discussions had several common elements: good timekeeping, critical in reining overenthusiastic speakers in; reminding delegates to ask pointed, concise questions; an ability to make thematic connections between disparate comments and questions; and, most importantly, the facilitation of interaction, rather than panellists’ monologues. In a room full of experts who have spent years working closely with migrants, it is, I think, less important for panellists to share statistics about rates of migrant abuse–an issue we can safely assume to all be intimately familiar with–and more important for a lively Q&A which will allow panellists and the floor to dynamically shape their responses in relation to each other, and to better explore topics of discussion.

Stories are crucial. 
And in many ways, this year, they shone. Poet Vanessa Kisuule’s performances were a gift: necessary, honest, funny, piercing; they felt organic, not shoehorned or tacked on, and I appreciated her active participation and reflection in the days following her poetry. The photo exhibition at the foyer–titled ‘The Best Years of My Life‘ and put together by Shahidul Alam–tracked the lives of Bangladeshi migrants to Malaysia, and glowed with open empathy. Nonetheless, however, I echo the comment we made in our reflection on last year’s GFMD. 

What is the role of research(ers) at the GFMD?
There are times where I itched, and tried, to temper abstract principles in empirical stories, data, and information. I think I talked often, for example, about how recruitment fee flows are gendered in Asia: women migrate through debt; men migrate through upfront fees. These have hugely different implications and will need different solutions. The perennial question of how to connect a global process to local contexts remains something that we will need to explore.

I am both optimistic and wary (and weary. Goodbye forever to 6 am wake-up times! I say fervently). It has been an exciting few days, with many ups and downs, coloured with lots of frustrations and Twitter rants and furiously whispered conversations with people at tea tables and in the audience, but also with moments of delight and joy, and a conviction that some conversations are, at last, moving forward and taking flight. Warm, warm congratulations to the Bangladesh team for pulling off a fantastically organised conference on a tremendous scale. Until we meet again.

How unpopular policies are made: Lessons from Bangladesh, Singapore, and South Africa

By Thea de Gruchy

In December, in a post titled #Decrim: A call for evidence-based policymaking, I referred to work which I had done with Ingrid Palmary investigating the making of South Africa’s 2013 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Act. This project formed part of a larger project, funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium , which included three case studies.

The first was on the processes and decision making which led to the creation, passing, and implementation of the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Act. The second case study was conducted by The Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit  at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and is an analysis of the Domestic Workers Protection and Welfare Policy, which was approved by the Bangladeshi government in 2015. And the third was undertaken by the Asia Research Institute  at the National University of Singapore, and investigated the mandatory weekly day off policy for migrant domestic workers  introduced by Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower  in 2012.

The three case studies are obviously all quite different. They explore different contexts; different kinds of policy; and different political structures. However, what Ingrid and I were able to do in this working paper, which has just been published, is explore the similarities and differences that could go some way in helping us to better understand policy making in post-colonial settings.

To be clear, a lot has been written about policymaking and policy processes. However, most of this has centred on understanding policy making in European and North American contexts – for example 84 % of studies using the Advocacy Coalition Framework to analyse policy making between 1987 and 2013 were conducted in Europe and North America.

But aside from trying to address this gap in the literature, the work highlighted three important things to bear in mind when trying to advocate for policy change in these contexts.

The first is that when trying to make interventions in the policy making process, being able to either harness or successfully address ideas and panics about morality, and women, is powerful. For example, the anti-trafficking movement in South Africa was helped enormously by its ability to use pre-existing normative ideas, which many South Africans have, about sex work and the inability of women, particularly poor women of colour, to make decisions about their own lives and, particularly, sex lives. Whilst I certainly don’t agree with these ideas or this tactic, it is important to acknowledge that this is a reason that many, what I would call, socially conservative causes are able to gain traction.

Secondly, building coalitions and relationships with those involved in policy making is important. Social and political capital go a long way when trying to convince policy makers of your cause. Policy makers often have their own personal agendas – this was clear in both the case studies focused on domestic work. Policy makers were, by-and-large, also employers of domestic workers and, therefore, more sympathetic to maintaining the status quo than incurring additional personal cost through implementing policy which gave more rights to domestic workers. Building coalitions and relationships with other organisations and individuals, both locally and internationally, who agreed and sympathised with the efforts of civil society in Singapore and Bangladesh was incredibly important in the fight for the two policies.

And finally, more work needs to be done to build the trust of policy makers and the public in research, whilst insuring that they maintain a critical perspective and understanding of the limitations of the research with which they are presented. In other words, we need to improve research literacy so that people are better equipped to figure out whether the evidence and (alternative) facts with which they’ve been presented are sound (this is obviously something which many people are advocating for in the age of Trump). And, so that people, who aren’t familiar with how research and universities work, are better placed to understand what peer reviewed research is able to bring to the policy making table.

UN draft Declaration on migration: A focus on internal migration and the generation and use of evidence are sadly lacking

By L Alan Winters

On the 19^th September, the UN will hold a High Level Meeting of the General Assembly on addressing large movements of refugees and migrants. It will be informed by a draft Declaration of fairly broad principles accompanied by two Annexes making somewhat more concrete commitments.

The Declaration makes twelve references to ‘sustainable development’ and is heavily oriented towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The high principles of the 2030 Agenda led to concrete promises only in terms of achieving ‘orderly’ migration and the minor issue of remittance costs. The Declaration takes a more balanced approach to migration, by recognising more frankly the developmental benefits that it brings. However, the Declaration’s principal route to ‘balance’ is to mention almost any idea that exists which pertains to migration. Given such comprehensiveness, it is perhaps surprising that I was mainly struck by two omissions – one conscious, but nonetheless regrettable, and the other (I hope) by over-sight. 

Internal migration

The Declaration states that there were 244 million international migrants in 2015. But we know that there were also probably about 760 million internal migrants. The causes and consequences of internal migration are pretty similar to those of international migration, except that in most countries there is no formal legal barrier equivalent to immigration policies a country’s border. People move to try to raise their standards of life in economic or social terms. Because the physical and cultural distances between origin and destination are usually smaller for internal migration, it is cheaper and thus more open to poorer people. So, internal migration is more likely to help overcome poverty than international migration because most international migrants tend not to be poor in the first place.

The lower cost of internal than international migration also means that people will move for smaller rewards and/or with less concern for the risks - internal migration involves taking a smaller bet. As a result it is not surprising to see that some internal migrants fail to realise the gains they hoped for and face challenges finding decent housing and secure employment. This is no reason to discourage migration, however; rather it calls for policies to ease migrants’ transitions by countering discrimination, making public services accessible even to newcomers, and ensuring that potential migrants have access to better information.

Where is the evidence base?

The unconscious omission is to evidence, research or analysis; none of these words occurs at all in the Declaration or its Annexes! There is a hint (in Annex II para. 4.3) of ‘technical expertise’ being provided by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and reference to a role for civil society, but these are not commitments to evidence-informed policy and practice per se.

Given our profound ignorance of the process and parameters of migration this omission is rather disturbing. The shopping list approach of the Declaration, which lists nearly all possible migration-relevant approaches and activities, means that there is a desperate need to characterise the necessary trade-offs and priorities in deciding what sub-set of them to actually undertake.

In the Migrating Out of Poverty Consortium we have studied the process of making or changing policy in the super-sensitive field of migration. We find that, while politicians often rely more on narratives and myths than on hard analysis (for more on this see our work in Singapore and Bangladesh). Handled sensibly evidence can make an important, if not dominant, contribution to good policy outcomes. Moreover, in one case soon to be published on our website – South Africa’s Trafficking in Persons Act 2013 – the politicians themselves felt the absence of data and analysis acutely.

For sure, we need to act now on migration and to make policy with the best information we have now, but that does not excuse failing to seek more and better evidence in future. Thus in its debate I urge the General Assembly to make a special reference to undertaking research and policy analysis in migration on a deep and wide scale, not to see it as a mere technical afterthought to be managed by its latest recruit to the UN family (the IOM).

Informal Settlements in Ghana

by Mariama Awumbila and Priya Deshingkar

On Saturday 20 June 2015, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly bulldozed Old Fadama, the largest informal settlement in Accra. Roughly 50,000 people, mostly migrants from Ghana’s northern regions, as well as others from the West Africa sub region, are said to have lost their properties during the demolition exercise, and many became homeless overnight. This is the not the first time that slum clearances and forced evictions have taken place in Ghana and Old Fadama residents have faced numerous eviction threats since 2002. 

Many slum clearances are done in the name of the greater public good. This most recent destruction of Old Fadama was ostensibly to improve storm water drainage and prevent floods in the city. The need to do this was highlighted by the 3^rd of June floods and fire in the city which claimed over 150 lives. The argument was that unauthorised construction, partly due to the activities of the residents at Old Fadama, was hindering the flow of water and in particular had stalled the execution of the Korle Lagoon Restoration Project, which aims to improve the ecological functioning of the Korle lagoon and so to improve Accra’s drainage, flooding and sanitation problems. City authorities felt that the demolition was necessary to help prevent future flooding and destruction around the Odaw river. The authorities are planning to construct drains that will allow water to flow into the Odawna drains and Korle Lagoon and then finally into the sea.

 

However it is not clear whether any scientific studies were conducted to establish the causality between activities at Old Fadama and flooding in Accra, and doubts have been expressed in the press about the effectiveness of slum clearance in addressing the root cause of flooding. Critics have called for a demolition “with a human face”.

 

Those who favour the evictions have an unwavering conviction that their approach is correct. Such approaches are embedded in the overall negative policy stance related to the migration of the poor. According to the 2013 World Population Policies Report, 84% of less developed country governments want to reduce rural to urban migration, up from 73% in the previous round. Africa and Asia have some of the highest percentages of governments with policies designed to reduce the flow of rural-urban migration: 85% in Africa and 84% in Asia. There has been a hardening of negative attitudes in many parts of the world and it is not clear what the empirical basis for this is.

 

There are a number of concerns about poor migrants and informal settlements - most inadequately supported by evidence - including the overburdening of urban services, the spread of disease, worsening crime and exacerbating vulnerability of cities to environmental disasters. There is little recognition of the economic contribution of the residents of informal settlements to the city in the form of cheap labour, specialised services and products.

 

A 2014 study on rural-urban migration to urban informal settlements or slums in Accra conducted by the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana under the Migrating Out of Poverty research programme showed that most of the residents in Old Fadama are young migrants who are economically very active. More than 80% find work within a few days of arrival, mainly in the informal sector, doing jobs such as recycling electronic waste; food vending, street hawking, head load portering (kayeyei), petty trading, and hairdressing. All the respondents in that study reported a wider range and better paid employment options compared to their places of origin. More than 77% remitted money home and this money went directly to poor and disadvantaged rural households. For some, these remittances are the only source of income. When asked how their lives had changed as a result of migration to the informal settlement, nearly half said their overall situation had “improved a lot”, 38% said it had “somewhat improved” and the rest said that it had deteriorated or remained the same. 

 

According to Amnesty International, Ghana’s laws and constitution do not provide the residents of informal settlements with adequate protection against forced evictions. They are, for all intents and purposes, illegal settlers and the metropolitan authorities can file a case against them in court as was seen in 2002 when the Accra Metropolitan Authority filed an eviction notice against the residents of Old Fadama.

 

It is well known that forced evictions do not provide long term solutions; in fact the only long term impact they seem to have is to worsen the risks of already poor and vulnerable people. Very often there are inadequate resettlement plans for residents, as happened in this case, and even when offered, the alternatives do not replace what has been lost because the sites are located at a distance from civic amenities and established business and social networks.

 

Old Fadama residents have faced a constant threat of eviction and have tried to unite against it. In 2006 and then again in 2009, two organisations, the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor (GHAFUP) and People’s Dialogue on Human Settlements organised a community enumeration of the residents to Old Fadama with Shack Dwellers International. This was seen as an important first step to show the civic authorities how many people lived here and what they do. It was hoped that such information would transform the attitudes of government towards informal settlements and prevent evictions. But unfortunately this has not happened.

 

By razing Old Fadama to the ground, countless poor, rural families will have lost an important source of support. It is therefore important that  informal settlements are recognised not only as a places of despair and misery, requiring social protection, but also as hives of economic activity providing services to urban areas and remittances to rural households dependent on them.

 

There is thus an urgent need to shape policy attitudes towards informal settlements away from forced evictions towards participatory relocations or rehabilitation.

 

 

Mariama Awumbila leads the Migrating out of Poverty West Africa team at the Centre for Migration Studies at the University of Ghana. Priya Deshingkar is the Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.

The migration researcher: Who's doing the talking?

by Paul Clewett

 

December 18^th marks the true Christmas of the migration world, as disciples of all things-migration meet and tweet their way through a copious amount of reflection on the developments of the last year. They will have talked about a global protection system in crisis and rising anti-immigration sentiment in the West; burgeoning South-South migration and global development; labour rights and the World Cup…  Yet they will not, I surmise, have talked much about themselves: a sprawling network of migration geeks united by a common obsession with understanding why people move.

So I’ve decided to make some sweeping statements about the characteristics of those who inhabit the field in a bid to provoke some group reflection on what it means to be a researcher of migration. I do so with the aim of shining a light where light is not usually shone, but without any kind of moralising agenda. We all know self-reflection is important in research, but what does this look like collectively? Who are the migration geeks of this world and why should we care?

Migration researchers are mostly women. This is in many ways refreshing as it bucks the general trend in European research which sees women underrepresented in almost every subject area. Yet one has to wonder where all the men are at. I’ve started calculating the gender balance at conferences in Brussels and, with the caveat that expert panels tend to reflect the dominance of men in senior policymaking positions, audiences are always clearly weighted towards women. I’ve found a similar imbalance in studies and at work, where far more often than not I’m the only man in the room. My unscientific hunches lead me down the dangerous path of conjecture: are there more women in migration studies because of this long-standing habit we have of portraying migrants as victims in need of (feminine) care? And are the men in migration largely confined to economics departments because policymakers, despite all the progress in the social sciences, still favour overtly economically rational (and masculine) approaches to understanding the world? Priya Deshingkar’s recent post brilliantly underscores the importance of taking a gendered approach in understanding the close relationship between social mobility and human mobility.  Maybe we should also be extending the approach to research and policy itself, where gender divisions between disciplines are part of wider gendered structures that affect the quality of our migration policy.

Migration researchers are often closet activists, supressing the urge to shout aloud about how ridiculous the stance on migration is in the north. I’ve heard more than one person express feelings of restlessness whilst in the thick of a major piece of research or trying to produce a piece of ‘dispassionate’ policy analysis against the grain of a growing internal rage at the injustices meted out by sovereign states and borders. We know that evidence is crucial to better, fairer policy, but sometimes the desk-based approach to changing the world just doesn’t feel like it can ever faithfully reflect the urgency for change.

Migration researchers often feel guilty about deriving pleasure from their work. Stephen Hopgood’s thoroughly engaging ethnography on Amnesty International - Keepers of the Flame – (which I read as part of a reading group organised by the Religion Cluster at the Asia Research Institute), dealt with the conflation by Amnesty staff of hard work and personal suffering, i.e. if you’re not in great pain and anguish yourself, then you are not doing justice to the topic.  Hopgood paints a picture of research staff who could not be satisfied with work that did not take them to the same dark places inhabited by the victims of grave human rights abuses they support. Most migration researchers perhaps aren’t at that extreme, but I think there is a fairly constant sense that enjoying what you are doing can somehow invalidate it. For instance, a friend of mine told me of his guilt that his PhD research proposal doubled-up as the perfect strategy for making his long distance relationship work. But his supervisor told him he was being ridiculous, he produced an excellent thesis, his subsequent work is original and well-respected, and the relationship is (so far) happily ever after.

Those studying mobility are hyper mobile and often migrants themselves. It stands to reason that we study those things that reflect our personal experiences and interests, but do we think enough about what this means for the subject we’re studying and the agenda we bring to our work as a consequence? Of course, many of us regularly write up reflexive pieces to accompany our work, but there’s more to this: I find, for instance, that my increasing mobility as I entered adulthood and started doing things of my own accord made me feel strangely detached from the places to which I was supposed to belong; the increasing ease and need for international travel made distance and difference less consequential. This has to matter for studying migration. Our place in the world and our understanding of what that means has to be especially important for those responsible for generating knowledge about other peoples’ place in the world. It’s not the most straight-forward conversation to have, but maybe one worth taking up.

Migration is both the Holy Grail and the poisoned chalice of contemporary global challenges, simultaneously propping up our economies whilst undermining the sacred principle of national sovereignty. Given the amount of energy expended year round through conferences and seminars trying to make sense of all of this – and the emotion that pulsates through the debate in constant duel with evidence – International Migrants Day offers a great opportunity to step back and take a minute to consider who is actually doing the talking.

 

Paul Clewett was the  Asia Research Institute's 2014 Migrating out of Poverty Research and Communications Intern at the National University of Singapore. He is currently Program Assistant at  MPI-Europe, the Migration Policy Institute's Brussels office. He writes in a personal capacity.

 

Indonesia's “Special Treatment” of their International Migrants: Between Lip Service and Reality

By: Endang Sugiyarto

 
 

Indonesia recently experienced a new breeze promising to bring a wind of change when the new president took drastic action to protect the welfare of Indonesian international migrants (who are known as Tenaga Kerja Indonesia or TKI meaning Indonesian overseas worker) by asking the relevant government apparatus to “really treat them as heroes” (as indicated in the government official documents)[1] but also to “remove some of the special treatments” or privileges associated with or given to them. The apparent contradiction between these two requests lies at the heart of the issue. 

 

Due to the lack of job opportunities in the domestic economy, millions of Indonesians are currently working abroad, mostly as low-skilled workers but with incomes at least five times higher than those of their counterparts working in the same job domestically. According to official figures from the National Authority for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers (BNP2TKI), on average 563,262 Indonesian migrants worked abroad each year during the period 2007 to October 2014. This number is far below that of the unrecorded migrants who leave the country using various means. The majority of the TKI work in Southeast and East Asia and the Middle East, and the top five destinations from January to October 2014 are Malaysia (30% of total), Taiwan (19%), Saudi Arabia (11%), Hong Kong (8%) and Singapore (7%). They are mainly employed as  domestic workers (33%), followed by caretakers (12%), plantation workers (11%), factory workers (11%), general workers (5%), seamen (5%) and others (24%). 

 

The TKI directly contribute to the domestic economy by reducing unemployment and providing foreign exchange income via remittances, which could only otherwise be obtained through exports. Thus, this labour export policy is a “win-win” for the government, for it doesn’t need to provide jobs for those who leave while the economy reaps the benefit of their remittance inflows. Thus, the government has decided to treat them as foreign exchange heroes who must be respected accordingly. This is reflected, for instance, in provisions made at the airport. The TKI are given a special terminal, a special immigration lane, a special lounge, special trolleys, a special transfer bus or transportation, and other special things (the pictures below illustrate some of these provisions). The list of special provisions is in fact more extensive than outlined here, as some local governments add supplementary benefits such as temporary accommodation. In some cases, additional special treatments are given to those joining the G(overnment) to G(overnment) programs operated in conjunction with  Japan, Korea and Taiwan for example. These G to G programmes provide benefits in the form of special seminars, financial management and exchange rates for the salaries of the TKI involved.

 

So what is the problem then?

 

The problem is the gap between the policy and the reality of implementation on the ground. In a nutshell, these special treatments provided by the government have been used by corrupt government bureaucrats and their accomplices, often located in the private sector, to extort money. They set up a range of tariffs, exchange rates, and mark ups for their own benefit. The findings of a series of undercover and surprise inspections by the anti-corruption committee that were also exposed by the media have revealed the bad practices. Moreover, during the video conference between the President and Indonesian workers in: Brunei Darussalam, Egypt, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, which took place on 30 November 2014, the exposure of further corrupt practices led to the President taking action to remove some of the special treatments afforded to the TKI. The crackdown on these extortionate practices is welcome, and include the thwarting of a syndicate allegedly engaged in human trafficking of Indonesian migrant workers through Malaysia to destinations in Middle Eastern countries. But more work is needed to address this issue since  what has been exposed so far is just the tip of the iceberg! The new government needs to systematically solve the problems by better facilitating migration and protecting migrants’ welfare, throughout their migration cycle from the stages prior to their departure up to their return home. 

 

To start with, the deployment system must be improved, including better preparation of migrant workers. In connection with this, serious concerns must be addressed in relation to recruitment agencies. Their role has become very dominant (partly due to the lack of appropriate government intervention) which has resulted in migration becoming very commercial. Many agencies now also act as employers, creating a situation in which the migrant worker has become very vulnerable to abuse and exploitation in different forms. The widespread practice of “fly now and pay later” which renders migrants indebted to the agencies until they repay the cost of their flights, and of agencies having full control over all the arrangements: from the migrants’ passports to their contracts and deployment etc., should be seen as worrying.

 

Last summer I met a new migrant on her way to Malaysia where the recruitment agency had organised her trip, obtained her passport and visa, provided domestic and international transportation, and made all the other arrangements, while she had made practically none of the preparations herself. She was just told to go to the airport, board the aircraft, and somebody would pick her up at the destination airport. She had no information at all about the Indonesian Embassy in Malaysia and less than Rp2000 (less than 20 US cents or around 10 GB pence) in her pocket because the agent also told her that she would not need any Indonesian money. What if just one step in this elaborate process went wrong? How would the aspiring migrant worker cope? The outcome of her desperate action is anybody’s guess! 

 

Even more concern will be revealed if we scrutinize the job contract and other details, and ask basic questions such as: what kind of job will she be doing? What are the terms? How much will her salary be? How many months will it take her to repay all the costs associated with her departure that have been prepaid by the agency? And so on…

 

The potential problems and complexities stemming from this kind of arrangement are predictable. To illustrate, the official data shows that 181,193 migrants arrived back in Indonesia through 14 different airports from January to October 2014. Many of them returned before their contracts were completed due to various problems, such as incomplete documents, work-related ill health, an inability to work or communicate properly, and other reasons. Who are to be blamed for these outcomes? I hope that the new government is not going to blame the migrant workers for they are more the victims than the culprits! Their only mistake is to try to escape from poverty by entering into the wilderness of the international labour market. And they only took that route because the domestic market did not provide them with any other opportunities….

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[1] This kind of treatment is not unique to Indonesia as many other developing countries adopt similar policies.

Fig 1: Examples of airport special facilities for the TKI - Indonesia's foreign exchange heroes

 Endang Sugiyarto is a doctoral candidate in Migration Studies at the University of Sussex, funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium

Migrating from the big cities for opportunities in smaller towns: The case of Brazil

by Eva Maria Egger 

While most of the literature on internal migration focuses on rapid urbanization and metropolitan cities as destinations filled with opportunities for migrants, little attention has been paid to those people who leave the big cities. Not only do migrants return to their places of origin in rural areas, but  many people decide to leave their place of birth in the metropolitan area to find opportunities in smaller towns. Recently, Christiaensen et al. (2013) have pointed out the importance of smaller towns for the economic development of African countries in contrast to the traditional standard two-sector development model. And considering all the discussions about the issues around urbanization, such as high unemployment, poor housing infrastructure, high crime etc., it should not be surprising that some people also consider leaving these difficult environments.

However, from an economic perspective, one of the main drivers for internal migration is the seeking of higher wages. As wages are on average much higher in metropolitan areas, leaving these areas comes at the cost of a wage loss. Despite this, Brazil’s 2010 census, the most recent demographic data, shows that net-migration into metropolitan cities[1] is negative for working-age male migrants. Between 2009 and 2010, 20% of all working age male migrants within Brazil moved out of metropolitan micro-regions to non-metropolitan micro-regions with on average less than 500,000 inhabitants. During the same period, only around 15% moved in the opposite direction. These urban out-migrants actually change jobs and are not just reflecting suburbanisation by commuters. Also, the migrants are a diverse group: a third of them have attained only primary education, while around 18% are college graduates.

Therefore, in my research I aim to use econometric methods to estimate which factors make  smaller towns more attractive compared to metropolitan cities, if not wages. My findings suggest, that one of the main economic drivers is the much lower living costs in smaller towns, such that migrants on average do not experience a wage loss in real terms. They prefer towns with growing economic opportunities rather than very small and remote areas. In terms of non-economic factors, the migrants appear to value the quality of provision of education. These findings indicate that the investments of the Brazilian government during the recent years into infrastructure development of smaller towns and former less developed and more remote regions is bearing fruit. As more and more Brazilians are attracted to these locations they contribute to a reduction in regional inequality. Thus it could be worth widening the focus of our migration research to include these destinations outside of metropolitan agglomerations and for policy makers, too, to acknowledge the potential of smaller towns.

Reference:

Christiaensen, L., J. De Weerdt and Y. Todo (2013), Urbanization and poverty reduction: the role of rural diversification and secondary towns, Agricultural Economics, 44, 435-447.

Eva Maria Egger is a doctoral candidate in Economics at the University of Sussex, funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.

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[1] Metropolitan areas are microregions with one million or more inhabitants. This definition follows the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects (UNWUP, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/) (Christaensen et al. 2013). 

The ‘Art’ of Research Communication

by Kuda Vanyoro

From my experience at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) and engagement with literature by other writers who have faced similar, it is clear that at times research findings and evidence on nationally contested issues like migration may prove the positive contributions of migration to development and poverty eradication prematurely, when the audience in question is not ready to hear the positions that researchers take. In other words, there may be socially entrenched stereotypical perceptions of migrants, as is the case in South Africa, which lead the recipients of the message to ignore it. In such instances, targeting a policy audience alone when communicating research findings and evidence is insufficient to impact or influence policy because of regressive societal attitudes which may also be held by policy makers.

 

There then arises, today more than ever, the need to tactfully disseminate research findings in a more decentralised, artistic and aesthetical manner. This may involve targeting a ‘popular culture’ non-policy audience through art and other forms of eye-candy such as film, exhibitions and storytelling in order to drive the facts home. The success of this process depends on creativity on the part of the research communicators tasked with coming up with a means of enticing and attracting this non-policy audience. Where this drive is led by the sole purpose of myth-busting and de-construction of shared societal misconceptions and stereotypes of migrants, such creativity may yield positive results, even in spite of the danger of further subjecting those whom we hope to emancipate with the research, to further stereotypes, which is a common pitfall.

 

Research communication is therefore in my view both a profession and an art. A good example of tackling a sensitive issue successfully is an ongoing research project at the ACMS titled Volume 44, which is a collaborative research project on migrant sex workers in the cities of Johannesburg and Musina. The South African National Aids Council has estimated that there are 153,000 sex workers in South Africa. A large proportion of these are located in Gauteng, the smallest but most populous province in South Africa, in which both Johannesburg and Pretoria are located. Sex work is popularly perceived as migrant dominated, and work conducted by Marlise Richter and Jo Vearey based on interviews with 1636 sex workers found that just over 85% of sex workers were migrants. Of these 39% were internal migrants and 46.3% were cross-border migrants. Volume 44 builds on a 2010 project which sought to highlight the experiences of migrant women involved in sex work within inner city Johannesburg through visual medium in the exhibition ‘Working the City’. At the time of writing, Volume 44 has staged 3 exhibitions: one in Johannesburg 21 May – 27 June 2014; a second in Amsterdam 25-28 June 2014; and the last one in Bogota in 14-19 July 2014. The exhibition was highly visual and its Johannesburg launch, for which I organised the publicity, attracted an attendance of nearly one hundred people from all walks of life: young students, media professionals, sex workers and academics.

Sex work in South Africa is not legal, and activist voices are calling for its decriminalization in a bid to combat the lack of access to health care, stigma, discrimination and criminalisation under the Sexual Offences Act faced by those engaged in it. While both migrant and local sex workers face stigma, particularly at grassroots levels, migrant sex workers are viewed with the utmost hostility. Therefore, it is only reasonable to assume that advocacy for the protection of sex workers in South Africa can only yield tangible policy results once social attitudes that result in stigma have been eliminated, or at least sensitised, from below. 

In the coming years, researchers will need to learn to adopt popular packaging for their research communication if their voice is to be heard beyond the ivory towers of universities. This is especially true with contentious topics like migration where research positions are often not what receiving communities and policy makers may want to hear. Volume 44 is an attempt to use photography, real-life narratives, audio and other forms of exhibitory art to get ordinary people thinking in a different way about contested issues. The art, complementing the research findings about migrant sex work, can provide potent weapons to communicate unwelcome research messages for positive evidence-based policy making, social transformation and other envisaged policy outcomes.

Visitors to the Johannesburg Volume 44 exhibition view '"Letter to a young sex worker" - a wall of letters written by the project participants'

 

Kudakwashe Vanyoro has concluded his Research, Communications and Outreach Internship at the African Centre for Migration and Society(ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), funded by the Migrating out of Poverty Research Consortium. Read Kuda's profile.