By Jon Sward and Priya Deshingkar
Today marks International Migrants Day, named as such because
on this date in 1990 the UN
Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members
of Their Families was signed.
The goal of the Convention was not to extend additional
rights to international migrants, but rather to explicitly safeguard their
human rights. Progress on the Convention’s implementation has been slow; it
took 13 years for the minimum number of countries (20) to ratify it before it
entered into force in 2003. As of October 2011, 40 nations had ratified the Convention,
and almost without exception these have been states in the Global South, many
of which are net emigration countries, including major migrant sending
countries such as Mexico and the Philippines.
As we mark International Migrants Day, it is important to
acknowledge that while migration to relatively wealthy OECD countries continues
to be the focus of attention of policymakers, academics and the media,
South-South migration[1]
accounts for about half of all international migration. It should be noted, however, that an estimated
65 per cent of this migration occurs to neighbouring countries – thus involving
cross-border migration. Thus while key OECD countries which receive large
numbers of migrants are conspicuous in their absence from the convention’s list
of signatories, so too are important regional receiving countries within
Sub-Saharan Africa as well as South and Southeast Asia, including the likes of
India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore.
This is significant, as South-South migration has important
implications for developing countries and regions, because it tends to involve poorer people than
long distance international migration.
These poorer migrants are often undocumented and there is very little systematic
understanding of the magnitude, structure and impacts of such migration. For
example cross-border migration in many parts of Africa involves large numbers
of women traders and not much is known about the poverty impacts of such
migration on the women themselves or their families. Research at the Migrating
out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium is seeking to better understand
the implications of South-South migration for poverty reduction and development
in five global regions across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, the role of South-South
migration is particularly important, as African destinations remain the most
common ones for international migrants in the region – the recent increase in
attention to African (irregular) migration to Europe notwithstanding. According
to the World Bank’s 2011 Remittances Factbook, all ten of the most
common international migration corridors from African countries of origin are to
destinations within the region, underlining the dominance of these flows, as
compared to other patterns of international migration.
Not only that, South-South migration flows in Sub-Saharan
Africa consist primarily of the migration of ‘low-skilled’ migrants, many of
whom find work in the informal sector. Conventional wisdom has it that work in
the informal sector rarely leads to poverty reduction but recent evidence
suggests otherwise and needs systematic probing. But there are also other
important dimensions of these flows. In 2005, 17.5 per cent of skilled
migration worldwide was to destinations in the Global South, with Malaysia,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Africa being significant Southern recipients
of the skilled – along with the Gulf Cooperation Countries.
Given that South-South international migration may be
relatively more accessible to people in developing regions, due to both
geographical proximity and increasingly restrictive immigration regimes in many
traditional OECD receiving countries, this type of migration likely has
important knock-on effects for poverty reduction and development.
However, the still incomplete efforts to ensure migrant
rights in major migrant receiving countries – of which the UN convention on the
protection of migrant rights represents just one example – means that these
migrants still face widespread risk of vulnerability, marginalization and
exploitation.
Jon Sward is a Doctoral Candidate at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, and Priya Deshingkar is the Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.
