We are delighted to announce that our Research Director, Priya Deshingkar, will be speaking in New Delhi next week.You can catch her on Monday 17 April at 10.30 in the Conference Hall of the Centre for Policy Research. Alternatively she is speaking later that day (15.00 - 17.30) at the Conference Room, UNESCO New Delhi Cluster Office.
Click on either link for more details of how to RSVP.
In this talk, Priya Deshingkar will draw on research conducted in different locations in Africa and Asia, including India, to draw out the conditions in which low-skilled migrants are recruited and employed and the contrasting discourses on their experience. In doing so, she will highlight the often complex and contradictory outcomes of migration and the difficulties this creates for dichotomies of forced and free labour. She will also discuss the policy implications of these findings.
Priya Deshingkar is Research Director of the six-year DFID-funded Migrating out of Poverty
Research Consortium; Principal Investigator for the Capitalising Human Mobility for Poverty
Alleviation and Inclusive Development in Myanmar (CHIME) project, and Senior Research
Fellow at the School of Global Studies. Her research focuses on migration and poverty with a
focus on precarious occupations, debt-migration, labour rights and agency.
As Research Director of MOOP, Priya Deshingkar has played a key role in designing and
overseeing mixed methods research in five global regions: South and Southeast Asia as well as
East, West and Southern Africa where she has worked closely with the Asia Research Institute
in Singapore, The Centre for Migration Studies in Ghana and The African Centre for Migration
and Society in South Africa. She has also developed a strand of work within the consortium on
the migration industry which has resulted in path breaking research on brokerage in the
migration of domestic workers in Ghana and brokerage in the migration of low-skilled
construction workers from Bangladesh to Qatar.
As the Principal Investigator of the CHIME project, Priya
Deshingkar has designed and led mixed methods research in four regions of Myanmar which
will yield unique evidence on migration drivers and process in the country.
Priya Deshingkar holds a PhD from the Institute of Development Studies and is an
internationally recognised authority on internal migration. She has played a key role in
influencing the global policy discourse on internal migration and development. Her most
recent book is Circular Migration and Multilocational Livelihood Strategies in India (co-edited
with John Farrington, 2009).
Wednesday, 12 April 2017
Tuesday, 21 March 2017
Risky migration: Choices of Cambodians looking for opportunities in Thailand
By Robert Nurick,
Before
I migrated, I worked in the rice field and did housework, our family rice
production was insufficient to feed the family in some years. We experienced
rice shortages for a couple months each year. I raised pigs but had to borrow
money from the private moneylender to buy pig food. The pigs died so I was
unable to repay the loan and the interest. I was sinking into deeper and deeper
debt so my husband and I migrated to earn money to repay the loan.
I
decided to let my daughter go to work in Thailand because of our debts...Once I
saw how others migrated and returned with cash I decided to let her go too.
However, when she returned from Thailand the money was not enough to pay back
the loan. I borrowed from the private moneylender to pay back the micro-finance
loan, and then used the micro-finance loan to pay back private moneylender. I
had to lie to the micro-finance agency saying that I would use the loan for
doing business and buying pigs
These quotes highlight the debt-driven and
precarious nature of migration from Cambodia to Thailand. The scale of
migration between the counties is significant. In 2013 estimates put the number
of Cambodian migrants at close to 1 million from an economically active population of 8.4 million.
Research conducted under the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme in April/May 2015 and December
2016/January 2017 revealed the experiences of Cambodian migrants – and the
challenges and opportunities that influence the choices that migrants and their
families make. Sharing these findings with migrants and their families, as well
as NGOs and government officials in both Cambodia and Thailand resulted in an
agenda for action.
The
undocumented phenomenon
Cambodians migrating to Thailand face
considerable challenges in acquiring passports that would allow them to travel
to Thailand unhindered and in safety. Although the ‘official’ price of a
Cambodian passport is US$104 with a processing time of one month, for many
Cambodians the reality is that they are expected to pay up to US$600 – the
extra made up of fees for the migration agents and bribes to passport office officials
– and, for the lucky ones, having to wait three months to receive their
passport. The unlucky ones, of which there are many, are cheated out of the
fee, never receiving the passport.
The challenges facing Cambodian migrants in
securing passports are reflected in the large numbers of undocumented migrants;
of the one million migrants to Thailand in 2013, those with papers numbered only 13,500.
What this means for many Cambodians is that
if they want to seek work in Thailand they must do so without documents, calling
on the services of informal brokers who smuggle them across the border in
unpleasant and dangerous conditions. Once in Thailand they must work for
employers without legal protection and with uncertainty over whether they will
be paid or not.
Why
take the risk?
Why do so many Cambodians take such risks
to find work in Thailand? The answers lie both in Cambodia and Thailand. In
Cambodia years of government neglect of rural areas and land grabs by ruling
elites have led to a class of landless or near-landless families unable to make
ends meet from their own farms, with little option but to look for paid work. Some
work as farm labourers on commercial farms within Cambodia, others migrate to
Phnom Penh and work in factories or as domestic workers. Many, however, are
attracted to Thailand where the working conditions and pay are better than they
experience within Cambodia, even for undocumented migrants.
In Thailand, the demand for construction
workers, labour for fishing boats and commercial agriculture, that cannot be
met by Thai workers who are reluctant to take such dangerous, dirty and
degrading work, leads to a huge pull of workers from Cambodia. Unable to secure
passports at home, these migrants are smuggled across the border by organized
but informal brokers and linked up with employers. With little protection and
wages less than that paid to Thai or documented migrants, employers benefit
from this underpaid and overworked migrant workforce.
The Thai authorities both tolerate and
clamp down on undocumented migrants. For the police undocumented migrants
represent a lucrative source of income – fees are paid to police by employers
to avoid migrants’ arrest and deportation; migrants are at risk of being picked
up on the streets and thrown in jail.
At times of political and economic upheaval
in Thailand undocumented migrants are easy targets for deflecting attention
away from internal turmoil. Most recently in 2014, in the wake of the military
coup in Thailand, when some 220,000 Cambodians fled Thailand over a two-week period in June that year,
resulting in loss of earnings, trauma and further impoverishment for their
families. Undocumented migrants continue to face risk of expulsion with 50,000
Cambodians expelled in 2016.
Agenda
for action
For migrants and their families the desire
to migrate in a safe and secure manner is of paramount importance. This means
addressing the barriers that migrants face in securing affordable and timely
passports from the Cambodian State: providing accessible information to
migrants on the procedures for applying for passports; effective regulation of
migration agents; and cessation of rent-seeking behaviour of government
officials responsible for issuing passports.
In Thailand, much more needs to be done in
providing protection to undocumented migrants: access to health care; access to
schools for migrants’ accompanied children; and labour protection in the
workplace.
The current priority of the Thai government
is to ensure all
migrant workers have documents by 2022. This will require a much greater
degree of cooperation between Thailand and Cambodia with a focus on migrant
protection.
Monday, 27 February 2017
Motility and gendered capital in household decisions about migration
By Dorte Thorsen
The consequences of global politics of migration for poverty
reduction can only be understood if we consider the capacity of individuals - and
of entire households - to capitalise on migration, argues a new working paper inthe Migrating out of Poverty series. The paper disputes simplistic dichotomies
of being mobile and able to migrate or immobile and stuck at home as parameters
of how households contend with poverty.
Households that engage in labour migration do not
necessarily choose between costly transnational migration with potential for
higher incomes and inexpensive internal migration with low financial potential.
Individuals may travel to transnational destinations at one or more points in
their life time and to national locations offering good employment prospects at
other times. Different household members may become migrants in a succession or
at the same time.
Livelihood strategies involving migration have consequences
that go beyond economic benefits. Research in the Ponorogo District in East
Java, Indonesia demonstrates how the politics of migration globally and locally
filter into household relations and gradually begin to unsettle inequalities in
conjugal relations.
An increasing body of literature addresses the effect of migration regimes on migration flows, global employment, temporalities in labour migration, documented and undocumented migration. This working paper presents a timely contrast to the focus in most studies on law-making, the industry that has developed to facilitate or deter migration, and individual migrants’ trajectories. Using Kaufmann, Bergman and Joye’s notion of motility the authors analyse how social structures at different scales intersect and, in turn, shape intra-household decisions about migration.
Motility captures the intricate ways in which spatial and
social mobility is shaped by access to migration and to the means that bestow
social mobility upon the migrating individual, migrant households, communities
or networks. The notion of motility also takes into account differences in the
competency to capitalise on access and in the assessment of which options are
the most suitable for meeting the aspirations motivating migration.
All components of motility are gendered, so to move beyond
stereotypes of the male migrant or more recent concerns about the feminisation
of migration, it is crucial to understand how gendered capital influence
household decisions about migration.
The Indonesian case study illustrates the myriad of ways that gendered capital is established and feeds into motility. Local norms and national legislation give men prerogative in decisions and identify them as breadwinners. As a result, men often choose to be the ones going abroad to meet their responsibilities within the family. Yet, gender differentiated access to transnational migration changes over time. Men’s access to migration is circumscribed by age limits imposed by destination countries and the upfront costs of migration, obliging many male migrants to opt for destinations considered less desirable.
Married women are constructed as housekeepers, wives and
mothers. Their migration is contingent on their husband’s approval by law, just
as it was contingent on their parents’ approval before marriage. This
institutionalisation of the subordinate role of women would curtail their
access to migration if the global labour market did not privilege the migration
of Indonesian women into care work. Thus, women’s access to transnational migration
has increased in recent decades because they move within a system of debt
financed migration with little upfront payment, if any.
Age also affect women’s access to migration but as a
contrast to male migrants it is not tied to restrictions in the global labour
market but to reproductive concerns. It is not having children that shrinks
their access to migration, though giving birth and nursing infants may do so
temporarily, it is the time when grandmothers grow too old and fragile to take
care of the children. At this point, internalised ways of thinking about
appropriate behaviour for women affect the assessment of suitable options and
tacitly shrink their access to migration.
An individual’s motility often has repercussions for the motility of other household members. The spouse of a migrant, for example, may be immobilised to the extent of staying at home to take care of children or elderly parents. Immobility is not the inevitable outcome however; a spouse of a transnational migrant may migrate internally or to another transnational location. Thus one individual’s motility can shrink other household members’ access to migration fully or partially. However, an individual’s motility can also increase the access to migration through financing the journey or facilitating employment and the necessary papers. Enabling undertakings may be across generations, as when parents’ migration facilitate access for a son or a daughter, or across conjugal units, as when young migrants furnish access for a sister- or brother-in-law married into the same household.
Decisions about whose migration to support reflect households’
capacity to capitalise on migration for mutual benefit. Husbands and wives may
discuss what will be best for the household and what is possible given the
politics of migration, the ability to meet recruitment costs and the needs for
different types of labour within the household. While the economics of
migration may be assessed explicitly, the long-term effect of a household’s
motilities on intra-household dynamics is very subtle.
Female return migrants find it difficult to readjust to the
institutionalised and lived subordination prior to migration. Even when they
conform publicly to the established positions that privilege men’s prerogative
in decision-making, in private they do not accept being completely dependent on
the husband again.
It is clear from this research that women’s gendered capital
is growing due to the demands in the global labour market and that this growth
has granted young women a much more prominent role in enabling other household
members, including their spouse, to access transnational migration. The active
facilitation of access and the multiple periods of working abroad will
inevitably impact on household dynamics in the future in ways that empower
Indonesian women and change their social position.
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