5. Migration, Mobility, and Border Politics

Migration and Globalization

Tension between

• Embrace of open economic borders

• Reluctance toward migration

→ Simultaneous processes:

• → Liberalization of trade and financial flows

• → Increasing border walls and securitization

Migration (key trends)

Common but mistaken assumption:

• Most migrants move from poor countries in the Global South to rich countries in the Global North

In fact

• At least 1/3 of migration is South-South

• Many migrants move to neighboring or nearby countries

• E.g., 80% of African migrants remain on the continent

Migration Classifications

• Migrant: “any person who is moving or has moved across an international border or within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence”

• Refugee: “someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence”

• Internally displaced people: people who "have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes... and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border”

• Labor or economic migrant: person who moves from home state to another state “for purpose of employment”

• New category?: climate migrant/environmental migrant/climate refugee

Migration: Classifications

• Legal classifications shape available protections →

• 1951 UN Refugee Convention:

  • A refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom

  • Outlines minimum standards for the treatment of refugees, including the right to housing, work and education while displaced

• Economic and climate migrants:

  • Currently treated as “voluntary” in domestic and international law

  • → No guaranteed legal protections for economic/climate migrants

Migration: Push/Pull Explanations

Push factors: drive people to leave home countries

• Poverty

• Famine/drought

• Discrimination (political, ethnic, religious)

• Conflict

• Ecological disasters

Pull factors: attract people to host countries

• Economic opportunities

• Access to land or food

• Educational opportunities

• Safety

• Tolerance

Home/host country dynamics seen as separate →

• “national” explanations

Migration: Relational Explanations

Relational explanations focus on

• Transnational processes

• Historical processes

• Relationships between home and host country societies

Examples of relational causes

• Imperial legacies

• Transnational wars and arms trade

• Drug trade and organized crime

• Global pandemic

• Previous migration patterns

• Climate change

• Uneven development

Differential Mobility

• Easier for goods and money than for people to cross borders

• Easier for some people than for other people to cross borders

Uneven Development v. Inequality

Inequality → migration = national “push”/”pull” explanations

• i.e. Because there is poverty in one place, people move to another place

Uneven development → migration = “relational” explanations

• The wealth of some places depends on/exacerbates the poverty of other places (via various transnational dynamics), while simultaneously attracting people from the latter to the former

NAFTA and the US/Mexico Border

NAFTA policymakers made flow of goods much easier

• But refused to make legal migration from South to North easier

Exposed Mexican farmers to heavily subsidized US and Canadian grain exports

• → Put many small Mexican farmers out of business

• → Increased rural to urban migration within Mexico

  • Especially to maquiladoras (special economic zones)

• → Increased transnational migration to US

• → (Hardening of border for people)

A relational explanation for the way processes of uneven development

• → migration

Malquiladora

• Foreign owned factories operating in Mexico

  • Production of goods for immediate export

  • Located mostly in 20 km special legal zone along US-Mexico border

  • Duty free

  • US-made parts, Mexican assembly

“Prevention through Deterrence”

• Strategy adopted by US government, 1993/4 on

• Intensifies security at most common, urban crossing points

• In order to deflect migrants towards harsher crossings

→ No reduction in migrants attempting to cross

→ Increased migrant deaths

→ Increased long term over seasonal migration

My argument is quite simple. The terrible things that this mass of migrating

people experience en route are neither random nor senseless, but rather part of

a strategic federal plan that has rarely been publicly illuminated and exposed

for what it is: a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind

the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert. - Jason De Leon

Decline of the WTO

Spurred by

• Rise of the BRICS and growing tensions between North and South

• US itself (interference with appeals process)

→ Weakening of WTO and multilateral free trade system

→ Shift to bilateral and regional trade agreements

→ Increasingly fragmented trading regime

State-Capitalist Geopolitics

• From increasingly free market neoliberal globalization

• To increasingly open geopolitical and economic rivalry among states

• But in a heavily globalized and interdependent world

→ Geopolitical economic rivalry today entails

• Struggle for control over already globalized economic networks

• Use of increasingly interventionist state economic tools

  • (e.g. tariffs, subsidies, state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth funds, export controls, foreign investment screening, etc., etc.)

  • (All heavily criticized under ‘G’ approach)

State-Capitalist Geopolitics (causes)

Causes of the shift?

• Financial crises →

  • Triggered massive state intervention (bailouts, QE)

• Complex GCCs →

  • Increased competition for better position within production networks

• Slowing global economic growth →

  • Intensified competition for limited opportunities

• Resurgence of “virulent forms of economic nationalism that collapse the distinction between economic interest and national security” →

  • Economic rivals recast as security threats

  • Legitimating rise of non-liberal economic policies