Chapter 9 

International Migration

• The decision to emigrate is based on whether there is something to be gained
• Asylum migration: international movement resulting from persecution and conflict
  • Refugees: persons who have been forced to flee their country because of a real threat of persecution or death
• Any major sociopolitical outbreak will produce refugees and internally displaced people
• Undocumented migrants: impossible to know how many there are
• Temporary migration: for work
• International migrants: people who change their country of abode
• Citizens:
  • Returning migrants: return to their own country
• Foreigners:
  • Returning ethnics: admitted by another country and become citizens almost immediately
  • Migrants with the right to free movement
  • Foreign students
  • Foreign trainees: admitted to acquiring particular skills through on-the-job training
  • Foreign retirees: beyond retirement age but won’t become a charge to the state
  • Settlers: have the right to stay indefinitely - permanent immigrants
  • Migrant workers:
  • Seasonal
  • Project-tied
  • Contract
  • Temporary
  • Established: can reside indefinitely in the country
  • Highly skilled: have a preferential treatment
  • Economic migration:
  • Business travellers
  • Immigrating investors
  • Asylum migration
  • Refugees
  • Persons admitted for humanitarian reasons
  • Asylum seekers: file the application for asylum
  • Persons granted temporary protected status: cannot return to their home country without putting their lives in danger
  • Persons granted stay of deportation
  • Irregular migrants: have not fully satisfied the requirements to enter a country
  • Migrants for family reunification: accompanying close relatives

Theories of International Migration

• Migration systems: ongoing patterns of migratory exchange in which some countries and regions function as core immigration magnets and others as peripheral sending areas
• Neoclassical economics: migration decisions are driven by differences in economic opportunities between sending and receiving countries
  • New economics perspective: migration could well continue even if wage differentials between countries were eliminated
• Network theory: as the numbers of international migrants increase, so do the number of social networks in operation, creating strong synergetic forces that promote additional migration
• Dual labour market theory: focuses on capitalist societies’ chronic need for foreign labour
• World systems theory: international migration is the consequence of the expansion of the capitalist economy into the developing regions of the world

Important Factors

• Transnationalism: the new tendency to retain multiple national identities
• Diaspora: ethnic minorities that maintain strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin while gradually adopting a new identification with the host society
• Transnational communities: members live between nations and may not feel much allegiance to any one nation

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