Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective

By Hein de Haas. International Migration Review, 2010

1,579 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The debate on migration and development has swung back and forth like a pendulum, from developmentalist optimism in the 1950s and 1960s, to neo-Marxist pessimism over the 1970s and 1980s, towards more optimistic views in the 1990s and 2000s. This paper argues how such discursive shifts in the migration and development debate should be primarily seen as part of more general paradigm shifts in social and development theory. However, the classical opposition between pessimistic and optimistic views is challenged by empirical evidence pointing to the heterogeneity of migration impacts. By integrating and amending insights from the new economics of labor migration, livelihood perspectives in development studies and transnational perspectives in migration studies – which share several though as yet unobserved conceptual parallels – this paper elaborates the contours of a conceptual framework that simultaneously integrates agency and structure perspectives and is therefore able to account for the heterogeneous nature of migration-development interactions. The resulting perspective reveals the naivety of recent views celebrating migration as self-help development “from below”. These views are largely ideologically driven and shift the attention away from structural constraints and the vital role of states in shaping favorable conditions for positive development impacts of migration to occur.

Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6c7cd630adccb79ddd0df44038bc8ffd93e7f22

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Citations in the corpus

Linking smallholder farmer climate change adaptation decisions to development (2016, background): “…linkages, as well as a body of literature on labour migration and community development in the sending communities that could provide insight into the design of planned adaptation projects in the future (e.g. De Haas, 2010; Sana & Massey, 2005; Schmook & Radel, 2008; Sheehan & Riosmena, 2013).”
The Migration and Development Pendulum: A Critical View on Research and Policy (2012, background): “These ideologies have links with neoclassical economic theory and the functionalist paradigm in social theory of which it is part, which in their focus on individual actors and markets largely neglects structural constraints such as ingrained socio-economic and power inequalities (de Haas, 2010a).”
The Internal Dynamics of Migration Processes: A Theoretical Inquiry (2010, background): “…http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20 The Internal Dynamics of Migration Processes: A Theoretical Inquiry Hein de Haas To cite this article: Hein de Haas (2010) The Internal Dynamics of Migration Processes: A Theoretical Inquiry, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36:10, 1587-1617, DOI:…”
Migration as adaptation strategy to cope with climate change: A study of farmers’ migration in rural India (2017, background): “De Haas (2010) also noted that: [. . .] whether migration occurs crucially depends on the skills and knowledge of migrants and conditions in the specific economic sectors where they are likely to find employment both at the origin and destination.”
Migration and Development: Dissecting the Anatomy of the Mobility Transition (2017, methodology): “Along a similar line of argument, de Haas (2010b) proposes to incorporate the notions of agency and individual aspirations into transition theory, by conceptualizing migration at the microeconomic level as a function of aspirations (as characterized by an inverted-U shaped relationship) and…”
Understanding Immobility: Moving Beyond the Mobility Bias in Migration Studies (2020, background): “…education and media, infrastructure, and security, tends to enhance people’s aspirations and capabilities (i.e., their financial, social, and human capital) to migrate (De Haas 2007, 2010).2 Applying the concept of capability to Carling’s aspiration/ability model makes two important contributions.”
Focus on environmental risks and migration: causes and consequences (2015, background): “There are diverse accounts of how economic growth and industrialization drive migration patterns (Hatton & Williamson 2008, De Haas 2010, Hugo 2011).”
Migration and aspirations – are migrants trapped on a hedonic treadmill? (2014, background): “Potential migrants not only need to have the ‘capacity to aspire’ (cf. Appadurai 2004; Ray 2006), but also the ‘capacity to realise’ a migration project (Carling 2004; de Haas 2010).”