Summary of all the required articles for the course 'migrants and integration'
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Course
Migranten En Integratie
Institution
Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
In this document, all the articles for the course 'migrants and integration' are summarized. The summary is written in English. The articles included are all the articles from week 1-7 for the schoolyear 2021/2022.
Migration and integration
Literature Week 1 – International migration: definitions, types,
trends and theories
Migration to European countries: a structural explanation of patterns
Introduction
Since the 1960s migration to Western Europe has increased substantially, despite
the fact that since the early 1970s various countries have adopted restrictive
legislation with regard to the entry of foreigners into the country.
In the current state of research, there is no clear-cut answer to the question why
migrants seem to prefer some countries over others.
Migration always involves two distinct decisions: migrants leave their country of origin
but they also have to decide in which host country they want to settle. Migrants leave
their country mainly because of economic reasons, and they expect better living
conditions elsewhere, but this still leaves unresolved the question why they decide to
move to country A instead of to country B. there are three possible approaches to
explain the pull factors determining a country’s attractiveness for migrants:
A) Economic and labor theory – migrants react to shortages in the labor market,
thus providing for an equilibrium in labor markets, both in their country of origin
and in the country they head to.
B) Cultural and world system theory – migration patterns reflect center relations
in the world system: they move from the periphery to the center, in terms of
linguistic dominance or cultural hegemony.
C) Social capital approach – migrants are attracted by the fact that other migrants
from the same ethnic group have already settled in the receiving society, thus
allowing for the occurrence of networks of recruitment.
Literature overview
Push-pull framework – focuses on economic factors to explain migration as they
assume that the supply and demand effect (macro level) and individual cost-benefit
analyses (micro-level) eventually lead to the establishment of an equilibrium on the
labor market, reached by the aggregate effect of individual decisions to migrate to
another country. Critics:
- Economic theory is too narrow a focus on a complex phenomenon such as
migration.
- Fail to provide a sound explanation for between-country differences, for
differences between individuals and for the resilience of certain flows whose
original casus have disappeared or diminished.
World systems theory – migrant flows are triggered when capitalist economic
relations enter non- or pre-capitalist societies. Cultural ties are of crucial importance.
Some theories focus on networks linking migrants to a variety of people, both
migrants and non-migrants, in their society of origin and at their destination. Such
,networks tend to enlarge over time, reducing the costs and risk of migration. At the
same time, migration becomes institutionalized through the workings of various
private and voluntary organizations active in the field – migration may become the
norm rather than the exception for people within the networks.
Hypotheses
Economic theory – it is assumed that migrants will respond to incentives operating
within the labor market. Migration is mainly seen as a mechanism to balance supply
and demand on the labor market.
World system theory paradigm – stresses the role of cultural elements. It is assumed
that migrants will tend to move from peripheral to central countries. In this approach,
migration is seen as a form of cultural hegemony.
Social networks explanation – stresses the effect of chain migration. Once ethnic
communities will have settled in a host country, for whatever reasons, this allows
future cohorts of this community to gain easier entrance.
While economic and cultural pull factors tend to be universal, and they tend to attract
people from different countries, the network effect is a very specific pull factor which
only exerts an influence on people from that one specific ethnic group, not on others.
A look at the figures
In the last two decades, Europe has encountered an increasing inflow of immigrants.
The number of immigrants Europe receives on average rises by 84.00 per year. This
perceived rise in migration inflow can be attributed to almost every European country
(except for Finland and Greece).
The population of almost every European country has become more ethnically and
culturally diverse between 1980 and 2004.
Testing the economic hypotheses
As could be expected, the population figure of the host country is one of the main
determinants of the influx of immigrants. Obviously, countries with a large number of
inhabitants – thus, larger countries – attract more immigrants.
Gross domestic product/capita is not significantly related to the influx of migrants,
indicating that migrants do not systematically select the richest countries among the
OECD member states. Neither is there a significant relation with the percentage of
social expenditure, indicating that migrants do not select countries with a generous
social security regime.
Unemployment is the only variable with a significant impact. Low unemployment
figures seem to attract migrants, and thus migration indeed primarily seems to
function as a mechanism to restore imbalances in the labor market.
The differences between countries are larger than the fluctuations over time within
countries. The evolutions over time vary across countries.
,Results show that migration is not just a powerful, but also a rather efficient,
mechanism to restore imbalances on the labor market. After one year only, migration
flows react to signals from the labor market.
Testing the world system approach: colonial past
The distance from a country to the equator does not influence the inflow of migrants.
The colonial past of a country, on the other hand, seems to play an important role in
contemporary migration fluxes. This finding supports the cultural approach – the
more inhabitants in the former colonies of a country, the larger the immigration flows
that country receives.
The initial observation of the influence of the colonial past can be attributed
completely to the UK ant its huge former colonial empire. This implies that the impact
of the colonial does not significantly change over time, it simply seems to remain
stable and it does not diminish or increase significantly.
Almost half a century after decolonization, the former colonial heritage still continues
to shape migration patterns to Europe.
World system hypotheses: language
Cultural hegemony is expressed not only by the colonial past, but also by language.
Countries where a dominant language is being spoken will attract more immigrants
than countries where this is not the case, according to the cultural approach.
Results show that European countries whose official language is spoken b a large
number of persons outside the country indeed attract a larger number of immigrants.
However, the effect of language dominance is smaller than that of the colonial past.
Therefore, we opt for including colonial ties rather than language dominance in the
final model.
Network approach
It is indicated that the initial size of the stock of foreigners in the country does not
have a bearing on the subsequent number of immigrants. The stock of foreign
nationals already present in the country does not seem to be a good explanation for
the current attractiveness of the country for immigrants.
Political control variables
At first sight, there is some influence from the presence of legislation against
discrimination: countries with such legislation tend to attract fewer immigrants. This
finding, however, does not prove to be stable.
Including political and historical variables, therefore, does not seem to add much to
the statistical analysis of the theoretical approaches we want to approach here. With
the data that are available thus far, it is not possible to develop an adequate and
comprehensive measurement of state policies in the field of integration, migration,
and discrimination policies.
, An integrated model
The final model can be considered a simultaneous test for the economic and cultural
models discussed (network model did not lead to significant results, none of the
political or historical variables proved to be stable and significant).
- Migration flows tend to increase over time, but apparently this increase can be
explained by the other independent variables, so that the time variables
themselves remain not significant.
- The population of the host country remains strongly significant, showing that
large countries attract more immigrants than small countries.
Both the economic and cultural frameworks turn out to be complementary
rather than mutually exclusive: they both possess a certain validity.
1. It is safe to say that European countries receive more immigrants if their
unemployment rates are lower. Typically, immigration flows react within a year
to a shortage on the labor market.
2. The former colonial powers still attract significantly more immigrants than
countries without a former colonial past.
The number of immigrants a European country receives annually can be seen as the
function of a constant, combined with the population figure of the country itself, the
unemployment rate in the previous year, and the combined population figure of all
the former colonies.
The determinants of asylum migration to western Europe (Neumayer)
Asylum migration creates conflict within developed countries between natives and
asylum seekers, and it creates conflict between neighboring developed countries,
with one trying to pass the burden of migration to the other.
Question of the article – what factors can explain asylum migration to Western
European countries?
A refugee in the legal sense is a person who ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social
group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or,
owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. Such
refugees enjoy the right of non-refoulement – the right not to be returned to their
country of origin.
Because it is difficult to justify denying protection for other ‘genuine’ refugees
altogether, many more asylum applicants are de facto accepted as refugees and
granted non-refoulement. They are, however, not officially granted asylum and are
often provided with the same rights as given to those granted asylum.
All countries have used asylum policies partly to further their own interests. Politics
and geography matter when it comes to asylum seekers. Little has been done to deal
with the reasons why people seek asylum in the first place.
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