MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT
D. BALLAS (DIMITRIS – ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY PERSPECTIVE) + S. ADAAWEN (STEPHEN – GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT +
POPULATION STUDIES PERSPECTIVES) + A. REMUND (ADRIEN – MIGRATION IN POPULATION HISTORY)
05-09-2022
1st Lecture
Godfather part 2 clip (1901):
Seek new (work/liberty) chances and opportunities in the new world (NYC > Ellis Island). Both
economic reasons and forced migrants (refugees). Border control + health check. Malta/Lesbos
today.
Migration is about personal stories (motivation behind migration/ why people move):
- Search for a better place
- Forced from/ to a place
- Social environment, integration, self-realization
• It has Regional Implications (competition in jobs, creating new jobs etc.)
o Economic implications
o Social impacts
o Political implications
Innovation is more likely in places with diversity.
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, 1. Major concepts: relocation/ migration
• Move/ relocation
o Residential mobility
o Migration
▪ Internal
▪ International
Migration (theoretical definition) = move involving major change in Daily Activity Space (DAS)
- DAS: Area in which someone performs daily activities
- Most important daily activity; work/education
- Differs by individual/ household (can you afford to travel big distances, enough income to
commute?)
(otherwise its more commuting/relocating). DAS = key concept!
2. Major concepts: Development
• Individual level
• Local and regional economic development
• National and global development (e.g. see UN Human Development Index)
Economic perspectives:
- Human capital and labour market related factors affecting individual migrating decisions
(e.g.; move to increase skills and have higher income later in life, education, economic
performance)
- Utility and happiness
- What are the individual consequences of migration?
- What are the regional and local economic impacts of migration?
- What are the national and macro-level impacts of migration?
Population Studies Perspectives:
- View of migration: event in the life course
- Ways of studying migration:
Macro-level: how flows affect size and composition of population
Micro-level: explaining occurrence of migration events in individual life courses (who, which
circumstances); identifying consequences
Meso-level: explaining migration in context of households/ families
Exams:
70% = on campus digital final exam in November
• Exam format: combination of multiple choice, short-answer, open-ended etc.
It takes 2 hours, resit in December.
30% = group assignment
The Mobility Transition: myth or reality
Empirically test it through historical settings, e.g.; prehistory/ pre-industrial/ industrial revolution/
recent trends. 1500+.
Ancient immobility?
Modern mobility?
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,Social representations of mobility
In summary:
- The ‘need to be mobile’
- Mobility = modernity
- Conveyed by neoliberal thought
• A decrease in death rates, followed by a decrease in birth rates, which together generates a
rise in population, and then both death and birth rates stabilizes to lower levels to a point
where population stops growing or even decreases/ starts diminishing.
• Country A will eventually look like country B, country B will eventually look like country C.
Point A1 becomes A2, becomes A3; same country has different stages.
• Logical sequences: less advanced countries will eventually move to the stage of more
advanced countries. Some countries are at the forefront, become the role model, where
other countries should/ will end up.
Reading history sideways. Variations across space and time.
In the beginning of the 1900’s very little migration to Europe, no political demand/ interest in theory.
Only Ravenstein’s laws of migration (1885).
Used as an explanation of diffusion of ideas: ‘Migration to cities as an agent of social change.’
Main claim: modernization of societies affects patterns of mobility.
Hypothesis › “There are definite, patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility through
space-time during recent history, and these regularities comprise an essential component of the
modernization process” p. 222
Definitions (change over time and differs per author):
Mobility › “there is no realistic alternative to treating all territorial mobility as a single continuum,
extending from the shortest, most routine of iterated motions to the most adventurous
intercontinental journey” p. 226
Migration › “any permanent or semipermanent change of residence (…) a spatial transfer from one
social unit or neighborhood to another, which strains or rupture previous social bounds” p. 225-6
→ Eliminates certain types of migration; within the country side, or from cities to the country side;
these kinds of migration will play an import role in history.
Homework: Lezen + quiz →
1971: The Hypothesis of the Mobility transition, Geographical Review, vol.61, no. 2
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, 07-09-2022
2nd Lecture
Zelinsky, W. – article (theory legacy)
3 crucial statements (out of 8): (first one most important, claims have back and forth pattern)
1. “A transition from a relatively sessile condition of severely limited physical and social mobility
toward much higher rates of such movement always occurs as a community experiences the process
of modernization” → Critics; there was no migration further back in time we go, thus this
statement is demonstrated to be wrong.
2. “For any specific community the course of the mobility transition closely parallels that of the
demographic transition and that of other transitional sequences not yet adequately described.”
8. “Such evidence as we have indicates an irreversible progression of stages.”
→ Associated with the paradigm of development. Hard to defend when you start digging.
MAUP = modifiable areal unit problem
A statistical biasing effect when samples in a given area are used to represent information such as
density in a given area.
Het aanpasbare gebiedsprobleem is een bron van statistische vertekening die de resultaten van
statistische hypothesetests aanzienlijk kan beïnvloeden.
Only around 25 countries have complete population registers. More have only certain data on
fertility/death rates/marriage/adoptions etc.
Paleomigrations = migration in ancient times, before historical times.
5000 B.C. migrants from Turkey spread through Europe.
3000/4000 B.C. second wave more from Asia.
Europe has always been receiving migration waves. (but in time from different areas of the world)
Ancient humans were thus far from being immobile, but were they migrants in the modern sense?
Not really because they move a few kilometres each year and there were no borders. Group
movement, new settlement each year.
UN definition of a migrant: “a person who is moving or has moved across an international border or
within a State away from his/her habitual place of residence”.
Statement 1: (16th – 19th c.)
“A transition from a relatively sessile condition of severely limited physical and social mobility toward
much higher rates of such movement always occurs as a community experiences the process of
modernization”
→ Lucassen brothers disprove above theory from Zelinsky.
1970s: the revolt of the early modernists
› Debunk archaic portrait of pre-industrial Europe
› Stop treating migration as exceptional (e.g. refugees) and reconsider workers and soldiers
2009 Lucassen brothers: The mobility transition revisited, 1500-1900: What the case of Europe can
offer to global history
Definition: Cross-community migration (“moving over a cultural, often linguistic, border”)
Types: Intercontinental, Settlement, To cities, Seasonal, Labor (e.g. sailors, soldiers)
Measure: probability to migrate in a lifetime
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