The new European Agenda on Migration: what can be learnt from recent academic research?

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On May 13, 2015, the European Commission presented a European Agenda on Migration. Given the current migration crisis in the Mediterranean with thousands of migrants putting their lives in peril, this new agenda aims first at proposing immediate and concrete measures that will be taken to prevent more people from dying at sea. But it also outlines a set of longer-term initiatives based around four pillars to “manage migration better”: (1) reducing the incentives for irregular migration; (2) improving border management; (3) ensuring a full and coherent implementation of the Common European Asylum System and (4) implementing a new policy on legal migration. Quoting the press release, this fourth pillar rests on three objectives: “maintaining a Europe in demographic decline as an attractive destination for migrants, notably by modernising and overhauling the Blue Card scheme, by reprioritising our integration policies, and by maximising the benefits of migration policy to individuals and countries of origin, including by facilitating cheaper, faster and safer remittance transfers.”

The future of global migration is a topic on which little in-depth research has been conducted so far. Part of the reason is that migration is a multi-faceted phenomenon that is shaped by many different forces (economic, geopolitical, social, technological and environmental, etc.), the evolution of which carries high This note overviews the recent accumulated knowledge relating to each one of the three objectives presented by the European Commission in the European Agenda on Migration. The aim is to provide research insights on both their relevance and the possible ways of achieving them. It starts with a synthesis of what is known about the global migration scenario for the future and about the attractiveness of Europe as compared to other regions. It then draws upon the burgeoning literature on remittances to discuss ways of channelling them towards more productive use in migrant source countries. It ends with a discussion on the links between migrants’ integration and rights and development.

October 2015

EUROPEAN

POLICYBRIEF

Enhancing Knowledge for

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level of uncertainty. It is therefore hardly feasible to get a clear view of what migration patterns might look like in the coming decades. There are however quite strong indications that today’s demographic and economic realities will change in the next 20-25 years, as will the current geography of migration1

.

First, growth in today’s emerging and developing economies is expected to remain significantly higher

than in current high-income countries

.

With more people belonging to the middle classes of emerging

economies, the pressure to migrate to Europe, North America, and Australia from these countries will almost certainly decline, and former sending countries might even gradually turn into destination countries.Second,

population ageing

,

which started many decades ago in the more developed economies, is taking off in

less developed regions

,

with some countries in this group (including Argentina, Chile and China) already being in an advanced stage of ageing. This means that new countries will soon enter the global race for talent and skills. China, for e.g., will be transformed within the space of a few decades in one of the most important immigration countries competing with Europe, North America, and Australia

.

2 Given such trends,

the current geography of migration is thus likely to change, with not only former sending countries

turning into destination countries, but also increasing volume of domestic and intra-regional migration at the expense of overseas migration.

Even if 2030 or 2040 seems a long way, there are already signs that

Europe’s relative attractiveness has

already started losing ground. A recent study using Gallup data on migration intentions reveals indeed that

within the OECD, Europe is not the preferred region of destination of Sub-Saharan Africans anymore3. When asked about the country they intend to move to in the next 12 months, migrant candidates residing in Sub-Saharan Africa who express a desire to move to the OECD are today more likely to cite a non-European country. And among them, the share of those willing to move to the United States is found to exceed that of those willing to move in one of the five main European immigration countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy). The same relative disenchantment is observed for Asians. Less than a quarter of Asians intending to move to the OECD in the next 12 months cites a European country as his preferred destination. Interestingly enough, migrant candidates from both regions also show a marked interest for non-OECD countries, and for intra-regional destinations in particular

.

Thanks to recent efforts to improve remittances-related data, there is now a wide literature on the developmental impact of remittances. While there is a consensus on the growing importance of this source of external financing for developing economies, the question of whether it promotes self-sustained development is much less clear-cut. At the micro-level, the role of remittances as welfare safety-nets is generally acknowledged. As such, they improve the living standards of those who stay behind, and are often found to be better at fighting transitory poverty than the external financial flows associated with development assistance because they are more closely targeted and reach their intended beneficiaries in a timely manner. However, remittances are often criticized for their low impact on the structural causes of poverty and for being put to uses that are not directly productive. A number of obvious constraints in the countries of origin explains why this is so: like any private investor, migrants who would like to set up a new activity are deterred by a lack of suitable investment opportunities; difficulties in accessing to credit; the absence of structures to support and assist enterprise creation and, more simply put, a limited level of local development. However, recent research on how migrants make their remittance-sending decisions underlines additional constraints encountered by the migrants, which possible actions could help address. One derives from the migrants’ function as insurance for the left-behind. By so doing, migrants compensate for the lack (or inadequacy) of local insurance systems in settings where incomes are often highly variables, diseases more common and severe; political, economic and/or social instability greater,etc. In this perspective, remittances are not just another source of capital, and as long as migrants have a

1

See, e.g., OECD (2009), The Future of International Migration to OECD Countries, OECD, Paris, 285p. and Münz, R. (2014), The

Global Race for talent: Europe’s Migration challenge, Bruegel Policy Brief, Issue 2014/02, March 2014.

2

The population of China is projected by the United Nations to begin to decline after 2035. However, the decline of the population of working age (and the concomitant rapid expansion of that of older persons) will start earlier (cf. UN’s World Population

Prospects: The 2012 Revision, retrieved from http://esa.un.org/wpp/ last accessed on May 22, 2015).

3

Gubert, F. & Senne, J-N (2015), “Is the European Union attractive for potential migrants? An investigation of migration intentions

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fundamental duty to insure their families, the share of their disposable income going to productive projects can be nothing else but low. A second factor that may further hamper investment efforts relates to the problems involved in managing at a distance, and, more generally speaking, to the lack of migrant control

over how family members, friends or acquaintances back home use the remittances they receive4.

Migrants often complain indeed that their businesses are poorly managed by unqualified staff, friends or family members, leading to financial losses and business collapse, and even that the money they send is sometimes diverted from its original purpose. Certainly the progress of information and communication technologies, together with the possibility of opening and managing online bank accounts have enabled migrant entrepreneurs to oversee their business in person. But it remains difficult, if not impossible, to do without the services of third parties in whom migrants place a limited amount of confidence.

Finally, as the European Agenda on Migration addresses the issue of integration, it is interesting to see what is known about the links between migrants’ rights and the development potential of migration. Indeed, even if integration policies first aim at strengthening freedom, security and justice in Europe, they can have some externalities on the migration-development nexus by providing immigrants with increased opportunities and rights. The question of interest is thus whether more or better integrated migrants in the host country have stronger links with their families and home communities. Most of the existing research first tends to confirm the expectation that the expansion of rights, which culminates in the full rights of citizenship, has

beneficial effects on migrants’ outcomes. A good illustration is provided by policies aimed at improving

migrants’ labour market integration. The available evidence suggests indeed that procedures recognising foreign qualifications and converting them into their host-country equivalents are associated with better labour-market outcomes5. In addition, it has been found that better integrated migrants are able not only

to thrive in the host society but are also better able to contribute to their community of origin and do contribute more. The dominant view according to which fully integrated citizens would, at time passed, lose

connections and contribute less to their communities of origin thus seems to have had its day. Several recent researches have indeed come to the conclusions that better integrated migrants were more inclined to send remittances and to send higher amounts of remittances, that they were more likely to be part of a migrants’ hometown association, and last but not least, that they were more involved in the political life of their origin country6. All this demonstrates the relationship between two areas that are usually kept separate in both academic and policy discourses, namely development in the less-developed world on the one hand and the integration of migrants in industrialized countries on the other hand.

It could be argued, of course, that migration intentions are a poor predictor of effective migrations. However, migration intentions have much more to say about countries’ or regions’ relative attractiveness than actual migrations given the selection process underlying the latter. There is thus a policy relevance of analysing migration intentions, as well as the factors influencing these intentions. Overall, they suggest that in a context of raising global competition for skills and talent, Europe needs to think about strategies to attract

skilled and semi-skilled workers, and that regardless of the route chosen, Europe should not wait too long to do so. Some of the predicted changes in migration patterns suggest indeed that the magnet effect

exerted by linguistic or colonial links, geographic proximity and/or by high levels of welfare provisions (if it ever existed) should no more be considered as granted. There is thus an urgent need of reducing the

4 _{See, for e.g., Batista & Narciso (2013), Batista et al (2013); Ashraf et al (2013) and Yang (2011).} 5

See, e.g.,OECD (2014), “Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children: Developing, Activating and Using Skills”,

International Migration Outlook 2014, OECD Publishing, Paris.

6

See, e.g. Mazzucato (2008) on the double engagement of Ghanaian migrants and Dedieu et al (2014) on the transnational electoral behavior of Senegalese migrants.

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accessibility challenges third-country nationals are confronted with, which the recent EU directives (the

Blue Card Directive, the Seasonal Employment Directive and the ICT Directive) have not yet fully solved7.

Stimulation the productive use of remittances

What has been previously stated implies that the current focus on remittances fees, which aims at “facilitating cheaper, faster and safer remittance transfers” will not be sufficient to stimulate the productive use of remittances. One potential solution to the problems posed by long-distance management would be to

provide scope for migrants to initiate and finance investments via intermediaries such as microfinance institutions (MFI), which would be given direct responsibility for monitoring investments. The

MFI could also take charge of finding reliable entrepreneurs in the home country and proposing potential partnerships to migrants with plans to set up businesses in their home countries. Another way of overcoming the drawbacks of long-distance management would be to devise an immigration policy that would allow

migrants to return home for as long as necessary to set up development projects and to travel back and forth building up more assets and improving their skills. By facilitating information flows and

lowering start-up costs, this kind of transnational migration would be of mutual benefit to host countries, home countries and migrants alike.

Strong data limitations explain the lack of quantitative impact assessment of collective remittances and migrants' associations. Thanks to the four waves of census conducted by the Malian office of statistics in 1976, 1987, 1998 and 2009, the research team built a panel dataset of all Malian villages informing their stock of infrastructures at those four dates. Retrospective and exhaustive data on local public goods over such a long period are rare in Africa.

The research team computed an original dataset that provides an exhaustive list of Home Town Associations (HTAs) created by Malian migrants in France. For each HTA, they were able to find its date of creation, as well as the name of the village where it intervenes in Mali. They found that almost one fifth of the Malian villages is targeted by an HTA whose declared aim is to improve the provision of public goods, such as schools or health facilities.

They finally combined these two datasets in order to compare the provision of public goods before and after the intervention of HTAs in villages with and without an HTA, through a difference-in-differences approach.

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For a forward-looking reflection on European labour migration policies, see Carrera, S., Guild, E., & Eisele, K. (2014),

Rethinking the Attractiveness of EU Labour Immigration Policies: Comparative Perspectives on the EU, the US, Canada and Beyond, Centre for European Policy Studies, 160p.

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Centre for Development Economics- CDE- Delhi, India

Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (India unit), Centre de Sciences Humaines / Institut Français de Pondichéry –CNRS-CSH- Pondichéry, India

German Institute of Global and Area Studies-GIGA- Hamburg, Germany Ghana Centre for Democratic Development-CDD- Accra, Ghana Grupo de Analisis para el Desarrollo-GRADE- Lima, Peru Kiel Institute for the World Economy –IfW- Kiel, Germany Institut de Recherche pour le Développement-IRD-Paris, France

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