Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 87)
TUESDAY 6 JANUARY 2004
PROFESSOR RICHARD
BLACK, PROFESSOR
RONALD SKELDON,
DR BEN
ROGALY AND
DR PRIYA
DESHINGKAR
Q80 John Barrett: Can I also touch
on the problems and the policy developed to deal with those left
behind. Often in the case of Scottish history people had to get
up and go and they got up and went. My parents went to Australia
on the Assisted Package Scheme, for £10 they headed off to
the sunshine in the 50s. Scotland now has this problem of a falling
population and needing to attract people back because of potential
labour shortages. How can policies be developed to look at not
only the problems of those that are leaving an area but the issues
that are caused for the people who have been left behind? I do
not know if this is what was mentioned earlier, we train the most
able people, for example we train people to work in the Health
Service and the end result is that they then leave the Health
Service and they come over to work in the United Kingdom, how
can a policy be developed to deal with those who have been left
behind?
Professor Black: Taking your specific
Health Service example, there clearly is a problem in some countries
with people being trained as doctors and nurses and then leaving.
It seems to me—and this is on the basis of a brief review
of the literature and reflects work that we are really just starting
to quantify—that you can say two or three things about that
process and in that sense what to do about it, one is that the
impacts are likely to be felt more heavily in the smaller labour
markets where there is less flexibility to respond, so the case
of Scotland is a good example in the sense that Scotland has a
distinct labour market—which it does in some senses—and
Scotland may suffer more from outward migration as a small country
than a large country like Nigeria. Picking up on that theme of
flexibility, if I take one example, Ghana is a country with relatively
little flexibility in terms of training medical personnel. Ghana
trains about 100 doctors in the Ghana Medical School every year
and every year of those doctors about 70 or 80 doctors leave.
That clearly is a problem. What should Ghana do about that? One
issue might be, how many doctors could Ghana realistically train?
Also, what is the pool of trained doctors from which Ghana can
recruit? Ghana has a relatively inflexible policy, it does not
have many options in terms of bringing doctors into the system
other than by training them or by recruiting them externally.
In contrast Britain recently facing a shortage of doctors used
both of those strategies in order to overcome problems in the
Health Service, both recruiting overseas and training more doctors
here. I can give many other examples, in response to recruitment
the Philippines has massively increased the number of nurses that
it trains, that is partly through market-led training or a flexible
approach to training that allows private training providers to
fill those gaps. A counter example was given by a committee member
in the last session of the South African labour market where a
development organisation, I think it was Voluntary Services Overseas,
finds it difficult to bring British doctors into South Africa
to fill posts that are left vacant by South Africans moving abroad
because the South African Government has a very restrictive practice
in regards to the recruitment of foreign doctors. There are lots
of ways of looking at this and I would prefer to see it as an
issue of looking at how flexible and dynamic the training and
labour market conditions are, in particular the skills sector
that you are talking about, rather than simply talking about the
numbers game and how many are trained and how many will leave
and concluding that the fact people are leaving is a problem.
Q81 John Barrett: Is one of the problems
that they look at migration in the short-term and they do not
look at the long-term impact of remittances and possibly the skilled
people who will then return to their original home?
Professor Black: That is part
of the problem, yes. Short-term migration can also be disruptive
in terms of leaving posts vacant, anybody in any business knows
this. If you have people moving out of a business you have problems
but at the same time a certain level of circulation is very good
and healthy for a business organisation. I think the same is true
for a country. What we want to do is try and manage the situation
so that you have a degree of flexibility, particularly in the
professional field, and that people are able to meet their development
goals, which may include migrating, this is part of the developing
strategy for a more skilled and more educated work force, but
at the same time you do not want everybody to leave at once, there
should be some incentive or mechanism to make sure that that does
not happen.
Q82 Mr Khabra: I believe there are
two views on migration and development issues, one view is the
view of the intellectual, the professional, the articulate, politicians,
the clever ones, and the other is the view of the ordinary people,
those who face problems on a daily basis, and their experience
is very much different from the first category I mentioned. I
can give you examples of migration within a country, as far as
India is concerned I come from a state where there is large migration
coming from one of the states in the east of India and the work
is in the construction industry, work on the roadside, building
roads. These people are very poor people and they come to make
a living, to work. Their living conditions are awful, they live
in rag tents and they have no provision for education for their
children. They are migrant, they move on, work here for a few
months and then move on to another area within the same state.
This is not a developmental situation at all. Although it is migration
we are over-emphasising the impact of migration and the benefits
that it brings, and that is not the real situation. For large
numbers of people who leave their country it is already accepted
in one of the memoranda that they are the people who are not poor,
they can afford to buy their airline ticket, they can travel,
they have money and they can go to the Middle East. They are sending
money back to their village and some development work is going
on, they build a new house and they are able to do other things
for example if they own a small farm. Then there are the people
who come to this country, they come here and they would like to
settle here permanently and not leave this country and they send
what we call remittances from here to help people back in India
or in Pakistan or Bangladesh, it is their intention to stay here
and not to leave. Here in my view migration is not a real solution
to the problem of the elimination of poverty and therefore the
rich countries should be directing their attention to real developmental
issues and give them as much support as possible for addressing
the issue on the spot, that development work takes place, and
that people do not have to move from one place to another place,
with the exception of the other migration, which will continue
all over the world for people who can buy tickets, who can bribe
somebody, who can come into this country not knowing a large number
of people, they are not asylum seekers, they are economic migrants
and they are better than the ones that they have left behind.
How does the status of migrants and rights they claim impact on
the likelihood of migration being developmentally beneficial,
especially with regards to temporary or seasonal migration within
developing countries?
Dr Rogaly: Thank you. I completely
agree with you that the meaning of migration to somebody who takes
the bus from eastern India and spends three days and three nights
to go to Punjab and then works very hard in the field or in other
types of work is different from somebody who has a regular income
and then has the means to migrate internationally for less arduous
and higher paid work. That is the point I was trying to make at
the beginning, and I think it is important to distinguish these
things. The second thing I want to say is that there is a very
good study of that migration from Bihar to Punjab by the kind
of workers we are talking about and what is very interesting about
it is that the outcome of migration for those, mainly men, who
go on that particular migration stream is when they come home,
according to the study by Gerry and Janine Rodgers entitled "A
Leap Across Time: When Semi-Feudalism Meets the Market",
published in Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, India,
2 June 2001, there are very high remittances, people come back
with consumer goods, houses are furnished with electronic goods
of the kind that other people who are migrating cannot afford
and people are proud and see that as a step up the ladder. It
is a very interesting study because it contrasts with some of
the other internal migration that happens in India which is a
lot more arduous and exploitative, where people come back with
very little and remain in debt. This is why it is important to
look at the particular conditions and not assume that all migration
is a positive thing. I agree with you, that we should not celebrate
migration unnecessarily and looking particularly at why for certain
people at certain times in their lives it works out well and how
to enable that to happen for more people in that way. That is
where we can look at policies not only in terms of social support
but also in terms of the regulation of industry and labour practices,
and so on, that is very important. There is another study by Roger
Ballard of migration from Mirpur in Pakistan to the United Kingdom,
where a lot of money is spent in Mirpur on housing, on two or
three storey brick built houses and the implications for building
work in Mirpur. When I was talking before I had in mind Albanian
Migrants, and another recent study by Beryl Nicholson, entitled
"From Migrant to Micro-Entrepreneur: Do-It-Yourself Development
in Albania".[3]
I agree with your point about the need to separate out different
kinds of migration.
Dr Deshingkar: Can I briefly add
to what Ben said, I do agree that most migrants lead a miserable
life in their destination because they have hardly any access
to drinking water or a proper roof over their heads, in that sense
it is not a positive thing at all. There is a strong link between
poverty and migration and if one is to look at poverty reduction
then assisting migrants to gain better access to services for
health and education and subsidised food for example, which are
major planks of poverty reduction in India, would make a big difference.
That is why ensuring rights to migrant workers would be an important
route into poverty reduction.
Professor Black: You are right
to contrast the experience of internal migrants in India with
the experience of external migrants to the US. The differences
are not as stark as you put them. Even for international migrants
to the United Kingdom and the United States the dominant migrant
story is one of suffering hardship, hard work, often in order
to build a better future for the migrants' children. The issue
really is, can those dreams be realised? In certain circumstances
they can and in others they cannot. I think rather than saying
migrants have a terrible time therefore this cannot be proper
strategy for development what we need to do is to look at why
they have a terrible time and what can be done about that. In
certain circumstances in the extreme case of exploitation what
can be done about that is to stop people being forced to migrate
in the first place. There is trafficking going on in the world
where people are forced to move against their will and are put
in very exploitive positions. In those circumstances clearly the
objective should be to avoid those circumstances for those people
into a kind of slavery. Very often things are not as black and
white as that. Migration, although not creating a very good life,
particularly for the first generation, may nonetheless be a freely
chosen strategy of the migrant, an objective judgment based on
the information they have available to them which is better than
other livelihood choices that they have available to them. In
that context you can do a variety of things to improve the range
of alternatives available to them. I am certainly not suggesting
that the United Kingdom government should not promote that but
it is also thinking about what you can do for the people who have
migrated in order to improve their conditions and improve the
likelihood of that migration leading to a better outcome for migrant
families and the communities from which they come and move into
because another error is to think, "How can we help the migrant?"
when we should not be thinking about that, we should be thinking
how can we promote development—and that might be development
based on improved living conditions for migrants or development
based on mobilising what the migrants have already done for themselves
or other people or it might also be about ensuring that the gains
accrued by migrants are not won at the expense of other people,
which is a possibility.
Professor Skeldon: I think it
is intuitively appealing to think of introducing a development
programme that would give people what they want locally so they
would not have to migrate but all the evidence that we have suggests
that when we implement development programmes mobility increases.
That development might involve the construction of roads or telecommunications,
it almost certainly will involve the construction of schools and
increasing education. In other words, for precisely the reasons
we started off with, people become more aware and so mobility
increases, so I would be pessimistic, frankly, about the possibility
of introducing development programmes that will keep people down
on the farm. All the evidence we have really suggests that is
not a viable proposition. In depopulated villages in Scotland
would it have been worthwhile to invest large amounts of money
in those villages if it were not possible to reverse that process
of depopulation? There are some countries and certain parts of
some countries that will not develop, they will depopulate, and
there is no policy that we can implement that will reverse that
over the medium to long term. So I think we have to plan for the
direction that migration is going to take us. I am not too sure
where we are going but you get my point. Parts of Scotland survive
on being essentially a niche for wealthy lowland communities in
terms of recreation, and small countries of the Pacific are in
exactly the same category.
Q83 Tony Worthington: It is a sociological
point really. I am intrigued when we refer to the migrant as to
how often it is that the migrant is an isolated individual who
is making a move and to what extent are they usually going to
networks that will support them? What do we know about those networks?
I have always been intrigued by the idea of the "Indian"
restaurants staffed by Bangladeshis from the state of Sylhet (although
we call them Indian restaurants) or the extent to which the corner
shop in the United Kingdom now is totally wrongly called a "Paki"
shop and by the whole fast food scene in Britain at the moment
because there is clearly some kind of network there which is providing
outlets. Should we be finding out more about that and supporting
it in some kind of way because it is an unofficial world and it
is working well as an unofficial world and should be left or should
there be some better support than there is at the moment?
Professor Black: Specifically
on that there has been some work done by Roger Ballard which has
been mentioned already, and our colleague, Katy Gardner at Sussex,
funded as part of the ESRC programme on trans-nationalism, looked
specifically at the current day dynamics of migration from Sylhet
to the United Kingdom and certainly in that case Katy's conclusion
is that it is very much linked to the maintenance of family networks.[4]
The economic and social aspects mix together in very complicated
ways so that, for example, as the children of first generation
Bangladeshi migrants in the United Kingdom grow up they often
no longer want to go on working in the corner shop or so-called
Indian restaurants and in order to maintain the viability of that
business as a family business Sylheti families are looking back
to Sylhet for marriage partners, particularly for young men to
marry their daughters in order to work in the family business.
Although at the same time there is a social interest in maintaining
the strength of the Sylheti community and maintaining the cultural
and religious values of that community, there are a whole number
of complicated social and economic issues that spin off those
kinds of strategies. As far as I know a report is available on
that migration which is comparative with Roger Ballard's work
on Mirpur in Pakistan where there are some very interesting contrasts
between the experiences of Bangladesh and Pakistan, partly to
do, if I have understood it correctly, with the somewhat different
class background of migrants that have come to Britain from those
two countries.
Professor Skeldon: I would argue
very strongly that you cannot understand migration without understanding
networks. Migrants operate within tight-knit networks and communities
of family and they have to be understood in that context. I think
if you are looking for a policy you can look at how to operate
with migrant communities or place of origin communities because
migrants do not cut off links with their home areas, they are
interested in what goes on in their home communities and they
can be used to foster improved education in the home community
with the funding of drinking water and sewage systems and so on.
That does not just apply to international migrants (although it
does apply to them) it also applies to the hundreds of migrant
associations you will find in capital cities all over the developing
world—Lima, Jakarta and Bangkok and so on—at the international
level and at the internal level.
Q84 Mr Battle: I might say I think
this is one of the most helpful and enlightening sessions I have
sat through. In the absence of a colleague who usually asks for
a further paper can I take his place. Ben mentioned the Joint
Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the TUC; could you nudge
us to something they have written.[5]
Dr Rogaly: If you have not got
them already from the two organisations concerned, I do not know,
I can certainly give you the two papers I have mentioned.
Mr Battle: Also the Roger Ballard paper,[6]
who I understand lived in Leeds originally so those are his roots.
If I can indulge you in a sense with a story. I went a couple
of summers ago to Cork in Ireland and to Cobh to the museum there
and I was tremendously moved by the story of a person who went
to America during that period of 19th century migration. She wrote,
"It is really good here, the streets are not paved with gold
but it is good and going well." Another family member got
out there and found she was living in terrible circumstances in
a tenement in Brooklyn and she said, "Why did you tell us
it was so good?" and she said, "You had spent so much
money raising the fare to get yourself here and you would not
have done that if I had not said that." It is that notion
of disjunction between people's experiences of migration and what
they tell even their families. There is a counter story going
on. That has been in the background of my mind during the questions
and that brings me to the focus of my question. What we have got
with the TUC and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants
spears us in some way to question here and our attitude—I
like the phrase Professor Black used—action and reaction—and
using that phrase in a deliberate way in how we respond. What
policies have we got in other countries? To lead you further into
it, in the written evidence there was an excellent paper looking
at support for migrants' rights and I think you, Priya, mentioned
building those into countries' strategies. Could I just ask you
about migrant support programmes, on the basis of the experience
in India what policy lessons can we get from migrant support programmes?
Should we not go down that road much more firmly and look at that?
That is one question. Then I would ask you finally for an example.
What have you come across as an initiative or institutional innovation
that fuses a positive approach to migration together? Is there
anything we could look at and study in closer detail that is a
beacon project? Why are we not funding more of that DFID support
for the migrant support programmes? Sometimes we do not know what
DFID is doing in country.
Q85 Chairman: Shall we do a tour
de table starting with Priya and working round the table.
Dr Deshingkar: The DFID Country
Assistance Plan identifies three major elements to their approach,
namely an integrated approach to poverty reduction, improving
the enabling environment for sustainable development, and improving
access of poor people to better quality services. Numbers one
and three are very relevant to any kind of policy that might address
migration because an integrated approach to poverty reduction
needs to recognise movements of people across areas and to better
tailor service provision to people who are on the move. There
are certain times of the year, for example, when there will be
a greater need for providing education to migrants' children in
some locations. At the moment migrants' children are not able
to access education facilities at all. They cannot go to the schools
in the destination areas so everything is geared to providing
services to people in the places where they live and I think that
there is scope within the country assistance strategy, as well
as in specifically DFID supported programmes like the Andhra Pradesh
Rural Livelihoods Project, to integrate something on migration.
At the moment migration is hardly mentioned in the Country Assistance
Plan or in the national Ten-Year Plan which DFID regards as a
PRSP basically because India does not have a PRSP and the Ten-Year
Plan gets very close to the Millennium Development Goals so DFID
regards that as equivalent to a PRSP. In neither of those documents
do we find any great mention of migration. In the two places that
it is mentioned, it is implicitly international migration, and
there is no focused reference to internal migration, so I feel
there is a greater need to recognise that, specifically in relation
to points one and three of their approach which are to develop
integrated poverty reduction strategies in a spatial sense as
well as across sectors. That means also finding ways to better
link the activities of different ministries because at the moment,
there are some main ministries that do cover the kinds of areas
that touch on migration, for example the Ministry for Labour or
the Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development. And although
they are all aware of the issue of migration and its significance
there, there is no specific programme or co-ordinating body to
address the issue and it tends to fall between several stools
and nobody is responsible for it. I feel in general terms there
needs to be a greater recognition of migration in the CAP as well
as in any kind of specific DFID-funded programmes. The migrant
support programmes that are being developed through DFID-funded
projects like in Andhra Pradesh or the Western India Rainfed Farming
Project are very innovative and have made a big difference to
the hardships faced by migrants. The Western India Rainfed Farming
Project is way ahead of anyone else. They have developed a system
of identity cards together with local government which does not
have any formal status but migrant labourers are required to register
with the panchayats, which is the lowest tier of government at
the village level, and they are given a card with their name and
address and possibly a photograph and this helps them an enormous
amount because they can show that at railway stations and bus
stops where they are harassed by the police or asked what they
are doing and it really does ease their hardship considerably.
The Western India Rainfed Farming Project is developing ways of
linking with NGOs across states where these migrants workers go
to work so that they can access information on wage rates and
working conditions and rights because the main problem is that
they do not know what their rights are as labourers. So creating
awareness about rights is one of the main things that they are
doing and better access to information on employment conditions
and rights is important.
Professor Black: I was at a meeting
in London yesterday where somebody explained in detail why it
was a consistent position to support university tuition fees in
sub-Saharan Africa and oppose them in the United Kingdom and I
want to make my comments in that light. The first point is to
draw attention to the possibility that we might support identity
cards in India for migrants but we have to think about the consequences
of proposals for identity cards in the United Kingdom for asylum
seekers. My proposal is focused on north-south migration not because
it is the most important thing in relation to poverty but because
it is the area in which I work. I wanted to draw the Committee's
attention to something called the Metcare Health Insurance Plan
(and I can supply the website[7]).
This is a scheme started in the United States and now established
in the United Kingdom for Ghanaian nationals to channel money
into health insurance which covers themselves but also their families
in Ghana. As I understand it, it involves them seeking health
care from the Ghanaian medical system and money going into the
Ghanaian medical system as a result. I cite this example not because
I know it to be a good scheme—in fact it might turn out
to be a very poor scheme—but because I think this is the
kind of thing you need to be looking at—ways to ensure that
the $80 billion of remittance which flows to developing countries
goes into things that might have some impact on poverty and the
outcomes that we desire in the Millennium Development Goals. That
essentially means money going directly to poor people and money
going into health and education, maybe HIV/AIDS and environmental
schemes, but into areas prioritised by the United Kingdom Government.
This is one example we are planning to look at—health insurance
schemes funded by migrants and what impact they have on medical
provision in countries of origin, both in terms of providing direct
medical care but also in terms of the impact that they have on
the way that medical care is provided in those countries because
bear in mind that currently the option for many educated wealthy
Ghanaians in terms of seeking medical care is to seek that care
abroad particularly in South Africa and not in Ghana at all. If
a scheme like this can help improve the quality of care in Ghana
that might be a step in producing better outcomes for all Ghanaians.
Professor Skeldon: All of us have
demonstrated the inevitability of migration. It is extremely difficult
to control and virtually impossible to stop over anything but
the immediate short-term. We have also tried to emphasise the
positive dimensions but possibly we have not looked too much at
the other side because we must always recognise that there is
a dark side of migration and we have to be concerned about issues
of migrant protection. If you are going to look at specific examples,
the Philippines has probably gone further down the road of developing
institutions, both formal and informal, to look after migrants
overseas because one of the curiosities about migrant protection
is that it is focused almost entirely on international migrants
but when you look at the situation within the Philippines there
is nothing to protect the domestic migrant. When you say, "Why
do you not have similar institutions to look after your own people
in your own country?" it is a different question because
those people are poorer. This is an example of best practice.
If you look at looking after international migrants you could
possibly look at ways to diffuse it more widely internationally
but also nationally.
Dr Rogaly: I would like to add
to Priya's point about the Western India Migrant Support Scheme.
The Committee will be able to study its document further but I
would like to add a note of caution in relation to this and my
note of caution in relation to it is that I do not think we should
fall into a kind of conclusion where we are talking about questioning
identity cards in the United Kingdom but saying they are a good
idea necessarily in India because whereas this scheme in Western
India works mainly with rural to urban migrants who come together
in the city and need to find employers in busy milling labour
markets and may benefit from having this card, for the migrant
workers (and there are over half a million of them in West Bengal
with a team of co-researchers I was working with a small number
of them) with whom I worked, who were agricultural workers migrating
for short periods of time for about a month at a time, the cost
of going to village bureaucrats at the local level, the hassle
and the time and the money involved in that to get a card, is
a whole layer of bureaucracy for those particular people. I do
not think they would have wanted to go through the identity card
route Their support is provided by other families and other members
of the gangs that they travel with. They also are a group of people
who benefit from the kind of social protection that Ron is talking
about. There is a scheme in West Bengal set up at a local level
by a coalition of businesses, unions, NGOs and local government
to provide health facilities for migrants at a bus stand with
the tens of thousands of people who were coming back from the
fields after the harvest season. This was down to the entrepreneurial
approach of the relevant municipal authority working with shopkeepers
and bus owners who had business benefits from the migrants feeling
safe. There was a common interest because they would get more
customers on their buses and in their shops if migrants felt they
could go through the bus stands and then unions got involved
and associations of migrants themselves. The enabling of coalitions
like that is a direction of policy which is worth thinking about.
Q86 Mr Khabra: A separate question:
what criteria did DFID use to select different areas for the programme?
Dr Deshingkar: This is an on-going
programme which covers several districts. If we are talking about
the Andhra Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Programme this is a seven-year
programme to address poverty so migration is just one of the issues
that they have looked at recently because it has emerged as an
important issue in the project areas. They are still thinking
about which direction to move in. They are not as far ahead as
the Western India Rainfed Farming Project.
Q87 Mr Khabra: You mentioned the
question of children. Families take their children with them coming
from Bihar to Punjab and there the medium of instruction is Punjabi.
They do not speak that language at all so it does disrupt the
education of the children. If they are going to live three or
four years in the Punjab they will have no question of education
in their lives at all.
Dr Deshingkar: That is right.
In Andhra Pradesh there are good examples of NGOs where they have
opened up bridging schools for children who have not been able
to attend school regularly—older children or children who
have missed a lot of school. This has really helped migrant families
to educate their children. With trans-state migration it is more
difficult, I would agree, because of language. Our data show that
20% of the children belonging to migrant families are pulled out
of school whereas in non-migrating households the average is 10%.
Chairman: This is a fascinating discussion
and, as John said, extremely interesting but I think we could
go on for a very long time and we have to draw it to a close,
not least because I know a number of us want to go and hear the
Secretary of State talk about DFID's agricultural policy which
this Committee at least has been prompting them to do something
on. So can we say thank you very much for a very stimulating session
this afternoon. I think our Committee Specialist is going to have
quite a task in trying to review all the evidence and put it into
some sort of structure. Could I abuse my position as Chairman.
I found a quote cited by Ron in the Asia- Pacific Population
Journal (not one's usual bedtime reading) from J K Galbraith
who said: "Migration is the oldest action against poverty.
It selects those who most want help. It is good for the country
to which they go: It helps to break the equilibrium of poverty
in the country from which they come. What is the perversity in
the human soul that causes people to resist so obvious a good."
It seemed to me a rather useful quote on which to finish so order,
order and we meet on Tuesday. Thank you.
3 Published in South-East Europe Review, Volume
4, Issue 3, pages 39-41. Another study on migration from Albania
to the UK by Sussex researchers has just been published by Oxfam
and the Fabian Society. Its conclusions on how returning Albanian
migrants use remittances do not concur entirely with Nicholson's
analysis (Russell King, Nicola Mai and Mirela Dalipai, 2003, Exploding
the Migration Myths). Back
4
Ballard, R. (2001) The impact of kinship on the economic dynamics
of transnational networks: Reflections on some South Asian developments,
paper presented at conference on transnational migration. Katy
Gardner worked with Roger Ballard on this project. Available at
www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/Ballard.pdf Back
5
See footnote 2. Back
6
See footnote 4, and Ev 157 Back
7
See www.ghanareview.com/int/metcare.html Back
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