UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 79-iii
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
Tuesday 6 January 2004
PROFESSOR RICHARD BLACK, PROFESSOR RON SKELDON, DR BEN ROGALY and DR PRIYA DESHINGKAR
Evidence heard in Public Questions 53 - 87
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the International Development Committee
on Tuesday 6 January 2004
Members present
Tony Baldry, in the Chair
John Barrett
Mr John Battle
Hugh Bayley
Mr Quentin Davies
Mr Piara S Khabra
Mr Andrew Robathan
Tony Worthington
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Richard Black, Director, Professor Ron Skeldon and Dr Ben Rogaly, Members, University of Sussex Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty, and Dr Priya Deshingkar, Research Fellow, Overseas Development Institute (ODI), examined.
Q53 Chairman: Welcome, and thank you very much for coming. Our Clerk is very concerned that we do not wander too far down the road of asylum and asylum seekers because, as he keeps on telling me, this is all done by the Home Affairs Select Committee. However, in terms of vocabulary, it occurs to me that there are some words, like "refugees", which are a bit ambiguous, so can we talk about either "migrants" or, if needs be, "asylum seekers" then we will not get confused. Can I also declare a sort of informal interest in that Ron Skeldon very kindly taught me last term at Sussex and Ben has the misfortune of teaching me next term at Sussex, and I am very grateful to both of them. No greater love hath a Member of a Select Committee who actually buys one of the witnesses' books or reads it! It is a very good book, although I think I am right in saying, Ron, that the whole book comes to only one conclusion, which is that "young men migrate".
Professor Skeldon: One general conclusion.
Chairman: All right. The purpose of this afternoon, really, is that we are going to ask a number of questions to prompt you to share with us your thoughts. So these are, really, pegs, and how you divide up the answers is entirely a matter for you. It will not necessarily be that on every question you all want to answer, but we will start and see how we get on.
Q54 Tony Worthington: Starting in very general terms and trying to understand migration and the factors (one assumes) behind it - like poverty, insecurity, inequality or opportunity - how do you rank those? When you are trying to explain migration what are the main building blocks of that explanation?
Professor Skeldon: Let me try and introduce it this way: I was working in Papua New Guinea and you can look at the Papua New Guinea societies before European contact, operating within traditional systems of migration within valleys; they did not feel themselves poor, they did not know that until they were contacted by outsiders. They had a lot of idle time, they had ample food but, of course, in our terms they had not the basics of what we would call development - running water, sewerage systems and so on. I do not want to suggest for a minute that they were living in paradise but they did not feel themselves poor. Once there is contact with the outside world then people's perceptions change. So the driving force behind migration seems to me to be that "push" from outside that suddenly breaks an equilibrium - it need not necessarily be a fact - and people realise there is a wider world out there, and that starts to get things going. Suddenly, for some people, it makes them feel poor. I think if you can conceptualise migration starting there.
Q55 Tony Worthington: Just to be clear on that, you said the "push" from outside, which I would have called the "pull" from outside.
Professor Skeldon: Yes, I suppose it is a pull from outside.
Q56 Tony Worthington: So that, in explanatory terms, it is knowledge about what is happening elsewhere that more often causes migration, in your view, than things that are happening in your own society?
Dr Deshingkar: We studied six villages in great detail in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India and we found that historically many of the very diverse migration streams did start because of a "push situation", mainly because of drought and unavailability of work locally. Over time, as more information became available and they had better contracts, then it was a "pull" situation because there better prospects elsewhere. So now people are migrating routinely because they make more money outside their villages. It is not just a "push" factor.
Professor Black: Another example we could give on a much more global scale is the great transatlantic migrations of the latter part of the 19th Century and the early 20th Century, where again people leaving Europe at that time in their millions were leaving from famine in Ireland and desperate poverty in many parts of Europe - and also from religious persecution in some parts of Europe. Also, over time, they were drawn by the opportunities that America offered. It is interesting that a study which was done in the 1950s that looked at how those migration trends moved over time against the fluctuations in political and economic conditions in Europe and in North America showed that, in fact, over time, over a period of decades, the strongest correlations were with fluctuations in the American labour market and in the American economy, and that, in particular, migration tended to fluctuate with building railroads, for example, on which many people were employed. Even though it took many weeks or months for information to get across the Atlantic about job opportunities (so you could not say that somebody offered a job and suddenly a peasant in Poland upped sticks and went to the States), nonetheless, in the absence of that information there was still a very strong correlation between opportunity - the "pull", effectively - and migration trends, in aggregate. It is actually not too helpful to separate out "push" and "pull" factors of migration; both are clearly significant but in different places and at different times you can clearly make a case that both are important.
Dr Rogaly: I think it is very important to avoid generalising about migration as a whole, even though we need to come to some general policy pointers through this process, because I think migration, for example, from one Indian village to another to do hard manual work for about three weeks is obviously very different to a longer-term, qualified person going for white-collar employment or somebody migrating for marriage. (We are just talking here about labour migration). So I think we need to avoid seeking a single route for a single explanation. One thing that it is safe to say is that poor people have access to different kinds of migration. Sometimes people say that you can either be migrating because you are poor or you can be excluded from migrating because you are too poor to migrate. One of the lessons for me is that different people in different kinds of situations, with different levels of wealth, education, health and so on - and contacts - have access to very, very different kinds of migration possibilities. We need to separate them out. To me, it is almost like a hierarchy.
Q57 Tony Worthington: Just winding up on this section, if your statement is correct that opportunity or knowledge is the biggest driving factor then this would mean that the amount of migration that there has been so far is as nothing compared to what will happen in the future, because knowledge will get greater.
Professor Skeldon: That is possible. We do not want to make too hard and fast a distinction between "push" and "pull" because, really, the "pull" creates a "push". As people know what is out there they realise what they can achieve locally, so the "pull" creates a "push" and vice-versa. I would not like to go on to say that the amount of migration would be necessarily massive. I think in any population the majority of people do not want to migrate. In cases where there exists the freedom to move, large numbers of people choose not to move, even though they can get a better return from the move. So in fact, when you look at the total numbers who do move they tend to be quite small relative to a population. So I would not like to give the impression that we are facing a tidal wave of migration. I do not believe that.
Professor Black: If I could give a couple of examples: one is the example of whether, as countries in Central and Eastern Europe come into the European Union and there is increased freedom of movement, that will lead to more people being able to come because they have better knowledge of the opportunities in the Western European labour market. The evidence from Southern Europe would suggest the reverse: the experience of Southern Europe (Spain and Portugal in particular) is that when they became members of the European Union migration actually slowed down from those countries to Northern Europe and circulation increased. 1974/75 was the time when the dictatorships ended in those two countries and by 1985 there were substantial movements back to Spain and Portugal coinciding with the entry into the European Union - although we do not know the extent of migration because it is not monitored in the same way; people come and go on a much more temporary basis. Another slightly different example, if you are concerned about what the trend in migration might be in the future, is a study done by Tim Hatton, who is an economist at the University of Essex, and Jeffrey Williamson, who I think is at Harvard, which looks at local migration trends and which argues that the most significant current factor affecting global migration is poverty in Africa, which constrains Africans from migrating to Europe and North America. In global terms Africa has a much lower proportion of international migrants per head of population than other global regions. Their explanation for that is that the poverty levels are so high in Africa that there are insufficient people who have the funds to afford to be able to navigate the immigration rules. Their prediction is that if the Millennium Development Goals are achieved and poverty is reduced dramatically in Africa in the way we all hope it will be, one of the consequences of that may well be an increased migration from Africa.
Q58 Mr Battle: I was under the impression (probably wrongly now, given what you said) that people moved about in Africa because they were pushed about by conflict and war over the border. So is conflict and war not as big a factor as I have, perhaps, imagined?
Professor Black: People do move about. As with all migration most people displaced by conflict do not cross borders. Even with that, as I understand it, the Hatton and Williamson study shows that the aggregate international migration, including between African countries, is lower than the aggregate international migration in other world regions. Of course, there are problems with all of the data that is available on the number of people moving around the world.
Q59 Mr Davies: Professor Black, you have just made an interesting point, and I think it is an analogy that might have a wider significance, when you used the example of Spain and Portugal and net emigration from those countries to Northern Europe - Benelux and Germany - during the generation or so before they joined the European Community (as it was) and since then, over the last 20 years, a considerable flow back. Is there not a simple economic explanation for that: that 20/30 years ago there was a very considerable gap in aggregate productivity between Spain and Portugal on the one side and the groups of countries I have mentioned on the other, and that that gap has narrowed very much and, therefore, real wages were much lower in Spain and Portugal 20/30 years ago and the gap is now much less significant, if significant at all? Therefore, it is the result of the faster rate of growth of productivity in Spain and Portugal and the economic development they have had since they joined the European Community which has caused labour flows to reverse.
Professor Black: It is terribly difficult to separate out these different causal factors. Of course, the growth of the Spanish and Portuguese economies in general has been a factor in encouraging Spanish people to stay in Spain and Portugal - and, of course, more recently, to encourage northern Europeans to want to move to live in Spain and Portugal; Catalonia, as you may know, is currently actively recruiting Britons to come and live in Barcelona and the surrounding areas. It is a more attractive place to go. However, there are other factors as well. It would be wrong to characterise this as "Spain and Portugal developed and therefore there was no need for people to migrate". I think it is more a case that they reached a certain level of development in terms of this idea of the migration hump where, as development increases, migration increases as people are able to migrate, then when you hit a certain level of development countries become more attractive and then the level of migration starts to decline again. So you have a hump. Spain and Portugal were positioned in the 1960s and 1970s some way up that hump; they had had dramatically increasing levels of migration and, as their economies improved in the 1980s and 1990s, they have gone over that hump and the migrational trends have reversed. Of course, there are still substantial numbers of Portuguese people coming to Britain to work.
Professor Skeldon: Could I add something else to that argument? I think it is important to realise that migration is a demographic variable. There are three basic variables in demography: one is migration, obviously, and the other two are fertility and mortality. We know that fertility and mortality change with development. We tend to trend towards lower levels of mortality and lower levels of fertility. Let me come to that one generalisation that we can make, that most migrants are young adults. Of course, the supply function is significant here. The number of migrants will depend upon the number of young adults, and that is a function of fertility; as your fertility goes down then there are fewer available to migrate. So as these countries have gone through this fertility transition then you see a reverse in the migration stream. So this does make migration complicated to analyse because you have to conceptualise it within changing patterns of mortality and, more especially, fertility. That is a very important relationship.
Q60 Mr Davies: Professor, you have just acknowledged that fertility is really a function of the economic change rather than the other way round. So the really dynamic factor here is economic change, which directly drives the demands by labour, productivity, "push" and "pull" and also drives the fertility which has a secondary impact. Is that not the right model?
Professor Skeldon: It is not necessarily as simple, because we know there are certain societies at relatively low levels of economic development which also have low fertility, such as Sri Lanka and states in Southern India. So there are very important social factors in accounting for a decline in fertility, and I would argue that there are migration factors as well because migrants return with knowledge about how to control family size. It is one of our big lacunae, if you like; we just do not understand the complete relationship between migration and fertility. I am convinced that that very important relationship exists.
Q61 Hugh Bayley: Can we go back to the very first example that Richard gave us of migration across the Atlantic in the 19th Century? What do we know about the cost and availability of transatlantic passages from, shall we say, the 17th Century to the end of the 19th Century?
Professor Black: I am afraid I cannot answer that.
Q62 Hugh Bayley: You could not possibly have had the migration you had in the 19th Century in the 18th century because there were not enough ships and they were too expensive in real terms.
Professor Black: Yes. My gut instinct would be that the cost of passage to the United States in the 19th Century was similar in order of magnitude to the cost of passage across the world from, say, China, India or Pakistan to the United States now. That is a guess, and I would need to go and work that out, which you can do.
Q63 Hugh Bayley: So maybe it is not "push" factors or "pull" factors as the nature of the US economy which changed hugely in the 19th Century, but there were extremely poor people in Europe, there were persecuted Jews in Baltic States in the 17th Century but they were just too poor to get out against the cost of getting out.
Professor Black: Yes, although the study that I am referring to looks at the trends over time over a period of around a century, and looks at whether increases or decreases correlate with increases or decreases in the economy on either side of the Atlantic, and the stronger correlation (I think the main correlation) is with trends on the American side of the Atlantic. That is the basis on which the conclusion is drawn that it was the pull of the American labour market that was more significant.
Hugh Bayley: There must be three factors: the "push" factor, the "pull" factor and the process ---
Q64 Chairman: I think Ben wants to make a comment.
Dr Rogaly: I want to say that we need to keep our attention on what kind of migration most people are doing. When we look at migration and development it is particularly important not to assume that what is happening in the global south today is going to be the same as what happened in Europe and the US earlier, although I think we do have to look historically as well; it is valid to look at it but we also need to keep our eyes on what this is about. We need to acknowledge that very large numbers of people, a very high proportion of migrants - perhaps even the majority - are migrating on a temporary basis, not as a one-off event or even, for a number of years as a younger person, each year migrating for work and coming back, and going off and coming back. That particular dynamic does not really fit with the concepts that we are using about "push" and "pull" with a one-off, life-long migration - although there are exceptions. I think we need to avoid this kind of temporary, often within-country, migration being seen as a residual. Otherwise we risk building all our understanding on the basis of another kind of longer term migration, and then trying to apply it to what is actually the bigger issue (temporary, internal migration) when we are looking at migration and development. Just to give you an example from China: I was reading an article in the Financial Times dated November 27th 2003, which reported that the Chinese government, apparently, plans to encourage the migration of between 300 million and 500 million more people from the countryside to cities by 2020. The kind of migration that is going on in China - and internal migration there is huge already - a lot of it is about keeping on coming back and having a diversified livelihood, having work in the city and coming back and being part of the rural production system back at home. The numbers are just enormous, and if you look at India again, you will see very high numbers of this kind of migration. It is not that we cannot learn from these other issues but we need to keep our eyes on the main issue.
Q65 Hugh Bayley: Going back to this concept of a hump, it seems to me it is a misleading concept because you cannot have a hump, you must have a series of humps, depending on the sort of migration. You could plot them on a graph and end up with a series of similar curves but moving right, depending on the costs of the migration. So migrating from one rural area to another for a harvest might be quite cheap if you can do it by a couple of days' walking. So you would encourage that kind of migration at a much lower level of income and development more than you would encourage migration from one continent to another by a professional worker. My understanding of the idea of a migration hump is that some people are too poor and, possibly, too unaware of the opportunities that are available to be able to put up the investment for migration which would deliver economic returns. Some people are too rich to need to migrate to get economic returns, and the hump comes in between those two, but depending upon the nature of the migration the hump will move right or left of the graph considerably. Is that not the case?
Dr Deshingkar: I would just like to add to what Ben said and, also, to the point that you are raising. I would first draw your attention to the magnitude of internal, voluntary migration for economic reasons in India, for example, where the official estimates are that somewhere around 10 million people are in circulation all the time but we feel, from a number of micro-studies, that this is a gross under-estimate and there may be millions more who are in circulation all the time. Even rural-rural migration has a cost. The poorest cannot migrate (that relates to your point) because a certain level of investment is necessary. We found this in all the villages that we studied across two states, that the poorest are the ones who are left behind and, in fact, the slightly better-off people can access migration as an economic opportunity. There is a range of options available to people but a certain minimum level of assets and, in some cases, skills even for so-called "unskilled" labour are necessary. For example, we found in one of our villages that people are recruited for earthwork, which we perceive as simple digging, but it is actually quite a skilled job and is strongly linked with a particular caste. So that now this caste is being employed all over Southern India because they are good at digging and their traditional skill is now in demand, so they are able to diversify into that new option of work. Similarly, even with sugar cane cutting, which again we would perceive as quite a simple job, that also requires some amount of traditional or learnt skill which would require at least one or two seasons of experience, and over time it becomes a lucrative option but within the early years it is very risky for the labourers concerned.
Q66 Hugh Bayley: If we are focusing primarily on migration and development and what contribution migration can make or what impact migration, positively or negatively, can have on the poorer development, we need to narrow down the field because people are migrating internally within a country and internationally, permanently and temporarily, all the time. People in Kiel in Germany migrate daily to Strasbourg and back. I have a friend who spends two days a week teaching at Cambridge University and two days a week teaching in Rome University; he flies, as long as Ryan Air or whoever it is continue, from Stansted weekly. We are not actually looking at either of those cases in relation to development. How do we whittle out from the many cases of labour mobility in to the sorts of cases which are critical for our study and then look at the migration humps there? Let me just add one final point: although the reasons for moving are demographic and sociological, these are all driven economically. Who models the economic consequences of those particular humps that matter to our study?
Dr Rogaly: If I can first of all take the last point, I think we must not underplay the sociological factors, for example in what Priya was saying about certain castes being identified with certain kinds of work and getting jobs accordingly and other people not getting jobs in those sectors, and we can broaden that through many complex studies that have been done on this to look at the ways in which men and women get different kinds of access to different kinds of work, to ideas about gender, and younger and older people, people from different ethnic backgrounds. These are all aspects which shape who gets access to what kind of migration and what the outcomes of that are. I think that if we are looking, as you say, at narrowing down, what we need to be looking at is acknowledging that migration comes in different types and some of it is involuntary, nasty, exploitative, brutish or whatever word - I think we use very emotive words - but much of it is not and it is not just an either/or. What policy can do is to contribute towards reducing the risks and the costs associated with migration for manual work, which is what so many people are doing in the global south, the kinds of areas Priya was talking about. Not only there but all around the world, but I think we are particularly concerned here with what is happening in developing countries. So, I think that we need to look at how the migration experience and the outcome of migration can be safer and less costly and then we are looking at measures like health, primary education, childcare provision, other kinds of protective measures to enable people to migrate more safely and in a less costly way and we are looking at how to build up alliances across different interest groups to ensure that this happens. It is not something that the Government can do on their own.
Q67 Hugh Bayley: That assumes that migration is good for development, putting in measures to encourage it.
Dr Rogaly: It assumes that migration can be a terrible thing for an individual. Alternatively, it can be something which leads somebody to become better off, to have more control over their life and to choose not to migrate. As Ron was saying, many people would prefer not to migrate. I think one can take that up a scale and say that it can be a developmental process, but it is not necessarily so. So, policy is focused on how to make it so if we look at the risks and the costs and how to reduce them.
Dr Deshingkar: At the moment, the unofficial estimate in India is that 90 % of the construction work all over the country, as well as most peak agricultural functions such as transplanting and harvesting and preparing the land, are carried out by migrant labour and their contribution to the economy is completely under-recognised.
Q68 Mr Davies: Migrants from other Indian states?
Dr Deshingkar: Yes, or from within the states. It is all internal. So, it can be either from other states or other districts or other villages even, but it is mainly migrant labour and there are various reasons why employers prefer migrant labourers because they can control them, they are not unionised, so they can bypass the minimum wage legislation in that way. What I am trying to say is that there is a strong link between development and migratory labour in that sense because their economic contribution is huge, but it is under-recognised because there is a reluctance to actually recognise that migration can in any way be positive. I feel that this needs to be recognised in various different ways, not just their economic contribution but also recognition of the costs and difficulties faced by migrant labourers and then to identify some ways in which we can support them to make it a more comfortable existence and actually also contribute to poverty reduction because so many of these migrant labourers are unable to access programmes that are meant for the poor and what we found was that, in most of the semi-arid villages, more than 50 % of the households have at least one person migrating, so the magnitude is enormous. Also, while they are away, they cannot access any of their basic entitlements: education, health and subsidised food. So, there are implications for poverty reduction in that sense as well in that, all the time that they are away, they are not really able to access what the Government are providing them. So, in that sense, poverty reduction measures are wasted because they do not reach the people they are meant to reach.
Q69 Mr Davies: The hump theory seems to be premised, among other things, on the assumption that the financial burden of migration, the cost of the investment if you like, falls on the migrant or emigrant and/or his or her family. If one looks historically, that has not always been the case. If we go back to the 17th century, in the first generations in the American colonies, a very large number of immigrants into the colonies and the majority certainly in the southern states, Virginia and Carolinas in the first generations before African slavery got under way in a big way, were indentured labour. In other words, the cost was borne by the employer or by the colonial company, the Virginia company or what-have-you. If you go to the 19th century and look at the big Irish emigrations you have just looked at, a very large number of Irish emigrants to the United States in the middle or later 19th century were paid for by their landlords who were anxious to end their tenancies and get them off their farm. To what extent in the modern world are there similar systems of financing external family sponsorship, contractual emigration of that kind? I suppose the NHS, thinking of the nurses in the Third World, might be one example of that. Is that a significant factor or can you say anything helpful by way of a generalisation on that subject?
Professor Skeldon: I am not sure that I can say anything helpful as a generalisation but it certainly goes on. You will find that plantations have to contract labour and they will bear the costs of transporting labour but of course there is also a cost for the individual and for the individual families. The actual cost of transport of labour may be borne by the plantation but what is the cost of lost labour to that family? What are the social costs? We do not know that. I think there are costs locally and costs further up the scale too. In your case, we do not know what the costs were for the families of origin. There certainly were costs involved but we do not know what they were. Today, you will certainly see companies bearing the costs of transport of labour. Priya has been pointing out the movement of construction workers/plantation workers within provinces/states within India. If you take countries at high levels of economic development such as Malaysia, they cannot find the labour locally, so it has to recruit labour from overseas. Most recently, it has been trying to divert sources from Indonesia to more distant sources because it feels the visible minorities are easier to control than the invisible Indonesian minority in Malaysia. That is perhaps another issue.
Q70 Mr Robathan: If I can turn back to an example that Dr Deshingkar gave, it is interesting that moving around within a state is described as migration. It is actually quite important for us at the start of this inquiry that we see whether we assess that as migration or whether it is actually moving for work. The impacts of migration across borders are different between two different places. It seems to me what you were describing about the problems people face is just moving for work in a way which happens in every society. You could say that a number of Members of Parliament move away for work. I think definition is quite important. Would one describe that as migration?
Dr Deshingkar: We do describe that as migration. We treated the movement for work such as the migration of labourers as migration. However, we distinguish that from commuting, for example, where people go to a place of work in the morning and come back in the evening. We also distinguish temporary or seasonal migration from the more empowering kinds of migration. When we talk about migration in our study, we refer to migration for work rather than population migrations which a lot of the formal data referred to. For example, if women move to another location because of marriage, that is counted as population migration in the official statistics of India. So, it depends on what kind of definition you use and the definition that we have used is also used by a number of other studies looking at migration. It is accepted.
Q71 Mr Robathan: If I could stick in fact with your definitions and your study at the ODI, you talk about livelihood strategies and I think it is quite important that we understand exactly what is meant by "livelihood strategies" and how the idea perhaps can improve the understanding of the relationship between migration and development and whether this can have any implications for policy here.
Dr Deshingkar: By livelihood strategies, we mean the different kinds of activities that people or a household engages in to make a living. So, it is a bundle of options and economic opportunities that people exercise. We regard migration as one kind of livelihood strategy, so we regard it as, in many cases, routine activity; it is not precipitated by some kind of shock or calamity such as drought, flood or famine, it is more regular in rural people's lives and that has policy implications because the whole system is not really geared to providing services and support to people who are on the move and there are millions of such people.
Q72 Mr Battle: Can I just clarify the notions of definitions in a way because I think that we have different worlds. I know at the beginning that the Chairman said we should try and identify whether we are talking about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and legal immigrants. I still become confused because I am thinking that, for example, there are workers organised by gang masters in Birmingham who send people for seasonal agricultural work in Gloucestershire. There were people killed on the railway in the summer and there were gang masters getting people to go across to Lincolnshire. Are we looking at them or are we looking at asylum seekers who are forced out by conflict and violence? My colleague comes to London from Scotland every week; is he a migrant? I come from Leeds. Is the terminology helpful or should we go into a discussion of the terminology? How can you guide us around that morass really in order that we are clear about what we want to focus on?
Dr Rogaly: I will not answer in general; I would just like to answer something specific about this and to back up Priya. I think what we are doing is resisting opening our eyes because the National Census certainly in India and in other countries does not pick up the temporary movement that goes on for just a few months and yet this temporary movement is so very important in poor people's livelihood strategies. So, if we are to say, "We are not used to this, it is not how we usually think about migration", and kind of resist going down that path, we are actually going to miss a lot of the relevance for migration and development. It does not mean that we have to study commuting. I agree completely with what Priya said. We can define commuting out of it but I think temporary migration for, say, a month to a year is very important and only comes about with the kind of studies that Priya has done. I have also done a similar study in another part of India in the state of West Bengal which is a state with 80 million people, so it would be much larger than the UK, and migration which takes place within the borders of that state is often a migration that, for example, might take two or three days' journey, where you spend a month to a year away from home, you live in completely different cultural circumstances, you eat differently and you come back with a lump sum of money which could last you three or four months in terms of your food supply and repaying loans, your housing improvements and so. It is hugely significant and has a family resembelence to the other kinds of migration that we are talking about, the longer term, the rural/urban and the international. I do think that these all belong to the same family, although I do think that we need to sort them out, as I was saying before.
Professor Black: Where you might also not be able to access the kinds of rights and services that one takes for granted when one lives in one's place of origin, so that is quantitatively different from you travelling from Leeds to London because, whether you are in Leeds or London, you have a right to access education and so on.
Q73 Mr Battle: If I can follow through with one example. I know a case of two sisters who are Filipino who came separately to Britain: one to be a nurse - she is a qualified nurse - and the other to be a household servant. The conditions in which they both live: the household servant lives in appalling circumstances; she is paid well below the minimum wage, well outside the usual parameters and all the rest of it. You wonder, in terms of justice, what their circumstances are and work permits and the rest and I am then pushed to ask the question: how much do I relate the question of migration to the much larger background question which is that of money going back to the place they come from, the remittances question, and linking it to what their work does and what value that has back home if they leave and do not even return but are pushing money back. I am thinking of people who move from poor neighbourhoods and poor countries to the Middle East and work on oil pipelines and the rest of it. Is that a factor that comes into the definition?
Dr Rogaly: Your initial example is a perfect example of how important policy can be in making migration safe and less risky. The nurse versus the domestic servant. It may not be regulation that is needed but it shows a difference in the outcome according to, for example, the UK situation, when somebody is illegal or legal and so on. That is very, very important because it means that it is worth doing this inquiry because one can actually achieve change through policy. The question of remittances I think is a separate question and I would like to leave that to my colleagues who know more about it.
Q74 Chairman: Maybe we could approach the whole issue of remittances on another occasion. The question that I would like to ask this afternoon follows up from John's question. Going back to Ron's point about fertility, it is quite clear that, if one looks at the figures, in the north and west, the birth rate is falling and we are going to need more skilled workers. I think the figures are quite stark. I think the Institute of Migration say that, in Western Europe between 2000 and 2005, the working population between 15 and 65 is going to fall by about 40 %, which is really quite a dramatic figure. What actually is happening at the moment is that we have all these asylum polices but they are migration policies. I have come to the conclusion that you make the asylum policy so complicated that only those with the really greatest initiative and determination get through. It is a policy selection, so you only get the bright ones in, or it almost looks like that. Somehow at some stage in terms of poverty, we are going to have to work out or face up to the fact that we are actually are going to need to have a migration policy. Then one thinks, if you are going to do that, from where do you have the migrants? At the moment, what is happening is that they are very often coming in from middle income countries - Yugoslavia/the Former Republic of Yugoslavia or, for France, Morocco and Algeria, middle-income countries - and, again going back to Richard's point about Africa, would we not be doing better to be giving a kind of green card system to poorer countries in Africa for the people to come to fill the skills gaps here temporarily and then to go back with those skills? At the moment, it is all rather haphazard, gets confused in the asylum policy and actually really is not addressing the fact that we are going to have substantial labour shortages over the next 20/30 years.
Professor Black: I think you perhaps over-estimate the extent to which the Government have an asylum policy! You also under-estimate the extent to which the Government have a migration policy. As I understand it, the Government have opened a number of channels for legal immigration. For example, temporary migration for agricultural work and other forms of temporary mobility into the UK. We might want to be looking in this Committee at how those kinds of schemes could be extended and how those kinds of initiatives could be made more coherent and particularly more consistent with our development objectives as a nation as well as with our immediate labour market needs. So, I do not think it is right to say that there is no migration policy, but we might want to think about how we can improve the migration policy that has been developed and I think actually quite boldly by this Government in the context of a general feeling of anti-immigrationism. They have opened up substantial opportunities for people to move to the UK.
Q75 Mr Davies: Professor Black, can I just draw you out on that very significant comment that you just made. How do you think that the Government's immigration policy, if you accept that they now begin to have one, could be made more consistent with our development objectives?
Professor Black: To give you a detailed answer, I would need to know more about the detail of the particular schemes that have been opened, but a general answer would be, for example, to ensure that the Department for International Development is properly consulted on the development of schemes, so that, in their conception, they have an element of meeting development concerns rather than simply being driven by the UK labour market needs. To give one example, there is a risk that, when you develop temporary mobility schemes for people to come from particular countries to work for particular periods of time in particular industries or particular sectors of the economy, you tend to think of the areas of skill shortage that the UK has. Actually, that is one of the best ways of selling the policy to the UK electorate, I suspect. A set of schemes that opens up more opportunities for well-educated professionals to leave developing countries may not be what is most in the interest of development. What may be of much more in the interest of development is to open up opportunities precisely for agricultural workers and workers in the caring sector. I say that but actually the Government have opened up opportunities in those areas, so, even without formal consultation with DfID, they have moved in a direction that is not opposed to the interest of development, but those things could be looked at and no doubt policies could be better.
Q76 Mr Davies: I wonder if I might perhaps ask you to think about this. My question was directly picking up a comment of yours but it may be a little unfair to expect you to deliver all your thoughts on the subject without any reflection. I wonder if I could possibly ask you to let the Committee have a note of any specific suggestions you may have as to how, to use your words, our immigration policies could be made more supportive of or more consistent with our development objectives.
Professor Black: Yes.
Q77 Mr Davies: The question I was going to ask you, which is a very general one for the panel, is, as I think you can see from the discussion this afternoon, this is such a vast and also disparate subject that, if we are going to make any progress at all, we will have to have a pretty robust conceptual framework for doing so. I therefore wonder if you could tell us whether, in your view, it would be sensible for us to categorise this subject into internal immigration - migration between developing countries, migration between developing countries and oil-rich countries, migration between developing countries and the West and any other categories. Are those robust categories? In other words, are there distinct factors which are driving migration in those different areas? Is the economic significance of migration in those categories broadly different or broadly the same? Are the social consequences for the country of origin of people concerned broadly different or broadly the same? I think it would be very helpful if you could give us some guidance as to how you see that.
Professor Black: I can make a general comment on that which is that, yes, it is helpful to categorise different flows of migration but, no, those categories would not be robust in the sense that you could construct a typology with discrete types of migration that are clearly more similar within group than externally. In other words, there is always going to be some overlap. Just to give one example, the most obvious categorisation of migration is between voluntary and forced and yet it is very clear that forced migrants exercise choice in some aspects of their movement in many cases, so refugees have the choice of which direction to flee to at a very basic level.
Q78 Mr Davies: Forced means a fleeing from political persecution or from war or famine; is that right?
Professor Black: Yes.
Dr Deshingkar: Also trafficking.
Professor Black: And internal/international migration obviously. It is an important distinction because people who move internationally do not enjoy citizenship rights in the country that they move to, but then of course the examples of China and India contradict that because people who move internally in those countries and no doubt in some other countries also do not enjoy citizenship rights. That is a good typology but it is not a robust one because there are exceptions. Whichever typology you come up with, you are going to come up with the exception, so it is going to be a question of finding the best fit for the purpose of this inquiry.
Dr Rogaly: I want to talk about the issue of aligning development policy with migration policy in the UK, but to also turn the case back on ourselves and look at development in the UK as broadly defined in terms of issues like equality of opportunity and relations between different groups and based on gender, ethnicity and so on, and I think that, when we do that, we have to address the contradiction in current policy between the way asylum seekers are talked about and actually the positive new policies that Richard referred to as managed migration. I do not think it is enough to say that the Government are responding to a politically thorny area because I think that if we are really going to address some of the disadvantages that are faced by migrants in Britain, then it is important not to perpetuate some of the myths, for example, about asylum seekers which are put across more by certain organs of the media than the Government, but sometimes the Government play into that. I am not trying to label any particular political party but I think it is something to watch out for and it does affect the well being of migrants and, if that is what we are about, we maybe ought to address that. I think that we can learn a lot from some national organisations which have tried to confront this contradiction and to come up with constructive ways of dealing with public education and dissemination of information about migration, and I would like to draw the Panel's attention to two organisations who have done this, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants recent document) and also the Trades Union Congress who have done some detailed work on this.
Professor Skeldon: Just to go back to the whole issue of categories because I think it is fundamental to this discussion. If you are going to develop relevant policy, you have to be dealing with specific groups of migrants and although the categories, as Richard has made very clear, are not focused, we have to deal with these categories despite the disadvantages. Quite clearly, the types of temporary migrants that Ben and Priya were talking about and the kinds of policies that are relevant to them would be very different from the kinds of policies relevant to skilled international migrants or even, within that, to students as a subcategory of skilled migrants. So, we have to know at which group of migrants we are directing policy and the policies have to be adjusted accordingly. We are not going to have one blanket policy flying right across the board. So, you have to restrict your universe and look at the objectives in order to achieve within this. Quite clearly, one of the basic categorisations is between internal and international migrations because it is very, very quite different because you move to a country in which you do not have citizenship rights. Two totally different traditions have grown up in migration studies and really the two groups talk to each other and in fact one of my particular interests is to look at how internal and international migration are linked, but I think that does not detract from the value of defining that in terms of internal and international migration. For some purposes, you have to look at them as separate categories. In fact, the United Nations prefers not to even talk about internal migration. It talks about population redistribution. I think this goes back to the point you are raising because, quite clearly, one of the fundamental transformations of the last century and presumably this in much of the developing world is the concentration of populations in urban areas and migration contributes very significantly to that.
Professor Black: If we were to come back very quickly, you asked which categories we should be focusing on and there was a question earlier also about, if we are concerned with the poor, we should be focusing on them and I would say that, in order of importance, the temporary work migration within developing countries is probably the most important in terms of its direct impact on the poor. We should also be looking at south-south international migration but I would not exclude south-north international migration as well for two reasons. Although it tends to have fewer poor people involved in it, the extent of transfers that are implied because of the difference in wage rates and labour market conditions is significant enough to have both direct and indirect impacts on the poor and on poverty. So, we should include it for that reason. I also think if the United Kingdom Parliament says something about migration in an international fora it is going to have no credibility if it only talks about south/south migration and is not prepared to address its own action and reaction to migrants that come to this country. North/south international migration should be included even though it probably involves fewer people.
Q79 John Barrett: Following up on that point and concentrating on poverty reduction, can I again widen it out and ask whether it is skilled, unskilled or whether it is a south/south, north/south temporary or seasonal movement, because that is most important in addressing poverty related issues? Would you like to add any more to that because that is important in concentrating on the impact of poverty?
Dr Deshingkar: I feel very strongly about that. From my experience of looking at several different village contexts in India, for example south of Andhra Pradesh to the state of Madhya Pradesh, also a large state in India, vast numbers of people are migrating for seasonal work. These people tend to be poor, they are mainly unskilled, illiterate labourers. In terms of the direct links between poverty and migration that is where there is the greatest potential to make a difference. There are ways in which the United Kingdom Government can help through the Country Assistance Strategy to integrate migration concerns into current policy. I can go into the detail of that if there is time.
Dr Rogaly: I agree with what both Richard and Priya said and Richard's point about the importance of the south/north migration for poverty reduction. The issue is also about investment. People do invest socially and they also invest economically with money that comes back. That can create employment, it can be an anti-poverty tool in an additional way to the way that Richard was talking about but with a caveat, which is that remittances can also increase inequality, and we have to look at the details of that.
Professor Skeldon: Can I just turn the argument a little bit on its head, if you look to those societies which attempted to limit mobility, China in 1966 and 1976 North Korea and Myanmar, these are countries which tended to have increasing poverty during these periods. Controlling mobility tends to limit development, so it would be helpful if you can see it from that point of view as well.
Mr Davies: We would not have had the industrial revolution here if we had limited mobility, would we?
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 memorandums 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, 2nd 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". 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. 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. John mentioned the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and the TUC; could you nudge us to something they have written.
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, 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 but 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 in-country strategy 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. 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 Strategy or in the national Ten-Year Plan which DFID regards as a PRSP basically because India does not have a PRSP but the Ten-Year Plan goes very close to the Millennium Development Goals so the 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 it is mentioned it is implicit 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, although they are all aware of the issue of migration and its significance. Because there is no specific programme or co-ordinating body to address the issue 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 CAS as well as any kind of specific programmes but the migrant support programmes that are being developed through DFID-funded projects like in Andhra Pradesh or the Western India Rainforest Farming Project are very innovative and have made a big difference to the hardships faced by migrants. The Western India Rainforest Farming Project is way ahead of anywhere 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 and they see the Western India Rainforest Farming Project as developing ways of linking with NGOs across states where these migrants workers go to work so they can access information on wage rates and working conditions and rights because most of the 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). 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 Rainforest Scheme.
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 experiences by 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 shows that 20 % of migrant families are pulled out of school.
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.