Forced migration and neoliberalism
Migration is economic. Beyond refugees, we have to understand how global capital flows are involved with nativist rhetoric and global economic systems.
The United States is well aware of a problem with migration. Though a substantial portion of the rhetoric may involve the fact that there is too much coming across our border and that Mexico must stop it, Mexico too feels the problems of this kind of population loss. With towns sitting near empty while the working-age population works abroad to find higher wages, Mexico’s economy likewise suffers under a forced backtracking and what the Autonomous University of Zacatecas’s Dr. Raúl Delgado Wise refers to as “labor exportation.”
Delgado Wise, a scholar focusing on international development and coming from a school of economics known as dependency economics is of a mindset that the current system of global trade is designed to keep a stratified set of nations. Dividing us into two groups — core and periphery — , dependency economics argues that core nations (known as the Global North and including Anglo- and Franco-North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and sometimes the nations of the Persian Gulf) are a centralized reservoir of capital that is used for their own self-enrichment while producing foreign investment into the Global South (everything else) that allows for supply chains to form that benefit the North’s mega-corporations and our populations while keeping the South in a state of lower development.
Delgado Wise’s argument within this particularly focuses on the role of labor exportation and direct and indirect migration. Delgado Wise’s conception of labor exportation is simple: economies that have become subjugated in the periphery must primarily base their economies around the exportation of items not meant for the local market and which will not strongly influence their local economies, particularly as the funds from merchandise sales will go to multinational firms whose center is located in the core nations.
This then leads to two conceptions of migration. Direct migration is the movement of people who are upset with the lowered wages seeking economic advantage in the nations of the Global North, while indirect migration is the manifestation of periphery labor within the economies of the Global North. While these workers are working in nations such as China and Mexico, they ultimately are propping up economies in the United States and Europe and are counted as such.
Because neoliberal growth has focused on the opening of border to free trade, firms are able to simply move their most cost-ineffective (i.e. non-robotic) manufacturing to those locations where labor is most cost-effective but linked up to good ports. These ports then often are opened up as special economic zones (SEZ’s). Books could be written on this (they are, and the World Bank makes some of them free), but economic growth based on this model is tenuous, and perhaps slower than models that center around growth that is pan-national. As Delgado Wise furthers, against models in which entire nations move forward, SEZ’s encourage development that is concentrated in a pair of export-oriented cities, meaning that the countryside is even more left behind than it is in the core nations. The inequality between these regions of periphery nations is the inequality of the globe brought into sharp relief.
It should be no surprise then that global migration flows are fleeing this level of inequality towards the promise of more equal development in nations of the Global North, as shown below in the unsurprising flow diagram (interactive version here).
While American inequality clearly is something the nation is not proud of, it still runs less than a concentrated ladder of the globe’s scales of wealth played out in each periphery nation. The question is whether those who leave these systems for the equality afforded even under the disastrously under-protected H-2B unskilled guest labor programs should be included under the name of forced migrants.
It is clear that when it comes to putting food on the table, these migrants should be recognized as those who have a necessity to provide for their families — particularly under the base ethical code of neoliberalism and its single-minded focus on the individual’s responsibility. In this case, migration is no longer a decision to stay in poverty or leave, but a representation of a global fight for survival.
Why care? Donald Trump is one of a number of nationalists who have come into power in recent history under the idea that national borders should be more closed and that the laborers coming into the core nations to perform work largely undesired by the workers for the prices that employers are willing to pay are, well, undesirable in their worst terms. This stop of the flow not only will disrupt the economies of the core, but could lead to social unrest in many of the nations where those who were able to alleviate some of the worst social inequalities will now be forced to reckon with the neoliberal system without its most basic necessity: migration.
When and as, not if, these recently elected governments come to power, it is likely not just to harm the core’s economies but also to help destabilize many of the regimes that held these economic ties together. Parag Khanna might say that the supply chain integration model of global development has yielded a more efficient economy, but that economy also has choke points. Going forward, neoliberalism could easily rip our global order apart. While the core will experience discomfort, those on the periphery will be the most harmed.
The personal is political, the political economic, and the economic a system of life and death, most of all for those on the lowest rungs. America and much of the rest of the world have chosen upheaval for all.
