Hélène Pellerin

The ‘Diaspora option’, migration and the changing political economy of development

ABSTRACT Influenced by the recognition of the social and economic value of migrant exchanges, the shift to a Post-Washington Consensus, and the rise of India and China as emerging economies – the ‘Diaspora option’ is becoming a significant component of the development strategies of countries with large migrant populations across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Eastern Europe. In this paper we examine the political economy within which the Diaspora option has emerged and the broader implications of the discursive and material ways that migrants are being incorporated as professionalized partners in development. Drawing on a case study of the World Banks Africa Diaspora Program we examine the underlying assumptions, ideologies and silences upon which this policy option rests. We conclude that the emerging Diaspora option should be approached more critically because the current celebration of these strategies obscures the selective and narrow neoliberal orientation; the assumptions that they make about the nature of diasporic engagement, and their increasing reliance on migrant populations to shoulder the investment risks associated with social transformation.

The cart before the horse? The coordination of migration policies in the Americas and the neoliberal economic project of integration

The coordination of migration policies is generally understood as a mechanism for improving the management of migration flows in response to new migration challenges or to pressures by public opinion in receiving countries. The analysis of the Regional Conference on Migration offers another interpretation. Such coordination among countries of North and Central America is not so much about controlling flows. Rather, one can look at this process of coordination as a mechanism through which specific patterns of social and spatial relations are being locked into the region. The coordination of migration policies in the RCM constitutes an effort to manage the mobility of capital and labour in an orderly manner. In addition, the coordinating effort serves two other purposes: to attribute specific responsibilities to states, and to depoliticize the issue of migration. Such developments fit neatly with the neoliberal project of integration, with the imposition of particular state-society relations onto the variou...

On Governance of Migration Management at the World Level, Lessons and Challenges

This chapter focuses on the governance of migration management as a process of negotiating power and responsibilities between various actors, and as the production of a normative framework, around which various objectives and interests on immigration regulations and agency participation are organized, negotiated and re-defined. The analysis of the last two decades of multilateral migration management initiatives points two waves of efforts distinct in terms of goals and institutional settings. Despite these differences, the analysis reveals some consensus around the normalization of orderly migration flows and policies. Moreover, the analysis of the global governance of migration management also unveils the political process that is involved, whereby major stakeholders and principal orientations are promoted and others marginalized.