Receiving Countries (receiving + country)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Protection of Migrants' Human Rights: Principles and Practice

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 6 2001
Heikki S. Mattila
In principle, migrants enjoy the protection of international law. Key human rights instruments oblige the States Parties to extend their protection to all human beings. Such important treaties as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have been ratified by more than 140 states, but many political, social or economic obstacles seem to stand in the way of offering those rights to migrants. In an attempt to bridge this protection gap, the more specifically targeted International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families was created and adopted by the United Nations in 1990. This treaty is not yet in force, but the number of States Parties is increasing towards the required 20. In the past few years the human rights machinery of the United Nations has increased its attention towards migrants' human rights, appointing in 1999 the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Governments, as the acceding parties to international human rights instruments, remain the principal actors as guardians of the human rights of all individuals residing in their territories. Receiving countries are in a key position in the protection of the migrants that they host. However, active defence of migrants' rights is politically difficult in many countries where anti-immigrant factions are influential. Trafficking in migrants is one example of the complexity faced by states in formulating their migration policies. On the one hand, trafficking has made governments increasingly act together and combine both enforcement and protection. On the other, trafficking, with its easily acceptable human rights concerns, is often separated from the more migration-related human smuggling. The latter is a more contentious issue, related also to unofficial interests in utilizing cheap undocumented immigrant labour. [source]


Regrounding the ,Ungrounded Empires':localization as the geographical catalyst for transnationalism

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 2 2001
Yu Zhou
The emerging literature on transnationalism has reshaped the study of immigration in the USA from ,melting pot' and later ,salad bowl', to ,switching board', which emphasizes the ability of migrants to forge and maintain ties to their home countries. Often under the heading of ,transnationalism from below', these studies highlight an alternative form of globalization, in which migrants act as active agents to initiate and structure global interactions. The role of geography, and in particular, localization in transnational spaces, is central to the transnationalism debate, but is yet to be well articulated. While it has been commonly claimed that transnationalism represents deterritorialized practices and organizations, we argue that it is in fact rooted in the territorial division of labour and local community networks in immigrant sending and receiving countries. We examine closely two business sectors engaged in by the Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles: high-tech firms and accounting firms. Each illustrates, respectively, the close ties of Chinese transnational activities with the economic base of the Los Angeles region, and the contribution of local-based, low-wage, small ethnic businesses to the transnational practices. We conclude that deeper localization is the geographical catalyst for transnational networks and practices. [source]


Emigration from China: A Sending Country Perspective

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 3 2003
Xiang Biao
This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the policies pursued by the People's Republic of China (PRC) regarding the emigration of Chinese nationals. Most of the available literature on migration management has focused on receiving countries. With a few exceptions, little attention has been directed at migration management policies pursued in countries of origin. In the case of the PRC, policies regarding overseas Chinese have been fairly well documented and researched, but very little has been written about how the Chinese authorities manage ongoing emigration flows. This gap becomes particularly salient as the importance of the "partnership with the countries of origin" in devising migration policies is being increasingly acknowledged by receiving countries in Europe (Commission of the European Communities, 2000). Over the last 20 years, there have been significant changes in the Chinese Government's policies and perspectives on emigration. But, just like most other governments, the Chinese authorities do not have a single blanket policy covering all categories of emigrants. Emigration is normally managed on a case-by-case basis and the Government's attitude toward the same type of emigration may vary depending on different cases and circumstances. Because of this, this article examines China's major emigration-related policy spheres one by one. Specifically, six issues will be discussed: (1) exit control; (2) diaspora policy; (3) student migration; (4) labour export; (5) regulations on emigration agencies and, finally (6) the Government's response to human smuggling. This article shows both the coherence and the fragmentation in China's policies toward emigration. The coherence is due to the fact that all the policies are inherently linked to China's overall economic and social development strategy. The emigration management regime is sometimes fragmented partly because emigration consists of different streams and is handled by different Government departments, partly because some emigration issues (such as regulations on emigration agents) are very new for the Chinese Government and the authorities are still exploring them. Overall, the Chinese authorities increasingly see emigration as a means to enhance China's integration to the world and are keen to avoid conflicts with the international community over migration issues. At the same time, China's emigration policies need to be more balanced, in particular, the emigration of unskilled labour should be given more priority. [source]


The Jewish Emigration from the Former Soviet Union to Germany

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 2 2002
Barbara Dietz
Since the end of the 1980s a massive emigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union (FSU) can be observed. Israel and the United States were the most important receiving countries, followed by Germany, a comparatively new immigration destination for Jews from the successor states of the USSR. One of the reasons the German Government allowed the admission of Jews from post-Soviet states was the Jewish community's claim that this immigration might rejuvenate the German Jewish population in the longer run. Using an index of demographic aging (Billeter's J), the following article examines if this has actually happened. Findings suggest that immigration actually initiated a process of rejuvenation in the Jewish population in Germany. However, it was reversed during the end of the 1990s because of an unaffected low fertility. [source]


Rational Migration Policy Should Tolerate Non-zero Illegal Migration Flows: Lessons from Modelling the Market for Illegal Migration

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 1 2002
Horst Entorf
The debate on the immigration policies in OECD countries has turned its attention towards illegal migrants. Given that migration flows are determined by immigration laws, the probability of potential detection, penalties for unauthorized migrants and their employers, and income differences between sending and receiving countries, this paper presents a new approach to the problem of illegal migration, grounded on the economic theory of illegal behaviour. The framework considers the interaction of potential migrants, citizens, employers, and the government. After introducing the supply function of illegal migration and its determinants, the trade-off between social costs and benefits of preventing and combating illegal migration is demonstrated. This trade-off results in an optimal level of migration larger than zero. A complete "market model" of illegal migration is offered by presentation of a demand curve of illegal migration, based on the tolerance of the society towards clandestine foreigners. Equilibrium forces predict a non-zero level of illegal migration. The rule of law of our legal systems, according to which any illegal activity has to be reduced to zero, bears the danger of producing inefficient disequilibria. A reasonable policy of wanted and unwanted migration should address the question of how to allocate scarce resources. Ignoring social optima and equilibrium forces means to abandon public resources that could be used for other public assignments, such as schooling or foreign aid, for instance, i.e., measures that could strike the problem of illegal migration at its root. [source]


Best Practices to Reduce Migration Pressures

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 3 2002
Philip Martin
Are there best practices to foster economic development, reduce population growth, and protect the environment in source countries of unauthorized migration, in a manner that reduces emigration pressures and redirects migration towards legal channels? This paper outlines cooperative actions that can be undertaken by both source and receiving countries to better manage the movements of people over national borders. There are two broad approaches to foster wanted migration and to reduce unwanted migration. First, maximize migration's payoffs by ensuring that the 3 Rs of recruitment, remittances, and returns foster economic and job growth in emigration areas. Second, make emigration unnecessary by adapting trade, investment and aid policies, and programmes that accelerate economic development and thus make it unnecessary for people to emigrate for jobs and wages. Most of the changes needed for stay,at,home development must occur in emigration areas, but immigration areas can cooperate in the management of immigration, guest workers, and students, as well as in promoting freer trade and investment, and in targeting aid funds. In a globalizing world, selective immigration policies may have important development impacts, as with immigration country policies toward students, and workers in particular occupations, such as nurses and computer programmers, as well as with mutual recognition of occupational licenses and professional credentials. Trade policies affecting migration are also important, such as trade in services and laws regulating contracts between firms in different countries that allow the entry of lower wage workers as part of the contract. opening channels for legal migration can deter irregular migration. [source]


Some Structural Effects of Migration on Receiving and Sending Countries

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 5 2000
Daničle Joly
Traditionally, the question of migration has been compartmentalized analytically between, on the one hand, the causes of international migration which in the main have been studied by economists and geographers and, on the other hand, the consequences of migration primarily on the receiving countries, which has mostly been an area of concern for sociologists, demographers and geographers who have looked into theories and processes of settlement/integration. The twain rarely met. As a consequence, for heuristic purposes a separation based on discipline, geographical areas and objects of study has taken place, an approach challenged recently by some scholars. This article brings together the threads of international migration in its causes and consequences affecting both sending and receiving countries as well as the migrants. The close interaction between causes and consequences is enhanced by the role of migrants themselves. Indeed, migrants are not only objects whose moves are deterministically conditioned by structural factors, they are social actors who formulate their own strategies and life projects within given settings and conflicts in their society of origin and society of reception, which they in turn contribute to modify. [source]


Migrants, Refugees and Insecurity.

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 4 2000
Current Threats to Peace?
Since the early 1980s, international migration has moved beyond humanitarian, economic development, labour market and societal integration concerns, raising complex interactive security implications for governments of migrant sending, receiving and transit countries, as well as for multilateral bodies. This article examines the effects of international migration on varied understandings and perceptions of international security. It discusses why international migration has come to be perceived as a security issue, both in industrialized and developing countries. Questions are raised on the migration-security nexus and the way in which the concepts ,security' and ,migration' are used. The real and perceived impacts of international migration upon national and regional security, both in industrialized and developing countries, are analysed. The policies developed by governments and multilateral agencies since the mid-1980s to mitigate the destabilizing effects of certain kinds of international population movement and human displacement are examined. The conclusions stress the need for the establishment of a comprehensive framework of international cooperation among origin and receiving countries and international organizations to address the destabilizing implications of international migration. [source]


Expectations and motivations of Hondurans migrating to the United States

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2007
Jana Sladkova
Abstract This study explores the expectations and decision-making processes of potential migrants at a community in Honduras. Hondurans have become one of the fastest growing populations in New York. Yet, although approximately 80,000 Hondurans try to reach the US annually, only 25 per cent succeed. To reach the United States they must undergo a dangerous journey across Guatemala and Mexico, a process to date under-researched by social sciences. As new undocumented migrant streams continue to expand within the global economies, scholars and practitioners who work on their behalf should understand the pre-migration values and expectations because they shape the way migrants adjust to and develop new cultural patterns in the receiving countries. Drawing on immigration and narrative theory, I hypothesize that narratives of migration from media, prior migrants, coyotes and community practices play an important role in the construction of potential migrant expectations. To represent narratives across several individual and community domains, the research design includes individual interviews, analysis of local newspapers, participant observations and teaching English classes. Analysis across these data reveals complex dilemmas potential migrants face as they weigh the costs and benefits of migration. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Rules, Red Tape, and Paperwork: The Archeology of State Control over Migrants

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2008
DAVID COOK MARTÍN
How and with what consequences did state control over migration become acceptable and possible after the Great War? Existing studies have centered on core countries of immigration and thus underestimate the degree to which legitimate state capacities have developed in a political field spanning sending and receiving countries with similar designs on the same international migrants. Relying on archival research, and an examination of the migratory field constituted by two quintessential emigration countries (Italy and Spain), and a traditional immigration country (Argentina) since the mid-nineteenth century, this article argues that widespread acceptance of migration control as an administrative domain rightfully under states' purview, and the development of attendant capacities have derived from legal, organizational, and administrative mechanisms crafted by state actors in response to the challenges posed by mass migration. Concretely, these countries codified migration and nationality laws, built, took over, and revamped migration-related organizations, and administratively encaged mobile people through official paperwork. The nature of efforts to evade official checks on mobility implicitly signaled the acceptance of migration control as a bona fide administrative domain. In more routine migration management, states legitimate capacity has had unforeseen intermediate- and long-term consequences such as the subjection of migrants (and, because of ius sanguinis nationality laws, sometimes their descendants) to other states' administrative influence and the generation of conditions for dual citizenship. Study findings challenge scholarship that implicitly views states as constant factors conditioning migration flows, rather than as developing institutions with historically variable regulatory abilities and legitimacy. It extends current work by specifying mechanism used by state actors to establish migration as an accepted administrative domain. [source]


The responsiveness of remittances to price of oil: the case of the GCC

OPEC ENERGY REVIEW, Issue 3-4 2009
George S. Naufal
We investigate the responsiveness of remittances from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to the changes in the price of crude oil. Most of the GCC countries rank in the top 20 remitting countries in the world. We find that oil price elasticity of remittances is around 0.4. While most studies have examined the impact of remittances on the real economic activities in the receiving countries, this study emphasises the impact of remittances on the remitting countries. We examine various policy implications with regard to macroeconomic shocks, monetary policy and fiscal policy of the GCC countries. [source]


People's Exit in North Korea: New Threat to Regime Stability?

PACIFIC FOCUS, Issue 2 2010
Kyung-Ae Park
As suggested in a growing literature that securitizes the phenomenon of refugee migration and analyzes it as a national as well as a regional security issue, the growing number of North Korean border-crossers has far-reaching political implications for both North Korea and the international community. Studies have argued that refugees could contribute significantly to democratic change in their home countries by assisting and actively participating in the struggle of the domestic opposition, even sparking regime instability and eventual regime breakdown. Much of the North Korean refugee research has focused on the human rights issues faced by the refugees, but a largely unexplored area of the refugee research concerns the political consequences of the refugee flight for the current regime in Pyongyang. This article examines whether North Korean refugees are expected to play the role of political opposition in exile by raising the following four questions: (i) Are the refugees political dissidents? (ii) Are they a resourceful critical mass? (iii) Does exit always lead to regime instability? and (iv) Would China and South Korea encourage exile politics against the current North Korean regime? The article contends that the North Korean refugee community does not currently represent a critical mass that can trigger instability of the Pyongyang regime. Most of the North Korean refugees are not political dissidents, nor have they organized into any resourceful critical mass capable of generating a threat to their home country. In addition, people's exit does not necessarily destabilize the regime as it can sometimes yield a positive political effect by driving out dissidents' voices. Furthermore, several of the receiving countries, in particular, China and South Korea, would not encourage exile dissident movements against North Korea for fear of Pyongyang's collapse. The North Korean regime's stability does not seem to be threatened by the current refugee situation, although the potential of refugees becoming a critical threat should not be discounted should people's exit ever reach the point of developing into an uncontrollable mass exodus. [source]


Post-return experiences and transnational belonging of return migrants: a Dutch,Moroccan case study

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2010
JUNE DE BREE
Abstract In this article we explore the links between return migration, belonging and transnationalism among migrants who returned from the Netherlands to northeast Morocco. While transnationalism is commonly discussed from the perspective of a receiving country, this study shows that transnationalism also plays a vital role in reconstructing post-return belonging. Return migration is not simply a matter of ,going home', as feelings of belonging need to be renegotiated upon return. While returnees generally feel a strong need to maintain various transnational practices, the meanings they attach to these practices depend on motivations for return, gender and age. For former (male) labour migrants, transnational practices are essential for establishing post-return belonging, whereas such practices are less important for their spouses. Those who returned as children generally feel uprooted, notwithstanding the transnational practices they maintain. The amount of agency migrants are able to exert in the return decision-making process is a key factor in determining the extent to which returnees can create a post-return transnational sense of home. [source]


Portugal as a Semi-peripheral Country in the Global Migration System

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, Issue 3 2009
Pedro Góis
Although Portugal has traditionally produced many emigrants, the last 30 years have also shown increasing immigration. This increase in immigration has drawn attention away from the fact that significant emigration from Portugal continues. In this article, some of the main characteristics of migrations to and from Portugal are highlighted from a systemic perspective. The article shows that Portugal is both a receiving country and a sending country in the global migration system, and that it integrates several of the main migration systems at different levels. It is suggested that Portugal's participation in existing migration systems is best captured and explained by conceptualizing it as a semi-peripheral society, one that is part of a core region of the world system (the European Union) and displays a number of characteristics of both central and peripheral countries. The concept of semi-periphery enables one to recognize the existence of what could be termed a quasi or emergent migratory system: the Lusophone migration system, which one can conceive as communicating intensively with other macro migratory systems. Observing the country's migratory dynamics from the last two decades, and especially the migration flows that bond the Portuguese-speaking countries, one may view the Lusophone migration system as able to combine different levels of centers that (in some moments, and given certain conditions) could evolve into a bicephalous, or even tricephalous, center. These centers function as bonds among several other migration systems, and it is in the middle of this Lusophone migration system that the semi-peripheral role of Portugal becomes evident, as it can be core and periphery at the same time. [source]


Migration and welfare: a very simple model

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 7 2007
Roberto Cellini
Abstract The paper presents a very simple model of migration, relying on three widely accepted points: first, labour productivity and wages in a country depend on the present average human capital; second, agents maximise their utility, so that migration decisions depend on the wage gap across economies; third, the larger the personal human capital, the higher the propensity is to migrate (ceteris paribus). The model shows that migration through its external effects always lowers the welfare in the sending country, while the effects on the receiving country can be positive or negative. As a consequence, selfish developed economies could desire a larger migration than the optimal level for a benevolent World Planner. This calls for international coordination concerning the regulation of migration flows. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Foreign aid and long-run economic growth: empirical evidence for a panel of developing countries

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2006
Georgios Karras
Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between foreign aid and growth in per capita GDP using annual data from the 1960 to 1997 period for a sample of 71 aid-receiving developing economies. The results show that the effect of foreign aid on economic growth is positive, permanent, statistically significant, and sizable: raising foreign aid by $20 per person of the receiving country results in a permanent increase in the growth rate of real GDP per capita by approximately 0.16,per,cent. Using an alternative foreign-aid measure, a permanent increase in aid by 1,per,cent of the receiving economy's GDP permanently raises the per capita growth rate by 0.14 to 0.26,per,cent. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Output/Endowment and Commodity/Factor Price Relationships and Welfare in a Multilateral Trade Model with Partial Factor Mobility

PACIFIC ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 3 2000
Bharat R. Hazari
A multilateral model of trade with both commodity flows and partial mobility of factor flows is set up. This model is used to develop factor endowment/output relationships as well as commodity/factor price relationships. Welfare consequences of these parametric shifts are examined. The model is built on the customs union framework which involves three countries and both commodity and factor flows. Owing to spillover effects in multilateral trade models, many nontraditional results are obtained. Many developed countries accept skilled and unskilled migrants from other countries. These migrants are generally accepted on a quota system. Moreover, it has been established that an increase in the migrant quota in the presence of factor mobility may raise or lower the output and welfare in the country not receiving migrants. In fact it is shown that the non-migrant receiving country could be immiserized due to loss of capital. The main message of this paper is that in a multilateral trade framework there exist international spillover effects which must be taken into consideration in national policymaking. [source]