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Thinking about migration through a capability lens
HDRO Conference Room
7 October 2008
Time: 12:30 – 2:00 pm
Topic
Migration can affect the development process in at least five ways: 1) through its direct effects on the living and working conditions of migrants, 2) by changing the behavior of migrants before they leave, and those who never leave but might have, 3) by changing the lives of those who must cope with the absence of the migrants, 4) through financial, cultural, and other interactions between those who are outside a country and those who are inside, and 5) through the ways that international experience changes those who later return home. A conventional wisdom has arisen in the international policy and research community that suggests that benefits arising through any of these five channels are so limited by the scale of movement, and so diluted by countervailing negative effects in all five areas, that there are reasons to consider migration a multifaceted threat to the development process in many contexts, a threat that deserves tight regulation. These include the effects of skilled-worker emigration on service provision and public finance, the tendency for remittances to be consumed rather than invested, the posited tendency for mobile skilled workers to remit less than the unskilled, low return migration rates among the skilled, and the political unpopularity in destination countries of larger-scale movements by low-skill workers. Many of these views have been formulated based on emotionally gripping anecdote rather than systematic causal evidence. A new body of evidence is emerging that profoundly questions all of these ostensible threats and others.
About the Speaker
Michael Clemens currently investigates the effects of skilled-worker emigration on developing countries. Together with Nancy Birdsall, he leads CGD's Migration and Development Initiative. He studies skilled professionals from Africa and the South Pacific, and what happens in their home countries after they leave. The central question of all his research is what the past experience of today's rich countries can teach about the future of today's poor countries. Clemens has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Bain & Co., the Environmental Defense Fund, and the United Nations Development Program, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. He has lived and worked in Brazil, Colombia, and Turkey.
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