Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
there, these newcomers live in urban squalor and poverty, in burgeon-
ing squatter settlements with few resources, no infrastructure and few
social services. Josef Gugler (1982) would soon add a caveat to Lipton's
arguments, charging that 'overurbanization' was another reason why
the poor stayed poor in the global South. In his view, much of the
blame for such urban migrant poverty could be directed at the South's
urban elites who were only too eager to have the majority of resources
of their developing societies invested in their largest cities, or 'centres
of power and privilege'.
Migration has consequences for development (or the lack thereof) in
rural sources too, and an important set of migration-development rela-
tionships occur both within countries and across borders, that have
both negative and positive aspects. While out-migration can cause dis-
ruptive and devastating labour losses, in-migration can swell the
number of unemployed, so that urban informal sectors have to absorb
the surpluses. Consequently, continuous excesses of uncontrolled occu-
pancy and irregular, spontaneous squatter settlements prevail to make
the residential landscapes of global South cities extremely disorderly
and divisive, relatively powerless, yet informally autonomous (Hardoy
and Satterthwaite, 1989). A fuller set of migration-development rela-
tionships will receive attention later, because cross-border as well as
internal migration processes are accompanied by a substantial set of
development impacts that appear to be more positive than the earlier
outcomes just mentioned (Skeldon, 1997).
233
International migration
International migration occurs when migrants cross national borders,
with immigration being a relatively permanent move to reside in a dif-
ferent country than the migrant's original home. Emigration is the
relatively permanent move out of the home country. International
cir-
culation
refers to a more temporary move and subsequent return-move
between the migrant's source home country and their destination,
thereby completing a migration circuit 'back and forth' across borders.
The 2009 UN Human Development Report estimated that by mid-2010
there would be around 214 million international migrant workers and
their families, voluntarily residing outside their country of birth. This
figure excludes the world's 15-16 million refugees, those whose move-
ment across a border has been forced by fear of persecution or violence.
