Asian Labour Migration: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

The Asia-Pacific region has witnessed some of the most rapid changes in the global division of labour over the past decade. Since 1970, the economies of East and Southeast Asia have been transformed from suppliers of agricultural and mineral raw materials into major exporters of manufactured goods, from cars to computer chips. In 1992 Asian countries (excluding Japan) ex ported US$453 billion worth of goods, more than the United States or Germany, and equivalent to about 16 per cent of the exports of all the ad vanced industrial countries, including Japan. The economic transformation from resource exports to goods exports has been attributed to a number of factors: judicious government inter vention to promote exports, policies that encouraged transnational corporations to invest, timely restructuring and upgrading of industries, and continuing investments in human resources. Open economic policies succeeded in inducing large inflows of foreign capital and technology, which Asian countries used with great effective ness to speed up the pace of industrialization and development. One important consequence of rapid develop ment is the growth of labour migration: over the past two decades, cross-border flows of migrant labour have increased ten-fold in East and South east Asia. Most of the growth occurred in the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1980s, there were perhaps 1 million foreign workers in East and Southeast Asia, including long-term resident Koreans in Japan and Indonesians in Malaysia. By 1990, the number of foreign workers probably exceeded 3 million. During the 1960s, economically-motivated migration was directed largely to countries out side Asia, such as the United States and Canada. Today, labour migration means flows of all kinds of workers, from housemaids to oil engineers, within Asia. The thesis of this article is that labour migra tion is a normal part of the economic development re-shaping Asia, and the number and diversity of labour migrations are likely to increase in the years ahead. There are many reasons for expect ing more rather than less migration: the rapid depletion of traditional reserves of flexible