Emigration Policy Research Articles

Box Jenkins ARMA Model for Forecasting Bangladesh's Remittance Inflow

This study uses Eviews software in order to determine the best Box-Jenkins ARMA model for forecasting the growth rate of remittances in Bangladesh by utilizing time series data from the year 1980 to 2022. In our study, we used the Augmented Dickey-Fuller Test (ADF Test) to check the stationarity of the time series data. This test shows that data is stationary at level 0, i.e., Remittance (0). By performing several selection criteria for the lowest SIGMASQ and the lowest value of AIC and BIC, we obtain ARMA (1, 1), which is the best model for forecasting remittances in Bangladesh. Diagnostic tests additionally demonstrate the stability and acceptability of the parsimonious model that has been given for remittance prediction in Bangladesh. The study's findings reportedly demonstrate that Bangladesh's remittance inflows are declining. The article makes the case that, in order to increase remittance inflows into Bangladesh, the country's emigration policy needs to be strengthened.

Wartime (im)mobilities: effects of aspirations-capabilities on displaced Ukrainians in Canada and Germany and their viewpoints on those who remain in Ukraine

ABSTRACT In war times, what differentiates those who manage to flee from those who remain behind? Based on 468 qualitative interview and survey responses with displaced Ukrainians’ in Canada and Germany, and the aspirations-capabilities framework, we identify how macro-level policies and individual resources and aspirations combine to shape wartime (im)mobility outcomes. Canada and Germany have relaxed their entry-stay policies to facilitate the displaced populations’ arrival while Ukraine has implemented exit restrictions for conscript men aged 18–60 and, by extension, for the family members who decide to stay with them in Ukraine. Accordingly, individuals with high pre-war migration aspirations and capital have arrived in Canada, those with mid-ranging aspirations and capital have arrived in Germany, and those with high aspirations to be with the draftees have remained in Ukraine. We make a threefold contribution to forced migration studies. We argue that war acts as an amplifier of preexisting migration aspirations for some individuals, that wartime exit restriction is a distinct example of macro-level emigration policies, and that a proactive-stay-aspirations component extends the aspirations-capabilities framework’s conceptual range.

“A Desirable Class of Homeseekers”: Colonization, Race, and Italian Migration in the Progressive Era US South

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century in Italy and the United States, a transnational media dialogue emerged that promoted facilitated emigration policies that their supporters called colonization. Designed to permanently transfer a highly mobile population to a region with a proportionally small foreign-born population, colonization's press coverage exhibited an elite class and race consciousness that sought to remake landless Italian migrants, undesirable in other areas of the United States, into good citizens working their own farms in the American South. A close reading of articles published in Progressive Era magazines in Italian and English, and direct appeals for settlement to the Italian ambassador in Washington, demonstrate how proposals to colonize Italians in the American South shaped the debate over desirability in a period grappling with policy solutions, both in Italy and the United States, to an emerging immigration problem. Race and the immigration problem intersected powerfully in the Progressive Era South in unusual ways as colonizationists adopted their own definitions of racial desirability that centered white southerners’ economic needs. When historians take distribution policy as seriously as Progressives did, the public debate over desirability that drove turn-of-the-century restrictionism becomes more complicated and the significance of the regional setting more pronounced.

Policy differentiation and the politics of belonging in India’s emigrant and emigration policies

ABSTRACT India is the largest emigrant origin country in the world. The majority of Indian emigrants work in low-wage employment in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. This paper contrasts India’s policy responses directed at migrants living in the Gulf countries with policies targeted at those in the Global North. India has extended substantive rights and symbolic inclusion to Indian citizens and (descendants of) former citizens residing in the Global North. However, while it established a social protection framework for low-wage emigrants in the Gulf, these emigrants are often unable to access other substantive citizenship rights and are mostly ignored at the symbolic level. Through critical approaches to the study of diasporas and the lens of boundary work, this article analyzes how emigrant origin states (re-)define belonging through differentiated emigration and emigrant policies. It shows that the Indian state links inclusive/exclusive boundaries of (symbolic) national membership, inherent in emigration and emigrant policies, to classifications regarding emigrants’ social identities, in this case class and religion.

Administering Diaspora: Complexity and Innovation in the Emigrant Policies of Latin America and the Caribbean – A Learning Opportunity for the Global North?

Diaspora engagement policies are an area of migration policy which tends to be neglected in countries of the Global North. Specifically, the configuration of public administration agencies behind diaspora policies has been treated superficially in comparative analyses. Epistemic communities have created a narrative that diaspora policies are mostly a form of window dressing. Using original data, this article compares the configurations of agencies that design and implement diaspora policies across 22 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, a particularly innovative region in this policy area. It argues that the Global North misses a learning opportunity in overlooking their complexity.

Competing policies within the sending state: Labour export and the provision of primary healthcare in the Philippines

AbstractIn framing nations as places that either send or receive migrants, there is a danger in defining migrant‐sending nations as monolithic entities driven by a single mandate of exporting labour to a global economy. Using the concept of viscosity, we argue that sending states comprise multiple state agencies with varying interests, which can either impede, slow, or facilitate labour emigration. We demonstrate our argument by examining the Philippines' nurse retention policies against the backdrop of the country's labour export policies. While these retention policies led to an influx of Filipino nurses to rural health centres, these nurses considered such mobility a means to wait out the lack of opportunities for nurses overseas. Thus, inadvertently serving the interests of the Philippines' labour‐exporting regime. We argue that a nuanced view of sending states advances our understanding of how migrant‐sending nations balance emigration policies with other government interests beyond labour export.

Dimensions of emigration policy: An indexing exercise for polities across three regions

AbstractSpecialized indices of immigration, immigrant integration policies, and citizenship policies are expanding the confines of our knowledge in the field of comparative migration policies. Emigration policies, however, have garnered less attention. We address this gap in the literature, by using a new data set to create an index that measures contemporary emigration regulations of 32 polities across three regions in the world (Asia, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean). Based on this exploratory exercise, we examine the assumptions about emigration controls and policies being a matter of the past or belonging to non‐democratic regimes. We find that emigration policies go beyond the mere regulation of the right to exit. Different components across a continuum from restriction to encouragement of emigration suggest different rationales and purposes of states, even if the hardest forms of emigration control, such as exit bans are absent in the studied sample.

Closed Doors to Open Minds: Refugee Policies, Crossing Frontiers, and Émigré Art History

The present contribution focuses on the impact of closed frontiers and immigration policies in the tragic period of the 1930s when the need to emigrate became more and more evident for populations and individuals directly threatened by the rise of totalitarian regimes. I will, in the first part, briefly recall the problematic role of emigration policies, especially in the United States. In the second part, I will recall the stories of art historians who emigrated, and the impact of this experience on their scholarly engagement. Ultimately, I wish to open the question of art historians’ shifting engagement with societal issues through the impactful experience crossing frontiers had on their intellectual framework. How much, indeed, can we still learn today from the experiences of émigrés at a moment when the field of art history and visual studies itself has radically expanded and is in urgent need of reassessing its place and role within society?

The limits to migration policies

The sheer complexity of migration policies defies easy categorization. The complexity applies both to policies designed specifically to address migration, direct policies, and to policies designed for some other objective but which can have profound impacts upon migration, indirect policies. For reasons of practicality, this entry focuses primarily of the direct policies of immigration, emigration, migration and development, and integration. While the state is central to any analysis of migration policy, so, too, have become subnational units such as metropolitan areas, as well as supra-national units such as regional groupings. The multilateral, global level also provides a normative framework. Migration policy becomes challenged by underlying economic, political and social trends and the specific example of the «shock» of covid-19 is examined. The varying policy responses in the migration and development debate are outlined, which often give the illusion of control rather than of any ability to promote development or achieve objectives. Probabilities of success are only likely where migration policies are fully integrated into wider development policies.

Examining the cyclical pattern of remittance flow, migrants stock, and income of 31 pairs of countries with India

This study has examined the cyclical pattern of remittances, migrants’ stock, and income of 31 pairs of countries with India for the period from 2010 to 2016. The main motivation was to examine whether immigration and emigration policies play an influential role to improve welfare between the host and origin country or not in terms of bilateral remittance flows. As our bilateral remittance and migrant stock data follow a binomial distribution, so we have applied both ordered logit and ordered probit regression models to examine the smoothing hypothesis which was a new addition to the literature. Our result shows that remittance and migrant stocks show a counter-cyclical movement with an income of country origin while it shows a pro-cyclical movement with an income of country destination. The study concludes that financial constraint is a major issue for immigrants’ movement that leads to low remittances flows and should be alleviated. Further, immigration and emigration policies should be determined by looking at the unemployment rate, the magnitude of migration, and the population size of both host and origin countries.

Colonies et « question juive »

To this day, the idea that the Polish government collaborated with Hitler to persecute Jews in Africa during the Interwar period is a topic of debate—if not outright tension. Poland had clearly adopted anti-Jewish laws, as evidenced by its emigration policies, and Jewish emigration was one of the central focuses of the Interwar period. Only the great economic crisis, the rise of nationalism, a shift in the international balance of power, as well as other factors, derailed the country’s plans.However, the Polish political elite supported this idea, which was based on both colonial misconceptions—as seen in the case of the “Madagascar Plan”—and discriminatory political principles. This article examines how the Second Republic, influenced by national, and even nationalistic, currents in a population hostile to “foreigners” and Jews, promoted emigration as a solution to the social, political, and economic difficulties of the time.

"Observant of the Laws of this Commonwealth": A Free Black Family between Forced Migration and Slave Capitalism

In 1860, with the Civil War looming, David and Elizabeth Frazier (a free Black couple), petitioned for a legal exemption to an 1806 statute demanding that any newly-freed African Americans emigrate from the Commonwealth within a year of their emancipation. Their petition capped a decade-long struggle to gain their freedom and keep their family intact, during which the Fraziers campaigned on fronts spanning from the courtroom to the slave market. Through a microhistory of the Fraziers' battle for the right to remain in the Commonwealth, this essay explores the ways in which a slave state used emigration policies to safeguard the institution of slavery. It also reveals the ferocity with which Black Virginians defended their families and communities, and, by examining the Fraziers' twin deployment of the law and of relationships built through a decade of work amid the horrors of the domestic slave trade, reveals how free people of color seized the scarce options available to them. Between the law of white supremacy and the maw of slave capitalism, the Fraziers carved out a modicum of liberty for themselves and their children, escaping forced migration in their bondage and forced emigration in their freedom.

Entrapment processes in the emigration regime: The presence of migration bans and the absence of bilateral labor agreements in domestic work in Nepal

Abstract This Article offers an integrated analysis of the combined effect of the presence of migration bans and the absence of BLAs in domestic work in the emigration regime of Nepal. It identifies, acknowledges, critiques, and contributes to the critical literature highlighting entrapment processes in labor relations and immigration regimes by demonstrating the presence of such in the emigration regime. Drawing on the empirical findings of a participatory action research (PAR) project conducted in Nepal, the Article demonstrates how restrictive emigration policies and practices entail entrapment processes constitutive of the existing historical, cultural, gendered, racialized, and classed constraints impacting the lives of Nepalese citizens. The Article contributes to the critical literature that seeks to advance migrants’ rights, arguing that experiencing, encountering and escaping entrapment processes in the emigration regime impacts their agency when navigating immigration regimes and labor relations. This contribution advances the existing efforts to establish oft-ignored emigration regimes as important epistemological sites of research, theorization, and intervention.

Fantastyka polityczna czy konieczność? Portugalska Afryka, Nikaragua, Boliwia i Ekwador w polskich planach kolonialnych

Political Fantasy or Necessity? Polish Colonial Plans in Portuguese Africa, Nicaragua, Bolivia and EcuadorIn interwar Poland some institutions intended to solve part of the country’s economic and ethnic problems by acquiring colonies abroad. Accordingly, the Polish Foreign Ministry as well as special institutions such as the Union of Colonial Pioneers and the Maritime and Colonial League undertook some projects. Poland, a member of the victorious Entente, was supposedly entitled to ca. 10% of the area of the former German colonies (e.g. in Cameroon or Togo), which could be administered independently or as a condominium with one of the colonial powers. These plans were made more specific in the mid-1930s.Argentina and Brazil, as well as Madagascar, were considered to be natural goals of Polish emigration policies. Then Poland became interested in settlements in the colonial dominions of Portugal in Africa, i.e. Angola and Mozambique, and some time later, also in some countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. As for Bolivia, the aim was to send as many Ukrainians as possible to the mountainous area of Todos dos Santos (Province of Cochabamba). Places in the vicinity of the town of Ibera in Ecuador were also considered by the Polish authorities as suitable for settlers, predominantly from Poland’s eastern borderlands. In the region of Encarnacion in Paraguay, a colony called Fram was established in the 1930s. Nicaragua, too, was considered a convenient place for Polish colonisation, following an effort undertaken by the Polish businessman Stanisław Czarnocki, who was a personal acquaintance of the local dictator, the famous Anastasio Somoza senior. According to some unreliable rumours, Dominica was supposedly ready to accept some hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews.All in all, these Polish colonial ambitions were unsuccessful, mainly due to the lack of sufficient Polish state power to make them into reality.

Engaging with Labour Migrants: Emigration Policy in Tajikistan

ABSTRACT Tajikistan is one of the main migrant origin countries in the post-Soviet world, with about one million labour migrants living and working in Russia. It is also one of the world’s most remittance-dependent economies. By exploring how and why the Tajik government has engaged with labour migrants since 1991, this article analyses the development of emigration policy in Tajikistan. In doing so, the article de-reifies the state and illustrates the complexity of policy processes: many actors are directly and indirectly involved in policymaking and implementation. Four aspects are analysed: shifts in emigration policymaking over time and the influence of different domestic actors; the assistance offered to labour migrants; the impact of Russia as the main host country; and the influence of international organisations in the context of the nascent global governance of migration. This article argues that Tajikistan’s emigration policy has gradually moved from a laissez-faire phase, through a proactive, then a “messy”, to a reactive one. It shows that Tajik authorities have followed often contradictory pathways of (non)involvement with labour migrants and thereby illustrates how declared policies can be distinguished from informal practices performed by the state.

Courting diaspora for foreign direct investment: The conditional nature of diaspora engagement

AbstractThe paper focuses on an understudied aspect of the relationship between states and their diasporas—emigration policies attracting diaspora investment. I find that countries with weaker rule of law face particularly strong incentives to adopt diaspora engagement policies and engage in initiatives attracting diaspora investment as opposed to the countries with stronger rule of law. This argument is illustrated through an investment game between migrant investors and governments with different strengths of rule of law. It is tested by using the data from multiple levels of analysis: original and existing data examining the instances when top government officials reach out to their diasporas for investment and bilateral foreign direct investment and migration data.

Do Diaspora Engagement Policies Endure? An Update of the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX) to 2017

AbstractHow states of origin regulate the rights, obligations, and services they extend to their emigrants has remained mostly in the shadows of migration policy research. We have tackled this gap in the literature by advancing the Emigrant Policies Index (EMIX), which was designed for comparing the degree of adoption of emigrant policies – also called ‘diaspora‐engagement policies’ – across countries in a whole region and, with the update provided in this paper, for the first time in a longitudinal direction. Having previously introduced the EMIX in a synchronic frame, this article presents its scores for 14 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2015 and 2017. This effort already shows that some emigrant policies (e.g. citizenship policies) endure more than others (e.g. social policies). These suggestive findings support the need to compile not only cross‐national, but also longitudinal datasets on these policies.

Terrorism and Brain Drain in Pakistan: Is There a Connection?

This study empirically investigates the effect of terrorism and other push and pull factors on the skilled labour out-migration in Pakistan over the time period 1973–2015. The empirical findings based on fully modified ordinary least squares (FM-OLS) technique suggest that the waves of terrorism have not significantly driven the out-migration of skilled labour from Pakistan. Relatively, traditional push factors including inflation, unemployment and rising capital share in gross domestic product (GDP) have remained the major factors behind brain drain from Pakistan. Comparatively, the per capita economic growth, poverty and host and origin country’s emigration policies have curtailed the skilled out-migration. The findings suggest improving socio-economic conditions, increasing GDP per capita and decreasing unemployment and inflation in order to control the out-migration of skilled workers from Pakistan. Besides, the domestic labour market is required to boost the absorption capacity of highly educated and qualified workers in the country by making them more compatible to the existing stock of capital to restrict the brain drain. JEL: F22, F52, J24, C32

Emigrants into colonists: Settlement-oriented emigration to South America from Poland, 1918-1932

Starting in the late-nineteenth century, Polish national elites considered emigration a ‘necessary evil’ that alleviated local economic pressures. In the face of an exodus from all of the partitions, leaders of many political persuasions worked to channel the emigration of peasants towards destinations such as Paraná, where a ‘New Poland’ could be built. In the 1920s, the emerging inter-war Polish state created a sprawling emigration apparatus that adjusted the old policies to the new circumstances. This article traces the consecutive turns in the Polish government’s attitude towards emigration to South America, demonstrating the ways in which they mirrored broader European discourses and responded to systemic changes around the globe. Moreover, in line with the recent scholarship that points to the legacies of empire in inter-war Eastern Europe, the article also examines the relationship between the post-imperial nature of the nascent Polish state and its ‘colonial’ emigration policies.

Israeli emigration policies in the Gaza Strip: crafting demography and forming control in the aftermath of the 1967 War

This article uses archival sources to demonstrate how Israel crafted policies in the Gaza Strip following the 1967 War to reduce the size of its population, and how, in a two-year process, it reformed its policies to meet the needs of a long-standing occupation. Underlying these policies was the Israeli aspiration to annex the Strip without absorbing a large number of Arabs. The Israeli government developed an economic policy, based on high unemployment rates and low standard of living, aimed to encourage Gazans, and particularly refugees, to leave. In face of growing resistance, the Israeli government introduced in early 1969 a new economic policy, designed to improve the local economy, while continuing to encourage the emigration to other countries of educated youth. This new policy explains long-term demographic and economic patterns in the Palestinian society under a prolonged occupation and illuminate the Israeli mechanisms of control in the Gaza Strip.