GLOBALISATION AND MIGRATION

GLOBALISATION AND MIGRATION

1. Globalisation

   • Barriers between societies are disappearing and people are becoming increasingly interconnected across national boundaries
   • Result of many processes
     • Including the growth of communication systems and global media, the creation of global markets, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and expansion of the European Union
   • Producing rapid social changes
     • Increased international migration - movement of people across borders

2. Acceleration

   • Rate of migration increasing
     • United Nations (2013)
       • Between 2000 and 2013
         • International migration increased by 33% to reach 3.2% of the world's population
         • 862,000 people either entered or left the UK

3. Differentiation

   • Increasing the diversity of types of migrant
     • Students now a major part of migrants
       • UK - 2014
         • More Chinese-born (26%) than UK-born (23%) postgraduate students
   • Before 1990s
     • Immigration to the UK
       • Came from narrow range of former British colonies
         • Most had the right to settle and become citizens
           • Formed a small number of stable, geographically concentrated and homogenous ethnic communities
   • Vertovec
     • Super-diversity
       • Migrants now come from a wider range of countries
       • Within single ethnic group
         • Individuals differ in terms of their legal status E.G. As citizens or spouses
         • May be divided by culture or religion and be widely dispersed throughout the UK
   • Class differences among migrants
     • Cohen
       • 3 types of migrant
         • Citizens
           • Full citizenship rights
             • 1970s
               • UK state has made it harder for immigrants to acquire these rights
         • Denizens
           • Privileged foreign nationals welcomed by the state
             • E.G. Billionaire 'oligarchs' or highly paid employees of multinational companies
         • Helots
           • Most exploited group
             • States and employers regard them as disposable units of labour power
               • Reserve army of labour
           • Found in unskilled, poorly paid work and include illegally trafficked workers
           • Legally tied to particular employers such as domestic servants

4. The feminisation of migration

   • Almost half of all global migrants are female
     • Globalisation of the gender division of labour
       • Female migrants find that they are fitted into patriarchal stereotypes about women's roles as carers or providers of sexual services
   • Ehrenreich and Hochschild
     • Care work, domestic work and sex work in western countries is increasingly done by women from poor countries
       • Result of several trends
         • The failure of the state to provide adequate childcare
         • Western men remain unwilling to perform domestic labour
         • Western women have joined the labour force and are less wiling or able to perform domestic labour
   • Shutes
     • 40% of adult care nurses in the UK are migrants - most are female
   • Global transfer of women's emotional labour
     • E.G. Migrant nannies provide care and affection for their employers' children at the expense of their own children left behind in their home country
   • Migrant women enter western countries as 'mail order' brides
     • Reflects gendered and racialised stereotypes