By Anju Mary Paul

Humans are social beings and we have evolved to want to feel like we belong. It may be to a family, a tribe, a nation, but a sense of belonging to a group that is larger than ourselves feeds our sense of self, and can give us a sense of security and purpose.

 

Migration – both internal and international, voluntary and involuntary – is often destabilizing because it takes us physically out of our traditional social groups and places us in new contexts with new people. Migration often expands a person’s self-identity as they take on new roles, increase their knowledge of the world, build new capacities for personal growth, and establish connections with new people in their new location. However, migration can also result in status loss, increased personal stress, the rupture of family and friendship ties, and alienation and isolation.

 

In the 21st century, more and more people are engaging in international migration, but much of this migration is occurring within a political-legal framework where permanent settlement overseas is not an option. High- and middle-income countries need migrants to take on dirty, dangerous, and demeaning jobs that natives shirk, and to fill other structural and demographic gaps in their domestic labor markets. However, these countries want but do not welcome most of these migrants, and rely on guestworker programs and strict labor and immigration restrictions to ensure that many economic migrants do not settle down within their borders. Governments are also nervous about the permanent settlement of high-skilled migrants in case this upsets their existing ethnic/racial proportions or instigates a nativist/populist backlash against foreigners who take “good” jobs away from locals. The bargain that is offered these high- and low-skilled economic migrants is that they can earn higher wages overseas in their host country for several years and perhaps even decades, but they will never be able to fully belong and can never integrate themselves into their host society. The integration and assimilation of first-generation immigrants is already a difficult policy goal to accomplish. With temporary labor migrants defined by the host state as transient sojourners, the possibility of their settlement and integration are taken off the table.

 

What does the imposition of transience as an identity do to migrants? One outcome is that it increases these migrants’ spatial mobility. Host governments imagine that temporary migrants will return to their home countries upon the completion of their contracts or when they reach their economically “unproductive” years. Instead, many migrants will seek out work in other overseas destinations, adopting a stepwise migration strategy and seeing their current destination as merely a stepping stone to somewhere “better.” This is linked to the migrant’s adoption of more general self-interested behavior, that is, seeking to maximize their profit from their overseas job while reducing their psychic, emotional, and economic commitment to the host country in which they are located. On the social and cultural front, this can include actions such as not interacting with natives, not learning the local language(s), and maintaining exclusive ethnic enclaves. On the economic front, this can mean limiting their long-term investments in their host country and instead remitting their savings and entrepreneurial ideas back to their home country or elsewhere. On the political front, this can result in a significant slice of the resident population being disengaged from the civic life of the nation. Whether we take a human capital, or a more philosophical approach, to the question of labor migration, it is necessary to consider these opportunity costs to the receiving society of imposing transience on economic (and other) migrants.