By Rajeswar Basu
Published On: February 13, 2022 at 13:21 IST
Introduction
Transnational migration with global flows of labour has always been[1] significant in the South Asian context. However, today’s unprecedented exodus continues to shock one. When talking about forced migration in South Asia, there are a number of reasons that can be cited which include agricultural distress, climate change induced displacement, the rise in socio-political tensions often forcing a huge chunk of the population to migrate, either to urban centres within the region or to other far off destinations (e.g., Gulf countries) and beyond. The process of forced migration results in migrants being relegated to the ranks of the precariat.
Not surprisingly, each day around 2000 farmers who face[2] abject poverty engages in rural-to-urban migration, swelling the ranks of the precariat. In the case of Nepal, 1,600 workers leave Nepal for foreign employment each day, joining the ranks of millions overseas.
Today, half of all Nepali households survive on the income coming from overseas. Bangladesh, already grappling with the Rohingya crisis, has at hands another migration problem where people are searching for an alternative between battered coastlines and urban slums.
Now moving on to Pakistan, where the urban population is growing at a rate of three per cent a year, there has been a vast mass migration to cities faster than any other country in South Asia. By 2030, 250 million citizens of the country will reside in its cities.
In the last two decades, Sri Lanka has seen a tenfold increase in migrant numbers and as per current estimates, about 1.7 million migrants work abroad, with an annual outflow of about 200,000 persons. The prospect of rising sea levels will drive hundreds of thousands of Maldivians to far-off lands.
Moreover, there are millions of refugees, asylum-seekers, development-induced displaced people and others, who are subject to forced migration. The region has also been afflicted with imperialist occupations, conflicts and civil wars, forcing displacement and expatriation of high magnitude.
Migrants in the labour market; situating ‘Migration’ within the gender binary
What must not be left out is the gender dimension to migration[3] which has been pointed out in a report by ILO whereby it is shown that from 2000 to 2010, the number of migrants from South Asia more than doubled, with an increasing number of women moving independently.
Migration obviously continues to remain a crucial livelihood strategy given the heavy remittances from the migrant’s earnings provides financial support to their family members who survive on that.
At the same time, the report concedes that in receiving economies, migrants create turmoil in the labour market as they take way the jobs of locals as well as generate downward pressure on wages; there is a complete violation of labour laws thereby creating the conditions for forced labour.
Undoubtedly, migrants are a lot more disadvantaged than non-migrants and come to terms with additional discriminations in various forms. There are numerous reports which highlight their inadequate wages, poor and hazardous working environments, squalid living conditions and the heavy burden of work owing to their migrant status.
They remain neglected in the sense that migrants are denied access to social security measures, including food and health programmes. They become targets of prejudicial treatments, harassment, violence and ostracization when they shift to socio-culturally different locations.
These vulnerabilities spring up even further if they are deemed to be illegal or unauthorised.
South Asia continues to witness an increasing rate of migration- both internal and external- over the past three decades. These two categories of migration might be distinguished in terms of internal dynamics of their own but the significant overlaps between these two streams cannot be discounted.[4]
The poor and vulnerable are compelled to move at an alarming pace, largely such migration remains undocumented across the region. In the receiving economies, they are assigned with precarious jobs in the labour market to form the underclass. While acknowledging migration as the only alternative livelihood strategy available to such population, the report notes that mitigating the issues of unemployment and underemployment comes at a cost.
As already discussed, remittance inflows are an important source of income for migrant households and the source countries which aims at reducing extreme poverty but giving rise to other social inequalities and vulnerabilities. These vulnerable migrations have their clients.
Migration aids in the process of capitalist accumulation and growth by providing a steady flow of cheap labour at the destination. Employers prefer migrants since it is flexible, easy to control, unorganised and bargain-priced. By ‘flexible’, it is meant that such migrants generally employed in the informal sector are deprived of proper working conditions and basic rights. Migration also has its gender dimensions with women’s migration which carries associated risks and perils. Female migrants, including the refugees and the displaced, are at much a greater danger of abuse and exploitation, including trafficking.
However, in the case of high skilled women, it is comparatively better but the vast section of the female workforce is engaged in low-skilled jobs. They are more exploited and work in less-regulated and less-visible sectors than male migrants.
Locating Vulnerability, Inequality and Poverty from the migrant’s lens
The connection between poverty and migration is self-evident especially in this present global era of neo-liberal economics which has resulted in the acceleration of this phenomenon.
Neo-liberal policy gives rise to growing economic inequalities thereby having an impact upon the ability of poor families to sustain themselves where they are. Poverty and a lack of opportunities compel the poor to move in search of new opportunities for sustenance. At the same time, the state backs away from adopting a pro-poor public policy and support measures in a neoliberal regime which further increases the precarity of the migrant worker and his/her family, either living with him or her or left behind.
It is usually seen that the ruing political regime is hell bent on heaping the blame of poverty and inequality by referring to the influx of migrants, thus deflecting the anger of the deprived to the hapless migrant. Globally, there has been a political shift towards the far right which promotes majoritarianism and encourages xenophobia, often viewing the migrant as the “other” to be reviled. What is disturbing is the hardening of borders to the free movement of people in an era of globalisation of capital.
An understanding of migration is critical to an analysis of labour and poverty, and labour struggles in any region. It is equally critical for an understanding of urban society and the struggle for sustainability and democracy. There are varied responses by different state regimes to this challenge and differing impacts on society. This analysis has to be at the core of any fundamental understanding of societies in transition.
Condition of IDPs in South Asia: An emerging question of statelessness
In South Asia, one finds that majority of the displaced are victims of the policies of governments[5]. During the last five decades, displacement has occurred not on the account of violation of human rights on the part of state/non-state actors but rather due to the structural violence inherent in the development policies of states.
India, the largest country in South Asia has more than 21 million displaced persons within borders, the bulk of which constitute people who have been displaced by development projects implemented on the part of the government. It would sound outrageous but it could be argued that those who are uprooted by government development policies have even less freedom of choice than the victims of generalised violence.
The rehabilitation process in the case of such people has not taken lace and is not possible as well. Thus, they continue to remain displaced within the borders of their counties. In the context of South Asia, only a small fraction of these persons has crossed international borders.
But when they do so, they are often termed as voluntary migrants and not refugees. Forced migration in the South Asian region or for that matter any part of the globe is customarily divided into two types: internal and external on the basis of the territorial spread in which it takes place. But in this article, my focus would remain on the first type.
The sheer magnitude of forced internal migration, or internally displaced persons or IDPs, as they are popularly called, in the countries of the South Asian region is believed to outweigh that of external migration. While the refugee crisis in some way or the other has acquired some legal standing in the international context, the status of the IDPs still continues to remain ambiguous. For someone like me, who works on the issue of forced internal displacement, at times find it almost impossible to make any watertight distinction between forced internal migration and forced external migration.
An instance could be in the seventies and eighties, a large number of ethnic Nepali people who lived in various parts of north-eastern India were suddenly branded as ‘foreigners’ by the protagonists of ethnic movements in Assam and Meghalaya states of the Indian Union and were forced to take refuge in Nepal across the international border to escape torture and harassment and even death at the hands of the agitators.
By all accounts, most of these Nepalese were bonafide citizens of India. The point that I am basically trying to drive home is that the issue of external migration cannot be properly understood independent of its internal dimension.[6]
Role of state/non-state actors in creating IDPs
The UN Secretary General in his analytical report on the IDPs dated 14th February 1992 defined the IDPs as
Persons who have been forced to flee their homes suddenly or unexpectedly in large numbers as result of armed conflict, internal strife, systematic violation of human rights or natural or man-made disasters, and also who are within the territory of their country.
However, this definition of IDPs carries certain deficiencies especially when it comes to the Third World or South Asian context.
First, while it is true that a substantial number of IDPs comprises those who, according to this definition, are ‘forced to flee’ on their own, there exists some examples of people who were moved from their homes by the state. The case of Merapani, for instance, which is a small and sleepy village situated along the Assam-Nagaland border whose inhabitants often had to be evacuated on several occasions by the central government of India. There was a bone of contention between Assam and Nagaland.
They used to send their armed constabularies to ‘evict’ officials of each other from the village which resulted in clashes between the two forces, leading to death of civilians. The central government of India was forced to evacuate the civilians from the village to safer areas. It is evident from this example that the state played an active part in sending the ‘threatened’ population to ‘safe’ areas.
Secondly, some cases of internal displacement are neither ‘sudden’ nor ‘unexpected’ as they occur in a planned manner and with meticulous precision. In such cases, the potential outsees are informed in prior of their imminent displacement.
In 1899 in India, an organization of the Bodo indigenous people had issued a notice to the Santhals an indigenous people of southern Bihar to vacate the ‘Bodoland’ areas by 15 August otherwise they would be evicted forcefully. The Santhals were forcibly removed from their traditional habitat and sent to Bodoland as indentured labour for the tea gardens by the British in late nineteenth century.[7]
Edited by: Ankita Singh, Associate Editor, Law Insider
References
- Migration in South Asia: Poverty and Vulnerability (ruralindiaonline.org) ↑
- Ibid,pg.10-11 ↑
- Ibid pg.11 ↑
- Ibid pg.12 ↑
- Das, Samir, Sabyasachi Basu, Roy Cahudhury, and Tapan K. Bose. “FORCED MIGRATION IN SOUTH ASIA: A CRITICAL REVIEW.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2000): 48–57. ↑
- Ibid pg.48-49 ↑
- Ibid pg.49 ↑
