The International Organization for Migration ( IOM) releases its World Migration Report every year. Most of these studies are anodyne, pointing to a liberal increase in relocation during the period of capitalism.
As states in the poorer regions of the world began to suffer from the effects of the Washington Consensus ( cuts, privatization, and austerity ), and as employment became more and more difficult, more and more people took to the streets to try to survive.
In 2000, the IOM released its primary World Migration Report, which stated that “it is estimated that there are more workers in the world than ever before.” It was between 1985 and 1990, the IOM calculated, that the rate of growth of world migration ( 2.59 % ) outstripped the rate of growth of the world population ( 1.7 % ).
A major force behind global movement was the liberal attack on government spending in poorer nations. By increasing payment payments to their families, it was evident that the migrants had become an important pressure in providing foreign change to their countries by 1990.
Remittances, primarily from the international working class, outstripped the volume of official development assistance ( ODA ) by three times and foreign direct investment ( FDI) by 2015. FDI is the investment funds provided by private companies, whereas ODA is the support provided by says.
For some places, such as Mexico and the Philippines, payment obligations from working- group migrants prevented state debt.
This year’s report notes that there are “roughly 281 million people worldwide” who are on the shift. This is 3.6 % of the world community. It is much higher than the 153 million persons in 1990 and is quad the 84 million people who moved in 1970.
” International trends point to more movement in the future”, notes the IOM. Based on extensive research, the IOM finds that the increase in relocation may be attributed to three aspects: conflict, economic precarity and weather change.
Second, people relocate battle, and with the increase in war, this has become a leading cause of movement. Conflicts are exacerbated into battle because of the enormous level of the arms trade and the pressures of the merchants of death to avoid peace initiatives and to use extremely expensive weaponry to resolve disputes. Many of these problems may be resolved by quiet heads are allowed to succeed.
Global military spending is now nearly US$ 3 trillion, three- quarters of it by the Global North countries. Meanwhile, arms companies made a whopping$ 600 billion in profits in 2022. Because of this profiteering by the merchants of death, tens of millions of people are permanently displaced.
Second, the International Labor Organization ( ILO ) calculates that about 58 % of the global workforce –or 2 billion people – are in the informal sector. They have little access to social security and little protection at home.
The data on youth unemployment and youth precarity is stunning, with the Indian numbers horrifying. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, India’s youth, who are between the ages of 15 and 24, are “faced by a double whammy of low and falling labor participation rates and shockingly high unemployment rates. The unemployment rate among youth stood at 45.4 % in 2022- 23. This is six times higher than India’s 7.5 % unemployment rate, which is alarming.
Many West African migrants who attempt the dangerous crossing of the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea are frightened by the region’s high levels of precarity, underemployment, and unemployment.
According to a 2018 report from the African Development Bank Group, peasants have moved from rural areas to cities to low-productivity informal services, where they decide to relocate for the lure of higher incomes in the West, as a result of the attack on global agriculture.
Third, more and more people are faced with the adverse impacts of the climate catastrophe. Government leaders convened in 2015 to create a Task Force on Climate Migration at the Paris climate summit. Three years later, in 2018, the UN Global Compact declared that those who are moving because of climate degradation must be protected.
However, the concept of” climate refugees” is not yet established. In 2021, a World Bank report calculated that by 2050 there will be at least 216 million climate refugees.
According to the IOM’s most recent report, these immigrants, many of whom lead extremely precarious lives, return larger and larger sums of money to aid their increasingly flimsy families.
” The money they send home”, the IOM report notes, “increased by a staggering 650 %during the period from 2000 to 2022, rising from$ 128 billion to$ 831 billion”.
Most of these remittances in the recent period, analysts show, go to low- income and middle- income countries. Of the$ 831 billion, for instance,$ 647 billion goes to poorer nations.
Working-class migrants ‘ remittances make up the majority of these nations ‘ gross domestic product ( GDP ), which is significantly higher than FDI and ODA combined.
Remittance payments are subject to two crucial aspects, according to a number of studies conducted by the World Bank. First, these are more evenly distributed amongst the poorer nations. FDI transactions typically benefit the largest economies in the Global South and are directed at sectors that do not always offer the poorest members of the population employment or income.
Second, household surveys indicate that these remittances significantly lower poverty in low- and middle-income nations. For instance, remittance payments made by working-class migrants reduced the rate of poverty in Ghana by 5 %, in Bangladesh by 6 %, and in Uganda by 1 %. When remittances are dropped, countries like Mexico and the Philippines see their poverty rates dramatically rise.
The treatment of these migrants, who are crucial for poverty reduction and for building wealth in society, is outrageous. They are treated as criminals and are abandoned by their own nations, which prefer to spend cheesy money on foreign investments through multinational corporations rather than attracting less impactful investments.
According to the data, a shift in the class perspective regarding investment is required. More in- and out-of-country “hot money” than the “hot money” that” triangles down” into society are greater in volume and have a greater impact on society.
If the migrants of the world – all 281 million of them – lived in one country, then they would form the fourth largest country in the world after India ( 1.4 billion ), China ( 1.4 billion ), and the United States ( 339 million ).
However, migrants are treated poorly and with little respect ( a recent study from the Zetkin Forum for Social Research demonstrates, for instance, how Europe treats migrants as criminals ).
In many cases, their wages are suppressed due to their lack of documentation, and their remittances are taxed heavily by international wire services ( PayPal, Western Union, and Moneygram ) which charge high fees to both the sender and the recipient.
There are currently only a few small political initiatives that support the migrants, and no platform that can bring their populations together into a potent political force.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, an editor of .org”>Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
He has written more than 20 books, including .amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20″>The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Globetrotter produced this article, and it has since been republished.