Turn on the TV in India at the moment and sooner or later you come across one man’s search for love. He stares at the floor as a girl shyly sings for him amidst a flock of encouraging relatives. Cut to another scene where he looks horribly uncomfortable as a second prospective wife tells him her PhD is in “the behavioural patterns of ugly men”. And so on, and so on. It’s awfully awkward and your heart goes out to him – but at least he seems to have a large number of prospective brides. Which is indeed the point.
The montage is an advert for the BBC, an attempt to show the importance of taking a global perspective to understand local trends. And the example they’ve chosen to demonstrate this is the current high demand for local grooms – why? Because the global recession is causing Indians abroad to lose their jobs. Whilst the motifs of the economic crisis in the UK may have been bank collapse and rising domestic unemployment, in India shrinking opportunities for Indian workers abroad is just as resonant an issue.
Of course migration hasn’t been absent from discussions of the recession in the UK – far from it. But the focus has been almost totally on whether migration will affect UK workers, with protestors demanding ‘British jobs for British workers’. Little attention has been given to what the recession means for migrants and prospective migrants. And that, of course, simply reflects our broader national dialogue about migration, which is seen almost entirely as a domestic issue.
Now every government has a primary responsibility to its own people. But there are very few issues to which our approach is so stridently domestic and protectionist. Looking at the experiences of India’s migrants makes clear how inappropriate this is. One Indian state – Kerala – has especially high numbers of migrants, who go primarily to the Persian Gulf. All sorts of people leave – domestic workers, construction labourers, engineers – and they have helped build the region’s towers and reputation for customer service. But the recession has led to a plummeting of labour demand, and many are losing their jobs.
Whilst this might benefit our locally employed friend in his search for a wife, effects on the migrants and their families and communities are drastic. Remittances – money migrants send back to Kerala – had reached more than £5bn pounds annually, more than double the state’s total tax take. This looks likely to slow, with devastating effects. Real estate prices in migrant-heavy districts are already crashing, as migrants’ families suddenly have fewer funds to invest, and worse, suicides by returned migrants are rising.
But this isn’t the whole story of Indian migration, of course. Indian workers have moved all over the world, with some, for example, going to California’s Silicon Valley. The global recession also threatens this movement, however, with US bail out conditions forbidding companies in receipt of state funds from hiring such migrants. Again, the effects on India could be substantial. Migrants who have moved to the US have played a key role in strengthening India’s IT industry. They invested back home when others refused to, knowing better than anyone the potential presented by the highly skilled but relatively low paid labour force. This played a key role in getting the industry off the ground. Plus, many migrants eventually return to India, bringing back new skills and fresh approaches gained abroad, strengthening the sector. If these migration opportunities are truncated, it seems Indian business could be harmed.
It’s clear then that migration has important international implications. A truly progressive migration policy would take them into account. But this is not just because of our moral obligation to the citizens of other countries (though moral obligations matter), as the Indian case makes clear. Indian migration has benefited the countries receiving its migrants as much as India itself. Without migrant labour the Gulf simply couldn’t have become the place it is today. And Indian migrants didn’t just help build the Indian IT industry, they also built Silicon Valley. In the early 90s, a key time for the sector, one quarter of all start ups had an Indian founder. New ideas and skills didn’t just flow back to India when its migrants returned. They flowed into the US with them too.
Global interconnectedness isn’t just a reason to watch a global news channel, it’s a fundamental reality, as the global financial crisis has made clear. We need to realize, however, that interconnectedness goes beyond finance and trade and also includes migration. Examining Indian experiences shows that a progressive migration policy must recognize this, and reflect the moral responsibility and the benefits that it brings.
ippr has developed a major project on migration and development in partnership with the Global Development Network (GDN).