Doctoral Dissertation Research: State Capacity and Labor Migration

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

SES- 1435946 Vivek Chibber Suzy Lee New York University In recent years, international labor migration has become an increasingly visible component of overall economic development strategy, promoted by the World Bank and other international agencies as a potential source of foreign exchange, with the Philippines often upheld to be a model for how states can "manage" migration flows. For the past forty years, the Philippines have been among the top labor exporting countries of the world -- in both absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population. This project seeks to identify the factors that explain this rate of migration. The predominant explanation for this phenomenon, in both policy and scholarly circles, has been to attribute high rates of migration to migration itself: past migration produces social networks that facilitate and promote further migration. The problem with this explanation is that, while it works well to explain migration from certain countries, such as that of Mexican workers to the U.S., it fails to explain the Philippine case, which relies less on friends-and-family networks than it does on a complex state-led bureaucracy that helps coordinate migrants with international labor markets. This dissertation will assess the role of the Philippine state, and, more importantly, to explain the factors that contributed to the development of the state's labor export system. Among the factors examined will be the role of elite preference: Did economic and social elites promote the development of a labor export program as a political "safety valve" -- a means to ameliorate social and economic conflicts without making the radical changes required for rapid economic development? If it can be shown that, in the Philippine case, the very factors that led to the strength of the labor export apparatus were also the factors that obstructed the development of state capacity in agrarian reform and industrialization -- two policy areas critical to economic development, it would suggest that promoting labor migration is unlikely ever to produce the desired development outcomes. It would suggest that the social costs of such policies are not likely to be balanced by economic growth, and thus, that the people of developing countries are better served by policies that do not rely on large-scale labor migration. Scholarship on migration, particularly in the U.S., has long been dominated by the importance of the Mexican-U.S. migration circuit, in which historical links and strong social networks has played a major causal role, while the sending states efforts to intervene in migration has been largely nonexistent. In the past two decades, new research on other labor migrations, notably from the Philippines, has suggested that states can play a more significant role. However, migration theory has struggled to incorporate these findings, opting, for the most part, to see the Philippine state?s activities as an extension of the social networks theory a more institutional and structured form under which migration takes place, but both a product of the same forces that produce migration elsewhere and producing effects that are not very different from what would occur without state intervention. Demonstrating that a domestic causal factor, not directly related to migration itself, was key in the development of the Philippines labor export apparatus, would advance our understanding of international labor migration and states' role in its growth and globalization.