EN CASTILLA Y LEÓN
3- MATERIALES Y METODOS
All migrations take place in a simultaneous time-space setting (Malmberg 1997).
Therefore, all geographies of migration – or any form of human mobility – have temporal dimensions as well. Often, short-distance moves, such as cross-border commuting, take place over short time-spans and with high frequencies, whereas long-distance migrations, such as from Europe to Australia, take place infrequently, perhaps only once in a lifetime.
The new geographies of migration in Europe, facilitated by free movement for those
‘within’, or controlled by visa regulations for those ‘outside’, are lubricated by faster and cheaper travel, but they also reflect changing temporalities of movement. Even the very word ‘migration’ gets elided to accommodate the new time-regimes of mobility rather than migration. Once again, this is not a neutral semantic shift. Migration implies that the migrants will stay for some time, perhaps for good. Mobility implies that people will not stay but will remain on the move; they will move on or return back home.
In light of the above, it is interesting to observe that the word ‘migration’ is often accompanied, or even replaced, by the term ‘mobility’ in recent Commission documents (e.g. EC 2011a; EC 2014: 3, 815). A similar shift from migration towards mobility is evident in recent IOM ‘World Migration’ reports (IOM 2008: 23–49; 2010: 11–27). And
14 For other relevant case-studies, see Labrianidis and Vogiatzis (2013); Triandafyllidou and Gropas (2014; Bygnes (2015); Conti and King (2015).
15 In EU documents, ‘mobility’ usually refers to intra-EU mobility for EU citizens.
the UNDP Human Development Report devoted to the developmental possibilities of migration preferred the term mobility in its title and throughout much of the text (UNDP 2009).
Since the early 2000s, circular migration, sometimes referred to as temporary migration programmes or TMPs (Ruhs 2006), has become all the rage in international migration policy circles. It is seen as a rational strategy when trying to balance receiving countries’
specific needs for certain types of labour with the aim of migrants being effective contributors to their home country’s development. The virtuous result is the ‘win-win-win’ situation which circular migration theoretically offers: the migrants win because they get work and an income, the receiving countries win because their labour needs are suddenly filled without having the cost of ‘raising’ the workers from birth, and the sending countries win because they can export their unemployed workers and get back, in return, flows of remittances and savings from migrants’ earnings abroad. This triple-win scenario is discussed in more detail and from a more critical stance in Chapter 4 (see section 4.1).
To a certain extent, and in many contexts, the benefits alluded to above are real.
Moreover, this can be a pragmatic solution to the desire of migrants (increasingly seen as transnational migrants) to not uproot themselves from home and to keep at least part of their lives (including, perhaps, their families) based there.
The more questionable aspects of circular migration are raised by several authors. Writing in a NEUJOBS publication, Cholewinski (2014) points to the danger of circular migrants being reduced to a commodity to be traded back and forth, with little attention given to their rights as workers or as human beings. Hence they may suffer discrimination, exploitation and social exclusion; they may be denied their workers’ rights and attention may not be paid to their integration; it is also likely that they will not be able to bring family members with them. Castles (2006) writes that circular migration recalls the old and discredited guestworker system, and therefore runs the risk of the same negative social outcomes. Nevertheless, circular migration is more amenable to public opinion than other types of migration, because the idea is that the temporary workers will not stay long.
Two other FP7 projects are more centrally geared to the study of temporary migration and circular mobility. Both only started in 2014, so outputs are preliminary. TEMPER investigates temporary and other short-term migration flows, focusing on a number of countries from four major geographic sending areas: Eastern Europe (Romania, Ukraine), Latin America (Argentina, Colombia), Sub-Saharan Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Senegal) and North Africa (Morocco). The destination countries under analysis are France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Thus far, TEMPER (2015) has carried out an inventory of EU and national legislation on short-term migration which shows that, although the EU has succeeded in harmonising some aspects of its relevant migration policy, such as short-stay visas, many procedures and discretionary implementations are at the state level and are not being harmonised. As an example, the challenge of migrant overstaying remains a question of weak internal controls rather than one of efficient entry controls, since most overstayers enter legally on visitor, tourist or student visas.
Overall, TEMPER has identified great difficulties in measuring actual temporary and circular migration flows, mainly because most national statistical systems in the EU have limited possibilities to measure out-migration. Furthermore, detailed scrutiny of Eurostat data on immigration showed the underlying heterogeneity of the information provided by different countries, partially concealed by the lack of proper documentation in the metadata, thus making comparisons less reliable.
In addition to this work, the TEMPER project is developing ‘ImPol’, a tool that allows a historical quantitative and qualitative overview of immigration policies of different EU countries since the 1970s, classified by channel of entry – short-stay, family, irregular, studies and work. The ImPol database has systematically collected and codified legal texts including international treaties, laws, decrees, circulars, instructions and judgments that regulate the entry of foreigners of any nationality into three EU countries (France, Italy and Spain) for the period between 1960 and 2008. The database is currently being extended to 2015 and the UK is being included among the destination countries.
The greatest value of ImPol derives from the fact that information has been codified in a way that allows not only for contextual analyses, but also for a wide range of statistical analyses aimed at 'measuring' the effect of admission policies on a range of outcomes.
The index will be used by TEMPER, in combination with primary data collection exercises, as a tool for the evaluation of how policies on temporary and circular labour migration are actually being implemented in different EU Member States.
The other project, EURA-NET, aims to understand the evolving nature of temporary migration in the Euro-Asian context and analyses transnational migration and mobility between the following countries: China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Turkey and Ukraine. The project emphasises, first, that there is no commonly agreed definition of what constitutes ‘temporary migration’, as definitions and registration procedures differ across countries. A second preliminary finding is that temporary migration between the EU and Asia is on the increase, in the general context of globalisation and more specifically due to Asia’s growing markets and large and increasingly highly educated population (Pitkänen and Carrera 2014;
Pitkänen and Korpela 2015). For example, Thailand attracts increasing numbers of retirees, medical tourists and lifestyle migrants from Europe. Most Europeans in Asia are resident there on a temporary basis (and presumably such is also their intention), whereas Asian people typically migrate to Europe wanting to have the option of settling permanently; however, due to restrictions in the receiving countries, their residence often ends up being temporary.
The general thrust of EU policy thinking and allied research reflects a twin approach to increasing the facilitation of mobility and circularity but being cautious about the long-term settlement of migrants. Objectively, there is a need to recognise the changing temporalities of people’s movements around the world, including in and out of, and within, Europe. There are the needs of businesspeople, professionals, students, academics and transnational family carers, all of whom need flexible and helpful policies of legal access. More difficult is the policy landscape of labour migration, especially in job sectors where seasonal work is important (agriculture, tourism) and where demand for labour has to be effectively matched with supply, both in space and in time. Often this can be achieved, with the added benefit that the workers themselves want to maintain their ongoing lives in their countries of origin. This demands, however, that special attention be paid to working conditions and the maintenance of a respectful social status, so that temporary or circulating labour is not exploited or socially degraded (Nieswand 2011).