Abstract
This chapter covers the contemporary phase of cross-border labor mobility focusing on: (1) how the forces of globalization—such as the rapid growth of international trade, commerce, and investment—have phenomenally increased international migration both in terms of absolute numbers and percentages of people living in a country where they are not born; (b) why most migrants are now moving to advanced developed countries where native populations may not be particularly welcoming; (c) why many migrants now maintain active connections with their homelands and why many migrants are moving abroad for earning remittance alone; (d) how and why slavery-like practices, such as forced marriage and sex trafficking, have been on the rise around the world; and (e) how various countries have been addressing the phenomenal growth in political refugees resulting from a redrawing of national boundaries, civil strife, political conflict, governmental repression, and so on.
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- 1.
The United States however introduced the farmworker program with Mexico in 1917, which continued up to 1922. Under the program about half-a million Mexican workers were imported to work on American farms.
- 2.
The UN defines an international migrant as any person who has changed his or her country of usual residence. Short-term migrants are those who have changed their country of usual residence for at least three months but less than one year, and long-term migrants are those who have done so for at least one year. There are currently two main international datasets on international migration flows, both are derived from national statistics: the UN DESA’s International Migration Flows dataset and the OECD’s International Migration Database. Both datasets have been used in this study.
- 3.
Permanent migrant refers to one who is granted a residence permit by a country—such permits are renewable and conditions for renewal may vary from country to country.
- 4.
Of course, as described in Chapter 8, Europe had a major refugee crisis between 2014 and 2016, when about two million political refugees, mainly from war-torn Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan took refuge in European countries.
- 5.
Foreign-born refers to all persons who have migrated from their country of birth to their current country of residence, including those born as nationals abroad.
- 6.
The traditional forms of slavery however have not yet totally disappeared. Some countries, such as Mauritania and Niger, have adopted anti-slavery legislation only recently (Quirk 2011, 167–192), and in many parts of the world traditional-style slavery has been practiced in situations of military conflicts (ILO-WFF 2018; UNODC 2011).
- 7.
ILO-WFF (2018) maintain that of the 10 countries with the highest prevalence of global modern slavery in 2016, three of them—North Korea, Eritrea, and Burundi—have the highest prevalence of state-imposed forced labor as well. The Report found that Korea had 104.6 victims per 1000 of the population in state-imposed forced labor—routinely mobilized for unpaid communal labor in agriculture, road building, and construction. The US State Department (2019) also suggests that the North Korean government mobilizes thousands of adults and children to prison camps and labor-training centers.
- 8.
For example, the League of Nations Slavery Convention, 1926, defined slavery as the “status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching the right of ownership are exercised.” The Forced Labor Convention of the ILO, 1930, defined forced labor as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.” The UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, 1956, included various other forms of slave-like exploitation, such as serfdom and debt bondage, as slavery.
- 9.
Forms of coerced labor that the UN now considers ‘modern slavery’ include: (a) bonded labor—workers who have failed to pay back debt and are forced to work for free to repay lenders; (b) descent-based slavery—people born into slavery because their families belong to a certain class or caste of ‘slaves’ in countries that have strict hierarchical social structures; (c) forced labor—those who are forced to work, with no or inadequate payment, through violence or intimidation; (d) early and forced marriage—when children, usually girls under 18 years of age, are married without their consent and forced into sexual and domestic servitude; (e) human trafficking—when adults and children are exploited through violence, deception, or coercion and forced to work against their will. Obviously, these definitions are readily misleading and overlap significantly.
- 10.
These estimates are based on data collected by the ILO—adequate data was not available for many regions and countries, especially from the Arab States and some countries in the Americas. That may explain why the number of reported sexual exploitation is so low in some regions. As Table 10.3 indicates, in many Arab countries the share of female migrants is significantly large—in the UAE the share is more than 80 percent, in Kuwait 57 percent, in Qatar 42 percent, and in Saudi Arabia about one third of migrants are females.
- 11.
See, for example, the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, both adopted in 2000 and both designating TIP as a form of coerced labor, that involves exploiting adults and children through the use of violence, deception or coercion, and forcing them to work against their will. According to these instruments, TIP encompasses all people trafficked for forced prostitution, forced labor, forced servitude, forced marriage, forced organ removal, and so on, and such trafficking may take place both domestically and internationally (UNODC 2018).
- 12.
In the United States alone, estimated revenues from sex-trafficking industries in eight major cities in 2014 ranged from $39.9 million in Denver (Colorado) to $290 million in Atlanta (Georgia). See https://www.bustle.com/p/13-sex-trafficking-statistics-that-put-the-worldwide-problem-into-perspective-9930150, accessed on March 14, 2019.
- 13.
For example, human smuggling occurs when a person is procured for financial or other material benefits, and human trafficking also occurs when a labor is forced to forced labor and similar practices. In case of smuggling, consent of the trafficked matters, in case of human trafficking consent of the trafficked does not matter. At the end, what constitutes smuggling and what constitutes trafficking would depend on lawyers and courts, not on facts.
- 14.
A 2014 study by the Urban Institute found 71 percent of the TIP victims entered the United States legally. See also IOM/ICAT Issue Brief #1, 2016, available at http://icat.network/sites/default/files/publications/documents/UNODC-IB-01-draft4.pdf.
- 15.
The UK Home Office (2014) developed a typology of 17 types of modern slavery crimes and offences in four main categories: labor exploitation, sexual exploitation, domestic servitude, and criminal exploitation. The report also provides best estimates of the cost of modern slavery by using a multiple systems estimation technique (cited in Cooper et al. (2017) and Reed et al. (2018).
- 16.
The report (Reed et al. 2018) estimated that each instance of modern slavery crime costs around £330,000 to the nation, including victim support, lost earnings, and law enforcement.
- 17.
While in 2009 only 26 countries had an institution which systematically collected and disseminated data on trafficking cases, the number has increased to 65 in 2018. In the same year, 168 countries had legislation in place that criminalized trafficking in persons broadly in line with the UN Trafficking in Persons Protocol, which came into force in 2003 (UNODC 2018).
- 18.
Remittance is understood as a financial or in-kind transfer made a migrant directly to their family or community in their country of origin.
- 19.
One such migrant, Angela Dorothea Merkel, Chancellor of Germany since 2005 and leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union since 2000, was born and raised in East Germany.
- 20.
The World Bank’s 2016 classification of four groups of countries according to their gross national income stands as follows: low-income countries (US$1045 or less), lower middle–income countries (US$1046–$4125); upper middle–income countries (US$4126–$12,735), and high-income countries (US$12,736 or more).
- 21.
During this period, outbound remittance from Russia (accrued mainly to Central Asian countries) increased by 5 percent in ruble terms, and 21 percent in US dollars.
- 22.
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Dowlah, C. (2020). Cross-Border Labor Mobility: The Twenty First Century. In: Cross-Border Labor Mobility . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36506-6_10
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