Reimagining Dependency: An Ode To Unpopular Economics

By the Centre for Poverty Analysis -February 21, 2014 

In Sri Lanka huge swaths of the rural population have found themselves starved of local employment opportunities as a consequence of Jayewardene’s neoliberal revolution

The relationship between migration and development has been a long-scrutinised topic of debate within developmental discourse. Understandings of this dynamic have “swung back and forth like a pendulum” (de Haas, 2010) since first emerging as an area of academic interest in the 1950s, oscillating from optimism to pessimism and back again. Early perspectives attached to modernisation theory highlighted the potential for migration to catalyse a ‘developmental takeoff’ for sending nations by way of remittance and skill transfers. Later, radical critiques (from neo-Marxist and dependency perspectives) re-framed migration-development in a profoundly sceptical light, emphasising migration’s propensity to siphon skills and labour in a way that stymies genuine economic development in sending countries. Since the ‘rediscovery’ of the migration-development nexus in the early millennium the tone of discussion has once again been overwhelmingly hopeful; a solidifying neoliberal status quo has drowned out the radical critiques of the 70s and 80s and shrunk the contours of development until a “golden straitjacket” (Friedman, 2000) woven of market signals is all that remains. Within this neoliberal development paradigm, the World Bank, IOM and fistfuls of Northern think tanks have promulgated the notion that temporary labour migration yields a ‘triple win’ scenario, in which sending countries, receiving countries and migrants all benefit from a reallocation of global labour ostensibly coordinated by forces of supply and demand. Meanwhile, alternative approaches to migration that emphasise the exploitative disparity of those ‘wins’ have been dismissed in parcel with the failed developmental projects with which they were ideologically aligned and are today something of a theoretical faux pas. Sri Lanka’s own experience with a closed-economy highlights many of the problems of such developmental models, though it remains difficult to disentangle the culpability of economic theory from the social and productive vulnerabilities inherited from colonial occupation (Kelegama, 2006).

No matter how the past is construed, the South should remain wary of developmental fables concocted and disseminated by yesteryear’s imperialist powers and their institutional mouthpieces. Of those ‘winning’ from migration, it is far easier to recognise the benefits for receiving countries of the North – a cheap, exploitable and ever-replenishing reserve army of ready-made labour – than it is for remittance-dependent economies of the South or, less still, for individual migrants driven to foreign employment in vacuums of jurisdiction on account of survival. Recent attention to migration as it pertains to migrant agency and household income strategies (de Haas, 2010) thus obfuscates the overarching dynamic of labour migration: global patterns of capital accumulation. The global division of labour underpinning capital accumulation in the North is predicated not only on the outsourcing of production, but also the importing of workers for exploitative labour in care, construction and service roles that cannot be offshored. Meanwhile, adherence to migration as a de facto developmental strategy has left Sri Lanka increasingly dependent on remittances as a means of shoring up its foreign reserves (a staggering 49% of export earnings) to counterbalance a historically impregnable trade deficit, keep the rupee afloat and subsequently finance the ongoing gentrification of urban Colombo. Where national development projects and attempts at export diversification have failed, migrants have picked up both the foreign exchange slack and the suffix of ‘hero’ (MFEPW, 2011). Worse again, with remittances failing to translate into sustainable long-term livelihoods for migrant families, some of the most vulnerable portions of Sri Lanka’s population are coaxed into an unsustainable cycle of repeat migration to attain a transient reprieve from poverty.Read More