Addressing the ‘Root Causes’? The Effect of Development Aid on Irregular Migration Flows

Masterarbeit, Fachbereich Politik- und Verwaltungswissenschaft, 58 Seiten, engl.

Summary:

Since the world is witnessing the largest number of displaced people seeking shelter from conflict, persecution, or economic deprivation in neighbouring regions and countries of the ‘Global North’, large-scale funds have been set up to address the ‘root causes’ of irregular migration. Thereby, policy-makers and donors envisage that by fostering economic, socio-political and security-related conditions in the countries of origin, a reduction of the pressure of South-North migration flows will follow. The existing academic literature has begun only recently to systematically study the relationship between development aid and migration, both theoretically and empirically, and at best has achieved contradicting results. Therefore, the paper contributes to the discourse by examining how development aid affects irregular migration flows.

The overall effect of more development aid leading to decreased migration flows from a country, is argued to be mediated through the level of development of that country through indirect causal paths. From the perspective of the modernisation theory, as a first part of the causal chain, it is argued that development aid contributes to improved socio-political conditions and reduced security-related conditions which both decrease migration flows. However, development aid simultaneously contributes to improved economic conditions which increase migration flows. In the second part, neoclassical migration theory gives insights into the connection between structural ‘root causes’ and migration flows through cost-benefit decisions that are driven by push and pull factors.

Results from a time-series cross-sectional analysis are inconclusive, suggesting a nonlinear relationship between development aid and migration. Contrary to the initial expectations and to previous studies (Berthélemy et al., 2009; Gamso & Yuldashev, 2018; Lanati & Thiele, 2018), the empirical results point to a non-linear relationship where more development aid increases migration. However, the positive effect turns smaller the higher the levels of development aid. One explanation for this effect distribution could be the mediating effect of GDP per capita and that the economic effect carries over to the relationship between development aid and migration. The migration-hump theory has described such an non-linear effect between GDP and migration (Clemens, 2014; Zelinsky, 1971). Furthermore, it has been found that food deprivation has a very small but significant negative effect, decreasing migration, whereas state fragility is an important factor that explains the increase of migration flows. State fragility could be confirmed as a ‘root cause’ of migration.

Further research could build on the efforts made in this paper and test if the relationship between development aid and migration flows is non-linear. However, the analysis could not show a decreasing effect of development aid on migration from developing countries. Therefore, it is important to highlight that donors seeking to affect migration flows must go beyond deterrence and should instead invest in new tools to change the terms on which migration happens (Clemens & Postel, 2018). The paper also showed that the debate on the impact of state fragility as major ‘root cause’ of migration (Grävingholt et al., 2015; Martin-Shields, 2017) is important and should be further advanced. A methodological advance of the paper was to consider the indirect paths that underlie the relationship between development aid and migration. These first attempts should be deepened in further studies through, for example, structural equation modelling techniques. Qualitative research could bring more attention to the effect in country case studies, taking into account the influence of regional migration flows.

Finally, migration policy-makers can draw practical implications from these findings and recommendations. As other scholars have highlighted already: there is an “urgent need for coherent, more evidence-based and less fear-based policy-making” (Raineri & Rossi, 2017: 1) with local co-ownership in the reduction of poverty and implementation of migration governance strategies. Therefore, “facilitating higher levels of migration from developing countries into Europe may be a more effective way of reducing poverty than the launching of another development programme in Africa” (Bakewell, 2008: 1355). Migration should be analysed as a global phenomenon, moving away from the assumption that mobility is normal for the developed, but a symptom of failure among the developing countries.