Questions on final paper Flashcards
What is environmental stress and how does it influence migration?
Environmental stress is a disturbance to the ecosystem: a drought. Environmental stresses can be natural, like droughts, floods and hurricanes, or human-induced, like the release of CO2 into the atmosphere or an oil spill into the ocean. Furthermore, these can cause sudden-onset environmental changes, which is the case for natural disasters, or slow-onset changes, like the continuous land degradation caused by drought in the 1930s.
When environmental ‘‘stressors” put an individual’s wellbeing at risk, decrease her personal income, and/or lower her opportunity for future employment then she is more likely to consider migrating to places with better environmental attributes and better income opportunities. Environmental stress, therefore, combined with other economic, political, and demographic stresses can be at the roots of migratory movements.
It is important to highlight, however, that not all individuals act the same way in times of environmental stress, and that the decision to migrate is ultimately based on the subjective perception of the problem itself.
Explain the difference between voluntary and forced migration
On one hand, migrants are usually people with a strong will who mobilise significant resources in order to prepare their journey and arrival in the country of destination. They save money, they gather information about the trip and the destination and about potential employment there. They speak to friends and family at the destination who will help them upon arrival. They may speak to travel agents, potential employers at destination or middlemen of different sorts. They may try to learn the language of the destination country. In short, migrants clearly make decisions and take up actions in order to prepare for their migration.
However, this does not necessarily mean their migration is voluntary. The reasons for leaving their country of origin may have to do with circumstances that are beyond their control. Migrating is not a decision taken easily, it involves high costs – both material and emotional as well as social – and it is usually undertaken because there exist strong motives that make a person want to go to another country. Thus, people may simply not have work in their country of origin or they may be employed but their income may not be enough for them and their families to survive. They may suffer very harsh living and working conditions. They may also be pressured by their own family to migrate in order to help the other family members (for instance to create a small family business, to help siblings and their families, or to support elderly parents).
In other words, the decision to leave is usually taken under very strong pressure by circumstances beyond the control of the migrant her/himself. Let us now look at three examples in order to discuss the extent to which decisions by migrants are forced or voluntary.
What does it mean for someone to be trapped?
When people feel the need and the desire to migrate but are unable to do so, they can become ‘trapped’. This is most often the case for individuals with low socio-economic status, few material and financial assets, or limited social support networks, who are thus already very vulnerable. In such cases, environmental stress functions as an aggravating factor which adds to systemic economic, demographic and political factors that shape individual livelihoods, access to resources and vulnerability, and influence the need (or
desire) to move.
What is the role of structure and agency in migration
Castles and Miller (2009) contend that interdisciplinary research should be
employed by migration scholars to examine the role of both social structures and individual actions, as well as the intermediate level of agents and intermediaries in the decision-making processes and the outcomes of migration. But rather than develop a macro-theoretical framework for understanding these complex processes, they suggest that complexity is
framed within migration systems or networks. Migration systems and networks theory thus acknowledges that moves tend to cluster, can be circular and take shape within wider contexts and systems. Understanding migration processes involves moving out from the individual to the wider and interconnected sets of circumstances – the wider system or network – within which an individual agent is located.
What is vulnerability in migration?
Within a migration context, vulnerability is the limited capacity to avoid, resist, cope with, or recover from harm. This limited capacity is the result of the unique interaction of individual, household, community, and structural characteristics and conditions.
As a concept, vulnerability implies exposure to and susceptibility to some form of harm. There are different forms of harm, meaning that different sectors use the term differently (e.g. vulnerability to food insecurity, vulnerability to hazards, vulnerability to harm and violence and abuse, vulnerability to rights violation).
Vulnerability derives from a range of intersecting and co‐existing personal, social, situational, and structural factors. For example, in crisis or disaster affected communities, individuals and groups may have different levels of vulnerability, depending on their exposure to hazards or to risks of neglect, discrimination, abuse and exploitation. The level of exposure is determined by the interplay of many factors: their sociodemographic characteristics, their capacities (including knowledge, networks, access to resources, access to information and early warnings, etc.), their location (in a camp, in a spontaneous settlement, in a transit center, at the border, etc.) and the crisis induced factors having an impact on them (such as separation, loss and lack of resources and opportunities, discrimination in access to assistance, etc.).
