Varieties of ‘Migration States’ in the Global South

• In Event: Migration States and the Sources of Migration Governance in the Global South

Abstract

International migration and mobility raise a host of economic, humanitarian and security concerns for states in the Global North and the South. The garrison state was linked with the trading state in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen the emergence of the migration state (Hollifield 2004, 2014, 2017), where managing migration is vital for national and human development. The migration state is an ‘ideal type’ that takes different forms in various regions of the globe, from the ‘liberal’ state in classic settler nations, to the ‘post-imperial’ state in Europe (also evolving into a liberal type), to the ‘post-colonial’ migration states in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia (India and Pakistan), and to the ‘developmental’ migration state in East and Southeast Asia. This paper develops a typology of migration states in the Global South to explain variation in migration governance and the extent to which migration states converge on the ‘liberal type.’ To explore variation, the paper revisits the rights/numbers/markets tradeoff and the ‘price of rights’ argument of Martin Ruhs (2013) and Philip L. Martin (2018).

Author

• James F. Hollifield, Southern Methodist University