During the last presidential campaign in France, many debates occurred about the immigration and the globalization. Indeed, some of the candidates denounced the danger that the migration was for the employment and the good economic health of the country, because of the globalization which tends to exacerbate the international concurrence. This kind of debates is quite surprising about this country when we know that foreign workers used to help it after the Second World War to rebuild the country.
This example is interesting, because it reflects an evolution of the mentalities about the migration question, and it raise questions about the migration role in the globalized world that we know, because France is a great power, and this behavior is actually revealing of the political debates in the Western Europe.
In this essay, we are going to wonder how really migration contributes and reflects the challenges of globalization. We will try to show in a first part of the migration is reflecting the historical and current evolution of globalization. After that, we will explain how migration is economically contributing to globalization, before talking in a last part of the place of the human in globalization.
[...] Some thinkers call the current globalization the third one. The first one would have been the 15-16th centuries, because of the discovering of America and other new fields, and the second globalization would be the second industrial revolution. Actually, the evolutions of globalization and of the kind of migration are closely linked. For example, we can be interested in the exchanges which used to occur when there were colonial empires such as France or Britain. The French case is very interesting, because, when countries such as Algeria were part of France, the exchanges were between a metropolis and its colony. [...]
[...] But this system is based on the negation of the human being. Indeed, workers are just seen as adjustment variables. One of the challenges of the globalization is to help countries to develop, but it does not go through the discrimination of a certain category of workers. The real problem is that people are just seen as economic data, and all the dimensions of cultural meetings or exchanges between populations, are forgotten and denied. The integration of foreigners in the countries is not a goal, and even not an aim. [...]
[...] Recently, the world has seen a return of the labour migration, which is seen as a chance for the developing economies. The migration development theory defends the fact that when many workers go in a foreign country to work, they send remittances to their family. This action would help the development of poorest countries. The idea that remittances can be the solution to help developing countries can seem utopic, but the figures are edifying. Indeed, the remittances represented about 250 billion of USD in 2008, what is far to be negligible. [...]
[...] The work must have coherence between the American and Indian teams, and it is allowed by the compression of the time, one of the characteristics of the globalization. This way of working exists only thanks to the “time-space compression” (Aneesh, 2006), but the integration seems to be only a mean for alienation in this process, Indians have to take American names when they work in the services, women have to work at night. Actually, this system presents a lot of advantages when we think about the productivity challenges due to the international concurrence, but erases the human dimension of the work. [...]
[...] That is the other part of the migration in the globalization. Migrants or refugees have a lot of difficulties to insert themselves in new countries when they have low-skilled jobs, and it is easier when they have jobs which need a specific knowledge. Actually, inequalities overcome boundaries and frontiers, and the gap between rich and poor people is huge within the migrant population. The situation of the refugees over the world is far from being solved, as we can see it with the example of the Syrian refugees who are living in the neighbouring countries of the Syria, in camps in which the conditions of living is degrading. [...]
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