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Can they?: Implications of Obama victory for migration and development
What a moment in history! As soon as Obama was projected to be the next president of the United States of America, countless migrant mothers (I know one!) patted their children and said, with tears in the eyes, "You too have a chance to be the president of this great country!" Seems to me that overnight America has become more inviting to the immigrants. Has it? Will Obama follow through with his campaign promise, or will he change his stance? Should he? What would that mean from a development point of view?
On their website, Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan on immigration states the following:
- Create secure borders via additional personnel, infrastructure and technology at entry points
- Fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy
- Increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill
- Remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants
- Support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens
- Promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration
Several of these steps relate directly to migration and development. As I have noted before, most of the migrants are economic migrants, and therefore, migration benefits the migrants themselves, the employers who hire them, and the families back home who receive remittances and other kinds of help from the migrants. Economic underdevelopment is the root cause of outward migration. Low labor cost is the main cause for inward migration. An economic, development-based approach to the migration problem, therefore, is likely to have a higher chance of success than other approaches that rely on quantitative controls like walls and electronic surveillance.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on these questions.
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One way for Obama to adopt
One way for Obama to adopt an economic-development oriented approach to the migration problem would be for him to change US policy towards Cuba. An article in the Miami Herald says that during the campaign trail, Obama promised to lift travel restrictions and remittances caps to Cuba. Currently, Cuban-Americans have to wait three years to visit their relatives on the island. If they are authorized, they can only carry $300 in cash with them to Cuba. US law also restricts the amount of remittances immediate family members can send to Cuba from the US to $300 every four months for a total of $1,200 per year. By lifting these restrictions, Obama will allow Cuban-Americans to lift their Cuban family members out of poverty.
Will Obama change the US-Cuba policy during his first-term as President?
People movement power (come & go, and also up & down)
It is interested to talk about the person leadership. The new post of US President will be replace by the new comer. The sensitivity power policy for American people and the other country would be determined for a better outlook.
We live on the earth, as an officer would follow the leader. Many things concern a lot about leadership.
The role of the other new leader who get the position for a better sustainable development is also important for us. So far, I am not realy sure about the deep impact for the leadership position. I am confident that working in a team, the leader and God's blessing will direct us for the best way.
Dilip, the morning after the
Dilip, the morning after the US presidential election I addressed a conference on African migration in France, attended by many people from the French Immigration Ministry and representatives of several diaspora groups in Paris. A high-level ministry representative reminded us that the US was only following France's lead: here, after all, the president is the son of immigrants, too. But the palpable euphoria and hope in the room seemed to derive from the fact that Obama is a member of the African diaspora, and not only that he is the son of an immigrant. Groggy from having stayed up all night following the returns, my energy was propped up by the steady stream of congratulations and good wishes that came my way merely because I am American. (It's not always like this abroad.)
Will this euphoria and hope translate into new thinking on immigration? The incoming administration has crises on several fronts, and while one hopes that the broken immigration system will be a priority, it is not clear that it will. Even if immigration is addressed early on, policy won't necessarily change in the direction of greater development-friendliness.
The thorniest political issue, I think, has to do with your statement that the "root cause of emigration is economic underdevelopment." That's surely true, but I think it's equally true -- perhaps even more true -- to say that the root cause of emigration is economic development. If rising prosperity increases out-migration, at least in the short and medium term, that will complicate political negotiations on the issue between the US and Mexico.
But I've already gone on far too long for the blog format...
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