1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Public Policy and Diversity - Migration Patterns and Policy
The International Movement of Labour in Asia
Dr Manolo Abella
Senior Migration Specialist, Employment Department, International Labour Organisation
Introduction
The ethnic tensions and intolerance that the rise of new nationalism have unleashed with the break up of the former Soviet Union remind us of the impermanence of political boundaries and the volatility and unpredictability of population movements. Before the dust settles in that part of the world many thousand more people will have been dislocated and become members of migrant communities in other states.
It is not yet certain how the hoped-for shift from totalitarian regimes towards a more democratic political order would reduce the forced movement of people and bring greater stability in the distribution of people among states.
Fortunately in our part of the world, in the region of Asia and the Pacific, most of the recent movements are being driven not by the need to escape oppression, but by the tremendous economic dynamism of successful economies that have quickly exhausted their supplies of native labour. Economic migration is on the rise throughout the region, notwithstanding the institutional barriers erected by states in the form of immigration restrictions, and oblivious of racial, linguistic, and religious differences.
The forces that drive migration are likely to gain even more force in the future, particularly as the growing integration of the region's economies through trade and investments proves to be another engine for their growth and development.
Trends in Asian Labour Migration
It will be an understatement to say that there is a grave risk involved in making generalisations about trends in Asian migration. Asia is a vast region containing over half of the world's population, expanding over an area from the Persian Gulf to the Tasman Sea, and encompassing over 40 politically independent and autonomous states. What forms and streams of migration get noticed and recorded are often only a part and sometimes even the smaller part of all the movements of people actually taking place.
In many parts of Asia traditional rural to rural movements across borders often escape formal state controls, sometimes because authorities tolerate them or sometimes because they have given up on trying to regulate them. In the large continental countries like China and India, international migration is insignificant in comparison with movements of people within the national boundaries, but more is known of the former because it involves passing through formal doors for exit and admission.
Separating specific forms of migration like labour migration from other forms like those of political refugees, environmental refugees, business migrants, and settler immigrants is likewise a daunting task. The three million Afghans who crossed over to Pakistan during the early 1980s were initially political refugees fleeing from violence or persecution in their country.
But today many of them are still in Pakistan not because of such threats to their safety but because of the employment they have found in the country. In Nepal deforestation has forced many families to migrate to neighbouring India and Bhutan in search of work and livelihood but few if any of them ever get recorded in immigration statistics.
At any time there are many thousands of technical and managerial people working as expatriate staff of multinational companies in countries other than their own who also often escape notice since they are admitted on temporary visitor visas. Although the numbers are probably not large, there are also marriages entered into for purposes of admission as families of citizens, masking the economic motivation for emigration.
Compared to the size of their population, contemporary emigration rates from most Asian countries are unimpressive. The growing numbers of people leaving China every year are totally insignificant in relation to her population. The same is true of the sub-continent in spite of the freedom enjoyed by the Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis to leave their countries anytime they wish.
In South-East Asia emigration rates have been more noticeable, partly because of their smaller populations, and because much of recent movements from the sub-region, such as the boat people from Vietnam and the holocaust refugees from Cambodia, evoked sympathy from the international community. But contemporary emigration rates from the Asian countries nowhere exceeding five percent of the population are relatively small compared to flows from the subcontinent during the colonial period and compared to emigration rates from Europe during the last century.
Labour Migration to the Middle East
The oil crisis of the 1970s created a situation that was totally unpredicted in its effects on the dimensions and directions of migration in the region, and their social and economic implications for the countries on both sides of the migration chain. After twenty years since they first came in droves to the Gulf there are today still over 3.5 million Asians in that region consisting of 2.2 million from South Asia and 1.3 million from South-East Asia. In what has been characterised as a circulatory movement of guest workers to the Gulf, many more millions actually found their way to the Gulf to work for one or two years to take up offers of wages three to ten times higher than what they could aspire to get at home.
The politics of the Middle East and the economics of drawing from the large pools of skilled labour in Asia combined to broaden this migration system in a way that no one had foreseen. The Gulf Crisis forced the repatriation of close to half a million Asians but it proved to be a mere interruption. Most of the Asians have since returned and over the last four years the flows of contracted labour to the Middle East from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia have resumed at even higher levels than before.
A political fallout of the war is the expulsion of Yemenis, Palestinians, and Jordanians from many of the Gulf States notably in Saudi Arabia where they are no longer welcome. Aside from these political factors are the other advantages of drawing from Asian sources. Asians did not seek social integration and political participation in their host societies. They accepted their disenfranchised status for the chance to earn some money and return home.
The immigration policies of the Gulf States permitted the massive entry of foreign workers but under conditions that progressively deteriorated as labour suppliers vied for the available jobs. These policies were anchored around the "khafeel" or sponsorship system, under which certain favoured nationals were granted the privilege of "importing" foreign labour.
In turn, the khafeel was held responsible for ensuring the proper behaviour of the foreign workers, a task which over time led to some of the most odious features of the system such as very high recruitment fees paid by workers, confiscation of travel documents, substitution of contracts, and the like. In countries where there are no legislated minimum wages and where freedom of association or the freedom to organise is not enjoyed even by national workers, the khafeel system worked very well in providing Arab employers ample supplies of cheap docile labour.
The migration structures that developed during the 1970s in response to the opportunities for employment in the Persian Gulf are now serving the new migration system emerging in east and southeast Asia. It is clear that the migration within the region is organised by the same labour market institutions which had earlier facilitated the massive movement of Asian contract labour to countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Libya whose fortunes soared during the oil crisis. These institutions include recruitment systems established by commercial agents, state policies to promote employment abroad, and support systems that among others financed the costly processes of emigrating abroad.
In almost all of the Asian countries that supplied labour to the Middle East the complexity of interstate labour transfers and the state regulations that were adopted to protect the workers have spawned a lucrative recruitment industry. At the height of the Middle East construction boom Arab employers paid money to obtain the large numbers of workers they needed for their construction projects. This demand created a market for the services of people who could quickly find and mobilise the needed workers.
By the time the boom subsided there were already thousands of recruitment companies operating in the region and they accounted for all but a small fraction of the total placements of workers in foreign countries. They were soon charging fees from the interested workers whose numbers have multiplied because of the expectation of higher wages being offered abroad. The same recruitment companies have seized the opportunities for placing labour in Japan and in the Asian NIEs when these markets were opened in the 1980s.
New Labour Migration System Emerging in East Asia and ASEAN Region
There are unmistakable signs that a new migration system has developed in the region over the past two decades. At the beginning of the 1980s foreign workers in these countries numbered just over a million, even including long-term resident Koreans in Japan and Indonesians in Malaysia, but by the end of the decade the foreign workers population has already exceeded three million. The volume of the flows was estimated to have risen by at least ten times during a very brief period of a decade. In the 1960s most of the economically-motivated migration movements in the region were of the permanent settlement kind directed mostly at the traditional receiving states.
Today flows of labour of all kinds, from housemaids to oil engineers are circulating in the region, from tiny but rich Brunei to up and coming Vietnam. Over this relatively short period a number of countries in the region have been transformed from labour surplus economies, some of whom supplied large workforces to the Middle East, into labour importers.
Diversity of Manpower Flows
The constituent flows of labour in this system are taking place at several levels. At one level are the almost invisible rural to rural flows of migrant labour between neighbouring states in the region such as between Indonesia and Malaysia, Thailand and Malaysia, and Burma and Thailand. In some countries these flows are much larger than those which pass through any formal border controls.
When it offered to regularise the situation of illegal workers late in 1991, the Malaysian Government was able to induce some 450,000 foreign workers to register in west Malaysia alone, the vast majority of them being Indonesians who found their way to the country by sea and were quickly absorbed in communities where relatives and friends had settled long ago.
In Thailand young male Burmese man most of the fishing trawlers in the south while young female Burmese cross over the border in large numbers to fill household and other information sector jobs left by Thais who prefer more formal employment in modern industries.
At another level are the more visible movements of contract workers who pass through formal immigration channels but not necessarily with visas that would allow them to work. They include Malaysian workers recruited to work in shipyards in Singapore, Filipino entertainers bound for clubs in Tokyo, Bangladeshis who will take the place of native workers in the Malaysian plantations, Indonesian and Filipina maids in Hong Kong and Singapore, and Chinese construction workers in Seoul.
The numbers of these contract workers are multiplying everyday as labour shortages worsen in Japan and the region's NIEs, and as their official controls on immigration get modulated in response to pressures from local industries. Legal admissions of temporary contract workers alone into Japan and other Asian NIEs have risen from less than 30,000 a year at the beginning of the 1980s to over 300,000 in 1994. If we include the illegals as well, the total flows may have risen already to over a half a million a year.
At a third level are the less conspicuous movements of higher level manpower consisting among others of expatriate managers, accountants and engineers of transnational corporations, merchant marine officers, airline pilots, and free-lancing teachers and journalists. Coming from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, and even from Australia and New Zealand, these professionals and technical workers constituted the less visible group of migrant workers who were nevertheless an important element in the system.
The volume of these flows is the most difficult to assess because one does not have to establish residence in order to engage in many of these high level occupations in another country. Furuya reported that in 1985 about 50,000 Japanese classified as high-level manpower left for Asian destinations.
In 1989 it was estimated that there were at least some 89,000 technicians from Hong Kong alone who were working in China. In Indonesia there are about 85,000 foreign expatriates who have been issued working permits. Every country in the region has very liberal policies on the admission of foreign expatriates who are engaged by foreign investors.
Integration with Global Economy through Trade
The Asian NIEs have achieved remarkable progress in a short period of time through closer integration with the global economy. This integration took the form of increasing share of the world trade in manufactures and absorbing a large part of direct foreign capital flows. Both of these required flexible domestic labour markets which are now being threatened by shortages as a consequence of an early fertility decline and changing social attitudes to work.
It is unlikely that these states will opt for slower economic growth to avoid importing foreign labour. In fact the resistance to immigration of foreign labour is breaking down all over the region as pressures build up, especially from the small industry sectors, for the relaxation of controls.
Over the last 25 years, the economies of East and South-East Asia have become major players in the production and export of a whole range of manufactures from complete cars to the latest silicon wafers. In 1992 these countries (excluding Japan) sold US$453 billion worth of exports to the world market, greater than the total exports of the United States or Germany, and equivalent to about 16 percent of the total exports of all the advanced industrial countries including Japan. Exports accounted for nearly one-quarter of the GDP in East and South-East Asia. In the 1960s and 1970s many of these states specialized in exporting textiles and garments.
It did not take very long for them to advance to exports of manufactures which were capital and skill intensive, such as steel, automobiles, chemicals, and electrical equipments, as they depleted their labour reserves. Exports from these countries increased at dizzying rates during the 1970s and the 1980s, with Taiwan reaching exports of US$81 billion in 1992, Korea US$77 billion, Singapore US$63 billion, and Hong Kong US$33 billion. Japan led these countries in making remarkable progress in capturing a huge chunk of the world market for manufactures, her exports soaring from US$4 billion in 1960 to $339 billion in 1992.
How these countries managed to capitalise on their advantages in the international division of labour has been well covered in the literature on development. The transformation has been attributed to a number of factors: judicious state interventions bordering on mercantilism to promote exports; hospitable policies to encourage the entry of transnational corporations and foreign capital; timely restructuring and upgrading of industries to higher value added products as domestic wages rise; and heavy investments in human resources. With their open economic policies they succeeded in inducing massive inflows of foreign capital and technology which they used with great effectiveness to direct the pace of industrialisation and gain an increasing share of the world market for their manufactures.
Labour Mobility still a Minor Element in Economic Integration
While the role that capital flows and trade in the rapid growth and integration of the regional economy has been well recognised, little has been said of the role that crossnational transfers of workers may have played in bringing about the rapid absorption of new technologies, in facilitating the adjustments to external shocks that linkage with the international economy implies, and in stabilising the prices of vital services and non-tradables. Indeed the movement of workers has been seen as an indication of the failure of some countries to become integrated in transnational production systems and participate in the beneficial impact of such integration in fostering the more rapid growth of their economies.
Foreign workers employed as short-term contract employees in countries from the region other than their own, however, still represents a tiny percentage of the region's total workforce. This suggests that it is still too early to speak of the emergence of a regional labour market. Indeed one might well argue that there is an absolute lack of integration as wages and per capita incomes in the region are very wide apart. For example, in 1980 the differential in GNP per capita between the Philippines and Japan was 14:1. In 1988, it rose to 33:1 and with Japan's continued growth and the yen's recent revaluation the differential must have become even wider.
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