Doctoral Dissertation Research: State Capacity and Labor Migration

vivek Chibber Suzy Lee纽约大学近年来，国际劳动力迁移已成为整体经济发展战略中越来越明显的组成部分，世界银行和其他国际机构将其作为潜在的外汇来源加以推动，菲律宾经常被认为是各国如何“管理”移民流动的典范。在过去的40年里，菲律宾一直是世界上最大的劳动力输出国之一——无论是在绝对数量上还是在人口比例上。这个项目试图找出解释这种移民率的因素。在政策和学术界，对这一现象的主要解释是将高移民率归因于移民本身：过去的移民产生了促进和促进进一步移民的社会网络。这种解释的问题在于，虽然它很好地解释了从某些国家（比如墨西哥工人到美国）的移民，但它无法解释菲律宾的情况，菲律宾的情况更多地依赖于复杂的国家主导的官僚机构，而不是朋友和家人的关系，后者帮助移民与国际劳动力市场进行协调。本文将评估菲律宾国家的作用，更重要的是，解释促进国家劳动力输出系统发展的因素。考察的因素将包括精英偏好的作用：经济和社会精英是否推动了劳动力输出计划的发展，将其作为一种政治“安全阀”——一种不进行快速经济发展所需的激进变革而改善社会和经济冲突的手段？如果可以证明，在菲律宾的情况下，导致劳动力输出机构强大的因素也是阻碍国家在土地改革和工业化（两个对经济发展至关重要的政策领域）方面能力发展的因素，这将表明，促进劳动力迁移不太可能产生预期的发展结果。这将表明，这些政策的社会成本不太可能通过经济增长来平衡，因此，不依赖于大规模劳动力迁移的政策会更好地服务于发展中国家的人民。长期以来，关于移民的学术研究，尤其是在美国，一直被墨西哥裔美国人的重要性所主导。移民环路，其中历史联系和强大的社会网络发挥了主要的因果作用，而派遣国在移民方面的干预努力基本上不存在。在过去的二十年里，对其他劳动力迁移的新研究，特别是来自菲律宾的劳动力迁移，表明各州可以发挥更重要的作用。然而，移民理论很难将这些发现纳入其中，在很大程度上，选择了菲律宾国家？作为社会网络理论的延伸，美国的活动是一种更加制度化和结构化的形式，在这种形式下，移民发生了，但两者都是产生其他地方移民的相同力量的产物，并且产生的影响与没有国家干预的情况没有太大不同。证明一个与移民本身没有直接关系的国内因果因素是菲律宾劳工输出机构发展的关键，将促进我们对国际劳工移民和国家在其增长和全球化中的作用的理解。

SES- 1435946Vivek Chibber Suzy Lee New York UniversityIn recent years, international labor migration has become an increasingly visible component of overall economic development strategy, promoted by the World Bank and other international agencies as a potential source of foreign exchange, with the Philippines often upheld to be a model for how states can "manage" migration flows. For the past forty years, the Philippines have been among the top labor exporting countries of the world -- in both absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population. This project seeks to identify the factors that explain this rate of migration. The predominant explanation for this phenomenon, in both policy and scholarly circles, has been to attribute high rates of migration to migration itself: past migration produces social networks that facilitate and promote further migration. The problem with this explanation is that, while it works well to explain migration from certain countries, such as that of Mexican workers to the U.S., it fails to explain the Philippine case, which relies less on friends-and-family networks than it does on a complex state-led bureaucracy that helps coordinate migrants with international labor markets. This dissertation will assess the role of the Philippine state, and, more importantly, to explain the factors that contributed to the development of the state's labor export system. Among the factors examined will be the role of elite preference: Did economic and social elites promote the development of a labor export program as a political "safety valve" -- a means to ameliorate social and economic conflicts without making the radical changes required for rapid economic development? If it can be shown that, in the Philippine case, the very factors that led to the strength of the labor export apparatus were also the factors that obstructed the development of state capacity in agrarian reform and industrialization -- two policy areas critical to economic development, it would suggest that promoting labor migration is unlikely ever to produce the desired development outcomes. It would suggest that the social costs of such policies are not likely to be balanced by economic growth, and thus, that the people of developing countries are better served by policies that do not rely on large-scale labor migration.Scholarship on migration, particularly in the U.S., has long been dominated by the importance of the Mexican-U.S. migration circuit, in which historical links and strong social networks has played a major causal role, while the sending states efforts to intervene in migration has been largely nonexistent. In the past two decades, new research on other labor migrations, notably from the Philippines, has suggested that states can play a more significant role. However, migration theory has struggled to incorporate these findings, opting, for the most part, to see the Philippine state?s activities as an extension of the social networks theory a more institutional and structured form under which migration takes place, but both a product of the same forces that produce migration elsewhere and producing effects that are not very different from what would occur without state intervention. Demonstrating that a domestic causal factor, not directly related to migration itself, was key in the development of the Philippines labor export apparatus, would advance our understanding of international labor migration and states' role in its growth and globalization.