Migration is Here to Stay

Shashwat Dhar on May 11th, 2016

Migration has been a recurring phenomenon throughout human history. Since time immemorial, man has perpetually been on the move in search of greener pastures and greater opportunities. These migratory movements have been a potent force in shaping the cultural landscape and political configuration in much of the modern world. Had it not been for migrant labour, some of the world’s greatest cities would probably not have taken shape. There would have been no London, New York, Tokyo, Beijing or Mumbai. Yet, much of the policy discourse on migration continues to harp on the potentially disruptive forces that it brings in its train, often leading governments and policy makers to shy away from addressing the substantive concerns of migrant populations in host areas.
There’s a plethora of reports, academic papers and policy briefs documenting how migrants across the world face debilitating barriers to leading a dignified life. They lack access to adequate housing and sanitation, are typically engaged in low-paid, hazardous work, and mostly excluded from the ambit of social protection programs and public services. In some parts of the world, migrants are practically reduced to second-class citizens, with their passports taken by their employers. Many of them often face harassment at the hands of local authorities. Political parties in multi-ethnic societies including India have spearheaded sons-of-the-soil movements against immigrant populations, unleashing a reign of xenophobic violence on them. Similar cases of xenophobia have lately been reported from South Africa and many countries of Europe, in the wake of mass migrations from war-torn countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
As more and more migrants land up on the shores of Europe, tensions between immigrants and natives are likely to grow. The larger challenge for Europe and the rest of the world is not to contain or discourage migration, but to facilitate the integration of these migrants into mainstream society. So far as internal migrants are concerned, governments need to think of suitable ways to also facilitate their participation in electoral politics. There are tens of thousands of them in India who cannot exercise their right to vote due to rigid administrative rules and hostility of regional and state-based parties. Living on the porous frontiers of legality and illegality, these migrants lose out on that one opportunity to cast their ballots, since the country’s laws do not permit a citizen to vote from a place other than where s/he is ‘ordinarily resident’. An exception to this rule has been made for those who are compelled to remain at a place other than their place of ordinary residence, owing to the compulsions of the public office held by them in ‘public interest.’ Legislative efforts are on to extend voting rights to Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) as well, who alone number some 16 million, as per a latest UN survey on international migrant trends.
The question that begs an explanation here is: Why should a democracy, in principle, privilege some voters over others, when they are de jure citizens of the same country, governed by the same set of laws? To say that migrants, being ‘private persons’, make a lesser contribution to a nation’s development than its service personnel or diaspora is to be completely unaware of the role internal migrants have historically played in making and remaking our cities as nerve centres of industry and commerce.
As developing countries like India become more urbanized and their populations more mobile, migration is likely to occur on a much larger scale that it is happening at present. Instead of shying away from addressing the concerns of this floating population on grounds of administrative inconvenience, governments and policy makers would do well to make special arrangements for them to exercise their right to vote in elections in either their place of origin or destination. This would not only help them articulate their specific interests and concerns better, but would also restore their status as citizens possessing a sense of agency to lead the kind of lives they have reason to value.

Read the full article here- http://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/migration-is-here-to-stay-59498/

Shashwat Dhar (1)

Migration is Here to Stay

Shashwat Dhar is a research associate working on domestic migration and issues of electoral participation in India. His primary fields of interest are comparative politics and political theory, with an emphasis on electoral politics and issues of citizenship. He has worked as a research Intern with Lokniti, Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. He holds a Master’s degree in development studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, and a Bachelor’s in political science from Hindu College, University of Delhi.