2. Migration and its determinants
2.5 The mobility transition approach
A less well-known but original theoretical approach to migration, which emerged in the 1970s and was initiated by Wilbur Zelinsky (1971), is that which explores the idea of a
“mobility transition” analogous to the demographic (Thompson 1928) and epidemiological (Omran 1971) transitions. Like the two latter transitions, the mobility transition hypothesis
41 is a set of mostly descriptive propositions to do with the distinctive stages that societies go through as they modernise – in this case, with respect to mobility patterns. “Nations” are thus posited to follow unilinear paths from a traditional stage to a modern or post-modern (“future superadvanced”; Zelinsky 1971:231) stage, exhibiting “definite, patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility [,which] comprise an essential component of the modernization process” (id ibid:221-2). In this interpretation, the modernisation process is construed as radiating “lava-like” from a “socioeconomic hearth” (id ibid:228), and as being composed of a set of mutually interdependent transitions: demographic, mobility, occupational, educational, etc.. The mobility transition is not limited to migration, in the usual sense of a permanent change of residence: the identified patterns and regularities refer to the various components of total territorial mobility, including both residential mobility and circulation. Five distinctive phases are thus identified as making up
“an irreversible progression of stages” (id ibid:230-1):
• Phase I (Pre-modern Traditional): little residential migration; limited circulation sanctioned by customary practice;
• Phase II (Early Transitional): massive movement from countryside to cities;
significant movement to colonisation frontiers; major outflow of emigrants;
significant growth in circulation; small but significant immigration of skilled professionals;
• Phase III (Late Transitional): slackening but still major movement from countryside to city; lessening flow to colonisation frontiers; emigration on the decline or ceased;
further increase in volume and complexity of circulation;
• Phase IV (Advanced): residential mobility has levelled off; movement from countryside to city further reduced; vigorous intra- and inter-urban movement;
stagnant or retreating settlement frontier; significant net immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled workers from relatively underdeveloped lands; significant international mobility of skilled professionals; vigorous circulation, particularly economic and pleasure-oriented;
• Phase V (Future Superadvanced): decline in residential mobility and some forms of circulation due to better communication and delivery systems; acceleration of other forms of circulation and possibly inception of new ones; nearly all residential
42 mobility is intra- and inter-urban; possibly, strict political control of internal and international movements.
Zelinsky’s approach is commendable in its depiction of all aspects of mobility as interrelated, as well as in its ability to integrate many actually-existing processes that have characterised the historical trajectory of many different societies. However, it is also criticisable (and has been criticised) on several grounds. First, on the fact that this model
“perpetuated the myth of the immobile pre-modern society”, which has been dismissed as historically inaccurate (Skeldon 1997:32). Second, due to being too ‘loose’ and descriptive:
like the demographic transition model, it is more a set of descriptive propositions than an actual theory, insofar as the mechanisms through which the progression from stage to stage comes about are only sketched or assumed, rather than specified. Third, probably the single greatest weakness of this model is its implicit assumption that the past trajectories of more advanced social formations can be replicated by the ‘laggards’ as if each transition proceeded autonomously and unconstrained. In this sense, Zelinsky’s mobility transition model might perhaps be described as ‘historical-structuralism minus polarisation’: the approach is clearly historical and structural (as opposed to hypothetical-deductive and methodologically individualistic), but it assumes the possibility of the independent
“modernisation” of all nations, disregards the supra-national constraints at work in the world economy, and implausibly extends to the realm of international migration that which is more plausible in the sphere of internal migration and circulation.
Probably the most sophisticated attempt to build on the mobility transition hypothesis is that put forth by Ronald Skeldon (1990 and 1997), who explicitly sought to ascertain whether “’patterned regularities’ in human mobility through space and time (...) have existed in the recent experience of developing countries and whether the sequence of mobility change is as Zelinsky suggested” (Skeldon 1990:45). With this in mind, this author examined the historical evidence from a variety of countries and eventually concluded that Zelinsky’s hypotheses are generally corroborated, but fail to take into account the contextual modification brought about by the (hierarchical) dynamics and constraints introduced by the “gradual absorption of areas into a world-wide capitalist system” (id ibid:218). While Skeldon starts out in the footsteps of Zelinsky and acknowledges the general validity of the latter’s hypothesis, it is also apparent that his own approach is in fact closest to the methodological and theoretical tenets of the historical-structural perspective:
on the one hand, the methodology is clearly historical (indeed, almost encyclopaedic) in that the author draws on a wealth of population and mobility data from a variety of
43 contexts across time and space in order to identify both specificities and more general regularities; on the other, it is explicitly structural, insofar as the suggested way to overcome the perceived lack of “explanatory power” (id ibid:28) of Zelinsky’s formulation of the transition hypothesis is one that takes into account the concerns, “often but not necessarily Marxist”, with structural “questions of resource allocation, the international distribution of power and government policy, and the whole nebulous field of
‘development’” (id ibid:132). By pointing out the relationship between the global diffusion of the capitalist mode of production and the hierarchical shaping and reshaping of migration fields, Skeldon gives a considerable boost to the explanatory power of the mobility transition hypothesis by effectively reconciling it with the historical-structural account of migration. He thus highlights that the mobility transition hypothesis only seems to be valid if one takes into account that the societies undergoing it do so at different moments in “world time”, that the key element setting the pace of that “world time” is the global diffusion of capitalism, and that this process introduces a crucial element of differentiation in terms of how different geographical areas participate in different migration fields.
Skeldon’s later book “Migration and Development: a Global Perspective” (Skeldon 1997) expands the ideas put forth in his previous work by giving relatively greater emphasis to international migration, bringing the more developed parts of the world into the analysis, and introducing a typology of areas in the world economy according to the characteristics of their participation in the global migration system. In so doing, this author moves even further away from the methodological nationalism of Zelinsky’s original theory and closer to a world-systemic perspective, even though he once again refrains from explicitly endorsing a historical-structural approach and, in particular, criticises the world-systems and dependency schools for their alleged functionalist and Eurocentric bias. As a result of this exercise, Skeldon proposes a hierarchical global structure made up of five fluid (i.e.
“neither natural nor enduring”; id ibid: 15) tiers: “the ‘old core’ areas of Western Europe, North America and Australasia”; the “new core”, consisting mostly of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore; “core extensions and potential cores”, which broadly correspond to rapidly industrialising urban corridors in East, Southeast and South Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe and South Africa; the “labour frontier”, made up of areas, usually in the geographical vicinity of the previous three tiers (including Central America, North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, etc.), which have been undergoing profound structural transformation as a result of interaction with those tiers, thus setting the stage
44 for massive outmigration flows; and “the resource niche”, which encompasses the rest of the world and includes various large tracts of the African, Asian and South American continents (id ibid:47-54).
The general theoretical propositions that drive the analysis may arguably be summarised as follows, at some risk of oversimplification: i) “people are highly mobile in each tier” and, as a general rule, always have been (id ibid:194) – the latter idea explicitly confronting the myth of peasant immobility; ii) most worldwide population movement takes place within each tier and, in particular, takes the form of rural-to-urban migration;
and iii) the exception to the latter proposition is migration from the “labour frontier” to the other development tiers, which accounts for the bulk of South-North migration and is largely determined by the effects of the functional and spatial expansion of the capitalist mode of production along well-determined geographical paths (id ibid). In sum, population mobility is presented as inextricably linked to development, but the way in which this is done could not be further from the simple view of migration occurring mechanically from poorer to richer areas. Rather, international migration, urbanisation and proletarianisation (to lend a Marxist flavour to a formulation that does not seem too comfortable with explicitly assuming it) are presented as different aspects of the same process – one that is mediated by the complexities of history and geography to give rise to actually-existing migration systems.