Aid and Development as tools to prevent migration
Channel: Institute of Development Studies
Date: 2018-05-22

Michael Collyer, Professor of Geography, University of Sussex.

In recent years crisis thinking associated with international migration has motivated a political re-evaluation of well supported elements of the relationship between migration and development.

Migration control strategies have also engaged with humanitarian priorities in new ways to produce what has been called ‘the humanitarian border’. This involves the convergence of humanitarian and development priorities with migration control strategies. The enactment of the humanitarian border has required a refocusing of certain elements of migration control well beyond the territories of states that that are conducting and financing that control. A parallel and more recent shift has seen development and humanitarian priorities, and therefore funding, substantially broadened so as to encompass this new migration control landscape.

In this Sussex Development Lecture, Michael Collyer discusses these strategies and highlight evidence that suggests that these efforts will be largely futile if not entirely counterproductive in terms of the immediate efforts of restricting international migration.