Migration Governance: Moving Away from 鈥淯ncle Always Knows鈥�

Almost everyone on social media has that one Instagram friend who posts bronzed pictures in Santorini, or screenshots of champagne flutes atop the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyline looming in the background.  To those internationals for whom travelling on holiday was an annual rite of passage, the pandemic鈥檚 travel restrictions resulted in adventures that were inopportunely thwarted. Conversely, to economic migrants everywhere, the implications of banned travel, whether by air, train, or foot, equated directly with the fundamental ability to survive. The scrambles of governments worldwide to gauge appropriate responses to COVID-19 was understandable, inasmuch the magnitude of the event was entirely unprecedented, and the need to contain its spread dire. Yet, one of the largest follies of the pandemic remains undebated: instinctive government responses moved to ban travel without duly considering the global interconnectedness of labour markets in the modern age. Belonging to one state but working in another meant that with travel bans, economic migrants were either shackled to their workplaces, away from their families; or held back from gainful employment whilst trapped at home. In most contexts, migrants are to countries like an unknown opening band at a music concert: the audience does not fundamentally care, and everybody is simply waiting for the headline act. In their origin states, migrant workers often escape the focus of governments who are more concerned with those who remain behind. In the meanwhile, the countries to which they migrate often look at them as charity, despite these workers鈥� crucial role in economic development. Since they belong to places differently, being of and from multiple geographies at once, migrant workers have shifted typical state-worker relationships to a new realm. What, therefore, does good governance look like for an individual- a migrant– who is from several places at once?

Multiple answers to this question can be gleaned from . As the title suggests, the volume focuses on the South Asia-Gulf migration nexus. There are various considerations that render this book highly topical. First, the movement of people around the world, particularly for employment, has outmoded traditional conceptions of citizenship and a worker鈥檚 relationship with a state. This necessitates the re-engineering of these traditional conceptions of citizenship in ways that account for a dynamic and modern global workforce which is constantly on the move. Second, a fitting place to start thinking about the redefinition of worker-state relations is from the lens of workers emigrating from South Asia into the Arab Gulf. These geographies are of particular significance given the staggering volume of South Asian emigrants in the Arab Gulf, with over 80 percent of the region鈥檚 labour force being comprised of migrants, as Blarel and Ennis describe in their introduction. Governing this sizeable migrant workforce is what is collectively termed Kafala, a complex set of legal and policy frameworks centred around an employer-oriented visa sponsorship system. For years now, the Kafala system has come under severe criticism from human rights groups for rendering low-wage migrant workers in various conditions of modern day slavery, most recently with the . Further compounding the importance of the South Asia-Gulf nexus is the phenomenon of South-South migration, where the Gulf鈥檚 ambitious development projects tend to drive largescale demands for a workforce that can be tailored to expand and contract as per their whimsy (Ennis and Blarel; Hamadah; Walton-Roberts et al). Above all, this volume is timely given the now universal tussle between the need for good governance and sustainable worker livelihoods on the one hand, versus competing pressures for labour market flexibility on the other (Devkota; Babar; Hamadah).

At the heart of this book is the argument that the labour governance frameworks which exert influence over the lives of migrant workers are far more expansive than just the singular hold of the two main states between which the migrant moves. Typically, South Asia-Gulf migration has been looked at as occurring within a 鈥渃orridor鈥�- but the various authors across this volume venture forth realities which showcase a wholly different truth. Traditional policymaking approaches habitually consider labour governance within this space to be somewhat flat, not unlike a crepe. In reality, as the authors in this volume demonstrate, labour governance frameworks are more akin to a many-tiered cake. They possess many layers, multiple actors both formal and informal, and a variety of cross-cutting ingredients. While the sending and receiving states do play a substantial role in a migrant鈥檚 experience of emigration, this experience is additionally mediated by a host of other actors such as private sector players, recruitment agents, civil society actors, INGOs and NGOs. The conventional view of governing migration may be top-down, but a lot of it is also bottom-up, with added layers of complexity in the process (Blarel and Ennis).

By and large, this book holds appeal especially for those policymakers that have been stumped by the umpteen complexities of migrant stories, and are now seeking answers on how to begin addressing them. Refreshingly, the book does not shy away from critiquing various actors, and rightly theorises that Gulf state governments often palm off their responsibilities towards migrant workers by 鈥渙utsourcing鈥� governance to citizen-employers (Hamadah). At its core, the book is looking to do right by those workers who are the most vulnerable, whether irregular migrants or domestic workers- and it does this by arguing that workers鈥� voices must be mainstreamed in policymaking. Instead of such approaches which centre worker voices, the authors observe that rather than engaging with migrants as people, formal actors such as migrant origin states have historically tended towards paternalistic policies. Apt examples include Nepal鈥檚 bid to regulate the mobility of women citizens since 1964, or Sri Lanka鈥檚 Family Background Report, a policy which looks to regulate the movement of women via the sole lens of her offspring (Wadhawan).

The structure of the volume is itself vital to note. Its heterodox mix of scholars from different disciplines, and insights from practitioners cutting across government, industry and civil society exemplify nuanced policymaking discourse. The three parts of the volume tell a different story. The first segment is an assessment of the more formal actors in a migration space: the governments of migrant origin countries, at the national and federal levels. Undergirding the breadth of subjects covered is a cloaked warning for the attentive reader: governance processes which overly favour a state-centric approach tend to simultaneously favour paternalistic policies towards workers. This can be hugely deleterious especially for vulnerable groups such as irregular migrants, pushing them even further to the margins. The story of government intervention and oversight is assessed in multiple ways, from the emigration of Indian nurses to the Gulf (Walton-Roberts, Rajan and Joseph); irregular migrants in Nepal (Devkota); and finally, from state-level perspectives in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh (Akhil and Ganga).

The second segment of the book highlights the role played by the more informal, often non-state actors in the migration process. Examples of such actors include recruitment agents; friends and family on whom migrants may rely to emigrate; NGOs; civil society and trade unions. The section comprises a study of Pathan migrants from Pakistan (Babar), and an intriguing case of Bangladeshi migrants who have been emigrating out of the small island of Hatiya in the Bay of Bengal, to become fishermen in Oman, ever since the eighties (Percot). Through perspectives heavily informed by grassroots voices, the two cases speak to the ground-level complications of workers trying desperately to eke out a living overseas. At the same time, these cases are a microcosm of the seemingly damned lot of the developing nation. In both the Pakistan and the Bangladesh cases, workers are actively seeking avenues to escape indigent circumstances. A host of political quandaries pepper the landscape. These range from political instability, to migrant-sending governments using emigration as a 鈥渟afety valve鈥� against unemployment (Blarel and Ennis); the rampant corruption within migration governance institutions; and the role of actors such as recruitment agents, which is convoluted and tough to regulate.

The third segment of the book examines the conundrum of the contested ideas of governance and sovereignty in a migration context. Perhaps the best example of this is the description of the Kerala-Dubai migration complex by Ennis and Blarel. Describing India鈥檚 attempt to provide a digital solution to migration governance by way of its e-Migrate system, Ennis and Blarel also underscore the vast pushback in response to the move from multiple actors, including the UAE government, migrant activists and the Kerala state government. At the time, the main contention of the UAE government was that India was seeking to acquire information on Emirati companies via the e-Migrate portal. Astutely, the authors observe that such diplomatic kerfuffles are likely to result from attempts to regulate spaces which are shared.

This volume is also not simply home to critiques: its pages offer several answers as well. For starters, many authors push for democratic decentralisation and for formal actors such as governments to work more closely with other actors such as civil society and NGOs. Although different to each other, it is important to additionally take note of initiatives at the state level, or of subnational governance such as those in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, although as evidenced by Akhil and Ganga, these can always be influenced by political vacillations. Still others take heart in developments such as the Global Compact for Migration (GCM), the first ever UN agreement negotiated between governments to cover international migration.

But the overarching takeaway is clear. States fail when they choose to inhibit the mobility of women emigrants instead of focusing on empowerment; wilfully omit groups such as domestic workers and irregular migrants from data or ignore issues due to watery political will. States similarly fail when they choose to ignore migration as an issue from the ground up, forgetting to work with governments at the local level, instead taking a heavily centralised, top-down approach to labour governance.

Whether Bangladeshi workers escaping land erosion in Hatiya, or Tamang Nepali domestic workers rebuilding their homes after earthquakes, worker voices need to be mainstreamed in policymaking, rather than taking an uncle always knows approach. In their introduction, Blarel and Ennis argue that the South Asia-Gulf complex should be accorded far more attention than the small bucket to which it is relegated within either South Asian or Gulf Migration studies. On reading the book, it is easy to go one further than the editors themselves. Studying migration governance in all its complexity is not just imperative for workers in the South Asia-Gulf complex, or for the field of migration, but has far-reaching implications for the world in this moment of political, social and economic turbulence. It is a prime example of the need for deeper thought and collaboration across the multiple actors that dot a highly entangled policymaking landscape. In an era of pandemics, travel bans, and multiple other crises, perhaps it is even more critical to step away from ossified ways of thinking.

鈥淯ncle鈥� may know a lot, but so do the workers who choose to migrate every day.

Namrata Raju is a labour and public policy researcher focused on South and West Asia, and works at the international labour rights organisation, Equidem. She has an MPA from Harvard University and an MSc in Economics from the University of Warwick.