A Third Emergent Migrant Subject Unrecognized in Law: Refugees from 'Development'

Saskia Sassen on her lecture 'A Third Emergent Migrant Subject Unrecognized in Law: Refugees from ‘Development’':

‘There is an emergent type of migrant not formally recognised in law. She is a kind of refugee, but not of war. Rather this is a refugee from particular forms of economic development that not only cause environmental destruction but also have expelled millions of rural smallholders from their land over the last few years.

They include mining, plantations, land grabs to expand cities or new built types of private enclaves for the rich, water grabs by the big bottlers, and more. These modes of development are typically registered as “economic development” and show up as growth in a country’s GDP. The fact that they expel millions of small holders and often destroy small manufacturing and other local economic activities is not registered in those measures. The millions who have been expelled from their land (mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America) are invisible to those standard measures. The options they typically confront are either to go to the slums of big cities in their countries or try to emigrate.

The rapid surge in these flows combined with the conditions they leave behind raise a question that organises much of the analysis: Are the categories and the laws (national and international) we use to understand and describe migrants enough to capture this third type of emergent migrant – a migrant of economic developments that have created massive expulsions of people? My answer is: not quite.

Can we develop a new legal regime that recognises these outcomes and either condemns them or secures justice for the millions of people whose sources of livelihood are being summarily and often brutally destroyed.’