Weakened domestic unions pushed Pakistani laborers into transnational migration

Evidence

Cities had always received the excess population of the countryside. Persons who, for whatever reason (laws of inheritance, enclosure laws, and so forth), had been without a place in the traditional order of an agricultural world, had migrated to the cities. Many of them became a part of the organizationally unaffiliated mass, the “floating population” of the preindustrial city. But in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they came not only because they were pushed but because they were pulled. The disintegration of the feudal order, which, in England, had been proceeding for centuries, gave them the freedom to go. The “opportunities” of the developing industrial order gave them the desire to go. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 318 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The Asian Crisis of 1997-98 caused significant changes in migratory patterns. Laborimporting countries tried to reduce dependence on foreign workers through nonrenewal of contracts and expulsion of undocumented workers. In Malaysia, for example, the government announced that up to a million workers would be sent home and there were mass roundups of illegals, who were confined in special camps before being sent back to Indonesia and the Philippines. However, there was great pressure for emigration from countries like Indonesia, where the crisis led to soaring unemployment. In any case, Malaysian plantation owners soon found that they could not manage without foreign workers. Even unemployed Malaysians were not prepared to do this type of work. The plantation owners lobbied for a halt to the expulsion policy. In fact the number of migrant workers deported was quite small, and new recruitment started again fairly rapidly. By 1999 Asian economies were recovering and migration resumed. In the long run the crisis actually exacerbated the income differential between the least developed countries and the better-off economies. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3881 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pakistani working-class migrants sustain families through seasonal transnational migration; State destruction of trade unions left Pakistani workers surplus and exposed; Pakistani workers’ criminalization and racialization emerge from home-country social formations and regional migration — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 43 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Industrial-era migrants were pulled by opportunity, not only pushed by displacement. #complicates (0.75) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 318
• Economic crisis deepened migration because expelled workers resisted and employers demanded them back #complicates (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3881