ABSTRACT

To formulate an approach to migration and development that speaks to the growing impediments to migrants’ international movement and settlement, scholars and policymakers need both knowledge of previous arguments about the topic and an assessment of the changing conditions. These assessments must address the past and contemporary political climate within nation-states and around the world with regard to migration and people of migrant background. In assessing the political climate, it is important to ask when and why in the past and present migration becomes a hot topic of political debate and migrants become contested problematic figures. A consideration of the ways in which methodological nationalism has marked much of the migration debate is part of this assessment. This chapter revisits migration and development debates, not as a review of the vast migration literature but to establish a way of assessing what is missing from contemporary discussions and to theorise processes of accumulation by dispossession and its concomitant processes of physical and social displacement as the social relations that underlie contemporary migration and unequal development.