ABSTRACT
The migration-development nexus is anything but a new concern (de Haas 2012). Resurgent academic and policy enthusiasm regarding the relationship between temporary labour migration and economic development has overshadowed a longer and more ideologically fraught migration-development debate. Perhaps the most influential recent interpretation has been Hein de Haas’s argument that the migration-development debate has ‘swung back and forth like a pendulum’ (de Haas 2012, 8) from ‘optimism’ to ‘pessimism’ and back again. This chapter examines the overarching narrative of the migration-development literature with historical and ideological sensitivity, retracing the movements of de Haas’s pendulum while exposing the weaknesses of the metaphor and the ‘middle ground’ it promotes. It contests the pretences under which historical-structuralist perspectives have been dismissed and draw attention to the subtle repackaging of neoclassical economics in the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), as a more ‘nuanced’ and reputable guise for outdated assumptions.
