ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how temporary labour migration has, with varying degrees of locational difference, constituted forced migration. Processes of uneven development have selectively exploited vulnerable demographics while marginalising others entirely. The concurrent deregulation of foreign employment has, in turn, provided an open door for those unwilling or unable to find work within the degraded conditions of local employment. The first section examines the various reasons for migration throughout the four communities researched in the study, drawing analytical connections between the widely cited need to travel abroad in order to earn a liveable income and the conditions of local employment. Establishing that the ‘good life’ sought by migrants is largely analogous to conditions of decent employment that have been undermined by uneven development, it then explores the disconnect between entrepreneurial investment and other developmental ‘wins’ anticipated by the mainstream migration literature and the dominant empirical reality of remittance-led subsistence. Characterising the stubborn challenges of reintegration as symptomatic of the structural conditions producing forced migration itself, it then examines the path dependency emerging from this contradiction: that initial migration tends to produce repeat or ‘flow-on’ migration in order to preserve remittance streams for economic survival.
