Understanding the Relationship between Migration and Development: Toward a New Theoretical Approach

The relationship between migration and development is a topic of growing interest among international organizations. To varying degrees, those organizations see remittances as an essential tool in the development of migrant-sending, underdeveloped countries. We argue that this view, on which most pertinent public policies are based, mis- represents the notion of development and obscures the root causes of current labor migration. This limited and distorted perspective should be discarded, and the phenomenon should be analyzed in a compre- hensive manner that includes strategic/structural, multi-dimensional, and multi-spatial approaches based on the political economy of devel- opment. This type of analysis should take into account the following interrelated dimensions: social agents, global context, regional integra- tion, national environment, and local levels.