Emerging counternarratives on: migrants, border controls, digital networks, remittances, child labor, COVID’s impact, and deglobalization

Climate Migrants

“The discourse of apocalyptic climate change-induced mass migration is now past its prime. Particularly since the early 2010s, it has been extensively critiqued (see Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013; Piguet, Kaenzig, and Guélat 2018; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), and the majority of migration scholarship no longer expects a linear, massive and world-transforming movement of people under climate change. Indeed, an ever-rising number of studies shows the opposite is the case: that relations between climate change and human migration are often indirect, small-scale, and taking shape in context-specific ways, influenced by a host of other socio-economic and political factors. The ways in which people move in a changing climate are diverse, and typically consist of relatively local mobilities (for overviews see: Black et al. 2011a; Foresight 2011; McLeman and Gemenne 2018; Hoffmann et al. 2020; De Sherbinin 2020).”

(accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2066264#abstract)

Migrants into Europe

“Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.”

(accessed online at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/glob.12312)

Latin American Mobility and Border Controls

“While this spectrum defines the cognitive horizon within which most migration law operates, it misses what the infrastructuring perspective is able to show, namely that border regulation in practice is less hermetic and controlled (by states), and that those on the move have considerably more agency than is often assumed, and that the particular legal configurations that enable or disrupt mobility are constantly being infrastructured and (thereby) changed. Again, Latin America is a prime case study here as it features all the factors that allow for such legal infrastructuring.”

(accessed online at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qm9pr_v1)

Digital Networks

“With all the usual caveats about surveillance and manipulation by the big tech companies, digital technology has played a transformative role in the mobility and organisation of refugee, migrant and diaspora communities. People on the move make impressive use of GPS technology, increasing their capacities to anticipate danger, plan new routes, connect with family and communities at home and in their planned destinations, and liaise with sympathetic citizens in host settings. As well as for functions like sending remittances, refugee networks have turned to digital platforms to mobilise resources, share information, and advocate for their rights. For example, WhatsApp groups enable refugees to use digital tools to take control of their circumstances, particularly in regions where state infrastructure is weak or non-existent. Among Somalis, this use of digital technology has enabled a form of ‘platform kinship’, where online networks function as substitutes for state-based social welfare systems and even some functions of governance and justice – in the latter case, exclusion from a digital group provides a sanction for infraction and dereliction. In the Somali case this has been dubbed a ‘WhatsAppocracy’.”

(accessed online at https://reliefweb.int/report/world/rsc-working-paper-series-no-143-refugia-reflection-five-years-june-2025)

Remittances and the COVID Pandemic

“1.6% — The decline in global remittances, or money that foreign-born workers sent back to their home countries, to low- and middle-income nations last year. That drop was far less than the 20% decline projected by the World Bank early in the pandemic. Migrant remittances have become crucial economic lifelines as the recoveries of rich and poor countries diverge.” (accessed online at https://whatsnews.cmail20.com/t/d-e-qidpld-jdkdtdwtj-r/)

“Remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries in 2020 as a whole remained resilient, contrary to initial projections and despite having recorded a strong decline in Q2 2020. The latest available data shows remittances are estimated to have reached USD 540 billion in 2020, just 1.6% below the 2019 total of USD 548 billion. . .The decline was smaller than that recorded in 2009 during the global financial crisis. Fiscal measures in migrants’ host countries, including cash transfers and employment support programmes implemented in many large economies, the widespread use of remote work, and migrants’ commitment to continue providing a lifeline to families by cutting consumption or drawing on savings contributed to this better-than-expected outcome. However, there are important regional and intra-regional differences, including between the countries covered in this study.” (accessed online at https://www.esm.europa.eu/system/files/document/2022-11/ESM_DP_18.pdf)

Children’s Labor

“We examined a number of dimensions of children’s work in African agriculture in papers published in 2020 and 2022. It is certainly the case that some children are harmed by the work they do, and others may be forced to work, exploited or trafficked.

Yet, based on this and other work informed by extensive literature review and initial research, children who are harmed by working represent a minority of working children. And critically, neither their interests, nor those of other rural children, are necessarily served by ongoing efforts to eradicate child labour from African agriculture.”

(accessed online at https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/child-labour-on-farms-in-africa-its-important-to-make-a-distinction-between-whats-harmful-and-what-isnt/)

COVID Pandemic in Africa

“Viewed through the lens of the COVID-19 crisis narrative, Africa’s exceptionally low rates of COVID-19 mortality amid pervasive informality have widely been regarded as a delayed reaction, or a product of low testing capacity, masking a ‘ticking time bomb’. Yet, the statistical evidence shows that, nearly two years into the pandemic, high levels of informality remain inversely related to levels of COVID-19 mortality in Africa, and this pattern has continued to the present. The reality is, for a variety of reasons, larger informal economies are not associated with a higher level of COVID-19 mortality, either at a global level, or at the level of African sub-regions. However, social policy measures to facilitate lockdowns for precarious workers have been more problematic, supporting efforts to crowd the poor together in informal settlements and social provisioning activities.

(accessed online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877792/)

Deglobalization

“Globalization is past its peak, we are told. The rise of populist anti‐globalization movements and the return of geopolitical rivalries among great powers in the 2010s has put an end to free‐wheeling corporate global capitalism. Or has it? This article summons available data on cross‐border corporate investments at the level of countries (balance of payments), firms (subsidiaries and affiliates), and corporate managers (industry surveys). It pays special attention to the period between 2015 and 2021, which spans the election of President Trump and the outbreak of the Covid‐19 pandemic that have unsettled global politics. We analyze global patterns in foreign direct investment positions and in particular the evolution of investments by US corporations in China, arguably a ‘most likely case’ for deglobalization.

“Our analyses find no evidence that economic cross‐border integration is in decline. The global allocation of corporate investments across the world’s major economic regions has remained stable. US corporations have not notably reduced their global activities. If anything, their aggregate investment position in China has increased during the Trump administration’s trade war. Overall, the results cast empirical doubts on prominent narratives about the state of the global economy. Geoeconomic transformations in world economic infrastructures may well be underway, but they are better understood as new and adapted forms of internationalization rather than the end of globalization.”

(accessed online at https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/8092)

NB. In some cases, footnote numbers and internal citations have been deleted for ease of reading.