“Migration is increasing and continues to be a deeply divisive topic. We’d like to change the narrative from crisis, from the idea that it’s something that shouldn’t be happening. We also want to focus more on migrant agency rather than only governance,” said Anna Triandafyllidou, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University.
In a two-part presentation, Triandafyllidou and Igor Grossmann, Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, Canada, explored fresh ways of thinking about migration and governance. Triandafyllidou examined how social and economic transformations have reshaped migration in the 21st century, critiqued the ‘migration and development’ narrative, and pointed towards the need for more sustainable, resilient systems of governance. Grossmann then discussed the psychology of life’s major decisions — migration included —showing how ‘rational’ approaches often miss the equally vital ‘reasonable’ dimension of context and moral considerations. They aimed to illustrate why standard policy models for migration fall short and highlighted how more holistic, agency-focused perspectives might offer better solutions.
Re-positioning migration governance
Triandafyllidou started by pointing out that migration is not new – people have always moved – “the first human in Europe was an Ethiopian female”, and it is only the growth of the nation state and later the introduction of borders and passports that made it an international governance issue.
Sketching some of the recent historical context underlying our understanding of migration, she pointed to the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the impact of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
“But there have also been multiple crises in the last ten years – including climate change, the energy crisis and inflation, the crisis of democracy and rise of authoritarianism, health crises – including the COVID-19 pandemic, economic crisis, food insecurity and geopolitical conflict.
“How do we govern and understand migration at a time of multiple crises when emergency mode has become the terrain of policy and meaning making?” she asked.
“Migration as abnormal remains the narrative and European/US perspectives still dominate,” she added. “The Global compacts are all about South to North migration. There is lots of South to South and North to South migration. We must recognise the complexity, decentre the geopolitical terms and the knowledge products.”
She also emphasised that a migration and development paradigm has dominated the last 50 years of national and global migration governance. “Migration is not caused by underdevelopment in the country of origin. Without migration there would be no human development. Also, the idea that remittances of money and social ideas can alone lead to development is wrong. We need to think more comprehensively about the social, political and technological environment in which migration takes place.”
She highlighted the need for alternative narratives that are culturally defined and see migration as a regular part of socio-economic activities.
She explained that “hard distinctions are made between migrants (seen as economically motivated) and refugees seeking protection, but many migrants are a combination of both. This continuum is not reflected in relevant policies.”
“We need a much stronger focus on migrant agency,” she continued. “This includes analysing migrants’ aspirations (cognitive), desires (emotional) and the decisions (bounded reality) they make.”
She proposed the need for research and policy to build systems of migration governance that are sustainable and resilient. She explained that governing migration is a wicked problem requiring multi-level governance but that many of the stakeholders have conflicting interests. There is a need to understand the inter-relationships between migration and broader transformation to ensure that solving one problem does not exacerbate another. “There are uncertainties and unknowns, and solutions are not definitive. Often also those who try to solve the issue are those who caused it. It requires changing mindsets and behaviours. There is no silver bullet.”
“We need to work on the everyday issues,” she added. “Migration often relates to local or provincial management not national, yet policies are often at the transnational level.”
She pointed to the three levels of research and policy adjustment needed to build sustainability and resilience. “Situated resilience is about readjusting; structured resilience is about reorganising systems; and, systematic resilience is about changing all the components of the system to bring about reform.”
“We thought COVID-19 would lead to systematic change, that policy makers would realise the system was not resilient, but many of the measures were forgotten and abandoned.”
Rational or reasonable? Folk psychology of life’s big choices
In the second part of the seminar Grossmann examined how people navigate life’s consequential choices — such as whether and where to migrate?
“One longstanding answer — rooted in economics and policy — emphasises a ‘rational’ approach, grounded in cost-benefit analyses and algorithmic criteria to maximise outcomes,” he explained. “Traditional models often view deviations from this ideal as ‘irrational’ biases to be corrected. Yet scholarship in philosophy and law suggests that people often aim at a different standard — what might be called reasonableness — prioritising context, fairness and moral considerations.”
He explained that rational choice theory – an idea that has been around for over 200 years − is a set of guidelines that help understand economic behaviour originally introduced by political economist Adam Smith. These were extended to describe social behaviour by, among others, 1992 Nobel Economic Science Prize winner Gary Becker and focus on rational, goal-orientated decision-making behaviours that can be evaluated.
Grossmann emphasised that people make decisions in context and we are often irrational (per rational choice theory). “Or we may be irrational because we don’t have unlimited resources and hence don’t strive for the ‘best’ (impossible) but for ‘good enough’ (given the circumstances) – and good enough is often quite good!”.
“In addition, the rational choice idea is operating within the so-called ‘small world’ scenarios – where all parameters and choices are known and one can calculate what is best,” he continued. “In the ‘large world’ we typically live in, we have a great deal of ‘radical uncertainty’ – in fact we don’t even know whether our future self will like the choices we make now, as we can’t predict how much the future self will be like the present self!”
“Our reasoning is sophisticated and complex, even if it systematically violates the notion of neoclassic ‘rationality’.”
He explained that while rationality follows rules of formal logic, is consistent but reductionist and abstract, reasonableness is more holistic, context specific, tries to balance preferences and norms and is non-reductionist.
“Drawing on evidence from big-data analyses of narratives, behavioural experiments and spontaneous descriptions of features of sound judgment, we have shown that laypeople routinely distinguish rational judgment from reasonable judgment, each being deliberate but guided by different values and suited to different contexts. Migration decisions illustrate this point: strict, rule-based visa policies rarely capture the nuanced realities that drive migrants’ choices. Recognising how — and why — we switch between rational and reasonable standards can spur more effective personal strategies and more humane policymaking.”
“It’s not that people, especially migrants, fail to internalise standards of rationality but they often deliberately forgo the rational standard in favour of socially conscious reasonableness especially for ill-defined contexts (like migration). People switch between rational and reasonable depending on context.”
“In terms of policy implications this means there is a need to focus not just on the self-serving advantages (and risks) of migration but rather to gather information on the contextual factors and deepen understanding of how migrants balance different trade-offs.
Triandafyllidou and Grossmann’s STIAS project aims to facilitate an understanding of the future of migrancy and, in particular, to unpack the role of digital technologies. They will hold a workshop on this topic during their residency.
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photography