In my next few blog posts, I will be exploring the topic of education as it relates to migrants. I aim to answer the questions: do migrants have access to education at the same level as natives? If not, why? I will be attempting to answer these questions in the context of Germany and Russia, two countries who receive high levels of migrants. In this first post, I will look at education as it relates to some migration theories we have discussed in class. In my second and third posts, I’ll be looking at the evidence in Germany and Russia. How does educational attainment actually differ in these places?
I’ll begin by posing a question. Why do we want to encourage education? Why is it desirable? It seems like a lot of energy is expended discussing educational outcomes in low-income countries and rural areas. There are plenty of charities dedicated to providing education for girls and young women (donate to one!). The theory that underpins this work is that educational attainment is a good indicator of development, as well as an indicator of future earnings.
Education and Development
An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report found that providing every child with access to education would raise GDP by about 28% annually in low-income countries, and by about 16% annually in higher-income countries over the next 80 years.1 Economically, it seems that education can drive development. It can also help to predict long-term earnings. While other factors remain important, such as occupation, social status, and family wealth, it seems that educational attainment is a similarly strong indicator of long-term earnings. Education “reflects an individual’s actual and potential productive skills,” which can be used to predict long-term economic success.2 Level of education attained and field of study matter as well, with STEM degrees and the like resulting in higher earnings. With education providing a person with higher future earnings, it appears to benefit at the state and individual levels.
Education for women can similarly help to close the gender gap by increasing labor force participation.3 Abdulloev’s study of education and migration’s effects on labor force participation in Tajikistan show us that access to higher education leads to higher female participation in the labor force. Based on their results, they suggest that scholarships for young women or the opening of new universities in rural areas may help to close the gender participation gap. In turn, this can result in higher wages and job opportunities for women. Including women in the workforce, I would imagine, would be beneficial for the overall economy as well.
Education and Social Change
Education can also develop a country in ways beyond economics. Dana Holland, in her article “The Only Solution: Education, Youth, and Social Change in Afghanistan,” examines how higher education is perceived among Afghan youths.4 Afghanistan is not the focus of my post, but still offers some interesting ideas about why education can be beneficial. For aspiring youths in Afghanistan, education is seen as means to improve yourself and therefore your country. In fact, it is seen by those interviewed for this article as the only way to solve society’s problems and enact change. Learning more about politics and the world around you can help an individual to develop “independence of thought,” and make them less tolerant of injustices in their country. It can be more difficult to be manipulated by political leaders when you are educated. Just look at the 2016 election in the U.S. – education was a strong predictor of who would vote for Trump. A young woman interviewed for the article had strong ideas about education:
“When there are educated people, war and cruelty will be eradicated and also the educated will serve their country and their people. People will differentiate between bad and good, they will not fight for the will of the warlords, and they won’t even listen to them.”
It seems that she believes education is a force against manipulation and indoctrination or has some effect on politics. And education does have something to do with politics. What a person knows about the political process can change how they vote. Kimmo Gronlund, in a study on the determinants of political knowledge, says that “for a democracy to function properly, electors need to have sufficient knowledge of the political system and the political actors in order to cast a meaningful vote.”5 When a person is not educated, it’s more likely that they don’t have complete information. For political change to be possible, knowledge of the political system is necessary.
The idea that education can be a force for change is not limited to education in the origin country. When a person migrates and receives an education, they can then send social remittances back to their origin country. Social remittances can be ideas, values, attitudes, or information that a migrant conveys to those who stayed in their origin country. With communication as easy as it is (social media, texting, calling), social remittances can reach the origin country and begin to change ideas and social norms. We see this in Roosen and Siegel’s article, “Migration and its influence on the knowledge and usage of birth control.”6 Among Afghan women left behind, positive or negative ideas about birth control passed to them through a migrant in the family living in either Pakistan or Iran can change views about contraception. Non-Pashtun women who have a migrant in the family have higher levels of knowledge about contraception, while Pashtun women have lower levels. These differing levels of knowledge are thanks to different attitudes about contraception being passed to women in Afghanistan. This example shows us that knowledge and attitudes passed through migrants to their families can spur change. Education, which has the potential to expose migrants to modern ideas, can do this as well.
So education is good! We want more education. If migrants and their children are denied access to education and higher education at the same level as natives to the country, then we can also expect that they will have lower earnings, lower social capital, and less political knowledge. These gaps would only serve to reinforce the structural disadvantages migrants face (see my second blog post for some examples of these disadvantages).
Migrants probably don’t migrate with these lofty goals of changing their country in mind. Often, migration is a rational decision to better your individual situation. Migrants complete a cost-benefit analysis in their heads – they can make more money in X country than at home, their children will have access to a quality education in X country, etc. These decisions are often made in the context of the family unit. The new economics of labor migration (NELM) theory posits that migration is a risk minimization decision made between family members. They can spread their potential incomes across countries and cities to minimize risk, a sort of investment to maximize benefits.7
To engage with another theory we discussed in class, the aspirations-capabilities model is useful to understand why education might increase migration. Education, of course, is not just taking place in destination countries. In discussing this theory, De Haas notes that “income growth, improved education, and improved communication and transport links increase people’s capabilities to migrate.”8 It also increases their aspirations to migrate. When people in rural areas have access to education, they are likely to learn about alternative and urban lifestyles, spurring a desire to leave and access those.
The idea of education as a benefit is convincing. Now, I’ll be exploring whether or not migrants and their children are denied that benefit. My second post on educational outcomes for migrants in Russia is up now. My third post is forthcoming, and that will explore outcomes for migrants in Germany. Before getting into the evidence, why might there be different outcomes for migrants and natives in a country? One answer might be racism or xenophobia. It’s possible that migrants and their children could be denied a place in a university if admissions officers do not see them as equals or hold them to higher standards than natives of that country. Second, immigration laws might keep them from needed scholarship money and effectively disallow their education. Many scholarships in the United States, for example, are only for U.S. citizens. Another possible answer could be that migrants and their children lack social capital. They may not have strong social networks who can help them navigate the education system or have the necessary information about how financial aid works. They are at a disadvantage because they do not have as much acquired knowledge or connections as others. Here is the second part of this post.
Sources:
1 OECD/Eric A. Hanushek/Ludger Woessmann (2015), Universal Basic Skills: What Countries Stand to Gain, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264234833-en.
2 Kim, C., Tamborini, C., and Sakamoto, A. “The Sources of Life Chances: Does Education, Class Category, Occupation, or Short-Term Earnings Predict 20-Year Long-Term Earnings?” Sociological Science, 2018. https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-v5-9-206/
3 Abdulloev, I., Gang, I., and Yun, M. “Migration, Education, and the Gender Gap in Labour Force Participation.” European Journal of Development Research (2014) 26, 509-526.
4 Holland, D., Yousofi, M. “The Only Solution: Education, Youth, and Social Change in Afghanistan.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Vol. 45, Issue 3, 241-259.
5 Gronlund, K., and Miller, H. “The Determinants of Political Knowledge in Comparative Perspective.” Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2006.
6 Roosen, I., and M. Siegal. “Migration and its influence on the knowledge and usage of birth control methods among Afghan women who stay behind,” Public Health 2018, 158: 183-192.
7 De Haas, Hein et al., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: The Guildford Press, 2020), 54.
8 De Haas, Hein et al., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: The Guildford Press, 2020), 62.