euro-Mediterranean Migration futures 35
expanded. This ‘capabilities approach’ contrasts with narrower views of
development that are largely restricted to income indicators (e.g., gross
national product per head).
The crucial issue here is that the non-economic dimensions of capa-
bilities-enhancing development also tend to increase not only people’s
capabilities, but also their aspirations to migrate as a means to improve
their lives. In particular, improved education and access to information
not only give people enhanced capabilities (for instance, to migrate), but
are also likely to increase young people’s socio-economic life aspirations.
As long as these aspirations are not matched by growing employment
and economic opportunities in origin countries, this will probably result
in increasing aspirations to migrate. So, initially, development tends to
stimulate emigration because, f irstly, of its capabilities and, secondly, of its
aspiration-enhancing effects. Therefore, development in the form of increas-
ing incomes, improved transport and communication infrastructure, and
education tends to give people the capabilities and aspirations to migrate:
initially predominantly internally (assuming that internal migration is
usually cheaper and easier); in later stages increasingly internationally
(de Haas 2005).
In their analysis of European mass emigration between 1850 and 1913,
Hatton and Williamson (1998) showed that emigration usually increased
as wage rates in source and destination countries converged, because
declining wage differentials initially tend to be outweighed by the mass
arrival of cohorts of young workers (as a result of past fertility) on the labour
market. Simultaneously, the growth of emigrant populations leads to the
accumulation of social capital in the form of migrant networks, which
promoted substantial chain migration irrespective of the declining wage
gap (Massey 2000). Only in the longer term, after sustained growth and
signif icantly decreasing wage and other opportunity gaps with destination
countries – often, but not necessarily, coinciding with demographic transi-
tions (Zelinsky 1971) – long-distance (generally ‘South-North’) emigration
tends to decrease and immigration to increase. In this way, countries tend
to gradually transform from net emigration into net immigration countries
(Martin & Taylor 1996; Rotte, Vogler & Zimmermann 1997). It has been
argued that this transition occurs f irst for internal migration, then for
international unskilled migration, and f inally for the migration of the highly
skilled (Fischer & Straubhaar 1996).
The end result is that economic growth, infrastructure, improved educa-
tion and exposure to information tend rather to have a J-curve or inverted
U-curve effect on net emigration (even if opportunity differentials with