36 Hein de Haas
destination countries decrease), steeply increasing in the initial phases of
development and only later gradually decreasing. This quite adequately
ref lects past (Hatton & Williamson 1998; Massey 1991) and contemporary
(Olesen 2002) migration patterns. In recent decades, countries such as Spain,
Italy, Greece and Ireland, in Europe, and Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea,
in Asia, completed their migration transition. The result of the complex
interplay of demographic, social and economic forces embodied in the term
‘development’ is a ‘stylized emigration curve characterized by an introduc-
tory phase of slow development, a growth phase of rapidly accelerating
emigration, a saturation phase during which emigration approaches a peak
and levels off, and a regression phase when rates of emigration rapidly fall’
(Massey 2000: 497, referring to Hatton & Williamson 1998).
In line with this transitional migration theory, it is striking that the
countries with the lowest GNP and the highest population growth gener-
ally do not exhibit the highest rates of (transcontinental) migration to the
Western world (Olesen 2002).^3 Instead, the world’s main labour exporters are
typically upper-lower- to lower-middle-income countries (such as Mexico,
North African countries and the Philippines), which are generally located in
a zone that Skeldon (1997) has conceptualised as the global ‘labour frontier’.
Labour-frontier countries generally experience falling birth rates but a
3 It should be noted that there is signif icant ‘South-South’ mobility of labour migrants and
refugees. It is, instead, the more costly and risky transcontinental migration to wealthy countries
that is generally more limited from the poorest countries.
Figure 1.1 The migration transition
source: de Haas (2010)