Migration, Education and Socio-economic Mobility

The primacy of education in development agendas is unquestioned. With the gradual acknowledgement of the potential benefits that migration can hold for development, the relationship between migration and education is a growing area of research. Migration, Education and Socio-Economic Mobility explores how the decisions people make in terms of both their migration choices and educational investments, mediated as they are by gender, class, caste and nationality, can potentially contribute to earning incomes, building social and symbolic capital, or reshaping gender relations, all elements contributing to the process of economic and social mobility.

Much of the existing literature examining the links between migration and education focuses either on the investment of migrant remittances in the education of their children back home or on ‘brain drain’ that refers to the migration of skilled workers from the developing to the developed world. Most of these discussions are firmly rooted in materialist arguments and while undeniably important, tend to underplay the social processes through which migration and education interact to shape people’s lives, identities and status in society. Along with economic security, people also aspire to social mobility and status enhancement. The ideas presented in this book take a more varied and nuanced view of the relationship between education and migration.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Nitya Rao is Senior Lecturer at the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia, UK. She has over 25 years experience as a field-level practitioner, trainer, researcher and teacher. She has worked extensively in the field of gendered land relations, and her book Good Women do not Inherit Land: Politics of Land and Gender in India was published in 2008. She has also been involved in researching, from a gender perspective, issues of livelihoods and economic growth, with a focus on migration, education, resource access and social identity, with a particular focus on South Asia.