Join our seminar to get to know how OPEC oil crisis unleashed economic and geopolitical changes that led to over 100 million unexpected migrants.
The speaker’s presentation starts with a puzzle. There was every reason to believe that global immigration should have stagnated or even declined after 1970: economic growth halved, the Europeans ended the guestworker programs, the US capped Mexican immigration, and the public was resolutely opposed to immigration. Yet it tripled. Why?
Randall Hansen argues that the OPEC oil crisis unleashed economic and geopolitical changes that lead to over 100 million unexpected migrants. The quadrupling of oil prices permanently halved economic growth in the West, leading to a five-decade stagnation in wages. The middle class responded by rebuilding its standard of living on the back of cheap labor, which brought in millions of exploited low-skill migrants. In the oil-poor Middle East, OPEC put the last nail in the coffin of import substitution industrialization, forcing Egypt and Syria to turn to neoliberalism. The resulting inequality and poverty led to political protests, crackdowns, and open revolt. In the oil-rich Middle East and Russia, a sudden rush of oil money destabilized Iran, led to the fall of the Shah, and resulted in multiple military conflicts: the Iran-Iraq War, two Gulf Wars, and, in a more complicated way, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The result was tens of millions of refugees. War led tens of millions to flee, while work and want made them into disposable laborers. Work —our demand for it, poor migrants’ need for it—and want—our insatiable desire for food, goods, and services at ever-cheaper prices have led tens of millions of low-skilled laborers to migrate. The result is a structurally embedded, global, migrant working class. The world economy, and the world, are awash in migrants, documented and undocumented, driven by war, drawn by work, and destined to satisfy our insatiable consumerist wants.
Speaker:
Randall Hansen (University of Toronto’s Munk School).
Chair:
Andrew Geddes (Migration Policy Centre, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI).