Forced migration and the osmotic pressure of poverty

Abstract

Poverty is an incentive to migration. Poverty is not a fatality nor is it irremediable, it is a policy choice. A choice that can be compounded with other measures (deprivation of basic needs, eviction, persecution, criminalisation of poverty) that push persons experiencing extreme poverty into desperation and can ultimately drive them out of their homes and out of their countries. In such cases it is possible to say that poverty is exported. But, in the same way as poverty is not inevitable, exporting poverty need not be inconsequential.