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Where these discussions of modernity and Eurocentrism find their most immediate and obvious application in migration studies is in the field of migration and development. There are two main perspectives on this: the developmental perspective, which is interested mainly in the effect of migration on development; and the migration perspective, which is mainly interested in the effect of development on migration. In relation to the former, for a long time, a key question within migration studies has been ‘whether migration encourages development of the countries of origin or, conversely, hinders such development’ (Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014: 69). On the one hand, migration is thought to aid development in sending countries through ‘brain gains’ and remittances, and on the other hand migration is thought to lead to ‘brain drains’ and to therefore hinder development. The general consensus appears to swing, pendulum-like, between these two perspectives (de Haas 2010, 2012). From the migration-focused perspective, which is of great interest to (perhaps even led by) governments and policy actors in the Global North, the argument has been about whether development increases rates of migration through providing people with the financial means to migrate, or whether it allows them to stay in their countries of origin as a wider range of jobs and opportunities open up (see Clemens 2014). As Raghuram (2009: 104) has pointed out, ‘almost all theorisations of this link assume migration to be something that can be contained, regulated or influenced, [and] development as normatively good’. Few of these perspectives challenge the idea of ‘development’ itself as a problematic colonial framework.

De Haas (2012) dates the migration and development debate back to the post-Second World War period. Indeed, this is the period in which decolonization began apace and in which ‘development’ replaced civilization as the primary language of progress through which the modernization project was articulated because ‘development’ as a project, we must recognize, is a project of modernization in which ‘developing’ countries are engaged in an externally facilitated effort to catch up with the West (Escobar 1995). Development, as a discourse, aspiration, project, practice and set of social relations, then, cannot be understood without recognizing the colonial context from whence it emerged. The idea of development has of course come under significant critical scrutiny for its damaging Eurocentric assumptions (Ake 2000 [1979]; Escobar 1995; Esteva and Babones 2013; Sardar 1999). Nyamnjoh, writing on the expansive topic of development discourses in Africa, explains:

Development for Africa is a theme fraught with a multiplicity of western-generated ideas, models and research paradigms, all with the purported goal of alleviating poverty. This discourse is carried on mainly by economists and other social scientists who limit the question of development to the problematic of achieving economic growth within the context of neo-liberal economic principles. Notwithstanding the fact that there are now novel paradigms of development that search for solutions under the theoretical rubric of alternative development, the problem is rarely studied in a holistic manner. (Nyamnjoh 2004: 162; see also Ake 2000 [1979] for an earlier intervention in this vein)

In 1992, Sachs described development as ‘like a ruin in the intellectual landscape’, obsolete owing to its clear failure to achieve what it had set out to do (Sachs 1992: 6; see also Rutazibwa 2018). Yet the post-Cold War period has not seen development become obsolete as a discourse or project; it seems to receive as much attention, funding, focus and effort as ever before. In this vein, Sardar (1999: 49) succinctly explains that ‘development continues to mean what it has always meant: a standard by which the West measures the non-West’, though we must of course acknowledge that it is not only western governments and NGOs that buy into the development discourse.

Nevertheless, the development discourse, according to its critics, does centre western knowledge about how to develop, and it decentres non-western knowledge systems which might offer an alternative to development (Escobar 1995). In more extreme critiques development has become something to be feared in many places, as it brings pollution, consumerism, the destruction of communities and cultures, and all of the individual and collective harms of global market capitalism – though such perspectives have not gone uncontested (Cooper and Packard 1997; Esteva and Babones 2013; Nilsen 2016). Nevertheless, these critiques, most vocally under the ‘post-development’ agenda (see Rahnema and Bawtree 1997), have, as noted above, not decreased the dominance of ‘development’ as a discourse within or outside of the academy.

In a widely cited article tackling the migration and development agenda, Raghuram (2009: 104) argues that the development industry has achieved very little, even as development has morphed from a concept of economic growth ‘to basic needs … [to] poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods’, and yet it continues to look for new solutions. Migration has recently received renewed focus as a possible solution since migrants undertake activities which could be construed as international wealth redistribution through remittances. Northern governments are also concerned about whether migration is a desirable mechanism for development since it moves people out of place and leads to concern over terrorism, integration and cohesion. For Raghuram, the growing interest amongst policy makers in the dynamics of migration and development has led to a concomitant increase in academic research on these dynamics. Particular ‘forms of migration and certain kinds of development come to be visible in this debate’, she argues, ‘occluding other imaginaries of the relationships between migration and development’ (Raghuram 2009: 104; see also Bettini and Gioli 2016; Sinatti and Horst 2015).

The harms of the discourse of development have, of course, been challenged by social movements around the world who have both fought for the rejection of development as an ideology and also sought to manipulate or alter the meaning and understanding of development in particular contexts for the benefit of the people who live there (see, for example, Moore 1998; Rangan 2000; Vergara-Camus 2014). Equally, as Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2015) has pointed out in her work, there is a risk of maintaining and reinforcing North–South dichotomies in critiques of development, rather than challenging them. Acknowledging South–South responses to development would enable us, she argues, to include rather than erase Global South actors within the history of development.

The challenge for migration studies, then, is how to listen to critiques of development and seriously engage with them without continuously erasing the agency and endeavours of ‘southern’ actors from the picture (see Rutazibwa and Ndushabandi 2019). How might we research and write about the relationships between international migration and, for example, poverty as a phenomenon and at the same time root our understanding of poverty in colonial histories and neo-colonial relations, and as connected to global processes of accumulation, dispossession and liberal capitalist ideology? Escobar (1995: 215) argues that better futures will not be found in ‘development alternatives, but in alternatives to development, that is, the rejection of the entire paradigm altogether’. By thinking with alternative discourses, might we imagine the search for equality, dignity, ‘a better life’, beyond the confines of the ‘development’ discourse? Might we also follow Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s (2015) lead in decentring the Global North in our understanding of such phenomena? Perhaps by being more specific about the actual processes that we seek to understand, that are being wrapped up in the idiom of ‘development’, and exploring how migration is related to those factors, migration researchers need not fall prey to the pitfalls of Eurocentric modernization orthodoxy.