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Keralites no longer inclined to migrate

KOCHI: Are Keralites giving up their inclination to migrate? Findings of the Migration Monitoring Studies (MMS) for 2007 conducted by the Research Unit on International Migration of the Centre for Development Studies point towards the static nature of migration from the State.

The latest in a working paper series on MMS, co-authored by K.C. Zachariah and S. Irudaya Rajan, touches three main areas – migration, remittances, and employment – and their short-term trends and long-term implications for development.

The study, funded by the Department of Non-Resident Keralite Affairs, observes that, “the era of large-scale emigration from the State seems to be largely over.”

Coining a new phrase, “mobility in Kerala has become immobile,” the paper states that international migration from Kerala has remained “absolutely stationary” during the 2003-07 period.

The total number of Non-Resident Keralites (NRK) has remained the same at 27.3 lakh during 2003 and 2007.

The percentage of households with a Non-Resident Keralite each in them remained static at 25.8 per cent in 2007, the same as it was in 2003.

Significantly, the number of NRKs per hundred households dropped from 39.7 to 36.2 during the period.

Three-fourths of Kerala households do not have even a single member abroad, and more importantly, the situation has remained the same during the recent years.

There has been a perceptible fall in migration rates; it declined from 26.7 per hundred households in 2003 to 24.5 per hundred households in 2007.

United Arab Emirates is dethroning Saudi Arabia as the preferred destination of Malayali emigrants bound for the Gulf.

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