 Hi everyone and welcome to this knowledge clip on theories of international migration, whereby I will explain you structuralist approaches to international migration and in particularly world systems theory, which has been formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein. So if we want to understand structuralist approaches to international migration, we start always from dependency theorists. And these are a group of theorists who are rooted in kind of Marxists, neo-Marxists, sociological historical thinking about international relations, who argue that the world is inherently unequal. So global power relations do exist, whereby some core countries do, and generally that's the western world, do have power or make the peripheral countries dependent on these core countries. And they say, well, there is a globally stratified economic order whereby some countries have the power and can dominate basically the other countries in the developing world, who are structurally kept dependent on these core economies. And there is one sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein, who has been very famous, became very famous because of his world systems theory, which you can see here on the graph on the slide. So what Wallerstein indicated was that we have core countries who dominate the world economy. You have peripheral countries, and peripheral countries are countries where there is raw materials, where there is a lot of individuals that can work, who are unemployed, for example, where there is consumer markets. And generally the core countries are interested in these raw materials, because in a capitalistic economy of course you want to make profit the whole time, and how can you make most profit by taking the raw materials, for example, from the peripheral countries at a very cheap price, and you can then sell them of course in the west. Then in the middle you have the semi-peripheral countries, and these semi-peripheral countries are countries in emerging economies, where some of the raw materials, for example, are being assembled. Think about an iPhone, you might have an iPhone. Some of the materials of your iPhone might come from mine in Congo. Then that raw material is shipped towards, let's say Taiwan or South Korea, where there are some companies who assemble your iPhone, and then in the end it gets sold, also of course in the semi-peripheral and the peripheral countries, but particularly in these core countries where a maximum of profit can be made. So that is the idea of Wallerstein, that there is structural dependencies, and also that the countries in the core group of countries are very interested in keeping that structural dependency, because for them it's important to make as much profit as possible, and to do so you need for the capitalistic economy to keep the peripheral countries under your control. Now then the question is how does this influence or explain the existence of international migration, and I noticed that this is something quite difficult very often to understand for many students, which is why I will try to explain this with a lot of images. So first of all, capitalistic companies in the core countries, they seek to maximize their profits. That is the essence of the capitalistic economy, that you want to make as much profit as possible. There is many multinational companies who want to do so, and to do so you have to look at the peripheral countries in Wallerstein's model. Now what can you find in these peripheral countries? You can find raw materials, you can find land, you can find individuals who can cheaply work for you, and you can also find consumer materials over there. And that of course is all very interesting for these companies. The problem of course is that if your company let's say is American, you do not have direct control on all these different elements in let's say Burkina Faso or any other developing country. So what happens is that previously of course there was colonialism, which meant that these capitalistic companies had quite a lot of control because of the colonial regime. Afterwards, we had the independence of the different colonies, but structurally serious they argue that still today we have an era of neocolonialism, whereby the states are basically still dependent on the capitalistic companies of the West, because they do keep through all kind of relationships pressure on the local politicians who then still act as kind of an in-between person between the capitalistic companies and the local communities. And the result of this is that instead of having these raw materials, these lands, these people that can work under control of national economies or national governments or regional governments, this is not happening and you have all these peripheral areas that are actually under control of the global capitalistic market. And that means that because of this global system, there is a lot of social changes happening in these traditional communities, changes from people who experience weakening social bonds with other people, whereby there is much more consumerism, where there is much more individualism, there is a lot of images also that come from the developed world that influence people's behaviors, but also people's aspirations. And that of course leads to decisions to migrate because once people start to foreground a more individualistic, consumerist lifestyle, that leads to many social changes. And as a result of that, you see that many people either migrate internally to, for example, places where they can work for multinational companies in let's say factories, or they move internationally also next to this of course also because the multinational companies very often also have an intrinsic interest in attracting the best and brightest in these countries as well. So that is in a nutshell what world systems theories and structuralist approaches say about international migration. So the structural dependencies between countries make it kind of a natural consequence that people will start to migrate because of a change in their lifestyle, in their livelihood, because of social changes that follow globalization and capitalistic dependency relationships. Thank you for watching this video. Thank you. Bye.