Professor Tasneem Siddiqui: A life dedicated to migration research

Sketch: TBS

Professor Tasneem Siddiqui has dedicated her time and life to researching people and advocating for their rights and protection. Her studies have contributed immensely to producing new knowledge in labour migration, poverty, remittances, and climate change-induced migration. 

She has single-handedly brought migration research into the public and policy spectrum of Bangladesh since the mid-1990s and remains the authority in this discipline, both as a scholar and as a policy influencer. 

Professor Tasneem Siddiqui has long advocated for establishing a 'decent work' perspective in employing migrant workers. In her pioneering research on migration and gender, she dispelled the myth that migration is a 'male' phenomenon in Bangladesh and females are only 'trafficked-in victims'. 

In her book 'Transcending Boundaries: Labor Migration of Women from Bangladesh' published in 2001, she provided a solid ground for advocacy for female labour migration from Bangladesh. 

Her empirical research titled Female Labour Migration from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, published in 2000, was one of the studies that contributed globally to establishing that women not only migrate as spouses; they are also principal migrants, and many of them are the principal breadwinners of their households.

Her contribution lies in developing panel data through surveys on the impact of migration on poverty and development in Bangladesh from 2014 to 2022. She led a team of researchers to conduct a longitudinal study by collecting panel data from 6100 households. 

She established that migration allows women to close gender inequalities in the labour market. The third wave of the panel surveys took place during the Covid period. They show that migrant households could still maintain their expenditure on food consumption by reducing their expenditure on non-food items. 

Of late, a large body of literature has been produced to show various drivers of migration. Professor Siddiqui added a new lens to the inquiry by rigorously examining why some households with similar socio-economic backgrounds decide to migrate while others decide not to. 

As her research shows, attachment to places or economic solvency are not the only reasons for staying back in the country. Many non-migrants aspire to migrate but cannot due to a lack of access to resources, social networks, market information, and the absence of surplus working-age men or women.
Dr Siddiqui was a pioneer in researching migrants' remittances, too. Her first work on remittances, titled Migrant Workers' Remittance and Micro-finance in Bangladesh, was published by the International Labour Organisation in Geneva in 2003. The work was essential and the first to challenge the idea that remittances are primarily used in unproductive avenues. Her studies show that remittances are disproportionately used for better housing, children's education, and health, which are human solid development indicators.

Professor Siddiqui never failed to understand the importance of addressing the protection issues of migrants in the wake of the crisis. Through her research, Professor Siddiqui showed how, during the Global Financial Crisis in 2009–10 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, migrants were disproportionately affected. However, they sent more remittances during the crisis than usual. 

The Other Face of Globalisation—Covid-19, International Labour Migrants, and Left-behind Families in Bangladesh bear the testimony of these findings.

Over the past few years, Professor Siddiqui has devoted her time to studying the social cost of migration in Bangladesh. She carried out two studies, Cost of Migration: Left-behind Children, Husbands, and Wives in Bangladesh and Social Cost of Migration: Elderlies and Siblings, which showed that members of left-behind households go through various kinds of social costs. 

However, social costs vary by age, gender, health status, and a person's role in household decision-making. The study demonstrates that migrants who are left behind while enduring the costs develop their agencies to overcome some of them. She used the term 'left in charge' instead of 'left behind' to recognise the agency of the stay-put members of the migrant families. 

Mainstreaming climate change-induced migration
One of her most recent areas of interest and intervention is climate change and migration. During the early years of climate change-induced migration research and programmes, theorists and practitioners in Bangladesh mostly used to portray the environment and climate change as stand-alone and independent variables driving household migration from ecologically vulnerable areas to less vulnerable regions.  

The discourse also perceived migration as a failure of local-level adaptation efforts. However, Professor Siddiqui did not incline to uncritically accept this notion. She came up with a non-conventional hypothesis that, if proved, could challenge the dominant ideas in the discourse. 

She was able to foresee imminent challenges in introducing new knowledge; therefore, she forged partnerships with internationally acclaimed academics and researchers based at the University of Sussex, UK, and co-led a groundbreaking multi-county study on climate change-induced migration. This study went beyond environmental determinants and established that migration decisions are highly intricate and multi-causal in nature. 

She came up with the transforming idea that migration can be an effective adaptation strategy for many climate-vulnerable people, households, and communities. This was a fresh perspective. To push this idea, she started engaging with experts across disciplines and stakeholders to introduce new knowledge and influence policy framing and changes on climate change and migration.

In this process, she felt the need for more systemic evidence across the world, which later paved the way for her collaboration with an international research consortium based at the University of Exeter, UK, to study the interface of climate change and migration and its potential as a successful adaptation strategy. 

In this collaborative effort, Professor Siddiqui, through a large data set derived from different countries, led the validation process of her earlier study findings and was able to fully establish that migration can be an effective adaptation strategy for many poor households in climate-vulnerable areas, provided migration efforts are well planned and supported by stakeholders, including governments. 

Professor Siddiqui did not pause here; she envisioned translating this idea into policy changes and framing so that tens of thousands of migrants, who otherwise remain forlorn, fully realise the benefits of their migration. She began raising the issue in national, regional, and global forums to influence relevant policy changes and framing through coalition building with civil society organisations. 

Her relentless and persistent efforts convinced the Government of Bangladesh to develop and adopt a national strategy on climate change-induced displacement, which is the first of its kind for many countries. Professor Siddiqui led the development process of the strategy and drafted the instrument. 

Her vision and framework for studying migration as part of broader processes of social transformation appear to be more crucial than ever for understanding the challenges we will face in the following decades.

Apart from her unique contribution to migration research and policy changes, perhaps her greatest legacy lies in creating generations of critical migration scholars. 

Today, the vast majority of Bangladeshi migration researchers working at home and abroad, in different national and international organisations, in public and private universities, are blessed by her leadership, care, direct supervision, teaching, and, above all, the space to make their contribution visible.

She often prioritised encouraging and inspiring fresh graduates and young researchers to take up the mantle of research leadership and pursuing the imagination of how migration issues should be perceived in a way that is beneficial for society and the country.

All three of us have participated in different research projects with Professor Tasneem Siddiqui. We are proud to be part of her extraordinary contribution to research and advocacy in migration. 

Dr Rozana Rashid  is a Professor at the Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka. Motasim Billah is an Adjunct Sr. Fellow at the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU). Dr Anas Ansar is a  PhD Researcher at the University of Bonn, Germany. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.