The focus and concern of Agrarian Change, Migration and Development is the problem of labour migration. Veltmeyer and Wise explore the dynamics and development implications of the migration processes set in motion by the capitalist mode of production. The dynamics of these processes are both international - in regard to the international or cross-border flows of labour migrants - and internal to countries that have undergone, or are undergoing, a process of agrarian change and social transformation.
Veltmeyer and Wise examine what they call the "migration-development nexus" from both a political economy and a sociological perspective, highlighting current trends, the global scale and the human dimension of the labour migration process, with particular reference to the increasing south-north flows of migrants who are forced to abandon their communities and ways of life by the globalizing forces of capitalist development.
While it may appear that these migrants are free to choose to abandon their communities, and in many cases their families, in the search for greater economic opportunities and a better way of life, the authors show with devastating logic that the decisions made by so many migrants are rooted in the workings of the world capitalist system, which converts them into a pool of surplus labour to be pulled into and out of the system as required by capitalists in their endless search for private profit.