Changing Characteristics of International Labor Migration in Northeast Asia: With a Focus on the Russo-Chinese Border

tion. ” Globalization enables not only commodities and money to cross national borders but also gave rise to a mass international migration flow on a really global scale. At the turn of the 21st century, according to a specialist estimate (Stalker, 2000), there are some 30 to 40 million migrant workers in the world and, if we include their family members, the number rises to the order of 100 million people. If we include refugees and illegal migrants, the number grows sharply to 150 million according to MOM (Mi-gration News, December 2000). This is twice as big as it was two decades ago. Cross border migrants are now ubiquitous through-out the world. The socio-economic consequences of globalization on inter-national migration could be, in the author’s view, roughly sum-marized as follows: 1) Globalization intensified the uneven development of the world economy, and is leading to growing “polarization ” of the earth, segregation of the world labor market, which stimulates migration ever more strongly (Differentiation of income, possession, wealth, etc.). 2) Globalization gives rise to a stronger segregation of the domestic labor market in the developed countries, allocat-ing migrants to receive unrespectable, dirty, cheap and of-ten dangerous work