The IMI n working paper series presents current research in the field of international migration.... more The IMI n working paper series presents current research in the field of international migration. The series was initiated by the International Migration Institute (IMI) since its foundation at the University in Oxford in 2006, and has been continued since 2017 by the International Migration Institute network (IMI n ).The papers in this series (1) analyse migration as part of broader global change, (2) contribute to new theoretical approaches, and (3) advance understanding of the multi-level forces driving migration and experiences of migration.
Drawing on global migration data covering the 1990-2010 period, this paper investigates the relat... more Drawing on global migration data covering the 1990-2010 period, this paper investigates the relation between processes of development and migration patterns. We do so by conducting bivariate and multivariate analyses which estimate how several economic, technological, political, demographic, and cultural dimensions of social transformation shape patterns of emigration and immigration in complex yet systematic ways, and generate a series of hypothesizes for future empirical analysis. The findings corroborate the idea that there is an inverted U-shaped relation between processes of development and emigration. This challenges push-pull models and confirms ‘transition theories,’ which hypothesize that development and social transformation initially tend to boost emigration. While the incidence of warfare increases emigration, there is no significant effect of the level of political freedom on emigration levels, while the level of authoritarianism affect immigration levels positively. Th...
The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptuali... more The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptualized. De Haas has recently provided a powerful critique of the current literature highlighting some important flaws that recur through it. In particular, migration systems tend to be identified as fully formed entities, and there is no theorization as to how they come into being. Moreover, there is no explanation of how they change in time, in particular how they come to decline. The inner workings -the mechanics -which drive such changes are not examined. Such critiques of migration systems relate to wider critiques of the concept of systems in the broader social science literature, where they are often presented as black boxes in which human agency is largely excluded. The challenge is how to theorize the mechanics by which the actions of people at one time contribute to the emergence of systemic linkages at a later time. This paper focuses on the genesis of migration systems and the notion of pioneer migration. It draws attention both to the role of particular individuals, the pioneers, and also the more general activity of pioneering which is undertaken by many migrants. By disentangling different aspects of agency, it is possible to develop hypotheses about how the emergence of migrations systems is related to the nature of the agency exercised by different pioneers or pioneering activities in different contexts.
The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested in the face of their supposed f... more The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested in the face of their supposed failure to steer immigration and their hypothesized unintended, counterproductive effects. However, due to fundamental methodological and conceptual limitations, evidence has remained inconclusive. While the migration policy research is often descriptive and receiving-country biased, migration determinants research tends to be based on obsolete, theoretically void push-pull and gravity models which tend to omit crucial non-economic, sending-country and policy factors. More fundamentally, this stateof-the-art reveals a still limited understanding of the forces driving migration. Although there is consensus that macro-contextual economic and political factors and meso-level factors such as networks all play ‘some’ role, there is no agreement on their relative weight and mutual interaction. To start filling that gap, this paper outlines the contours of a conceptual framework for generating i...
This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of DEMIG POLICY, a new databa... more This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of DEMIG POLICY, a new database tracking major changes in migration policies of 45 countries between 1946 and 2013. Besides significantly extending the geographical and historical coverage of existing migration policy databases, DEMIG POLICY attempts to overcome the common ‘receiving country bias’ by also including emigration policies. This paper describes the process of compiling migration policy data and shares insights into the theoretical foundations and the operationalization of a coding system that disaggregates policy packages into their sub-components, categorises specific policy types and target groups, and assesses changes in policy restrictiveness and their relative importance. This paper also addresses the challenges involved in the various phases of the database compilation. It stresses that theoretical considerations should guide the making of well-reasoned, non-arbitrary decisions on database features...
Preparing for future changes in international migration requires an understanding of the differen... more Preparing for future changes in international migration requires an understanding of the different ways in which societies may change and how these will affect migration patterns. This requires us to move beyond traditional approaches of migration forecasting, which tend to focus on a limited set of relatively certain, easy-to-predict factors, such as demographic trends, and which assume structural continuity, by exploring methodologies that are suited to examine factors such as geopolitical shifts, economic restructuring, technological change and environmental change, which are notoriously difficult to predict, but which we cannot afford to ignore, since they will have a considerable impact on global migration patterns and trends. To this end, this paper presents the Global Migration Futures (GMF) Scenario Methodology developed at the University of Oxford’s International Migration Institute (IMI). The GMF Scenario Methodology integrates insights from migration theory with technique...
The Global Migration Futures aims to assess future regional and global trends and their effects o... more The Global Migration Futures aims to assess future regional and global trends and their effects on receiving countries in Europe and transit and sending countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East through the elaboration of scenarios, taking into account future social, cultural, economic, political, demographic and environmental changes. The aim of this paper is to outline the background of the project, its methods and in particular the scenarios approach. While the latter has hitherto been applied primarily in the business sector, it can also be helpful to explore the future of world migration.
The effect of ‘open borders’ on migration has been the subject of substantial controversy. Politi... more The effect of ‘open borders’ on migration has been the subject of substantial controversy. Political rhetoric and media images help stoke fear of uncontrolled mass migration that in turn fuels arguments in favour of tighter immigration regulations and border controls to ‘bring migration back under control’. In public debates, removing migration barriers is frequently portrayed as tantamount to ‘opening the floodgates’. However, immigration liberalisation may increase also circulation and return, rendering the effect on net migration theoretically ambiguous. Drawing on bilateral flow data over the 1959-2010 period contained in the DEMIG C2C database, this paper uses European Union (EU) enlargement as a case study to assess how liberalising border regimes affected migration flows. The analysis suggests that, with some exceptions, liberalisation boosted circulation rather than led to a structural increase in intra-EU migration. While removing migration barriers can lead to migration su...
Drawing on the new DEMIG VISA database which covers global bilateral travel restrictions from 197... more Drawing on the new DEMIG VISA database which covers global bilateral travel restrictions from 1973 to 2013, this paper explores patterns and trends in international visa regimes. We construct indices of cross-regional inbound and outbound travel restrictiveness to investigate (i) the extent to which different world regions and regional unions have opened or closed to other regions and (ii) the ways in which the formation of regional unions or the disintegration of countries or unions of countries (e.g. the USSR) has affected international visa regimes. Generally, the analysis challenge the idea of a growing global mobility divide between ‘North’ and ‘South’, and yields a more complex image reflecting the rather multi-polar and multi-layered nature of international relations. While the strongest change has been the decreasing use of exit restrictions, the level of entry visa restrictiveness has remained remarkably stable at high levels, with currently around 73 per cent of country dy...
This paper presents the features and potential uses of two new migration flow databases that were... more This paper presents the features and potential uses of two new migration flow databases that were compiled as part of the DEMIG (Determinants of International Migration) project from a wide range of primary archival and digital sources. While DEMIG TOTAL reports total immigration, emigration and net migration for up to 163 countries extending back from several decades to over one century; DEMIG C2C (‘country-to-country’) covers bilateral migration flow data for 34 countries over the 1946-2011 period. The paper also discusses the methodological considerations behind decisions on the selection, compilation and categorisation of migration data in constructing the database. These databases provide unprecedented coverage and detail in terms of flow data with historical depth, the inclusion of several countries outside Europe and North America and gender breakdown. The paper argues that, despite inevitable imperfections and inconsistencies, existing migration flow data is less scarce and ...
This paper synthesizes insights from new global data on the effectiveness of migration policies. ... more This paper synthesizes insights from new global data on the effectiveness of migration policies. It investigates the complex links between migration policies and migration trends to disentangle policy effects from structural migration determinants. The analysis challenges two central assumptions underpinning the popular idea that migration restrictions have failed to curb migration. First, post‐WWII global migration levels have not accelerated, but remained relatively stable while most shifts in migration patterns have been directional. Second, post‐WWII migration policies have generally liberalized despite political rhetoric suggesting the contrary. While migration policies are generally effective, “substitution effects” can limit their effectiveness, or even make them counterproductive, by geographically diverting migration, interrupting circulation, encouraging unauthorized migration, or prompting “now or never” migration surges. These effects expose fundamental policy dilemmas a...
New Perspectives on International Migration and Development, 2013
After decades of pessimism and concerns on brain drain and disbelief in the development role of r... more After decades of pessimism and concerns on brain drain and disbelief in the development role of remittances, since 2000 there has been a truly remarkable renaissance in optimism and the overall interest in the issue of migration and development among governments, development agencies such as the UK Department for International Development international financial institutions such as the World Bank. Also governments of developing countries have put renewed hopes on migrants as potential investors and actors of development. Surging remittances, in particular, are often believed to be a more effective instrument for income redistribution, poverty reduction and economic growth than large, bureaucratic development programs or development aid (
The International Migration Institute (IMI) has been publishing working papers since its foundati... more The International Migration Institute (IMI) has been publishing working papers since its foundation in 2006. The series presents current research in the field of international migration. The papers in this series: analyse migration as part of broader global change contribute to new theoretical approaches advance understanding of the multi-level forces driving migration
IMI has been publishing working papers since its foundation in 2006. The series presents current ... more IMI has been publishing working papers since its foundation in 2006. The series presents current research in the field of international migration. The papers in this series: analyse migration as part of broader global change contribute to new theoretical approaches advance understanding of the multi-level forces driving migration
The IMI n working paper series presents current research in the field of international migration.... more The IMI n working paper series presents current research in the field of international migration. The series was initiated by the International Migration Institute (IMI) since its foundation at the University in Oxford in 2006, and has been continued since 2017 by the International Migration Institute network (IMI n ).The papers in this series (1) analyse migration as part of broader global change, (2) contribute to new theoretical approaches, and (3) advance understanding of the multi-level forces driving migration and experiences of migration.
Drawing on global migration data covering the 1990-2010 period, this paper investigates the relat... more Drawing on global migration data covering the 1990-2010 period, this paper investigates the relation between processes of development and migration patterns. We do so by conducting bivariate and multivariate analyses which estimate how several economic, technological, political, demographic, and cultural dimensions of social transformation shape patterns of emigration and immigration in complex yet systematic ways, and generate a series of hypothesizes for future empirical analysis. The findings corroborate the idea that there is an inverted U-shaped relation between processes of development and emigration. This challenges push-pull models and confirms ‘transition theories,’ which hypothesize that development and social transformation initially tend to boost emigration. While the incidence of warfare increases emigration, there is no significant effect of the level of political freedom on emigration levels, while the level of authoritarianism affect immigration levels positively. Th...
The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptuali... more The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptualized. De Haas has recently provided a powerful critique of the current literature highlighting some important flaws that recur through it. In particular, migration systems tend to be identified as fully formed entities, and there is no theorization as to how they come into being. Moreover, there is no explanation of how they change in time, in particular how they come to decline. The inner workings -the mechanics -which drive such changes are not examined. Such critiques of migration systems relate to wider critiques of the concept of systems in the broader social science literature, where they are often presented as black boxes in which human agency is largely excluded. The challenge is how to theorize the mechanics by which the actions of people at one time contribute to the emergence of systemic linkages at a later time. This paper focuses on the genesis of migration systems and the notion of pioneer migration. It draws attention both to the role of particular individuals, the pioneers, and also the more general activity of pioneering which is undertaken by many migrants. By disentangling different aspects of agency, it is possible to develop hypotheses about how the emergence of migrations systems is related to the nature of the agency exercised by different pioneers or pioneering activities in different contexts.
The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested in the face of their supposed f... more The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested in the face of their supposed failure to steer immigration and their hypothesized unintended, counterproductive effects. However, due to fundamental methodological and conceptual limitations, evidence has remained inconclusive. While the migration policy research is often descriptive and receiving-country biased, migration determinants research tends to be based on obsolete, theoretically void push-pull and gravity models which tend to omit crucial non-economic, sending-country and policy factors. More fundamentally, this stateof-the-art reveals a still limited understanding of the forces driving migration. Although there is consensus that macro-contextual economic and political factors and meso-level factors such as networks all play ‘some’ role, there is no agreement on their relative weight and mutual interaction. To start filling that gap, this paper outlines the contours of a conceptual framework for generating i...
This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of DEMIG POLICY, a new databa... more This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of DEMIG POLICY, a new database tracking major changes in migration policies of 45 countries between 1946 and 2013. Besides significantly extending the geographical and historical coverage of existing migration policy databases, DEMIG POLICY attempts to overcome the common ‘receiving country bias’ by also including emigration policies. This paper describes the process of compiling migration policy data and shares insights into the theoretical foundations and the operationalization of a coding system that disaggregates policy packages into their sub-components, categorises specific policy types and target groups, and assesses changes in policy restrictiveness and their relative importance. This paper also addresses the challenges involved in the various phases of the database compilation. It stresses that theoretical considerations should guide the making of well-reasoned, non-arbitrary decisions on database features...
Preparing for future changes in international migration requires an understanding of the differen... more Preparing for future changes in international migration requires an understanding of the different ways in which societies may change and how these will affect migration patterns. This requires us to move beyond traditional approaches of migration forecasting, which tend to focus on a limited set of relatively certain, easy-to-predict factors, such as demographic trends, and which assume structural continuity, by exploring methodologies that are suited to examine factors such as geopolitical shifts, economic restructuring, technological change and environmental change, which are notoriously difficult to predict, but which we cannot afford to ignore, since they will have a considerable impact on global migration patterns and trends. To this end, this paper presents the Global Migration Futures (GMF) Scenario Methodology developed at the University of Oxford’s International Migration Institute (IMI). The GMF Scenario Methodology integrates insights from migration theory with technique...
The Global Migration Futures aims to assess future regional and global trends and their effects o... more The Global Migration Futures aims to assess future regional and global trends and their effects on receiving countries in Europe and transit and sending countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East through the elaboration of scenarios, taking into account future social, cultural, economic, political, demographic and environmental changes. The aim of this paper is to outline the background of the project, its methods and in particular the scenarios approach. While the latter has hitherto been applied primarily in the business sector, it can also be helpful to explore the future of world migration.
The effect of ‘open borders’ on migration has been the subject of substantial controversy. Politi... more The effect of ‘open borders’ on migration has been the subject of substantial controversy. Political rhetoric and media images help stoke fear of uncontrolled mass migration that in turn fuels arguments in favour of tighter immigration regulations and border controls to ‘bring migration back under control’. In public debates, removing migration barriers is frequently portrayed as tantamount to ‘opening the floodgates’. However, immigration liberalisation may increase also circulation and return, rendering the effect on net migration theoretically ambiguous. Drawing on bilateral flow data over the 1959-2010 period contained in the DEMIG C2C database, this paper uses European Union (EU) enlargement as a case study to assess how liberalising border regimes affected migration flows. The analysis suggests that, with some exceptions, liberalisation boosted circulation rather than led to a structural increase in intra-EU migration. While removing migration barriers can lead to migration su...
Drawing on the new DEMIG VISA database which covers global bilateral travel restrictions from 197... more Drawing on the new DEMIG VISA database which covers global bilateral travel restrictions from 1973 to 2013, this paper explores patterns and trends in international visa regimes. We construct indices of cross-regional inbound and outbound travel restrictiveness to investigate (i) the extent to which different world regions and regional unions have opened or closed to other regions and (ii) the ways in which the formation of regional unions or the disintegration of countries or unions of countries (e.g. the USSR) has affected international visa regimes. Generally, the analysis challenge the idea of a growing global mobility divide between ‘North’ and ‘South’, and yields a more complex image reflecting the rather multi-polar and multi-layered nature of international relations. While the strongest change has been the decreasing use of exit restrictions, the level of entry visa restrictiveness has remained remarkably stable at high levels, with currently around 73 per cent of country dy...
This paper presents the features and potential uses of two new migration flow databases that were... more This paper presents the features and potential uses of two new migration flow databases that were compiled as part of the DEMIG (Determinants of International Migration) project from a wide range of primary archival and digital sources. While DEMIG TOTAL reports total immigration, emigration and net migration for up to 163 countries extending back from several decades to over one century; DEMIG C2C (‘country-to-country’) covers bilateral migration flow data for 34 countries over the 1946-2011 period. The paper also discusses the methodological considerations behind decisions on the selection, compilation and categorisation of migration data in constructing the database. These databases provide unprecedented coverage and detail in terms of flow data with historical depth, the inclusion of several countries outside Europe and North America and gender breakdown. The paper argues that, despite inevitable imperfections and inconsistencies, existing migration flow data is less scarce and ...
This paper synthesizes insights from new global data on the effectiveness of migration policies. ... more This paper synthesizes insights from new global data on the effectiveness of migration policies. It investigates the complex links between migration policies and migration trends to disentangle policy effects from structural migration determinants. The analysis challenges two central assumptions underpinning the popular idea that migration restrictions have failed to curb migration. First, post‐WWII global migration levels have not accelerated, but remained relatively stable while most shifts in migration patterns have been directional. Second, post‐WWII migration policies have generally liberalized despite political rhetoric suggesting the contrary. While migration policies are generally effective, “substitution effects” can limit their effectiveness, or even make them counterproductive, by geographically diverting migration, interrupting circulation, encouraging unauthorized migration, or prompting “now or never” migration surges. These effects expose fundamental policy dilemmas a...
New Perspectives on International Migration and Development, 2013
After decades of pessimism and concerns on brain drain and disbelief in the development role of r... more After decades of pessimism and concerns on brain drain and disbelief in the development role of remittances, since 2000 there has been a truly remarkable renaissance in optimism and the overall interest in the issue of migration and development among governments, development agencies such as the UK Department for International Development international financial institutions such as the World Bank. Also governments of developing countries have put renewed hopes on migrants as potential investors and actors of development. Surging remittances, in particular, are often believed to be a more effective instrument for income redistribution, poverty reduction and economic growth than large, bureaucratic development programs or development aid (
The International Migration Institute (IMI) has been publishing working papers since its foundati... more The International Migration Institute (IMI) has been publishing working papers since its foundation in 2006. The series presents current research in the field of international migration. The papers in this series: analyse migration as part of broader global change contribute to new theoretical approaches advance understanding of the multi-level forces driving migration
IMI has been publishing working papers since its foundation in 2006. The series presents current ... more IMI has been publishing working papers since its foundation in 2006. The series presents current research in the field of international migration. The papers in this series: analyse migration as part of broader global change contribute to new theoretical approaches advance understanding of the multi-level forces driving migration
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Papers by Hein de Haas