Chapter 5
Global Migration Modelling: A Review of Key Policy Needs and Research Centres

Adam Dennett and Pablo Mateos

5.1 Introduction

Policies are an important element of international migration research and provide the context – indeed in part the purpose – for model-based research and analysis. Policies may seek to address specific issues such as the integration of migrants, but in most cases they can be boiled down to limiting the flows of some types of migrant or encouraging the flows of others. Judging the impact of both migration flows and migration policy can only be done effectively with good information, but too often data on migration are poor and thus the evidence base lacking. This chapter assesses some of the migration and policy issues, which are currently relevant, before examining where the modelling work being undertaken can help strengthen the evidence base available in order that better policy decisions are made. A directory of international migration research centres and the work they are undertaking is provided in an extensive appendix.

International migration is a perennial research interest to academics across the world. The €28 million NORFACE research programme on migration (http://www.norface-migration.org) is one such reflection of the continuing desire to understand the global patterns, processes and effects of the human population moving around the globe. The inaugural conference for the research programme titled ‘Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge’ and held at University College London in April 2011 (http://www.norface-migration.org/sites/index.php?site=3&page=1) exposed the breadth of interest surrounding different aspects of international migration, with researchers from across the globe presenting research related to a host of topics including migration flows, migration policy, migrants' impact on labour markets, migrants' impact on sending and receiving communities, migrant networks, second-generation migrants and migrant children, segregation, migrant identities, remittances and migration data. In most cases, interest in these broad areas was locally focused with country-level case studies predominating.

Drawing together a large number of academics who are currently engaged in international migration research, the conference was a snapshot of the current ‘state of the art’ of many branches in the field and showcased the work advancing current knowledge about international migration to fellow academics. While academics may assess the value of their work in very broad terms – progressing our intellectual understanding, asking new questions and revealing new truths – increasingly the value of research (judged by those who fund it) is measured through its impact on a wider society; and so outputs will frequently be geared towards realising this aim (whatever your position on the merits of this approach may be1). In the social sciences where much of the work on migration can be found, this impact will invariably be through the influence the research has on forming, shaping or redefining policies that are enacted by governments and other policy makers.

In this chapter, we present a short review of the policies that currently influence and are influenced by international migration. We will endeavour to link policy needs to modelling challenges to provide the context for later chapters. There are a number of research centres that are engaged in research activities related to international migration and international migration policy. The Appendix of this report provides a guide to international migration research centres around the world and the work they carry out, particularly focusing on whether modelling is used to enhance the evidence base from which policy decisions are made.

5.2 Policy and Migration Research

5.2.1 Key Policy Issues in Contemporary Migration Research

Studying the various research outputs from the migration research groups outlined in Appendix, ‘policy’ is a recurrent theme. This is perhaps unsurprising as research will top and tail the theoretical model of the policy cycle: this cycle begins with the identification of a problem (research) and progresses through the formulation, adoption and implementation of the policy itself (legislation) before the outcomes of the policy are evaluated (research). Frequently, ‘policy briefs’ are produced by a number of the research centres. These may be prospective and look to identify particular issues, which may then elicit policy stances by national or international legislatures, or retrospective and review or critique policy decisions which have already been made. Salt and de Bruycker (2011) detail a number of the more recent global policy legislation developments in OECD countries (plus a handful of others), the themes of which are echoed in a number of policy-positioning or policy-reviewing research outputs produced by international migration research centres. Of course, the policy legislation part of the policy cycle does not always follow on from sound research (although undoubtedly if it did, better policy decisions would be made). However, where research may not always come before policy, it almost always will be carried out afterwards by either those who enacted the policy or indeed those who may have opposed the policy in the first place.

Since the beginning of the global financial crisis in 2007/2008, countries which have traditionally been destinations for economic migrants have been keener than ever to ensure that labour migration meets labour market needs; and this has been a growing area of policy concern. Salt and de Bruycker (2011) cite a number of examples from Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia and Canada, and a full report on this matter for the Home Office was conducted at the UCL Migration Research Unit (Salt et al., 2011). For example, the introduction or expansion of migration points-based systems of entry has been a feature of policy in many of these countries, along with increasingly more stringent selection criteria for migrants and reduced ‘shortage-lists’ for jobs. In the United Kingdom, it appears that despite the introduction of a points-based system, there is still a gap between current policy and successfully addressing skills shortages through labour immigration. There remains a demand for migrant labour in the United Kingdom, and restricting access will only exacerbate this demand unless there are also changes to the policies and institutions which create the demand in the first place (Ruhs and Anderson, 2012). One particular example of current friction can be found in the elderly care sector – a sector where jobs are typically low paid and low skilled, but the work can be challenging; with an ageing population, demand for these services is clearly growing (Shutes, 2011). In the United Kingdom, recent demand for labour in this area has been filled with migrant workers, although with the recent introduction of the points-based-system which precludes the migration of low-skilled workers, there is a growing mismatch between the supply and demand of these key workers.

Salt and de Bruycker (2011) also highlight the role of family reunion/formation and humanitarian (asylum) policies in broader international migration policy. The pervading sense is that, in relation to family reunification, policies are becoming more restrictive – for example, the tightening of rules governing the level of maintenance support that should be provided by the employed migrant before the rest of their family are allowed to join them from abroad. In Sweden, this now means adequate housing should be provided, whereas in a number of OECD countries, immigrants wishing to bring families into the host country need to ensure (and demonstrate) that these new migrants will not be a financial burden on the destination country. In addition to these restrictions, age restrictions can also operate (stipulating minimum ages for parents) as can pre-arrival integration tests (such as those testing language proficiency). The Netherlands and Denmark require immigrants who are planning to join family members who are already settled, to have knowledge about their societies as well as knowledge of their language, before successful entry applications can be made – similar requirements also exist in France and Germany. One of the most contentious areas of immigration policy in relation to the family and human rights is that of the children of irregular (illegal) migrants. In Europe, the battle between migration and asylum policy, on the one hand, and child protection policy, on the other, has created difficulties in many countries, not least the United Kingdom (Sigona, 2011).

Irregular migration is a contentious policy area in its own right. In a number of countries, border monitoring and enforcement measures have been tightened in locations where irregular migration appears to be increasing. In countries such as Italy, other deterrent policies such penalties for illegal migration have been increased. In Europe as well as in a number of other OECD counties, sanctions against the employers of illegal migrants have been made more severe. Overall, despite the various measures that have been put in place to mitigate the flows of irregular migrants, the impression that Salt and de Bruycker (2011) give is that for a number of countries, dealing with issues such as human trafficking remains a persistent challenge. van Liempt (2007) warns that much policy surrounding irregular migration focuses on the criminal aspects and the last stage of the process – of ‘smuggling gangs’ and human trafficking across national borders – and too often neglects migrant agency, that is, the proactive decisions (taken with differing motivations at various points along the journey) made by the migrants themselves. The implication is that more attention needs to be paid by the policy makers to factors which – using Lee's (1966) terminology, ‘push’ migrants out of their countries of origin. These are factors such as poor security or war, economic hardships, social injustices or political oppression.2 It is important to understand how these factors may assist in the decisions that individuals make, which together with intervening and pull factors in turn lead to the international migration flows.

While many of the ongoing policy debates are concerned specifically with aspects of immigration, the UK government has made ‘net migration’ a key policy issue, with the Conservative party in 2011 stating publicly that they aim to reduce the current positive net migration balance for the country ‘from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands’. While one side of the net migration coin relates to immigration flows, the other relates to emigration, and therefore, by definition, any policies addressed to tackle net migration must necessarily address both sides of the coin. Indeed Salt and de Bruycker (2011) note that a number of countries have enacted policy to encourage emigration – particularly the return of recent immigrants to their home countries. Japan, Spain, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria are all cited as recently implementing such policies. Several examples are also cited in the Scandinavian countries where governments are actively providing funds to facilitate the return migration of asylum seekers who have failed in their applications to remain. In the United Kingdom, part of the persistent levels of positive net migration is due to lower emigration rates of non-nationals and higher immigration levels of nationals (a sort of ‘return’ to the United Kingdom). To complicate things further, some countries do not count nationals in international migration flows, but with increasing naturalisation rates one could arrive as a non-national and leave as a national being left as a long-term resident in population statistics.

Within Europe, the migration policies of individual countries have been driven by EU legislation. Salt and de Bruycker (2011) outline recent developments which propose new EU-wide policy frameworks in relation to particular areas of current interest:

  • The first of these relates to labour migration and would involve the easing of restrictions for third-country nationals working within large multinational companies; this would allow these workers easier access to the EU job market for a defined limited period of time. In addition, seasonal workers will be admitted to countries under EU-wide rules which will both ease admission and limit their exploitation.
  • The second relates to combating illegal immigration and sets out a number of policy measures which will assist in the management of external borders of the European Union.
  • The third sets out a series of recommendations for the management of legal immigration flows, including improving the annual reporting of trends by national agencies.
  • The fourth relates to a series of guidelines to assist countries in setting up integration policies in line with other EU states.
  • The final development within the European Union concerns stronger multilateral cooperation between EU counties and Africa in relation to international migration and development, and legal and illegal migration flows.

One of the central pillars of EU migration policy has been the Schengen Agreement which followed the Maastricht Treaty in 1991–1993 and has been fully incorporated into EU law with the Amsterdam Treaty since 1999. The free travel area created under this legislation has eased the movement of people between 26 European states, allowing the crossing of borders without the requirement for passport checks to take place. With the right to free movement and barriers to accessing employment for EU citizens in other EU countries removed, national policies have had to adapt to the migration scenarios caused by this EU-wide legislation. The accession of eight former Eastern-bloc and Baltic countries to the European Union in 2004 led to an unprecedented flow of economic migrants from these states to richer Western European countries – flows which whilst in many cases were not permanent moves, but nevertheless imposed significant changes to local social structures in receiving countries, at least for short periods of time. Certainly after the large influx of Polish migrants to the United Kingdom (Düvell and Garapich, 2011) – especially in the market gardening localities around the Wash region in East Anglia, policy makers felt they had to adapt quickly. The Worker Registration Scheme was the resulting attempt by the UK government to temper these flows within existing EU law, although it ceased its operation at the end of April 2011.

The final area of policy activity relates to issues of integration and citizenship, with Salt and de Bruycker (2011) outlining some of the policy decisions taken by some countries in this area. For example, in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, programmes exist to assist new migrants in language training or labour market participation. In other countries, citizenship and integration have been linked explicitly to residence permissions through legislation – some countries have required the signing of agreements or contracts by immigrants which provide assurances of their language competencies or willingness to undertake integration programmes. Countries with such policies include Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Norway. There has also been a focus on the integration of established migrants and their children, for example, the recognition of foreign qualifications enabling migrants to access labour markets has now been a common policy objective within a number of European countries. Citizenship can be viewed, in some ways, as the final stop along the route to the integration of migrants. It appears that a common policy within a number of countries (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands) is for citizenship to be contingent on the successful completion of newly introduced ‘citizenship tests’. With citizenship seen as the ultimate aspiration of migrants and with it carrying (in many cases) the most rights and benefits, it is perhaps not surprising that withdrawal of citizenship is also a sanction increasingly being employed by countries where immigrants have been seen to harm the national interests of those countries.

The common feature among all of these policy issues is that they are all responses to known or perceived situations. For example, faced with the issue of the oversupply of low-skilled migrant labour, the response is to introduce a points-based system to control these flows. Whereas with the issue of resource pressures caused by families of migrants who cannot engage with the job market due to language, dependency or other issues, the response is then to ensure that the head of family can support dependents and impose language proficiency conditions on their arrival. In order for these policies to be formulated as responses, governments have had to first marshal the available data and use this information to inform an appropriate response. Policies on international migration such as these are reactive, but for prospective policy decisions to be made there is a clear need to understand the rapidly evolving dynamics of international migration and attempt to anticipate future trends. As is argued by Penninx (2006), these dynamics are not yet fully understood and this has an impact upon the policy decisions which can be made.

One of the issues within migration research which is affecting the evidence base from which policy makers can draw and therefore limiting the effectiveness of policy – highlighted by Penninx (2006) and also by Kraal (2008) – is the disconnection between different levels of analysis. Much qualitative research is carried out at the level of the individual and rarely links to quantitative research which tends to focus on aggregate populations. For example, how might health and safety issues faced by migrant agricultural workers in Canada (McLaughlin, 2010) be better linked to knowledge of aggregate seasonal flows in order for improved targeting of policy interventions in the agricultural sector? Another example of levels of analysis failing to match up is in geographical space – while we may have some data relating to international migration patterns at a country level, there is often little comparable data at the level of the city or region. The availability of information at multiple levels of analysis is crucial when policy decisions at one level can have very different impacts at another. An instance of this might be where restrictions are placed on the number of unskilled migrants allowed into a country but this has a disproportionate impact on some regions where need for low-skilled migrants is most keenly felt or where social provision has, in the past, been stretched the most.

The impact of migration can be seen as a theme underlying all of the policy concerns outlined earlier, and in the United Kingdom this has been expressed explicitly in the recent Migration Advisory Committee report (MAC, 2012) titled ‘Analysis of the Impacts of Migration’. The report focuses on a series of areas upon which international migration might have an impact – the impact of migrants on labour markets, specifically native employment; the impact of migrants on the consumption and provision of public services; the impact on transport infrastructure and congestion; the impact on housing provision and housing markets more widely; and societal impacts such as crime, social cohesion and integration.

The authors of the MAC report consider the impacts of extra-European (non-EEA) migration on the United Kingdom and specifically look to quantify, not just the overall net present value (NPV – the single number representing the benefits minus the costs) of a particular migration-related policy, but the NPV for the already resident population. They see this as important as often economic measures such as GDP (which can be used to help compute the NPV) might be calculated per capita where the heads of the immigrant population are included in the denominator along with the previously resident population – the argument being that it is often the case that it is these very immigrants who gain employment and contribute to GDP, but gain most benefit from this additional wealth; and so a more accurate indicator of the value of a policy should only consider the value of migration to those previously living in the country.

Assessing the impact of migration in this way, however, is not straightforward. The authors concede that ‘on the basis of current data and knowledge, any attempt to calculate the NPV of migration policies will be subject to considerable uncertainty and likely biases’ (MAC, 2012, p. 12). Consequently, they recommend that the quantitative evidence base be strengthened, ideally with data sets including longitudinal information which allow researchers to track behaviours and consumption patterns over a migrant's lifetime; or data containing more detail on the types of migrant moving into different areas, or more geographically detailed information which allows for the impacts to be measured more effectively for smaller areas.

In summary, the unifying themes running through the key policy issues described earlier are impact and evidence. The impact of migrants on the societies they join or the impact of policies on migrant flows, and the evidence for assessing these impacts accurately – this holds true for local, national and international policies.

5.2.2 Linking Policy Issues to Modelling Challenges

Given the policy cycle outlined earlier and the impact agenda, there is a clear potential for effective modelling of migration flows to provide a major contribution in the initial phase of policy development. A model may fill gaps in current knowledge – for example, estimating the age profile of recent migrants to London in order that decisions about the amount of money allocated for maternity care in particular boroughs can be made more effectively. A model can also be used to make predictions of future populations: it could be formulated to provide intelligence on the likely impact of a specific policy decision – for example, what is likely to happen to migrant flows from x to y if country y decides to remove its border control from x? It could also be applied to assess impact in a more general context, perhaps to look at the implications for populations of particular socio-economic conditions resulting from certain overarching policy stances. This is something that the ESPON DEMIFER project did recently using a multi-regional demographic model to look at the likely evolution of populations in Europe under different growth/decline, competitiveness/cohesion policy scenarios (De Beer et al., 2010).

A recent example of a failure in policy preparation linked to inadequate migration flow predictions occurred with the EU enlargement in 2004. Predictions carried out for the UK government estimated that the net migration to the United Kingdom from 8 of the 10 new EU member countries (also called ‘accession eight or ‘A8’) would be between 5,000 and 13,000 migrants per year (Dustmann et al. (2003). Despite these estimates being produced with a number of assumptions and caveats attached, they were broadly accepted before later being widely criticised when in reality the number of accession migrants who came to the United Kingdom exceeded half a million migrants in the first 2 years (BBC, 2006). Clearly when discrepancies between migration estimates and actual figures are so large, there will be a policy vacuum where planned responses will not be able to deal adequately with real events.

In this particular case, the econometric model used to predict migration flows (which was essentially based on relative per-capita income differences and did not take into account the migration policies of the rest of the EU members) proved woefully inadequate. More recent qualitative research (Sriskandarajah et al., 2008) has shown that A8 migrants to the United Kingdom were motivated by more than just income-based factors: changes in origin unemployment, the opportunity to learn English, restrictive policies in adjacent countries and perceived opportunities for enterprise all contributed to a general preference for flows into the United Kingdom. None of these factors were incorporated into the original model devised by Dustmann et al. (2003).

Policy associated with migration responds to lived, perceived or expected impacts for all residents of a jurisdictional entity. The challenge for those engaged in migration modelling is to provide useful intelligence that will assist in better policy decisions being made for particular locations and periods of time. This challenge is of course not an easy one, but it can however be broken down into some specific modelling challenges that can be defined and tackled separately. Overcoming one or more of these sub-challenges in migration modelling will have clear benefits for those involved in migration policy formulation across various countries.

5.2.3 Policy-related Research Questions for Modellers

Consider the following in turn arising from this review.

  1. 1. Is it possible to model the bilateral migration flows of individuals at the country level as a function of the various factors at both origin and destination?

    • Spatial interaction models are effective at distributing migrants around a system as long as the number of in and/or out (or net) migrants are known. An improved cost matrix (see later) could assist with more accurate distribution of these migrants, but the generation of migrants at origins and/or destinations can be achieved through regression (or similar) models which use covariates that generate estimates of these figures.

      These covariates might include inter alia:

      • Population size and structure: size of the origin and destination populations together with their age and gender structures;
      • Development disparities: wage/income disparities between origin/destination; differences in other development indicators, such as the Human Development Index (HDI), sustainability, transparency/corruption and so on;
      • Other destination attractiveness (pull) factors such as language, historical migration flows, ex-colonial ties, ethnic/ancestry ties, education system, political system, social welfare benefits, perceived enterprise advantages;
      • Other origin repulsiveness (push) factors such as instances of war, famine or natural disasters; political instability; religious intolerance.

      Bilateral flow estimates have recently been produced, and so by fitting explanatory models to these flows, we may learn more about the importance of these and factors influencing each particular origin–destination pair and thus be able to make better future predictions. We have already started to make some inroads into this challenge within ENFOLDING (see Claydon, 2012).

  2. 2. Is it possible to define a better proxy for predicting migration flows than physical distance?
    • Distance is not a dynamic variable, but the ways in which people perceive or are affected by distance do change constantly. Borders become more or less permeable; visa restrictions are continuously changing; the costs of travel decrease; and in general, globalisation has made people feel more connected to other parts of the world. Using a time series of migration flows and/or stocks, is it possible to model a ‘de facto distance’ as something separate from ‘physical distance?’
    • Physical distance is still one of the strongest predictors of international migration behaviour (Cohen et al., 2008), although it is very far from an ideal proxy – for example, Morocco is very much closer to the United Kingdom than Australia, but we would expect significantly more migrants flowing from Australia to the United Kingdom. Using a time series of bilateral flows/stocks estimates, it should be possible to model the de facto or ‘inferred’ distances experienced by migrants – this could be achieved using the method outlined by Plane (1984). If there are stabilities in these de facto distances over time, then we have the basis for a more accurate proxy in a spatial interaction model which could then be used to create better estimates of bilateral flows. It might also be possible to model external influences on these de facto distances. For the ENFOLDing project, it would be interesting to look at how these might be useful in analysing trade flows/comparing trade and migration inferred distances.
  3. 3. Can levels of analysis be unified?
    • As stated by Kraal (2008), one of the major challenges facing migration research which looks to influence policy is the disconnect between spatial levels of analysis – country, region/city, households or individuals. A significant modelling challenge, therefore, is to try and unify the different levels of analysis so that effective policy decisions can be made local as well as national and supra-national levels. Dennett and Wilson (2011) have already made some inroads with this with a new multilevel spatial interaction model for estimating regional-level flows consistent with country-level information in Europe, but there is scope for experimenting with this methodology in other parts of the world with internal migration data from the IPUMS database and international stock/flow data from the United Nations and other sources such as national censuses.
  4. 4. What are the local impacts of inter-regional migration in Europe?
    • Building on the work of Dennett and Wilson (2011), there is scope for exploring in more detail the impacts of international migration at sub-national levels. The methodology can be refined to distribute international migrants to cities and regions, and then the potential impacts of these flows can be assessed though their comparison with other variables such as GDP and unemployment. This has particular relevance in the context of the MAC (2012) report where criticism of the evidence base allows accurate assessment of the impact of international migration on, among other things, employment and the labour market in the United Kingdom.3

The four modelling challenges outlined earlier should be used as the basis for the ongoing work agenda of the migration work stream. The project is now in possession of data which, while in some cases are provisional (and therefore potentially unreliable), will allow us to begin to explore areas such as bilateral migration flow covariates over time, or the ways in which distance is perceived by international migrants, or indeed whether the decisions made by individuals can be modelled in such a way as to reproduce aggregate behaviours, or whether the multilevel migration modelling framework recently defined by Dennett and Wilson (2011) can be extended globally. Each of these branches of research will lead to tangible outcomes, whether these are new estimates and data sets, or a deeper understanding of the factors which influence migration flows or a re-specification of the global migration system which is not characterised by physical barriers but which is shaped by the repeatedly lived experiences of migrants. All of these could have real influence on the evidence base used by policy makers.

5.2.4 Other International Migration Modelling Research

Despite the large amount of work being carried out on international migration, very little migration modelling is taking place among the various research centres in this field. The exceptions are the Centre for Population Change (CPC) at the University of Southampton (with colleagues elsewhere in the IMEM project), the Wittgenstein Centre in Vienna and CReAM in UCL (see Appendix for details). Within these three, CReAM is seeking explanations of migration using secondary evidence, while Southampton and the Wittgenstein centre, on the other hand, are engaged in trying to improve our understanding of international migration through increasing the volume of reliable primary data available to researchers. Both are working at the country level – that is, they are attempting to develop models which allow us to reliably estimate the number of migrants flowing between countries for given time periods, although IMEM is focusing on a relatively short European time series whereas the Wittgenstein centre is attempting a 50+ year time series for the whole world and is trying to disaggregate by age, sex and educational achievement. The ENFOLDing project, therefore, is well placed to offer new model-based insights into international migration.

5.3 Conclusion

In the next two chapters, we describe research aimed at the development of model-based solutions to real-world policy problems of the types described earlier. Many of these problems associated with migration have to do with the impact of migrants on the origins they leave as well as destinations they migrate to, and so a great deal of attention is paid by national governments and other policy makers to try and maximise the positive impacts and minimise the negative impacts of these flows in both origin and ‘receiving’ societies. This review has shown that policies looking to achieve this will be either prospective (anticipating impacts) or retrospective (responding to impacts) but critically in both cases, far too often built atop a rather shallow evidence base.

Academic research on international migration is currently largely concerned with qualitative case studies and policy responses to particular facets of international migration, whether these might be a focus on an individual country or perhaps on a particular classification of migrant. Indeed a journey through the outputs of the research centres described in Appendix will back up this assertion. The poor evidence base from which more extensive quantitative analyses can be conducted is sometimes acknowledged, but rarely tackled directly except for by the few projects engaged in modelling what turns to be rather inadequate data.

Through developing models which can help substitute for deficiencies in data availability and strengthen the evidence base from which effective policy decisions are made, these chapters will make an important contribution to tackling some of the pertinent real-world problems currently presenting themselves.

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  25. Plane, D.A. (1984) Migration space: Doubly constrained gravity model mapping of relative interstate separation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74 (2), 244–256.
  26. Plewa, P. (2010) Voluntary Return Programmes: Could they Assuage the effects of the Economic Crisis?, COMPAS, Oxford. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/wp-10-75/ (accessed 20 January 2016).
  27. Portes, A. and Shafer, S. (2006) Revisiting the Enclave Hypothesis: Miami Twenty-Five Years Later CMD Working Paper 06-10, Princeton University. http://www.princeton.edu/cmd/working-papers/papers/wp0610.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).
  28. Portes, A., Escobar, C. and Arana, R. (2008) Divided or Convergent Loyalties? The Political Incorporation Process of Latin American Immigrants in the United States CMD Working Paper 07-04, Princeton University. http://www.princeton.edu/cmd/working-papers/papers/wp0704.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).
  29. Raymer, J., de Beer, J. and van der Erf, R. (2011) Putting the pieces of the puzzle together: Age and sex-specific estimates of migration amongst countries in the EU/EFTA, 2002–2007. European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie, 27 (2), 185–215.
  30. Roca iCaparà, N. (2011) Young Adults of Latin American Origin in London and Oxford: Identities, Discrimination and Social Inclusion, COMPAS, Oxford. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/wp-11-93/ (accessed 20 January 2016).
  31. Ruedin, D. (2011) Conceptualizing the Integration of Immigrants and Other Groups, COMPAS, Oxford. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/wp-11-89/ (accessed 20 January 2016).
  32. Ruhs, M. and Anderson, B. (2012) Responding to Employers: Labour Shortages and Immigration Policy Policy Primer, The Migration Observatory, Oxford. http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/migobs/Labour%20Shortages%20Policy%20Primer_0.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).
  33. Salt, J. and de Bruycker, P. (2011) Migration policy developments, in International Migration Outlook 2011: SOPEMI 2011 (ed OECD), OECD Publishing.
  34. Salt, J., Latham, A., Mateos, P. et al. (2011) UK National Report: Satisfying Labour Demand Through Migration, Home Office/EMN. http://emn.intrasoft-intl.com/Downloads/download.do;jsessionid=AEF9A64EE84EC118A71644AF18D3D87C?fileID=2136 (accessed 20 January 2016).
  35. Shutes, I. (2011) Social Care for Older People and Demand for Migrant Workers Policy Primer, The Migration Observatory, Oxford. http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/migobs/Social%20Care%20Policy%20Primer_0.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).
  36. Sigona, N. (2011) Irregular Migrant Children and Public Policy Policy Primer, The Migration Observatory, Oxford. http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/migobs/Irregular%20Migrant%20Children%20Policy%20Primer_0.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).
  37. Skeldon, R. (2007) On Migration and the Policy Process, Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty, Brighton. http://www.migrationdrc.org/publications/working_papers/WP-T20.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).
  38. Sriskandarajah, D., Latorre, M. and Pollard, N. (2008) Floodgates or Turnstiles? Post-EU Enlargement Migration Flows to (and from) the UK, IPPR, London. http://www.ippr.org/publications/55/1637/floodgates-or-turnstilespost-eu-enlargement-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk (accessed 20 January 2016).
  39. van Liempt, I. (2007) Inside Perspectives on the Process of Human Smuggling IMISCOE Policy Briefs, IMISCOE, Amsterdamhttp://library.imiscoe.org/en/record/234829 (accessed 20 January 2016).
  40. Wessendorf, S. (2011) Commonplace Diversity and the ‘Ethos of Mixing’: Perceptions of Difference in a London Neighbourhood, COMPAS, Oxford. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/wp-11-91/ (accessed 20 January 2016).
  41. Winters, A.L. (2005) Developing Country Proposals for the Liberalization of Movements of Natural Service Suppliers, Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty, Brighton. http://www.migrationdrc.org/publications/working_papers/WP-T8.pdf (accessed 20 January 2016).

Appendix

A.1 United Kingdom

Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), incorporating The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford (http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/; http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/)

COMPAS, based at the University of Oxford, is an established international migration research centre in the United Kingdom. ‘The mission of COMPAS is to conduct high quality research in order to develop theory and knowledge, inform policy-making and public debate, and engage users of research within the field of migration’. Producing research output since 2004, COMPAS is now in a phase of work running from 2011 to 2016 which has five workstreams or clusters:

  1. 1. Flows and dynamics – exploring global migration flows and the dynamics that drive, facilitate and inhibit migration
  2. 2. Labour markets – analysing the socio-economics of international labour migration, particularly the economics and politics of labour shortages and demand
  3. 3. Citizenship and belonging – addressing the relationship between mobility, citizenship and the numerous ways in which people ‘belong’
  4. 4. Urban change and settlement – challenging assumptions around movement and settlement patterns, investigating emergent urbanisms and processes of integration
  5. 5. Welfare – addressing the relationship between migration and welfare provision in ‘receiving’ and ‘sending’ countries.

Within COMPAS, The Migration Observatory has recently been set up as a conduit for policy-relevant research within the group.

COMPAS publishes an extensive Working Paper series which documents the work across all clusters in the group. The bulk of the work in this series comprises qualitative analyses, with authors focusing recently on areas such as identity and assimilation (Pariyar, 2011; Roca iCaparà, 2011; Ruedin, 2011; Wessendorf, 2011) and Policy (Hynes and Cerna, 2009; Martin and Ruhs, 2010; Panizzon, 2010; Plewa, 2010). Little quantitative analysis appears in the Working Paper series, although The Migration Observatory, with a focus more on UK-based policy, does reproduce data and statistics on international migration trends in relation to the United Kingdom; although much of this is in support of the ‘Policy Primer’ reports which are the bulk of the output from the sub-group. The group does not engage in any explanatory or predictive modelling.

Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), UCL (http://www.cream-migration.org/).

Another major international migration research centre of the United Kingdom is CReAM, based at University College London. ‘CReAM's research focuses on the causes, patterns and consequences of international population mobility and movements affecting the UK and Europe. CReAM aims at informing the public debate on migration in the UK and in Europe by providing new insight, helping to steer the current policy debate in a direction that is based on carefully researched evidence without partisan bias’. Differing from COMPAS, CReAM also states an emphasis on quantitative research, with a research programme divided into four principal strands:

  1. 1. Forms of population movement and mobility
  2. 2. The non-migrant experience – effects of migration on origin and destination countries
  3. 3. The migrant experience – integration, adaptation and exclusion
  4. 4. Perception of migrants within receiving countries – identity and aspects of social cohesion.

CReAM has an extensive history of working (discussion) papers dating back to 2004 which make use of quantitative analysis techniques. Papers by Patacchini and Zenou (2012) and Cobb-Clark et al. (2011) use statistical regression-based techniques to examine the effects of ethnic networks on the employment outcomes of migrants and the influence of educational institution arrangements on the attainment of immigrant children, respectively, and are just two examples of the quantitative focus within this large body of work that emanates from the economics tradition within social science. There are, of course, occasional exceptions such as a review paper on immigration in Europe (Dustmann and Frattini, 2011), but the strand tying almost all of the CReAM work together is the empirical analysis of international migration and the associated data using a raft of quantitative techniques. Models are frequently used in these analyses as explanatory models to test assumptions about the relationships between migration and other social or economic variables. They are not used as a method to supplement inadequate data through synthetic estimates.

Centre for Population Change (CPC), Social Sciences: Social Statistics and Demography, S3RI, University of Southampton (http://www.cpc.ac.uk/, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/demography/index.page?, http://www.southampton.ac.uk/s3ri/).

A large amount of work on international migration is carried out under a number of projects run from the various inter-related social sciences and statistics departments/centres based at the University of Southampton. Within the CPC, a work stream exists which focuses on the ‘demographic and socio-economic implications of national and transnational migration’. Contained within this stream are a series of sub-projects focusing on:

  1. 1. Migration, mobility and the labour market
  2. 2. Migration, mobility and its impact on socio-demographic processes
  3. 3. Migration and ageing.

These sub-projects employ a variety of different methodological approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, but tend to concentrate on the effects of migration on aspects of demography and the economy within the United Kingdom.

Another work stream within the CPC project concentrates on ‘Modelling population growth and enhancing the evidence base for policy’. Led by James Raymer, the core aim of this stream is to develop a statistical methodology in order to produce a dynamic population model of the United Kingdom. Linked to this project via James Raymer is another workstream known as the Integrated Modelling of European Migration (IMEM) project, funded by NORFACE programme (http://www.norface.org/migration12.html). The aim of IMEM is to use statistical techniques to develop a consistent, harmonised time series of inter-country flows across Europe. These modelled migration flows are designed to improve the migration evidence base where empirical data collected via censuses and surveys are inconsistent across countries and, in some cases, unreliable.

IMEM's work in modelling and estimating international migration flows uses Bayesian techniques to incorporate auxiliary (expert) information, which assesses the quality of empirical data, into estimates which also fill gaps in intra-European migration flow matrices. The work follows a previous project called MIMOSA (Migration Modelling for Statistical Analysis – http://mimosa.gedap.be/), which also attempted to develop a consistent time series of inter-country flows in Europe (Raymer et al., 2011), although did not deal with uncertainties in the recorded data in the way that IMEM is currently attempting to.

Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR) – http://www.sussex.ac.uk/migration/.

The Sussex Centre for Migration Research has been at the vanguard of international migration research in the United Kingdom since 1997. The home for (and contributing to) dozens of research projects over the last decade or so, the SCMR, has produced a considerable volume of output in this time. Similar to COMPAS and CReAM, much of this output is documented in an extensive Working Paper series – a series which reflects the broad interests which the centre has supported, but which also exhibits themes reminiscent of those popular within COMPAS and CReAM: migration and identity, migration and economic impact, remittance flows and patterns of migration.

Among the large number of research projects supported wholly or partially by the SCMR, one of the largest was the Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty (http://www.migrationdrc.org/). The project ran from 2003 to 2010 and operated with a mission statement to ‘to promote new policy approaches that will help to maximize the potential benefits of migration for poor people, whilst minimizing its risks and costs’. Much of the output, therefore, had a distinct policy focus exemplified by papers by Winters (2005), Skeldon (2007) and Black et al. (2008).

The use of models does not appear explicitly in much of the body of work presented by the Migration DRC; however, some model assumptions are employed in the Global Migrant Origin Database sub-project (http://www.migrationdrc.org/research/typesofmigration/global_migrant_origin_database.html), which carried out the collation of global migrant stock data with some subsequent estimation to produce a complete matrix of bilateral migrant stocks. Models used in this project were relatively elementary, using, for example, average rates of attrition or the propensity for a country to send migrants abroad to update stock estimates for years where data did not exist.

Migration Research Unit (MRU) – University College London (UCL) (http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/mru/).

The MRU is another centre of international migration research based at UCL. With links to CReAM through the ‘UCL Global Migration Network’, the MRU was founded in 1988 and has similar objectives to CReAM and COMPAS based around policy-relevant research with a particular focus on migration statistics, high-skilled migration and irregular migration in the United Kingdom and Europe. With a long history of research output, the MRU focuses particularly on empirical analyses to inform policy and a growing interest in qualitative analysis of the implications of migration at local level. Modelling related to migration is not a current concern.

Centre for Interaction Data Estimation and Research (CIDER) – University of Leeds (http://cider.census.ac.uk/).

CIDER is principally concerned with supplying census-based interaction data (commuting, internal and international migration) to academic users within the United Kingdom. While synthetic data creation through various modelling techniques has been a feature of CIDER's work since its inception in 2005, this work has concentrated on the modelling of internal migration flows in the United Kingdom rather than international flows.

A.2 Rest of Europe

Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital – Vienna Institute of Demography/International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria (http://www.oeaw.ac.at/wic/; http://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/; http://www.iiasa.ac.at/).

The Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital is a research collaboration among the Vienna Institute of Demography, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. The overarching goal of the centre is ‘to better understand the role of human capital—the human resource base in terms of the number of people and their changing structure by age, gender, place of residence, level of education, health status, cognitive skills, and participation in the “production” of human wellbeing’.

Many research teams within the centre are engaged in a variety of data and modelling intensive activities related to global human issues. The ‘Migration and Education’ team focuses on the following:

  1. 1. Estimating annual bilateral international migration flows for the globe between 1960 and 2010
  2. 2. Modelling the age–sex–education structure of international migration flows
  3. 3. Determining the spatial structure of international migration and how it has changed between 1960 and 2010
  4. 4. Developing a set of alternative scenarios describing the alternative futures of migration from 2010 to 2050
  5. 5. Using case studies to determine the impact of climate change on international migration flows in Asia, focusing especially on educational selectivity.

Preliminary estimates of a time series of bilateral, country-level, migration flows have already been achieved, although have yet to be published.

Central European Forum for Migration and Population Research (CEFMR), Poland (http://www.cefmr.pan.pl/).

Founded in 2002 as a research partnership among the Swiss Foundation for Population, Migration and Environment (PME); the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and the International Organization for Migration, CEFMR continues to pursue a research programme which ‘specialises in multidisciplinary research on international migration in Central Europe. It conducts research in demography, population statistics, modelling of migration and population, geography, migration policies, sociology and economics’.

CEFMR has a notable Working Paper series which reveals a heavily quantitative approach in much of the work which has been carried out, for example, papers by Bijak (2005, 2006)(now at the Southampton CPC) reviewing and advocating a variety of modelling approaches (but particularly Bayesian statistical methods) for forecasting international migration flows.

Members of CEFMR have been and still are engaged in a number of research projects with an international migration focus. Perhaps the largest recent project has been the demographic and migratory flows affecting European regions and cities (DEMIFER) project (http://www.espon.eu/main/Menu_Projects/Menu_AppliedResearch/demifer.html). CEFMR researchers were responsible for the multi-level, multi-regional cohort component projection model known as MULTIPOLES (http://www.espon.eu/export/sites/default/Documents/Projects/AppliedResearch/DEMIFER/FinalReport/DEMIFER_Deliverable_D4_final.pdf) which projected, for a range of growth scenarios, demographic components (including in, out and net migration) for over 250 European regions up until 2051.

The European Migration Network (EMN), Belgium (http://emn.intrasoft-intl.com/html/index.html).

The objective of the EMN is to provide ‘up-to-date, objective, reliable and comparable information on migration and asylum’ in the European Union, in order to support policy making in these areas. The EMN was launched in 2003 as a pilot project, but has since been established by the European Council and given legal status in 2008. EU member states supply the EMN with information through a network of national ‘contact points’. The main outputs from the EMN are a series of annual policy reports which relate to political and legislative developments associated with migration and asylum, as well as an accompanying annual series on migration statistics. Various ad hoc studies are also produced on a range of migration and asylum-related topics as and when specific requests are made by EU partner countries. For example, recent reports have been produced on the impact of immigration on European Societies, irregular migrants living in the European Union, return migration, temporary and circular migration and satisfying labour demand in EU member states through migration.

Despite an extensive programme of work, the EMN states that it ‘does not normally engage in primary research’ and instead focuses on collecting, analysing and redistributing information on migration which is already available. As such, it hosts an ‘information exchange system’ which facilitates the sharing of migration information between EU partner countries.

IMISCOE – International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe, Netherlands (http://www.imiscoe.org/).

IMISCOE is a network of researchers and research centres across Europe. The organisation has a mission organised around a series of ongoing research questions: ‘What are the causes and nature of current migration processes? How can migration flows be managed and influenced? How can societies maintain social cohesion and societal viability? How can scientists, policy makers and practitioners in the field exchange knowledge and experience?’

IMISCOE is coordinated by the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES) based at the University of Amsterdam, but has an additional 27 institutional partner members from Universities across Europe. These include the following:

  1. 1. CEDEM (Centre d'Études de l'Ethnicité et des Migrations), University of Liège, Belgium
  2. 2. CEG (Centro de Estudos Geográficos), University of Lisbon, Portugal
  3. 3. CEIFO (Centre for Research in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, University of Stockholm, Sweden
  4. 4. CEMIS (Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies), University of Antwerp, Belgium
  5. 5. CEREN (Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism), University of Helsinki, Finland
  6. 6. CES (Centro de Estudos Sociais), Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
  7. 7. CES-NOVA, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
  8. 8. CESS (Centre for Economic and Social Studies), Tirana, Albania
  9. 9. CMR (Centre of Migration Research), Warsaw University, Poland
  10. 10. DEUSTO (Research Unit on Migration, Management of Diversity and Social Cohesion), University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain
  11. 11. efms (European Forum for Migration Studies), University of Bamberg, Germany
  12. 12. EUI (European University Institute), Florence, Italy
  13. 13. EUR (Erasmus University of Rotterdam), Netherlands
  14. 14. FIERI (The Forum Internazionale ed Europeo di Ricerche sull'Immigrazione), Italy
  15. 15. GRITIM (Interdisciplinary research group in immigration), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
  16. 16. ICMPD (International Center for Migration Policy Development), Austria.
  17. 17. IEM (Instituto Universitario de Estudios sobre Migraciones de la Universidad Pontificia Comillas de Madrid), Spain
  18. 18. IMIS (Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies), University of Osnabrück, Germany
  19. 19. INED (Institut National d'Études Démographiques), France
  20. 20. ISR (Institute for Urban and Regional Research), Austrian Academy of Sciences
  21. 21. MIGRINTER (Migrations Internationales, Espaces et Sociétés), University of Poitiers, France
  22. 22. MIM (Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare), Malmö University, Sweden
  23. 23. MiReKoc, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey
  24. 24. NIDI (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute), The Hague, Netherlands
  25. 25. NOVA (Norwegian Social Research), Oslo, Norway
  26. 26. SCMR (Sussex Centre for Migration Research), United Kingdom
  27. 27. SFM (Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies, the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

IMISCOE members are organised into a series of Research Groups:

  1. 1. Ageing migrants: demography, agency and welfare
  2. 2. Common European Economic Space and Migration Initiative
  3. 3. Diaspora and Development
  4. 4. Employment and Migrant Legality in Contemporary Europe
  5. 5. MIGCITPOL (Migration, Citizenship and Political Participation – former cluster B3)
  6. 6. Standing Committee on International Migration and its Regulation
  7. 7. Popular arts, diversity and cultural policies in post-migration urban settings (POPADIVCIT)
  8. 8. Research-Policy Dialogues on Migration and Integration in Europe
  9. 9. The Multilevel Governance of Immigrant and Immigration Policies
  10. 10. The Social Nexus between Irregular Migration, the Informal Economy and Political Control
  11. 11. TRANSMIG.

IMISCOE continues to produce a very large volume of work. The IMISCOE-AUP series is a collection of peer-reviewed books on themes ranging from transnationalism, to European Policy, through to local case studies. The series of almost 50 titles are publicly available through the open-access portal, OAPEN (http://oapen.org/search?title=&creator=&seriestitle=imiscoe&subject=&isbn=&year=&year-max=&smode=advanced). In addition to the AUP series, a Working Paper series is also available on the IMISCOE website (http://www.imiscoe.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=13&Itemid=21). Quantitative analysis is not uncommon in these outputs, but is used among various other analysis techniques. Explanatory or predictive modelling, however, is not something which features in these publications. Related to the books and working papers are a series of ‘Policy Briefs’. These are shorter documents which focus on a series of specific policy questions or statements – for example, ‘How can we turn Europe’s increasing cultural diversity into an economic and social asset?'

Most of the research partners within IMISCOE are based within universities, although there are examples of institutions without direct University affiliation, such as the International Centre for Migration Policy Development or the Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED) in France.

The International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), Belgium (http://www.icmpd.org/).

The ICMPD was founded in 1993 to provide expertise and services at a time when countries within Europe were beginning to cooperate on issues related to migration and asylum. The ICMPD specifically looks to promote ‘comprehensive and sustainable migration policies’ and act as a mechanism for the exchange of services between governments and organisations.

The ICMPD has a dedicated research unit which explores international migration trends, patterns and policies, with a particular focus on seven distinct themes:

  1. 1. Illegal Migration & Return
  2. 2. Trafficking in Human Beings
  3. 3. Border Management & Visa
  4. 4. Asylum
  5. 5. Migration & Development
  6. 6. Legal Migration & Integration
  7. 7. Multi-Thematic Research.

The ICMPD publishes details of much of its work – working papers, reports and policy briefs – through its separate research website: http://research.icmpd.org. In many cases, however, the research outputs are held separately often on the websites of the projects which the ICMPD has been involved with. One of the projects which has had more of a quantitative-/data-driven focus is PROMINSTAT (Promoting Comparative Quantitative Research in the Field of Migration and Integration in Europe) (http://www.prominstat.eu/).

PROMINSTAT ran between 2007 and 2010 and was a programme funded by the European Commission with an aim to contribute to a better understanding of migration and associated social issues within Europe. This contribution was defined through the main project exercise – an exhaustive documentation of statistical data and metadata on migration held by 29 countries (EU27 + Norway and Switzerland). The project produced three main outputs:

  1. 1. A series of country reports on the various national migration data collection systems
  2. 2. An online, searchable, meta-database containing information on all quantitative data sets featuring migration-related data in the 29 study countries
  3. 3. Thematic working papers on data collection.

PROMINSTAT was coordinated by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), although featured contributions from 18 partner institutions. It built on work which was completed in earlier ICMPD projects, particularly COMPSTAT (http://research.icmpd.org/ 1243.html?&F=ylohmjdtl) and THESIM (http://www.uclouvain.be/en-7823.html), which were projects designed to address the lack of comparable data on the social and economic integration of migrants in the European Union and the reliability of international migration data, respectively.

Migration Policy Centre (http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/).

Founded in January 2012, the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) is based at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. The broad aim of the centre is to ‘conduct research on global migration to serve migration governance needs at the European level. This means developing, implementing and monitoring migration-related policies to assess their impact on the economy and on society more generally’.

The MPC is focusing its attentions on two recent global developments which have the potential to shape migration flows and migration policies in the near future: the global economic crisis and particularly its impact in Europe and the ‘Arab Spring’, which has led to major political changes in the Arab world, especially in North Africa.

Assisting the work in these two areas, the MPC will oversee three regional ‘migration observatories’ which will monitor migration into Europe from three main regions of the world. The first of these, CARIM-South, was set up before the inception of the MPC in 2004 with a remit to ‘document and to analyse migration in seventeen countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and of Sub-Saharan Africa’. Two new observatories were set up in 2011: CARIM-East looking at the flows associated with seven countries to the East of the European Union; and CARIM-India focusing on the exchanges of migrants between the European Union and India.

Despite its young age, the MPC is already a home to a large volume of work on migration. Currently, much of the research consists of empirical studies related to the regional observatories, although a section for policy briefs has been set aside on the new website.

A.3 Rest of the World

Queensland Centre for Population Research (QCPR), Australia (http://www.gpem.uq.edu.au/qcpr).

The QCPR, based at the University of Queensland in Australia, is one of the leading centres of population research in the southern hemisphere. With a focus on understanding demographic processes and population dynamics, particularly in Australia, the QCPR is also concerned with some global patterns and processes, particularly in relation to internal migration.

The current ‘Internal Migration Around the GlobE’ (IMAGE) project, in collaboration with the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, aims to build an understanding of global internal migration patterns through developing a database of flows for more than 150 countries, with associated indicators and comparison metrics.

Institute for the Study of International Migration – Georgetown University, United States (http://www12.georgetown.edu/sfs/isim/).

The Institute for the Study of International Migration is concerned with analysis of international migration issues affecting the United States and other countries ‘including various bilateral, regional, and multilateral approaches to migration and refugee policy. Understanding forced migration and responses to humanitarian emergencies is another important area of policy research’.

Current research projects cover three main substantive areas:

  1. 1. Immigration and Integration of Immigrants
  2. 2. Migration and Development
  3. 3. Refugee and Humanitarian Emergencies.

The institute has published a range of reports on areas such as transatlantic migration, migration and climate change, impacts immigrants on health sector employment and refugee flows. Migration modelling does not feature in current or previous research projects within the centre.

International Migration Research Centre (IMRC) – Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada (https://www.wlu.ca/homepage.php?grp_id=2599).

The IMRC has a mission statement to ‘foster research in the areas of new policy development and alternative models and practices of managing both temporary and permanent forms of international migration’.

As with a number of other centres of international migration research, the work in the centre comprises a number specific case studies (migrant farm workers in Canada, temporary worker programmes in Canada, migration of nurses, effects of the global financial crisis on remittances, etc.). In the case of the IMRC, a theme which emerges is that of temporary and agricultural migrants with a specific focus on Canada. Again, while quantitative elements exist within the analysis, migration modelling of any sort is not prevalent.

The Centre for Migration and Development – CMD (http://www.princeton.edu/cmd/).

The CMD, established in 1998, at Princeton University has a particular interest in immigrant communities living in the developed world and in the growth and development prospects of sending nations. A Working Paper series documents various pieces of work undertaken to this end, and a data archive makes accessible a series of data sets which have been used in CMD research projects. These datasets include the following:

  • The Adaptation Process of Cuban and Haitian Refugees (CHR)
  • The Comparative Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project (CIEP)
  • The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS)
  • The Comparative Immigrant Organizations Project (CIOP)
  • Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the US (CMI)
  • Caribbean Urbanization in the years of the Crisis (CUIC)
  • Latin American Migration Project (LAMP)
  • Mexican Migration Project (MMP)
  • New Immigrant Survey (NIS)
  • Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)

The working papers are very much focused on individual issues – ethnic enclaves in Miami (Portes and Shafer, 2006), the political incorporation of Latin American migrants into the United States (Portes et al., 2008) or American retirement in New Mexico (Methvin, 2009). As is common with much of the research carried out by other institutions focusing on international migration, methods are mixed with some analysis of quantitative data but qualitative techniques such as interviews are also common place. Modelling does feature in some of the work, but again these will be explanatory regression models (or similar) used to analyse data which are readily available, rather than models which are used to supplement inadequate data holdings or predict future patterns.

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