Mobility in the labor market is widely known to be a good thing, but there is still much about migration patterns that we remain in the dark about.  With a growing number of people living in an urban setting however, it’s vital that we gain a greater understanding of the flow of people, not only internationally but also within countries.

A recent study by the EU-funded SoBigData and CIMPLEX projects aims to shed some light on things.  It shows that people from smaller cities are much more likely to migrate overseas than their peers in larger cities.

“We observe that individuals from small cities tend to migrate more frequently, tending to move to similar-sized cities, whereas individuals from large cities do not migrate so often, but when they do, they tend to move to other large cities,” the authors say.

Humble origins

The research shows that the respective sizes of the origin and destination cities is crucial in the movement of people across Europe, and indeed within individual countries.

The paper argues that despite migration being almost universally beneficial, both to the migrants themselves and to their host country, there is considerable backlash against migration across Europe.  It’s vital therefore that more is done to support the integration of migrants into their host community so that they settle as quickly as possible.

“The new scaling model has not previously been used to identify migration patterns. It applies a mathematical formula to migratory patterns relative to city size,” the authors say.

The project is part of the ongoing SoBigData initiative that aims to create a research infrastructure for the application of social data mining to various aspects of social life.

The second major backer of the research was CIMPLEX (Bringing CItizens, Models and Data together in Participatory, Interactive SociaL EXploratories), which aims to provide computational and modeling support to help understand social systems.