Population displacement is a huge issue around the world, and indeed, involuntary migration was one of the major risks raised in the WEF’s Global Risks Report 2018. Around the world there has been no shortage of stories highlighting the challenges integrating large numbers of migrants into their host countries.

The welcoming of around 1 million refugees into the EU in 2016 has placed renewed focus on the cultural dynamics of countries across Europe.  Re.Cri.Re is a project that aims to better understand these dynamics so that policy makers can better understand the complex nature of European culture.

The project features a consortium of some 16 universities and research centers from 13 different European countries.  The group were particularly interested in exploring whether the refugee crisis changed the identities present in various European countries so that policy responses could be nuanced.

“The expected impact of Re.Cri.Re. is to grasp how to develop policies that are able to leave the socio-economic crisis behind and to strengthen the resilience of societies,” the team say. “Of equal importance is renewing the promotion of integration and European identity, and strengthening the sense of solidarity in the public sphere.”

Measuring integration

A second project also aims to add to our understanding of migration by developing a tool to help measure the integration of migrants into their host communities.  The Integration Index is the work of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University and ETH Zurich and consists of a survey that measures the integration of migrants via both a 12-item and 24-item survey that aims to measure integration along six dimensions: psychological, economic, political, social, linguistic, and navigational.  The survey was compiled after testing on around 4,000 individuals, and whilst it’s always going to be difficult to provide a perfect measure of something so fiendishly complex, the team believe it does a good job.

“What you hope to demonstrate in testing the validity of the index is that it shows higher-levels of integration where you would expect, such as naturalized citizens having higher-levels of integration than recently-arrived immigrants,” they explain.

The initial testing found that the survey was as capable of predicting integration as more commonly used methods, such as citizenship and language skills.  The ultimate goal is to create a sufficiently reliable tool to enable government agencies, nonprofit service providers and academic researchers to gain a greater understanding of integration, which can in turn better inform policy decisions.

“The hope of the Immigration Policy Lab,” they say, “is that the dissemination of this research tool will help policy makers learn about the relative merits of their integration policies in a way that will benefit both immigrants and the communities in which they settle.”

AI support

Earlier this year, Stanford also produced an AI-driven tool to help support migrant integration.

The work, which was documented in a recently published paper, saw historical data on refugee resettlement in both the US and Switzerland analyzed.  This found that economic self-sufficiency required a range of things, such as the education level of the individual, their knowledge of English, and the location they settled in their new home country.  This translated into some refugees having much higher chances of settling than others.

The algorithm was able to assign placements for refugees based upon this data, with the assignments giving them the best chance of integrating.  Indeed, the researchers believe it increases their chances of finding a job by up to 70%.

“As one looks at the refugee crisis globally, it’s clear that it’s not going away any time soon and that we need research-based policies to navigate through it,” they say. “Our hope is to generate a policy conversation about the processes governing the resettlement of refugees, not just on the national level in the United States but internationally as well.”

With the successful integration of migrants so important, whether economically, socially or politically, it’s great that new tools are being developed to not only help us understand things better, but also to improve the situation.  The challenge, you suspect, is to actually integrate these approaches into the policy toolkit.