I’m a firm believer that the free movement of people is beneficial in so many ways.  For instance, research has shown that both science and innovation benefit when people travel and live outside of their homeland.  The general finding underpinning these trends is that innovation is increasingly recombinative, which in lay terms means that most innovation today sees existing ideas and innovations spun in novel new ways.

Migration helps this as the act of living abroad allows us to bring values and norms from our homeland into a new environment, which can spark a wave of fresh ideas.  What’s more, this cultural reassessment can prove hugely beneficial to our work in other ways too as people act as cultural and intellectual bridges between the two cultures.

This has been shown to massively help introduce new businesses into territories or to help bring finance and knowledge into the homeland of the migrant.

The introduction of free movement across the European Union has allowed us to monitor the impact this has had on the flow of knowledge, and research shows the benefits to be considerable.

What’s more, recent data from the UK government highlights how migrants are almost universally beneficial to their host country.  They don’t really undercut wages, they’re typically better trained than native workers, and because of their age they contribute far more to the public purse than they ‘consume’.

Smoothing integration

And yet, across the western world there is a backlash against migrants, with populist politicians using fear of ‘the other’ to drive through a range of illiberal policies.  It seems crucial therefore, that if the benefits of migration outlined above are to be maintained, countries have to get better at managing the movement of people.

The first step is to get more actionable data on migration flows, as too often officials rely on incredibly sporadic and outdated data such as that gathered by censuses to inform policy decisions.  Researchers from the University of Washington believe they’ve developed a better approach.  In a recently published paper, they describe a method to provide realistic estimations of migration rates.

The method, which relies upon  pseudo-Bayes approach, reveals a migration rate of around 1.2% of global population, with this figure largely holding steady between 1990 and 2015.  What’s more, the data reveals that around 45% of all migrants since 1990 have eventually returned to their homeland, which is a much higher figure than produced by other methods.

“Planning for migration is no simple task,” the researchers explain. “You need everything from medical infrastructure and trained personnel to elementary schools—and governments rely on accurate demographic estimates to help them put the right plans and responses into place.”

Optimal settlement

The team hope that their more accurate estimations of migration will ultimately help both the migrants and policy makers, especially in helping policy makers provide the resources for regions to cope with changes in their population number.

That’s vital for traditional migration, but the last few years have also seen huge numbers of refugees fleeing war-torn countries looking for safe harbor.  A team from Stanford University highlighted how an AI-based system could help provide the best place for those refugees to settle in a recently published paper.

The researchers used refugee settlement data from both the United States and Switzerland to try and identify whether particular things helped the refugees settle into their community and become productive members of it.

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.”

Measuring integration

Stanford have also been working with ETH Zurich to develop a tool known as the Integration Index, which aims to measure the level of integration of migrants into their host communities.

The tool 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.

A non-hostile environment

Of course, there are things that host communities can do as well, especially at a time where politicians from Theresa May to Donald Trump are actively trying to create a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.  This general tone can easily spread throughout society, with a recent paper from the University of Toronto highlighting the difficulties.

It highlighted a fundamental bias against immigrants who had non-anglicized names (or names the visually stand out from traditional names in the host country).  The researchers conducted a standard ‘trolley dilemma’ experiment to test whether white natives would respond differently to those with names suggesting they were immigrants.

Sadly, that was indeed, the case, with white participants more likely to sacrifice an immigrant than either a white person or an immigrant with an anglicized name.  Similar findings emerged in a number of other experiments, and whilst the authors don’t advocate changing one’s name, they do nonetheless hope their findings shed some light on the difficulties faced by migrants in integrating.

The benefits immigration can bring are quite clear, but it requires society to work together to promote diversity and inclusion in order for those benefits to be reaped.  Whether society is up for that challenge sadly remains to be seen.