Migration is nothing if not a hot topic in many countries around the developed world, with politicians continuing to use it as a dog whistle to appeal to the fears and insecurities people have about their own prospects. A traditional trope is that migrants are simultaneously taking our jobs and sponging off of our welfare systems.
The actual evidence highlights a different story however, with recent research from the Department of Economics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) revealing that migrants are typically those with the best education.
Their data on migration around the world shows that far more people leave their country of origin for work purposes than as refugees. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most job seekers like to go to countries where their opportunities for work are greatest. Here is the thing, the data shows that the vast majority of migrants are highly educated, with those migrants typically choosing to go to the most productive countries.
Likely to migrate
The data reveals that people with a university education are around four times as likely to emigrate as their less educated countrymen. This renders the migrant population more educated than the native population of their host country.
The data also highlights the importance of distance, with the highest qualified migrants willing to travel further from their origin country, whereas lower skilled migrants tend to stick to neighboring lands.
“Among the migrants crossing the border between Mexico and the US, a lower percentage has higher education than in the home country,” the researchers explain. “The border is nearby, no sea separates the two countries, and travel is relatively easy.”
The economic impact of migration is considerable, with the host country seeing up to a 4% boost in its welfare, which the researchers have defined across both social and economic factors. This boost is being seen across pretty much every OECD country.
“The welfare effect is positive from a global perspective, too, because the gain in the receiving country is greater than the loss in sending countries,” the researchers explain. “A world where highly educated migrants are over-represented provides a more effective localization of talent. Migration increases the highly educated workforce in countries that are most productive to begin with. The losers are countries whose most skilled workers leave. Small countries where only a small percentage of the population has higher education suffer the greatest loss.”
This is perhaps not surprising, as I’ve written before about research that has shown that both science and innovation benefit when people travel and live outside of their homeland. The question must surely be not, therefore, whether migrants should be encouraged, but how countries can help them to integrate, and how they can help local communities absorb changes to their population.
Helping to integrate
Researchers from the University of Washington believe they’ve developed an approach to allow policy makers and officials to better understand the flows of people into and within a country. 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.”
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.”
Whether such projects are scaled up does sadly depend, however, on the willingness of politicians and policy makers to look beyond dog whistle politics and look at the evidence instead. I won’t hold my breath.
