Hein de Haas is a sociologist and a geographer who has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Morocco and the United Kingdom. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Between 2006 and 2015, he was a founding member and co-director of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford. He continues directing IMI from its current home at UvA. He is also Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Maastricht.
In his work, De Haas has advanced a new, long-term view of migration as an intrinsic part of global change and development. He is lead author of The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, a seminal text book in the field of migration studies.
His new book How Migration Really Works was published by Penguin in November 2023 (US edition with Basic Books) as well as in German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Korean translations. Based on three decades of research, the book challenges 22 migration myths on the left and right, revealing the need for an entirely new theoretical understanding of human mobility .
Fluent in Dutch, English and French, Hein de Haas is a frequent keynote speaker and has provided commentary for press, radio and television around the world.He also maintains a blog on migration-related topics.
His research focuses on long-term trends, causes and impacts of international migration in origin and destination societies. De Haas did extensive fieldwork in the Middle East and Africa and, particularly, in Morocco. His publications cover a wide range of issues, including theories of migration, the causes of migration, migration and development, the effectiveness of migration policies, the links between climate change, environmental change and migration, as well as issues around racism, identity and transnationalism (see here for a full publication list with links to articles). He is also author of a personal account of his experiences in Morocco.
Majoring in environmental geography, between 1993 and 1995 De Haas studied the links between socio-economic transformation, desertification and agriculture in a south Moroccan oasis. Between 1998 and 2001 he led the IMAROM project on the interaction between migration, land and water management and resource exploitation in Moroccan and Tunisian oases. His doctoral dissertation (2003) on the social, cultural and economic impacts of migration on origin regions was based on two years of fieldwork in southern Morocco.
While at Oxford University (2006-2015), De Haas was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the DEMIG (Determinants of International Migration) project (2010-2014), which studied trends and drivers of global migration trends and the effectiveness of migration policies. In 2015, De Haas was awarded a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for the MADE Migration as Development) project (2015-2022), which investigated how processes of development and social transformation have shaped human migration across the globe over the past centuries.
Hein de Haas holds an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology (1989), a master’s degree (cum laude) in social and environmental geography of the tropics and subtropics (1995) from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in social sciences from the University of Nijmegen (2003). Between 1998 and 2001 he worked as a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and between 2001 and 2005 as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Nijmegen. In 2004-2005 he was visiting scholar at Bilkent University in Ankara (Turkey) the Program of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University of Cairo (AUC Egypt).
In 2006, he joined the newly founded International Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford. From 2011, he played a central role in lecturing and directing the newly established MSc in Migration Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID). He was also a fellow at the Oxford Martin School and governing body fellow at Wolfson College. In 2015, De Haas was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. During the 2020-2021 academic year he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). He also had visiting positions at the Forced Migration and Review Programme of the American University of Cairo (AUC), Bilkent University in Ankara (Turkey), Université Mohamed V in Rabat (Morocco), Duke University and the Université Gaston Berger in Saint Louis (Senegal).
He previously consulted for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the ILO (International Labour Organisation), the IOM (International Organisation for Migration), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Oxfam Novib, the European Commission (Joint Research Centre), the UK Government Office of Science, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship of the Australian government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.