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Over the coming months, I will share 22 short summaries of the central arguments in How Migration Really Works. Each summary contrasts the conventional wisdom on a major migration issue with scientific evidence on the nature, drivers and impacts of migration. Subscribe for free to receive the next migration myth.The conventional wisdomGlobal migration is at an all-time high and accelerating rapidly. The world has never experienced this much migration, and numbers are increasing fast. Grinding poverty, population growth, oppression, warfare and climate change lead to rapidly accelerating migration. Increasing inequality and greater ease of travel and communication have further heightened migration pressures. Growing numbers of poor people flock to cities and destinations abroad, exceeding the absorption capacity of Western societies. Rapidly multiplying migration and refugee crises around the world show that, unless these problems are addressed urgently, this growing South-North exodus will spin out of control.How it really worksCurrent migration levels are not exceptionally high. International migrants have represented 3-4 per cent of the world population over recent decades. Relative global migration levels were higher in the […]

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Immigration to OECD countries has shown a structurally increasing trend over the past two decades. Apart from occasional refugee influxes, these have been mainly driven by growing labor shortages for lower and higher skilled workers. In the post-covid “labour crunch”, labour shortages reached an unprecedented high across the OECD world, and so did immigration levels (for an example, see the graph below).Levels of immigration mainly follow business cycles. The main dilemma governments therefore face is that it is impossible to reconcile the growing demand for labour, and pressure by business lobbies to open more legal migration channels – and to turn a blind eye towards the widespread and largely tolerated employment and exploitation of undocumented migrants; and on the other hand to satisfy public demands for less, or more controlled, immigration. In other words: Governments can’t have their cake and eat it too.  Migration, it’s the economy!As I argue in my book How Migration Really Works, This explains the largely and growing “discursive gap” – and political hypocrisy – between tough political rhetoric and largely symbolic border crackdowns and much more lenient immigration policy practices.

We seem to be living in times of unprecedented mass migration. Images of people from Africa crammed into unseaworthy boats desperately trying to cross the Mediterranean, asylum seekers crossing the Channel into Britain, and “caravans” of migrants trying to reach the Mexico-US border all seem to confirm fears that global migration is spinning out of control. A toxic combination of poverty, inequality, violence, oppression, climate breakdown and population growth appear to be pushing growing numbers of people from Africa, Asia and Latin America to embark upon desperate journeys to reach the shores of the wealthy west. All of this results in the popular idea of a “migration crisis” that will require drastic countermeasures to prevent massive waves of people arriving in the future, apparently exceeding the absorption capacity of Western societies and economies. Despite this, however, and as I argue in my book How Migration Really Works, there is no scientific evidence to sustain the claim that global migration is accelerating. International migrants account for about 3% of the world population, and this percentage has remained remarkably stable over the past half a century. Likewise, refugee migration is much more […]

Among the many myths perpetuated about migration, one of the most common is that ‘South–North’ migration is essentially driven by poverty and underdevelopment. Consequently, it is often argued that stimulating economic development would reduce migration from developing countries to North America and Europe. However, this ignores evidence that most migration neither occurs from the poorest countries nor from the poorest segments of the population. In fact, the paradox is that development and modernization initially leads to more migration. Historical experiences show that societies go through migration transitions as part of broader development processes. In his The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition, a seminal article published in 1971, the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky argued that all forms of internal and international mobility accelerated when countries start to transition from rural-agrarian to urban-industrial societies.            The Migration Transition This has been confirmed by various historical studies. For instance, tn their classic study of large-scale European migration to North America between 1850 and 1913, The Age of Mass Migration published in 1998, economic historians Timothy Hatton […]