We briefly review the ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm, identifying the problems associated with an approach that emphasizes the salience of one social group, ethnicity, to the exclusion or ...downplaying of others, such as race, class, and gender. We introduce an intersectional approach to the study of (ethnic) enterprise, reviewing the literature and using the articles in this special issue to demonstrate the utility of this perspective. We close by encouraging the use of this approach in future research.
We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU ...immigrants by about 50 percent, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed and reintroduced. Based on a quasi-experimental research design, we find sizable effects: the benefit reduction reduced the net flow of immigrants by about 5,000 people per year, and the subsequent repeal of the policy reversed the effect almost exactly. The implied elasticity of migration with respect to benefits equals 1.3. This represents some of the first causal evidence on the welfare magnet hypothesis. (JEL F22, H53, I38, J15)
We propose a method for forecasting global human migration flows. A Bayesian hierarchical model is used to make probabilistic projections of the 39,800 bilateral migration flows among the 200 most ...populous countries. We generate out-of-sample forecasts for all bilateral flows for the 2015 to 2020 period, using models fitted to bilateral migration flows for five 5-y periods from 1990 to 1995 through 2010 to 2015. We find that the model produces well-calibrated out-of-sample forecasts of bilateral flows, as well as total country-level inflows, outflows, and net flows. The mean absolute error decreased by 61% using our method, compared to a leading model of international migration. Out-of-sample analysis indicated that simple methods for forecasting migration flows offered accurate projections of bilateral migration flows in the near term. Our method matched or improved on the out-of-sample performance using these simple deterministic alternatives, while also accurately assessing uncertainty. We integrate the migration flow forecasting model into a fully probabilistic population projection model to generate bilateral migration flow forecasts by age and sex for all flows from 2020 to 2025 through 2040 to 2045.
The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested. However, because of methodological and conceptual limitations, evidence has remained inconclusive. Moreover, prior studies focus on ...the effects of policies on inflows and fail to assess the simultaneous effect of policies on outflows. This is essential from a theoretical point of view as immigration restrictions may reduce both inflows and outflows and, hence, overall circulation. This renders the effect of immigration restrictions on net migration theoretically ambiguous. To fill this gap, and using unique migration and visa data from the Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG) project, this paper assesses the short- and long-term effects of travel visa policy regimes on bilateral immigration and emigration dynamics. The results suggest that travel visa policies significantly decrease inflows, but this effect is undermined by decreasing outflows of the same migrant groups. This confirms that migration restrictions decrease circulation and tend to encourage long-term settlement, and thereby sharply reduce the responsiveness of migration to economic fluctuations in destination and origin societies. We also identify asymmetric policy effects with migration flows declining only very gradually after a visa introduction but increasing almost immediately after visa removal.
In December 2018, the UN General Assembly adopted two Global Compacts: The Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). These two compacts, ...while non‐binding and aspirational in nature, offer the first widely‐accepted new normative frameworks on the movement of people since the ratification of the 1951 refugee convention and its 1967 protocol. This special issue of International Migration aims to analyse the way in which these two compacts were negotiated, examine their potential impact in a number of areas, and compare the way they deal with common themes such as gender, civil society and security. This introductory article describes the background and the process of negotiating the global compacts, provides a short summary of the articles included in this special issue, and highlights gaps in the two compacts that are not elsewhere discussed herein.
The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) was adopted in 2018 under the auspices of the United Nations. In a context in which the global governance of international migration ...remains weak, and in which states regularly confront migration/refugee crises, the GCM provides an internationally agreed-upon assessment of the political issues raised by international migration and identifies non-binding policy recommendations regarding how governments should address them. This article analyses the content of the GCM in light of the migration-related discussions at the international level since the 1990s. It critically examines its core arguments and argues that, because of the diverging worldviews and interests among governments and other stakeholders, the GCM is marked by major internal contradictions. This results in a depoliticised document and in a political language that hides the dilemmas raised by migration politics. There is therefore little consensus among states regarding the nature of migration and the political responses to govern the transnational mobility of people.
We study international mobility in academia, with a focus on the migration of published researchers to and from Russia. Using an exhaustive set of over 2.4 million Scopus publications, we analyze all ...researchers who have published with a Russian affiliation address in Scopus-indexed sources in 1996–2020. The migration of researchers is observed through the changes in their affiliation addresses, which altered their mode countries of affiliation across different years. While only 5.2% of these researchers were internationally mobile, they accounted for a substantial proportion of citations. Our estimates of net migration rates indicate that while Russia was a donor country in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has experienced a relatively balanced circulation of researchers in more recent years. These findings suggest that the current trends in scholarly migration in Russia could be better framed as brain circulation, rather than as brain drain. Overall, researchers emigrating from Russia outnumbered and outperformed researchers immigrating to Russia. Our analysis on the subject categories of publication venues shows that in the past 25 years, Russia has, overall, suffered a net loss in most disciplines, and most notably in the five disciplines of neuroscience, decision sciences, mathematics, biochemistry, and pharmacology. We demonstrate the robustness of our main findings under random exclusion of data and changes in numeric parameters. Our substantive results shed light on new aspects of international mobility in academia, and on the impact of this mobility on a national science system, which have direct implications for policy development. Methodologically, our novel approach to handling big data can be adopted as a framework of analysis for studying scholarly migration in other countries.
The first part of the text addresses three contextual points to better understand immigration in Barcelona: beginning by asserting that there is no "Spanish exceptionalism," but there are different ...times and tempos in social change; continuing by highlighting the specificity of Catalonia (and Barcelona) within Spain; and then describing the historical and sociological characteristics in the construction of the "immigrant Spain." The second part of the article offers three complementary considerations for understanding the social processes that have turned Barcelona into a city of immigration: (1) the process of dispersing immigrants to satellite cities in the metropolitan area; (2) the similarity of the construction of immigration as a "social problem" in both domestic and international migration; and (3) the way some features of the "Spanish model" in the field of international migration help explain the experience of Barcelona.
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