Beyond Six Billion Forecasting the World's Population (2000) / Chapter Skim
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International Migration
International Migration
Pages 156-187
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From page 156... ...
Sudden mass emigration as a result of unpredictable economic or political crises is also a major reason for error in projecting population. The projections we examine generally do not treat immigrants and emigrants separately, relying instead on estimates and projections of net international migration.
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From page 157... ...
The relationship between the stock of international migrants and net migration flows is complex and is not examined here. However, it should be noted that a rise in the stock of migrants in a population can occur even when net migration rates are zero or negative.
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From page 160... ...
International migrants are unevenly distributed across world regions (Figure 6-1~. By 1990, 45 percent of the stock of international migrants were resident in industrial countries and 55 percent in developing countries.
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From page 161... ...
Net migration figures may not adequately represent the true volume of international migration, given substantial movement across national boundaries, established during colonial times, that often cut across ethnic populations. 2Portions of the following are drawn from Russell (1996~.
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From page 162... ...
In 1990-1995, the annual net migration rate reached -57.6 per thousand in Rwanda and -60.1 per thousand in Liberia, about 150 times the continent-wide rate. Much smaller but long-standing migration streams, mostly motivated by economic forces, have developed between particular Sub-Saharan African countries.
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From page 163... ...
Over the span of several decades, Asia has contributed to international migration less by taking in than by sending out migrants. It is the source of major shares of permanent immigration to Australia, Canada, and the United States.
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· The United States, Canada, and Australia are the major traditional countries of permanent immigration. Northern America had a stock of 23.9 million migrants in 1990 and a net migration rate of 3.4 per thousand for 1990-1995.
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From page 165... ...
· Western Europe (defined here to include all of continental Europe except for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union) had a stock of 22.9 million migrants in 1990 and a net migration rate of 1.9 per thousand population for 1990-1995, average for industrial regions.
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From page 166... ...
· Eastern Europe and theformer Soviet Union had a stock of migrants of somewhat over 2 million in 1990 and a net migration rate of 0.9 per thousand for 1990-1995. More countries lost than gained population in that period.
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From page 167... ...
The initial motivation for such streams is often economic, involving difficult economic times in one place or attractive opportunities elsewhere. The specific countries involved vary, but Figure 6-2 shows that international migrants clearly flow toward industrial countries, where agriculture takes up less than 10 percent of the labor force.
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From page 168... ...
The five countries excluded in one curve are Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kuwait, Liberia, and Rwanda, for which the extreme effects of crisis migration in this period distort the relationship. In any particular year, these regular migration streams can be dwarfed by crisis migration.
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From page 169... ...
The differential between the industrial countries and the least-developed countries, however, widened considerably, with the comparable ratio rising from 43.9 to 78.7 United Nations Development Programme, 1999:154~.
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From page 170... ...
While policy decisions should therefore be important in dictating the future course of international migration, the ultimate effectiveness of policies to discourage migration is difficult to estimate. Future Flows Despite the changing policy environment, the migration flows that are strongest and most likely to endure are probably the flows toward the traditional countries of immigration, which have lasted, so far, more than two centuries.
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From page 171... ...
Some types of migration flows (such as labor migration) tend to perpetuate themselves over time in ways that are now well understood and reasonably well modeled, while others (such as refugee flows)
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From page 172... ...
Migration is already an important component of population growth in industrial regions. For industrial countries taken together, it accounted in 1990-1995 for only slightly less population growth than did natural increase (Figure 6-3~.
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From page 173... ...
(25.5) -5 0 10 15 20 25 30 Per thousand FIGURE 6-3 Natural increase and net migration rate per thousand by region, 1990-1995.
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From page 174... ...
PROJECTING MIGRATION Current Projection Procedures As with the preceding discussion of likely future trends, projections of migration often rely more on informed judgments than on systematic modeling. Agencies estimate current and sometimes previous levels of net international migration, or make judgments about the character of recent migration, and project levels into the future as constant for arbitrary periods, as declining toward zero, or as zero from the start.
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From page 175... ...
Because total net migrants should equal zero if all countries are covered, overestimates of net migrants for some countries in a given forecast must be balanced by underestimates for other countries in the same forecast. The average bias in net migration rates is likely therefore to be small, as in fact it is.
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From page 176... ...
Because the net migration rate is on average small, these multiple errors do not have much effect on projected population. The exception is errors due to crisis migration.
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From page 177... ...
Figure 6-4 demonstrates this: whichever migration assumptions are used, migration error is considerably smaller when calculations exclude countries that have experienced a demographic quake a sudden and extreme change in the population growth rate which is most often associated with crisis migration. This exercise suggests that the procedures currently used to project migration, while they produce substantial errors, may be hard to improve on.
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From page 178... ...
, a similar clear trend is difficult to define in the case of international migration. Worldwide, migration is not declining; in many regions and countries, it is rising, and no natural limits apply to it.
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From page 179... ...
Using Migration Theory Migration theory does not provide a solution to such problems, but it does provide an approach to understanding the basic process. No complete migration theory exists, but a synthetic account of the relevant factors can be drawn from several theoretical traditions, including neoclassical economics, world systems theory, the "new economics" of labor migration, segmented labor market theory, social capital theory, and the theory of cumulative causation.
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From page 180... ...
International migration is the next link in the chain, motivated by similar factors, because wages can be even higher in other countries. Researchers consistently find a significant correlation between wages in destination countries and emigration from .
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From page 181... ...
The expansion of networks that support migration tends to become self-perpetuating over time (according to the theory of cumulative causation) , because each act of migration causes social and economic changes that promote additional international movement.
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From page 182... ...
CONCLUSIONS Patterns and Trends On average, international migration produces small annual changes in national populations; for half of all countries, the usual gain or loss is Dissimilar dynamic equations have been used by Walker and Hannan (1989) to predict not only the number of immigrants to the United States but also their geographic distribution.
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From page 183... ...
Migration error is on average as important as fertility error in producing error in projected population, although much of this is due to the inability of forecasters to anticipate crisis migration. Over two decades, in addition, net migration into industrial countries has been underprojected.
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From page 184... ...
Countries need to adopt international standards and definitions for international migration, such as those proposed by the U.N.
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From page 185... ...
1995. The Political Economy of International Migration Policy: A Comparative and Quantitative Study.
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From page 186... ...
1998b World Population Monitoring 1997: International Migration and Development. New York: Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
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From page 187... ...
Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 1998 International migration 1965-96: An overview.
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