Nikola Sander

Quantifying Global International Migration Flows

Monitoring Migration Migrant “stock” data—the number of people living in a country other than the one in which they were born—are frequently used to understand contemporary trends in international migration, but the data are severely limited. Abel and Sander (p. 1520) present a set of global bilateral migration flows estimated from sequential stock data in 5-year intervals. The percentage of the world population moving over 5-year periods has not shown dramatic changes between 1995 and 2010. People from individual African countries tended to move within the continent, whereas people from Europe tended to move to very diverse locations. Estimates are provided for the international flow of people over 5-year periods between 1990 and 2010. Widely available data on the number of people living outside of their country of birth do not adequately capture contemporary intensities and patterns of global migration flows. We present data on bilateral flows between 196 countries from 1990 through 2010 that provide a comprehensive view of international migration flows. Our data suggest a stable intensity of global 5-year migration flows at ~0.6% of world population since 1995. In addition, the results aid the interpretation of trends and patterns of migration flows to and from individual countries by placing them in a regional or global context. We estimate the largest movements to occur between South and West Asia, from Latin to North America, and within Africa.

Internal and International Migration

The discussion surrounding how countries in sub-Saharan Africa can reap the benefits of a demographic dividend needs to pay closer attention to the effects of internal and international migration flows. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the ways in which migration alters the relative size of the working age population, the ratio of children to the total population, and the education level of a population, all of which are key variables in the discussion of the demographic dividend. This chapter aims to address this gap in the literature by drawing on two new datasets on internal and international migration flows as well as an innovative visualization of migration systems. The data suggests that, during the period 1990–2010, the spatial patterns of migration flows in sub-Saharan Africa were distinctive from those observed in the more developed world. Economic factors seem to play a less important role in shaping migration compared to violent conflict and political unrest. The results point to three clusters of countries between which migration flows are concentrated, underlining the importance of the regionalization of migration within sub-Saharan Africa.

Visualizing Australian internal and international migration flows

Migration research in Australia has tended to focus on internal migration, partly due to the paucity of international migration statistics at the regional scale, especially for emigration. In this regional graphic, internal and international migration flows for 50 major regions of Australia are presented using census data on internal migration and immigration over the one-year interval before the 2011 Census together with new estimates of regional emigration. Because of the difficulties of mapping migration flows for a country with huge variations in the geographical size of regions, a new visualization tool – the circular migration plot – is employed. It enables a more complete, and more interpretable, summary picture of the spatial pattern of internal and international migration in Australia to be depicted than has been possible previously.