New migration data provides crucial empirical evidence about the evolution and causes of global migration patterns over a sixty-year period.
The five-year Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG) project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), interrogated the nature, structure and evolution of global migration in the 1950–2010 period. It examined the nature and evolution of immigration and emigration policies over this period, as well as how states and migration policies have affected the (a) volume; (b) timing; (c) duration; (d) direction; and (e) composition of international migration.
In investigating these questions the DEMIG researchers compiled several major databases:
• DEMIG POLICY tracks more than 6,500 migration policy changes enacted by 45 countries around the world, mostly in the 1945–2013 period
• DEMIG TOTAL reports immigration, emigration and net migration flows for up to 161 countries covering various periods of time from the early 1800s to 2011
• DEMIG C2C captures long-term country-to-country global migration flows from 1946 to 2011 for 34 reporting countries and from up to 236 countries
Available in Excel and Stata format, these databases can be downloaded free of charge.
Principal investigator and former IMI Co-Director Hein de Haas said: ‘Based on 5 years of tireless and dedicated team effort, the DEMIG databases represent a huge step forward in advancing our knowledge of the evolution of migration patterns and migration policies in the post-WWII era. This will provide crucial evidence in understanding the nature and drivers of global migration and will also enable data-driven assessment of the effectiveness of immigration policies’.
Read more about the DEMIG project, including an extensive series of theoretical and empirical research papers, informed by these and further databases.