Immigration

• 1. Introduction

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  Immigration is the movement of people across national borders to settle permanently in a country where they are not usual residents. It is one of the most consequential forces shaping modern societies, touching economies, schools, hospitals, housing markets, and courtrooms all at once. The term itself was coined in the 17th century, when the first nation states were forming and people began crossing their emerging boundaries in large numbers. Since then the scale has grown almost beyond reckoning. By a recent count, 244 million people were living in a country other than the one they came from. That figure represents a 41 percent increase since the year 2000. What drives so many people to uproot their lives? What happens to them when they arrive? And what does research actually show about the economic, social, and institutional effects of migration, as opposed to what politicians claim? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Who Moves and Where

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  The United States is home to 19 percent of all international migrants in the world, making it the single largest receiving country. Germany and Russia each host 12 million migrants, placing them second and third. Saudi Arabia follows with 10 million, the United Kingdom with 9 million, and the United Arab Emirates with 8 million. One third of the world's migrants live in just 20 countries.

  Nearly half of all international migrants, 43 percent, originate in Asia. Europe is the birthplace of a quarter of the world's migrants, and Latin America accounts for 15 percent. India holds the largest diaspora anywhere on earth, with 16 million people living outside their home country. Mexico sends 12 million citizens abroad, and Russia sends 11 million.

  Age matters too. In 2015-37 million international migrants were under 20 years old. The 177 million between the ages of 20 and 64 form the backbone of the global migrant workforce. Migrants in Africa are the youngest group, with a median age of 29. In Oceania, Europe, and Northern America the median ages run considerably older, reaching 44 in Oceania.

  Between 2000 and 2015, Asia added more international migrants than any other region, gaining 26 million. Europe gained the second largest number at about 20 million. Most migration worldwide happens between countries within the same broad geographic region, not across hemispheres.

• 3. Why People Leave

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  One framework for understanding why people migrate distinguishes between push factors and pull factors. Push factors are the conditions that drive people out of their home countries, while pull factors are the conditions that draw them toward a particular destination.

  Economic calculation sits at the center of many decisions. In the 19th century, nearly 15 percent of the United States population was foreign-born, drawn by expanding economic opportunity. Travel time also shapes migration rates. Crossing the Atlantic once took up to 5 weeks in the 18th century. By around the turn of the 20th century, the same journey took only 8 days. Lower travel costs mean lower opportunity costs, and research shows that when opportunity costs fall, immigration rates tend to rise.

  A study on Guatemala found that environmental conditions outweighed economic ones as a driver of emigration. When people were asked directly to choose, 68 percent said they would prefer lower wages if it meant lower climate risk, while 32 percent chose higher wages with more climate risk. Natural disasters can also amplify poverty-driven flows. Research finds that for middle-income countries, higher temperatures increase emigration to other countries, while for low-income countries, higher temperatures actually reduce emigration.

  Non-economic motives are wide-ranging. Religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, risk to civilians during wartime, and political oppression all push people toward departure. Some people move to be near family. Others migrate to access gender-affirming care or to live safely in a same-sex relationship, since discrimination and punishment based on sexual orientation are legally sanctioned in numerous nations, with some imposing the death penalty for same-sex acts.

  A 2012 Gallup survey found that 640 million adults worldwide said they would migrate to another country given the opportunity. Twenty-three percent of those would-be migrants named the United States as their preferred destination. Seven percent, representing 45 million people, named the United Kingdom.

• 4. Economic Effects

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  Research suggests that migration can be beneficial both to receiving and sending countries, though the picture carries nuance. Studies estimate that eliminating barriers to migration could increase world GDP by somewhere between 67 and 147 percent, depending on the scenario, if 37 to 53 percent of developing countries' workers migrated to developed countries. Some development economists call reducing labor mobility barriers one of the most efficient tools of poverty reduction available.

  Remittances sent home by migrants are enormous. The World Bank estimated in 2009 that remittances totaled $420 billion worldwide, of which $317 billion flowed to developing countries.

  Within receiving countries, the effects on native workers are layered. Immigration can have positive effects on the native population overall. Low-skilled immigration can adversely affect underprivileged natives through wage pressure. But a compositional effect also operates: immigrants with below-median incomes tend to lower the overall median, while immigrants with above-median incomes raise it. As immigration rises, native workers are often pushed into less physically demanding jobs, which research suggests actually improves native workers' health outcomes.

  A 2015 study found evidence that larger immigrant population shares produce positive impacts on institutional quality. A study of Israel's population in the 1990s, which grew rapidly through the unrestricted immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union, found that the mass influx did not undermine political institutions and substantially increased the quality of economic institutions. A 2019 study found that the massive influx of refugees into Jordan during the Gulf War had long-lasting positive effects on Jordanian economic institutions.

  In Switzerland, naturalization has been shown to have measurable economic returns. One study found that winning Swiss citizenship in a referendum increased annual earnings by an average of approximately $5,000 U.S. dollars over the subsequent 15 years, with the effect concentrated among more marginalized immigrants.

• 5. Integration and Assimilation

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  A 2019 review published in the Annual Review of Sociology covering the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain found an overall pattern of intergenerational assimilation in socioeconomic attainment, social relations, and cultural beliefs. The broad trajectory is toward integration, even if the speed varies.

  A 2018 study in the American Sociological Review found that within racial groups, most immigrants to the United States had fully assimilated within 20 years. Immigrants who arrived after 1994 assimilated more rapidly than those who arrived in earlier periods. However, measuring assimilation is complicated by ethnic attrition, which occurs when descendants of migrants stop identifying with the nationality of their ancestors. Successful assimilation therefore tends to be undercounted, particularly among Hispanic and Asian groups in the United States.

  In France, a 2015 report by the National Institute of Demographic Studies found that an overwhelming majority of second-generation immigrants of all origins felt French, despite persistent discrimination in education, housing, and employment. A 2019 study in the European Economic Review found that language training improved the economic assimilation of immigrants in France. A 2020 Danish study found that language training boosted both economic and social integration of refugees, while cuts to refugees' welfare benefits had no integration effect except to temporarily increase property crimes.

  On cultural values, research shows that first-generation immigrants from countries with less egalitarian gender cultures adopt gender values more similar to native populations over time. One study found that the gender attitudes of second-generation immigrants become difficult to distinguish from those of mainstream society, including children from very gender-traditional cultures and from less well-integrated families. A study of Bangladeshi migrants in East London found they shifted toward the thinking styles of the wider non-migrant population within a single generation.

  Researchers at the University of California San Diego, Stanford, and the Sorbonne have argued that fear-based policies targeting groups by religion or region of origin are counterproductive. Their research on Muslim immigrants in France suggests such policies can feed a cycle in which discrimination encourages withdrawal from society, which then increases further discrimination and undermines national security. They concluded that the failure of French security in 2015 was likely connected to police tactics that intimidated rather than welcomed the children of immigrants.

• 6. Discrimination and Access to Justice

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  Discrimination based on nationality is legal in most countries. Extensive evidence of discrimination against foreign-born persons has been documented across criminal justice, business, the economy, housing, health care, media, and politics.

  In hiring, a 2016 meta-analysis of 738 correspondence tests across 43 separate studies conducted in OECD countries between 1990 and 2015 found extensive racial discrimination in both European and North American labor markets. Equivalent minority candidates need to send around 50 percent more applications to receive an interview invitation. A separate study showed that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.

  Product markets show similar patterns. A 1995 study found that car dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than to black or female buyers using identical scripted bargaining strategies. A 2013 study found that eBay sellers of iPods received 21 percent more offers when a white hand held the device in the photo than when a black hand did.

  In criminal justice, research suggests that racial profiling and in-group bias result in disproportionately high conviction rates for racial minorities in Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Denmark, and France. A 2012 study found that juries formed from all-white pools convict black defendants 16 percentage points more often than white defendants. When the jury pool includes at least one black member, that gap disappears entirely.

  In the United Kingdom, immigration detention policies have come under sustained criticism since 2010. The Detention Duty Advice scheme, introduced in the early 2000s to provide free government-funded legal aid, has been found by recent OECD research to have barred marginalized groups from legal assistance. Language barriers and a lack of interpreters compounded these problems.

  The United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families has been ratified by 48 states. Most of them are large exporters of cheap labor. Major migrant-receiving regions, including Western Europe, North America, Pacific Asia, Australia, and the Gulf States, have not ratified the convention, despite hosting the majority of international migrant workers.

• 7. Politics and Policy

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  Businesses tend to lobby for more immigration, while labor movements tend to oppose it, according to a 2011 study. A 2010 European study found that employers favor immigration when immigrants compete with employees already in the country, but oppose it when immigrants compete with employers themselves.

  The politics of immigration have become increasingly tied to security concerns and the presence of Islam as a new major religion in Western Europe. Those with security concerns have pointed to the 2005 French riots and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as examples of value conflicts arising from Muslim immigration. Immigration has become an emotionally charged political issue across many European nations as a result.

  In the United States, family reunification accounts for approximately two-thirds of all legal immigration each year. Ethnic selection policies, such as the White Australia policy, have largely disappeared, but priority is now typically given to wealthy, educated, or skilled migrants.

  A 2024 working paper by Borjas and Breznau found that research teams with pro-immigration stances estimated more positive effects of migration on public support for welfare, while anti-immigration teams reported more negative estimates. The immigration research community skews heavily toward a pro-immigration stance, the paper found.

  Open borders activist Jacob Appel has written that treating human beings differently simply because they were born on the opposite side of a national boundary is hard to justify under any mainstream philosophical, religious, or ethical theory. Some argue that free migration is a fundamental right and that restrictive nation-state immigration policies violate it; this view is common in libertarian perspectives on immigration.

  The practice of using migration to achieve demographic or political objectives has been described variously as replacement migration, demographic engineering, or settler colonialism, with settler colonialism characterized by some scholars as eliminationist due to its replacement of existing groups. The human costs in detention systems remain concrete: research has documented irreparable psychological, physical, and social damage to immigrants held in Canadian detention centers, and the international community has largely ignored these findings.