This paper introduces a new set of comprehensive and cross-country-comparable indexes of migration policy selectivity. Crucially, these reflect the multidimensional nature of the differential treatment of migrants. We use these indexes to study the evolution of migration policy selectivity and estimate how they affect migration flows. Combining all publicly available and relevant data since WWII, we build three composite indexes that identify selectivity in terms of skills, economic resources and nationality. First, we use these to characterize migration policies in 42 countries between 1990 and 2014. Second, we examine the relationship between the selectivity of migration policy and migration flows. Each of the three dimensions of migration policy is found to correlate strongly and significantly with both the size and structure of migration flows.

The predictions of the adverse effects of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change are now accepted. Somewhat less attention has been given to the economic, social, and political consequences. The three interact: the former will have social and political effects, which in turn will harm economies and economic well-being. This analysis of poor countries draws on much recent evidence and various projections. Climate damage contributes to internal political instability and conflict. There is a risk that poor countries will be driven down economically, so reducing the capacity of their governments: some will become fragile states. Internal migration is likely to become a central policy issue. However, international migration will also grow. Climate damage will drag countries into both cooperation and conflict with each other. The effects on sending countries, contiguous countries, and destination countries are examined. This scenario presented is predictive but should be taken as a warning.

International migration represents a potential channel for the transmission of norms, attitudes, and values back to the home countries. In this paper, we explore how international migration affects tax morale and aversion to the free-riding of members of the household left behind in the home country. We use a rich longitudinal household-level database on Polish society (period 2007–2015) that allows us to observe social attitudes and values of individuals before and after the actual migration of a member of the household. We find that having a migrant in the household has a significant and positive effect on tax morale and increases aversion toward free-riding of stayers. We also find that migrants have a lower level of tax morale before departure compared to stayers, suggesting that international migration leads to an overall gain in pro-social behaviors.

The potential impact of climate change on international migration patterns has recently received considerable attention, yet much of the empirical literature fails to find increases in international migration due to climate change. This paper attempts to resolve this “immobility paradox” by applying a real-options framework to the relationship between climate change and international migration. This framework suggests that individuals may postpone their migration response to climate change in the face of uncertainty and only migrate once impacts of climate change have exceeded certain thresholds. We test this prediction using semiparametric regression methods which allow us to empirically identify the threshold effects implied by the real-options framework. However, the findings are generally inconsistent with such threshold effects. Rather, the results suggest that in low-income countries, individuals’ migration response is hampered by the existence of liquidity constraints. These are likely to become more binding due to climate change-induced decreases in agricultural productivity.

Although the positive socio-economic effects of remittances for recipient countries in the short term are unmistakable, inflows of remittances may at the same time exert adverse effects on the trade competitiveness of an economy, by appreciating the real exchange rate. This phenomenon is characterised as an instance of the ‘Dutch disease’ – the negative impact of windfall revenue inflows on the competitiveness of other tradable sectors and hence on overall economic growth. While the real effect of workers’ remittances on real exchange rates in a recipient economy is still a controversial issue, several studies have analysed evidence for the existence of the ‘Dutch disease’ phenomenon in various sets of countries. The main objective of this study is to examine whether remittance flows have had any adverse effect on the international trade competitiveness of a selected group of developing countries during the period from 1995 to 2014. Using a one-step system Generalised Method of Moments specification within a simultaneous equation approach, it shows that remittance flows depreciate the real exchange rate at their levels and that the lagged value of remittances create the Dutch disease for this country group. In addition, we confirm that while trade openness and world real interest rates contribute to a depreciation in real exchange rates, gross domestic product per capita and net Official Development Aid inflows tend to appreciate real exchange rates. A policy implication is that trade liberalisation policies that lower tariff rates on capital imports and new export-oriented incentive programmes should be accompanied by measures designed to prevent appreciation in the real exchange rate: steps in this direction such as recent macroeconomic and prudential capital flow management initiatives are briefly referenced.

Between 1947 and early 1952, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which was established within the framework of the United Nations to “solve” the so-called European refugee problem after the end of the Second World War, resettled one million European refugees—victims of Nazism as well as East European refugees who escaped the Red Army—all over the world. The IRO's resettlement project is regarded as a blueprint for the establishment of the postwar international migration regime, and it was the predecessor of later initiatives such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In this article I argue that the IRO's history as well as the history of the migration regime after the Second World War has, thus far, mainly been written from the perspective of U.S. American and European history. Northern nations are considered agents in this history, while southern countries are considered as passive “destinations.” In the case of Venezuela, the article argues that the Global South's active role in the migration regime must be taken into consideration to understand postwar migration. From the perspective of a connective approach to global history, it shows how Venezuela, as a political agent, was involved in shaping the migration regime; how it perceived itself as an agent within that regime; and how it intervened on a small scale to shape its form and function.

Middle-class parents in China are increasingly torn between the need to secure their child's future in an environment where competition starts in kindergarten and parenting ideologies focusing on the child's individuality, creativity and freedom. Our study, based on ethnographic fieldwork among middle-class Chinese migrants in Budapest, shows that one result of this tension is a new wave of emigration that is justified in terms of securing a relaxed, healthy and free environment for the child. These migrants consciously reject what they see as a materialistic and dehumanizing social environment in China and pursue a “European” lifestyle that they imagine as wholesome and human-centred; yet while they rejoice in the “happiness” of their children, they retain a deep-seated anxiety about their children's future. Thus, the search for a mentally and physically wholesome environment consonant with China's discourse of national revitalization becomes decoupled from its original agenda and triggers a new trend in international mobility. This study illustrates how the broader tensions in the relationship between China's middle class and the state are externalized to the global stage.

The development of globalization processes in the world economy allows reconciling supply and demand for staff regardless of the employee's country of origin and leads to international labor migration. The experience of highly developed countries shows that a country's economy and its subsequent growth largely depend on the effective recruitment and use of skilled labor. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drastic restriction on population mobility and, consequently, worsened the economic and social situations in countries where labor migration was a widespread phenomenon. The ensuing economic crisis has not only altered trends in labor migration but has also brought new challenges to its legal regulation. The article aims to determine the features of migration trends and policy in the COVID-19 environment, examine them in the context of new regulations adopted to protect the labor rights of migrants under the current circumstances, suggest effective measures to regulate the situation in the labor market, and address the economic crises in the countries of destination and origin. The examination of this issue involved a complex methodological framework where the general scientific dialectical method was central to the research. The conducted research provides a foundation for overcoming the social and economic crises caused by COVID-19, which contributes to its practical significance.

Employment relations systems generally fail to enforce all legal rights of migrant workers. This article illustrates a broader approach to the way labour migration is regulated in practice, using the example of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Political economists have shown that the reality of low-wage migration is either ‘more rights, less access’ or ‘fewer rights, greater access’ in terms of rights enforcement systems. Attention to the effectiveness of such mechanisms and processes reveals another feature of regulation: the divergence of theory from practice. Much scholarly attention has been paid to rights, and this analysis, in which enforcement of those rights is sought, contributes to the literature with a frequently-occurring example of how such regulatory practices effectively restrict migrant rights. The article concludes by arguing that regulation uses employers as a further ‘mechanism of control’ to determine the actual quantity and quality of migrant workers’ employment rights regardless of what is stipulated in the law.

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

In light of increasing environmental stress and its likely implications for migration patterns, we conduct a cross-country individual-level analysis of the impact of self-reported exposure to environmental stress on people's migration intentions and their destination choice. We simultaneously model intentions to migrate domestically and internationally for 90 countries worldwide in 2010. We find that self-reported exposure to environmental stress increases the probability to intend to migrate both domestically and internationally in the coming year. In absolute terms, the largest impact is obtained for domestic migration, but controlling for the fact that this is the most common form of migration anyway, environmental stress particularly raises intraregional migration intentions. Overall, the effects on migration intentions to the different destinations are strongest in low- and middle-income countries in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, while in high-income countries, and in Europe particularly, environmental stress appears to spur only domestic migration intentions.

This paper empirically investigates the effect of transnational migrants on gender equality in the country of origin measured by the share of women enrolled in the lower chamber of National Parliaments. We test for a “migration-induced transfer of norm” using panel data from 1970 to 2010 in 10-year intervals. Total international migration has a positive and significant effect on female political empowerment in countries of origin conditional on the initial female parliamentary participation in both origin and destination countries. Endogeneity issues are taken into account and results are tested under specific geo-political subsamples.

International migrants are subject to many types of violence, such as trafficking, detention, and forced labour. We need an improved understanding of what protects migrants from such violence. The concept of ‘migrant protection regimes’ draws our attention away from formal rights advocacy and to both the informal dimensions of protection and the way migrants help determine the quality of protection they receive. ‘Migrant protection regimes’ are sets of rules and practices regarding who ought to protect whom. These regimes include formal rights to protection in the law and informal relationships that protect migrants from lawful violence by the state. They may be changed by ‘power grabs’, when sovereign actors seek to monopolise protection relationships, but also by ‘exits’, when migrants refuse to accept the protection on offer. The study demonstrates the value of these concepts by using them to explain an unlikely case: a change in laws concerning migrant protection in an authoritarian state: Thailand. Drawing on rich qualitative sources, the article reveals how, after a human rights advocacy campaign had placed migrants’ protection in jeopardy, a mass migrant exodus compelled the country's junta to offer migrants protection on better terms.

This paper examines the implications of labour migration models that rely on employer sponsorship. According to UK government proposals, long-term migration into high-skilled jobs after Brexit will require workers to be sponsored by employers, while workers in low-skilled and low-wage jobs will receive short-term work permits that do not require an employer sponsor. The paper argues that choosing employer sponsorship over worker-driven routes has three key effects: it gives the government greater ability to regulate which jobs migrants fill; it gives employers more power over their workforce; and it increases the administrative burden associated with hiring workers from overseas. This implies that in high-skilled jobs, employer sponsorship is likely to improve the skill composition of labour migrants but reduce the total number of skilled workers admitted; and that in low-skilled positions the government faces a trade-off between the ability to channel workers to specific jobs (including those where employers struggle to attract workers) and the risk of increasing underpayment or exploitation.

This paper studies the distribution of resources within families with migrant member abroad. We derive a complete collective demand system with individual Engel effects for male and female adults and children, and the respective share of resources. The focus is on migrant-sending families in Albania, where gender and inter-generational inequalities are relevant social issues. The results show that the female share of resources is substantially lower with respect to an equal distribution and do not benefit from father’s migration. Children have a larger share of resources and benefit from their fathers migration, when women maintain control over family decisions and when the proportion of female children is larger (at the detriment of women).