Abstract
Gaining control over refugee flows and undocumented migrants currently dominate the media and political arenas in Europe. Underlying driving and enduring forces, such as employment-related migration pressure, tend to be relegated to the background. In this article, we explore migration pressure prospects up to 2035 in four countries with a tradition of emigration to Europe: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey. More specifically, we first derive a simple decomposition model based on the relationship between working-age population (WAP) growth and growth of gross domestic production (GDP) and worker productivity (GDP/W). From this model, we derive an indicator of migration pressure: size of the non-employed population in a country. This model is then used as framework for deriving storylines for three different scenarios of economic and demographic change up to 2035. Subsequently, storylines are operationalized, leading to scenario estimates of migration pressure up to 2035. The implications of the results are then discussed. Time series of macro-level economic and demographic data are used to underpin scenario assumptions.Scenario results suggest that in all countries employment ratios are expected to increase, but only in Tunisia is the size of the non-employed population—our indicator of migration pressure—expected to decline, irrespective of the scenario. Depending on the scenario, migration pressure remains high in Turkey and Morocco and may even become somewhat higher. The general conclusion is that in the long term, after 2035, labour migration pressure can be expected to decrease because the growth and size of the working-age population is decreasing while employment ratios are rising.
Highlights
Today’s debates in the media and political arenas in countries of the European Union (EU) are dominated by how to gain control over rising numbers of refugees and uninvited labour migrants from countries in Africa and Asia
This focus on the management of and control over immigration and migrant-integration tends to overshadow the driving and enduring forces underlying migration in the countries of origin, such as un- or underemployment. This is the focus of our article, whereby we explore current conditions and future prospects of employmentrelated migration pressure in four countries in the Mediterranean region with a Groenewold et al Genus (2016) 72:8 tradition of emigration to Europe: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey
Working-age population prospects Regarding the first research objective about deriving economic-demographic scenarios up to 2035 for our four study countries, Table 2 summarizes the main results of demographic projections for each scenario
Summary
Today’s debates in the media and political arenas in countries of the European Union (EU) are dominated by how to gain control over rising numbers of refugees and uninvited labour migrants from countries in Africa and Asia. Differences between population scenario estimates are not great because differences in fertility assumptions only affect working-age population size in the long term, while effects of assumed changes in mortality and migration are relatively small, compared with the effect of cross-country differences in age structure in base year 2015.
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