Abstract
Young adults migrate more than older people. As populations in many countries get older, this may affect out-migration—and thus immigration to other countries. This is not usually accounted for in projections of future immigration, even though considerable ageing is expected globally. We show how United Nations projections of future age profiles in origin regions can be combined with those regions’ emigration rates by age group to improve national projections of immigration to a destination country, exemplified by Norway. Using various methods for projecting future migration, we show that projected immigration tends to be lower when taking expected ageing in origin regions into account. This may have a considerable effect on population projections: for Norway, taking changing age profiles in origin regions into account in immigration projections would have an effect on the projected population of Norway equivalent to that of reducing the fertility assumptions by 0.1 children per woman.
Highlights
Population projections are essential for planning in numerous areas, and thereby shape future societies
Origin countries may be grouped into regions, and rates of emigration are calculated by dividing annual figures for immigration from each origin region by figures for the population in those regions
For projections shown by solid lines, no age information is used, so all the changes stem from changed population size in origin regions
Summary
Population projections are essential for planning in numerous areas, and thereby shape future societies. Producing accurate population projections for nations is challenging, primarily because it is hard to foresee the future of fertility, mortality, and international migration. International and national statistical agencies take different approaches to projecting future immigration (Cappelen et al 2015), but models for migration forecasting are few in number and relatively underdeveloped (Raymer and Wiśniowski 2018). Some agencies keep the immigration level constant at the current level or make forecasts based on expert judgements. Others, such as the United States (US) Census Bureau, project immigration of foreign-born people using rates of emigration from origin countries (United States Census Bureau 2018). Statistics Sweden uses emigration rates from the Nordic and European Union (EU) countries in its population projections (Statistics Sweden 2018), and Statistics Norway bases its immigration projection model on emigration rates from different regions of the world (Cappelen et al 2015)
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