Global Migration Patterns Research Articles

Satellites Reveal Global Migration Patterns of Natural Mountain Treelines during Periods of Rapid Warming

Profound global transformations in the Anthropocene epoch are hastening shifts in species ranges, with natural mountain treeline migration playing a crucial role in this overarching species movement. The varied reactions of mountain treelines to climatic conditions across diverse climatic zones, when compounded by local disturbances, result in distinct migration patterns. Usually, warming encourages mountain treelines to migrate to higher elevations. Nevertheless, in a period of rapid warming, it remains unclear whether the natural mountain treeline in global thermal climatic zones and subclimatic zones has expedited its upward movement. Here, we employed remote sensing observations and the random forest algorithm to investigate the natural treeline dynamics across 24 major mountain ranges worldwide amidst a period of rapid warming (1990–2020). Our research shows substantial disparities in the migration patterns of natural mountain treelines across the global thermal zone. The natural mountain treeline in tropical and subtropical zones descends by an average of 1.1 and 0.8 m per year, respectively. Only 18.8 and 35.5% of the natural mountain treelines in these regions had undergone upward migration, respectively. The average migration rates of natural mountain treelines in temperate and boreal zones were 0.7 m per year. Correspondingly, 47 and 33.2% of the natural mountain treelines in these zones had already shifted to higher elevations. The highest average migration rate of natural mountain treelines occurs in temperate continental climates (1.7 m per year). The loss or degradation of alpine species habitats, a direct consequence of the upward movement of the treeline, highlights the necessity for increased monitoring and protection of alpine species in temperate and boreal zones in the future.

Plurilingual and Pluricultural Practices in Turkish Study Abroad: The Intersection of Identity and Lx Community

Whereas second language acquisition has embraced the multilingual turn, study abroad (SA) research often assumes that learners are situated in monolingual host societies. As the profile and preferences of the sojourner diversifies, destination sites become more cosmopolitan, and global migration patterns change the demographic makeup of communities, traditional models are no longer representative of SA. This article presents the plurilingual experiences of learners of Turkish abroad. Through analysis of weekly journals, plurilingual practice is examined as a potential resource and constraint. Findings confirm how plurilingual practice supports mutual understanding and translanguaging between participants’ L1 English and Turkish. Results also reveal how shared minority identity can support TL interaction more than seeking out “native speakers.” This study offers a unique contribution to the link between identity and language learning in SA, providing further support for the need to dismantle the preeminence of the “native speaker” as target interlocutor in study abroad.

Understanding the global subnational migration patterns driven by hydrological intrusion exposure

Amid the escalating global climatic challenges, hydrological risks significantly influence human settlement patterns, underscoring the imperative for an in-depth comprehension of hydrological change’s ramifications on human migration. However, predominant research has been circumscribed to the national level. The study delves into the nonlinear effects of hydrological risks on migration dynamics in 46,776 global subnational units. Meanwhile, leveraging remote sensing, we procured globally consistent metrics of hydrological intrusion exposure, offering a holistic risk assessment encompassing hazard, exposure, and vulnerability dimensions, thus complementing previous work. Here, we show that exposure is the primary migration driver, surpassing socioeconomic factors. Surrounding disparities further intensified exposure’s impact. Vulnerable groups, especially the economically disadvantaged and elderly, tend to remain in high-risk areas, with the former predominantly migrating within proximate vicinities. The nonlinear analysis delineates an S-shaped trajectory for hydrological exposure, transitioning from resistance to migration and culminating in entrapment, revealing dependence on settlement resilience and adaptability.

Cross Border Migration in India and its Global Implication

Abstract: Cross-border migration is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon with far-reaching implications for nations worldwide. This research paper focuses on examining the dynamics of cross-border migration, using India as a case study to understand its historical roots, current trends, and wide-ranging consequences. The paper begins by providing an overview of the significance of studying global migration patterns and introduces the historical context of cross-border migration in India, shaped by colonial influences and the partition in 1947. Subsequently, the paper delves into contemporary trends in cross-border migration, analysing recent data to find key drivers and motivations behind individuals' decisions to migrate. Economic implications of migration are explored, highlighting both the positive contributions of skilled labour influx and the challenges associated with brain drain and dependency on remittances. Social dynamics of cross-border migration are examined, focusing on cultural diversity, social integration, and the challenges and opportunities presented by cultural shifts. Additionally, the paper addresses environmental factors in migration decisions, considering the implications of climate change on migration patterns. Through case studies, the paper provides a human perspective on cross-border migration, highlighting individual experiences and outcomes. Finally, the paper synthesizes key findings and discusses potential future developments and areas for further research, aiming to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding cross-border migration and its global implications.

‘Away From Home’ - A Systematic Literature Review of the Factors and Challenges of Women Migration

Feminization of Migration refers to the increasing participation of women in long-distance migration, a trend driven by the evolving gender dynamics in the workforce. This shift is characterized by the engagement of women in occupations traditionally perceived as feminine, demanding the presence of women in these sectors. Consequently, the concept of the "Feminization of Migration" has prompted a gender-focused perspective on migration, redirecting attention towards the rights and interests of women within migration streams. Global patterns of women's migration have undergone a transformation, moving beyond the traditional role of women migrating as dependents with their families. Instead, there is a notable trend of women migrating independently, driven by economic motives and assuming the role of primary breadwinners for their families. This shift has not only altered the landscape of migration but has also amplified the presence of women in migration literature and practical policies designed with a gender-responsive approach. In light of these developments, this paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review that explores the factors and challenges associated with women's migration.

Testing classic theories of migration in the lab

We test different classic migration theories by using incentivized laboratory experiments to investigate how potential migrants decide between working in different destinations. We assess theories of income maximization, skill-selection, and multi-destination choice, as we vary migration costs, risk, social benefits, and incomplete information. The standard income maximization model leads to a much higher migration rate and more negative skill-selection than occurs when migration decisions take place under more realistic assumptions. The independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption mostly holds when decisions just involve wages and moving costs, but breaks down once we add risk and incomplete information. Cost-minimization, rather than income maximization, seems to be key in some migration decisions. The deviations found in our study between migration decisions and the predictions of classic migration theories call for richer models of migration to explain global migration patterns.

Urbanization as a limiter and catalyst of watershed-scale sediment transport: Insights from probabilistic connectivity modeling

The conversion of rural lands to urban areas exerts considerable influence on the hydrologic processes governing sediment transport at the watershed scale. While the effects of urbanization on hydrology have been well-studied, the corresponding impact to the spatial and temporal variability of sediment detachment, transport, and connectivity is less certain. To address this knowledge gap, we apply process-based hydrologic simulation, probabilistic connectivity modeling, and in situ turbidity sensing to five watersheds positioned along a steep land use gradient in Kansas, USA. Connectivity modeling results show that urbanization systematically decreases the maximal extent of watershed-scale connectivity on the wettest days of the study period, from 51 % in the most rural watershed to 28 % in the most urban watershed. On the other hand, urbanization focuses sediment transport into fewer, more frequently wetted pathways, such as roadway drainage networks, which are activated 3.5 times more frequently than the equivalent pathways in rural basins. In this way, urbanization limits maximal connectivity as impervious surfaces indefinitely disconnect source zones from the sediment cascade, but also catalyzes hot spots of connectivity as these same impervious areas generate excess runoff and channel it to drainage systems. The 23.9 ± 4.2 % of days that exhibit watershed-scale functional connectivity account for 85.0 ± 9.5 % of sediment export with most of the export tied to a few highly connected days. Sensing results show that increases in watershed-scale connectivity only translate to larger fluvial sediment loads after a connectivity threshold (the median connected day) has been exceeded, suggesting a transition from functional to structural connectivity control on sediment dynamics after sufficient wetting. This study highlights the role of land use impacts on the sources and mechanisms of sediment transport, which will be an important consideration for land managers as urban areas continue to expand to accommodate global migration patterns.

Schistosomal appendicitis: a rare cause of a common surgical condition

Despite the prevalence of schistosomiasis across the world, appendicitis secondary to schistosomiasis is a rarely encountered presentation even in endemic areas, letalone in developed Western countries. We report a case of a 34-year-old male in Australia with acute appendicitis and subsequent histopathology, demonstrating the presence of schistosome ova. The case highlights the difficulties in pre-operative diagnosis of this entity and the importance of its recognition for the practising surgeon, especially in the developed world, where this rare condition may be encountered because of changing global travel and migration patterns.

Understanding the global patterns of Venezuelan migration: determinants of an expanding diaspora

ABSTRACT The economic, political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela intensified since 2015 and has led to the largest migration crisis in the region’s modern history. In parallel, the composition of the major destination countries has changed fundamentally. This paper investigates the factors determining the choice of destination country of Venezuelan migrants in the pre- and post-2015 period. Exploiting the United Nations migration dataset (for 230 countries from 1990 to 2017), we apply a Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator to a modified gravity model of migration. The results suggest that Venezuelans were generally choosing a certain destination country based on economic criteria in times of relative stability (1990 to 2015). However, this determinant loses its importance during times of crisis (2015 to 2017), when Venezuelans were primarily immigrating to geographically proximate nations. Consistently for both periods Venezuelans appear to migrate in larger numbers to destinations with an already established network of compatriots.

More people too poor to move: divergent effects of climate change on global migration patterns

The observed temperature increase due to anthropogenic carbon emissions has impacted economies worldwide. National income levels in origin and destination countries influence international migration. Emigration is relatively low not only from high income countries but also from very poor regions, which is explained in current migration theory by credit constraints and lower average education levels, among other reasons. These relationships suggest a potential non-linear, indirect effect of climate change on migration through this indirect channel. Here we explore this effect through a counterfactual analysis using observational data and a simple model of migration. We show that a world without climate change would have seen less migration during the past 30 years, but that this effect is strongly reduced due to inhibited mobility. Our framework suggests that migration within the Global South has been strongly reduced because these countries have seen less economic growth than they would have experienced without climate change. Importantly, climate change has impacted international migration in the richer and poorer parts of the world very differently. In the future, climate change may keep increasing global migration as it slows down countries’ transition across the middle-income range associated with the highest emigration rates.

How the African Union can Improve the Protection and Integration of Refugees in Africa: An Analysis of Policy Frameworks and Implementation Strategies

The refugee crisis in Africa is a growing concern, with millions of people forced to flee their homes due to conflict, persecution, and natural disasters. The African Union (AU) has a critical role to play in protecting refugees and promoting their integration into African societies. However, despite the AU’s efforts to address the refugee crisis, significant challenges remain, including inadequate policy frameworks, lack of implementation strategies, and limited resources. This research topic seeks to explore how the African Union can improve the protection and integration of refugees in Africa. The study will examine the current policy frameworks and implementation strategies adopted by the AU to address the refugee crisis, as well as the challenges and gaps in these frameworks. The study will also analyze the impact of external factors such as global migration patterns, economic downturns, and climate change on the refugee crisis in Africa. The proposed study’s original contribution is that it focuses specifically on the African Union’s role in addressing the refugee crisis in Africa, which has received limited attention in the literature. The study’s findings will be useful to policymakers, practitioners, and stakeholders working in the field of refugee protection and integration, both in Africa and globally.

Exploring Mexican Immigrant Settlement in the Suburbs of Vancouver

In the current age of migration, suburbs in many Canadian cities are becoming important ports of entry for new immigrants from around the world. This has led to a growth in cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity in the suburbs reflecting global migration patterns. In Vancouver, Canada, the growing “suburbanization” of immigrants is shaping social, cultural, economic, and political landscapes in these areas. Through interviews with 60 key informants, we explore the settlement of Mexican immigrants in Burnaby, Surrey, and Abbotsford, fast-growing Canadian communities, and popular destinations for Mexican immigrants. The findings reveal that Mexican immigrants living in the suburbs of Vancouver face numerous barriers, including lack of access to affordable housing to rent or buy, lack of information on settlement services, and difficulty securing acceptable employment.

Climate change and international migration: Exploring the macroeconomic channel

International migration patterns, at the global level, can to a large extent be explained through economic factors in origin and destination countries. On the other hand, it has been shown that global climate change is likely to affect economic development over the coming decades. Here, we demonstrate how these future climate impacts on national income levels could alter the global migration landscape. Using an empirically calibrated global migration model, we investigate two separate mechanisms. The first is through destination-country income, which has been shown consistently to have a positive effect on immigration. As countries' income levels relative to each other are projected to change in the future both due to different rates of economic growth and due to different levels of climate change impacts, the relative distribution of immigration across destination countries also changes as a result, all else being equal. Second, emigration rates have been found to have a complex, inverted U-shaped dependence on origin-country income. Given the available migration flow data, it is unclear whether this dependence-found in spatio-temporal panel data-also pertains to changes in a given migration flow over time. If it does, then climate change will additionally affect migration patterns through origin countries' emigration rates, as the relative and absolute positions of countries on the migration "hump" change. We illustrate these different possibilities, and the corresponding effects of 3°C global warming (above pre-industrial) on global migration patterns, using climate model projections and two different methods for estimating climate change effects on macroeconomic development.

A First Individual-Based Model to Simulate Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) Migrations at the Scale of the Global Ocean

Whale migrations are poorly understood. Two competing hypotheses dominate the literature: 1. moving between feeding and breeding grounds increases population fitness, 2. migration is driven by dynamic environmental gradients, without consideration of fitness. Other hypotheses invoke communication and learned behaviors. In this article, their migration was investigated with a minimal individual-based model at the scale of the Global Ocean. Our aim is to test if global migration patterns can emerge from only the local, individual perception of environmental change. The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) meta-population is used as a case study. This species reproduces in 14 zones spread across tropical latitudes. From these breeding areas, humpback whales are observed to move to higher latitudes seasonally, where they feed, storing energy in their blubber, before returning to lower latitudes. For the model, we developed a simplified ethogram that conditions the individual activity. Then trajectories of 420 whales (30 per DPS) were simulated in two oceanic configurations. The first is a homogeneous ocean basin without landmasses and a constant depth of −1000 m. The second configuration used the actual Earth topography and coastlines. Results show that a global migration pattern can emerge from the movements of a set of individuals which perceive their environment only locally and without a pre-determined destination. This emerging property is the conjunction of individual behaviors and the bathymetric configuration of the Earth’s oceanic basins. Topographic constraints also maintain a limited connectivity between the 14 DPSs. An important consequence of invoking a local perception of environmental change is that the predicted routes are loxodromic and not orthodromic. In an ocean without landmasses, ecophysiological processes tended to over-estimate individual weights. With the actual ocean configuration, the excess weight gain was mitigated and also produced increased heterogeneity among the individuals. Developing a model of individual whale dynamics has also highlighted where the understanding of whales’ individual behaviors and population dynamic processes is incomplete. Our new simulation framework is a step toward being able to anticipate migration events and trajectories to minimize negative interactions and could facilitate improved data collection on these movements.

How Do Global Migration Patterns Present New Challenges for Nation States?

In today’s world, countries are increasingly interconnected and their interdependence is obviously growing. Migration has taken on a distinctly contemporary character as people move more frequently. The current global migration patterns not only have some beneficial effects on nation states, but also poses new challenges to them. For example, developing countries are losing their talent. The structure of international illegal immigration is more complex and its identity is increasingly ambiguous. International migration, especially irregular migration, poses security challenges (territorial, public and cultural) to nation states. However, the study has found that the impact of international migration on security is both objective and subjective.

Robust Phylodynamic Analysis of Genetic Sequencing Data from Structured Populations.

The multi-type birth–death model with sampling is a phylodynamic model which enables the quantification of past population dynamics in structured populations based on phylogenetic trees. The BEAST 2 package bdmm implements an algorithm for numerically computing the probability density of a phylogenetic tree given the population dynamic parameters under this model. In the initial release of bdmm, analyses were computationally limited to trees consisting of up to approximately 250 genetic samples. We implemented important algorithmic changes to bdmm which dramatically increased the number of genetic samples that could be analyzed and which improved the numerical robustness and efficiency of the calculations. Including more samples led to the improved precision of parameter estimates, particularly for structured models with a high number of inferred parameters. Furthermore, we report on several model extensions to bdmm, inspired by properties common to empirical datasets. We applied this improved algorithm to two partly overlapping datasets of the Influenza A virus HA sequences sampled around the world—one with 500 samples and the other with only 175—for comparison. We report and compare the global migration patterns and seasonal dynamics inferred from each dataset. In this way, we show the information that is gained by analyzing the bigger dataset, which became possible with the presented algorithmic changes to bdmm. In summary, bdmm allows for the robust, faster, and more general phylodynamic inference of larger datasets.

Negotiating in Migration and Environmental change: Experiences of Khmer communities in the Mekong delta, Vietnam

This paper reviews how Khmer people in the Vietnamese Mekong delta negotiate for their sustainable livelihood in the context of environmental change and urbanization and how potentially environmental change impacts their out-migration patterns. The concept of social risks and social networks will be developed, which is defined as how local people have been vulnerable in place of origin and destination and how they respond to enhance their socio-economic resilience. Therefore, the impacts of environmental change and urbanization can also be considered the main reasons for local people's short- and long-term mobility in vulnerable regions. The starting point of this paper will overview the migration and environmental change at the global level and rural-urban migration pattern, followed by analyzing these relevant concepts to clarify the research problem. Subsequently, the overview of the fundamental knowledge of migration in Vietnam can be understood by considering their historical process as a whole. On the other hand, to understand local people's vulnerability under this circumstance, the research investigates the social risks and its consequences for locals and migrants in general, particularly for Khmer people in the Vietnamese Mekong delta, concerning their social networks and cultural value.

Revisiting the Gravity Model of Migration

The recent global migration pattern indicates the importance of the movement of people from developing countries to developed countries in search of better economic opportunities. The G20 report of ‘International Migration and Displacement Trends’ mentions India at the top of the list of highly educated emigrants in G20 countries. The current study addresses the endogeneity problem in the migration determinants and attempts to highlight the major regional and economic determinants of migration flow from India to major OECD countries using the Gravity model of migration. We apply the Prais–Winsten regression method to address the cross-sectional correlation, while we apply instrumental variable regression and Hausman–Taylor regression estimation techniques to deal with the endogeneity issue. The findings reveal that the population of India, distance, common official language and per capita income differential are the major determinants of migration from India. In the backdrop of our findings, in terms of per capita income differential, there is a need for an upward revision in the pay scale of the white-collar workers in the organised sector. JEL Codes: C23, F22, J11, J60

Gravity models do not explain, and cannot predict, international migration dynamics

The major social and economic impacts of international migration have led to a strong interest in better understanding the drivers of cross-border movement. Quantitative models have sought to explain global migration patterns in terms of economic, social, climatic, and other variables, and future projections of these variables are increasingly being used to forecast international migration flows. An important implicit assumption in the most widely used class of these approaches, so-called gravity models, is that their parameterisation based on panel data enables them to describe the effects of predictor variables on migration flows across both space and time, i.e., that they explain flow variation both across country pairs at a given time and across time for a given country pair. Here we show that this assumption does not hold. Whilst gravity models describe spatial patterns of international migration very well, they fail to capture even basic temporal dynamics, indeed, often worse than even the time-invariant average of the historical flows. We show that standard validation techniques have been unable to detect this important limitation of gravity models due to the different orders of magnitude of migration flows across spatial corridors, on the one hand, and over time, on the other hand. Our analysis suggests that gravity-model-based inferences about the effects that certain variables have had, or will have, on international migration over time may in reality represent statistical artefacts rather than true mechanisms. We argue that future predictions based on gravity models lack statistical support and that, in its current form, this class of models is not suited for informing policy makers about migration trajectories in the coming years and decades.

Trends and Patterns of Global Refugee Migration.

This paper studies long‐term trends and patterns in global refugee migration. We explore the intensity, spread, and distance of refugee migration at a global, regional, and country level between 1951 and 2018. The analysis did not detect a long‐term increase in the global intensity of refugee migration. Primarily depending on levels of conflict, refugee numbers have fluctuated at levels of between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of the world population. Apparent increases in numbers of the globally displaced are driven by the inclusion of populations and countries that were previously excluded from the data. While refugee populations continue to be concentrated in countries with low‐to‐medium income levels, the analysis reveals several geographic shifts in refugee migration. Refugees tend to come from a shrinking number of origin countries and move to an increasing variety of destination countries. This trend seems to reflect a concentration of recurrent conflict cycles in a relatively small number of countries and a parallel increase in the number of safe destinations. Although the vast majority of refugees remain near to origin countries, the average distance between origin and destination countries has increased over time, presumably linked to the greater ease of travel and migration‐facilitating networks.