Today is B-Day, when British voters decide whether to leave or stay in the European Union. For anyone fond of buzzwords the choice is simple: Brexit or Bremain? Yet the data feeding into the referendum are more complex and, as shown time and again, woefully open to manipulation. One of the main arguments revolves around migration, specifically whether the economic impacts of migration benefit or harm the UK in terms of wages, employment and public services. Those pushing for Brexit say that EU l...
I was born of a mixed family in the south of Italy, in the city of Benevento. That day it was raining cats and dogs, as on most days when important things happen to me – from graduating to getting married to finding a new job. Benevento (meaning either ‘Good wind’ or ‘Good event’) was named by the Romans after they had finally defeated the local tribe, the Caudini....
I was born in a country of immigrants. During the first half of the 20th century, when Europe was suffering from wars, dictatorships and economic crises, Argentina was welcoming migrants and giving them residence permits upon arrival at the port of Buenos Aires. Easy as that!...
A conversation between Eduardo Ibarrola-Nicolín (EI), Ambassador of Mexico to the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Dr. Melissa Siegel (MS), Head of the UNU-MERIT Migration Group. This interview was recorded after a public lecture on 'Migration from the Mexican State Perspective', delivered on 12 April 2016....
The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), the Brussels-based research arm of the North Atlantic Alliance, visited UNU-MERIT in April 2016 to speak about migratory movements from Afghanistan — specifically the regional security environment and the impacts on mobility. As migratory movements are a predictor of (in)stability, and because little is known in real-time about migration from the region, NCIA sought a consultation with experts from the UNU-MERIT Migration Group. They c...
This paper describes the relationship between political leaders' migration experience and the evolution of democracy during their leadership. We build up an original database on the personal background of 932 politicians who were at the head of the executive power in a developing country over the 1960 - 2004 period. These data reveal the existence of a positive correlation between the fact that leaders studied abroad and the change in the score of democracy in their country during their tenure, ...
How do civil wars affect student achievement? How do social networks affect public goods? And how much has been achieved since the UN High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2013? These are a few of the questions tackled by our researchers over the last month — in one book, two journal articles and five working papers, among others. Click here for the full list. Books ‘Economic Systems of Innovation in the Arab Region‘ discusses the causes, consequence...
When people ask me where I come from, my thoughts inevitably take me way back in time to the early 1930s and to a place on the other side of the globe, the Japanese city of Hiroshima. This is where my story starts. During those years of economic crisis, tens of thousands of Japanese people, including both my mother’s grandparents, decided to emigrate to Brazil, in the genuine belief that they would soon be back home, having made a fortune after a few years of hard labour in the coffee bean plant...
A recent news article focused on the UNU-MERIT Master’s thesis ‘Competition for Talent: Retaining Graduates in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine’ by Julia Reinold. The article looked at the advantages and disadvantages of living in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine (EMR): the tri-national crossroads between Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Considering graduate migration and personal experiences, it examined the many efforts made to reduce border barriers by the Foundation Euregio Meuse-Rhine...
As a migration researcher as well as a first-generation migrant descended of migrants, mobility has been a major feature of my adult life. I find it difficult to separate my own migration story from that of my ancestors because it is precisely their decisions and trajectories that enabled my own....