Local circumstances play a key role in migration, from the decision to migrate to settling in destination countries. Most international migrants gravitate towards the largest cities in their destination countries, often after moving internally to a city in their origin country. This trend is also observed in Europe, where population growth in many cities is largely driven by an influx of international migrants.
In countries of origin, major cities serve as gateways to overseas destinations. Many potential migrants first move to larger cities before leaving their country. Therefore, cities in both origin and destination countries significantly influence global migration. To avoid misleading results based solely on the analysis of global or national patterns, understanding migration at local scale is essential.
Consequently, the Future Migration Scenarios for Europe project has focused on specific case areas to analyze migration patterns within and between them. This approach allows for the creation of scenarios that predict how international migration to Europe at different geographic scales may evolve. These scenarios help us better understand and prepare for the various ways migration to the region may unfold in the future.
The project team has worked to identify the major factors that explain international migrantion patterns by examining regional and local circumstances that motivate potential migrants to move, hinder the realization of the migratory project, and attract migrants, as well as to explore how future regional socio-demographic, economic, and environmental challenges could shape migrant movement patterns in Europe.
The main conclusions from this project are:
1. According to all FUME scenarios, the EU will remain a region with positive net migration in the future, with more people immigrating to the EU than emigrating.
2. In the absence of future migration, the population in Europe is projected to decline, and processes of population ageing would occur at an even faster rate.
3. Migration flows are influenced by wars, pandemics, economic and other crises that are difficult to predict, making international migration process highly volatile. At the same time persistent, structural social and economic disparities between world regions lead to constant international migration pressure.
4. Migration triggered by climate change is a rather marginal phenomenon, but may influence migration flows in the future, at regional but potentially also at a more global level.
5. Despite its importance for demographic development in Europe, we face challenges in measuring and analysing migration trends. Challenges include the difficulty of measuring undocumented migration, circular and temporal forms of migration, delayed publication of migration statistics, and varying definitions of migrants and migration that may also change over time and may differ across institutions and countries. To improve our knowledge of migration flows and migrant populations, new forms of data emerging from social media platforms can be used. While these data are instantly available, they face selection bias since not all migrants actively use social media.
6. A combination of newer and more traditional data sources is required to improve our knowledge of migration trends. A collaboration between researchers, statistical offices and policy makers is needed to make more progress in this area to gain a better overview of rapidly changing migrant flows.
7. Nowcasting of migration will become more important. The experience from the Russian attack on Ukraine powerfully shows that migration trends can change rapidly in crisis situations. Methods to ‘nowcast’ migration flows, as they have been developed and tested in the FUME project, can help to provide this type of information almost in real time to observe where and when people move.
