Are We Living in a Time of Unprecedented Migration?
This is episode one of our course Migration 101. In this course, we’ve teamed up with Hein de Haas, one of the field’s leading scholars, to tackle some of the most commonly asked questions related to migration. After watching his videos, you’ll have a fundamental understanding of the realities surrounding today’s debate on migrants and the refugee crisis. We recommend Migration 101 as a primer for other Migration Matters courses.
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PART 1/10 OF MIGRATION 101
More people than ever before are on the move, right? Not exactly. More people may be moving, but there are also more people in the world. In this episode, we take a closer look at the history of migration and what this means for the future.
Recommended Reading
Have a look at Chapter 1 of The Age of Migration, one of the world’s leading textbooks on migration written by Hein de Haas.*
Hein explains how the world has not, in fact, become more migratory in this article for the International Migration Review.
For a fun and interactive picture of the global flow of people, visit the Global Migration project.
Also, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) makes it real easy for you to see in/out migration for each country in the world: just click on a country to find out more.
This is an eye-opening read from Spiegel Online on the large numbers often quoted in connection to migration: The World is Staying Home.
What will migration from North Africa look like? A report on the future of migration from that region to OECD countries.
For an example of how global migration may be changing, an article on China’s first immigration agency from Bloomberg.
And since we are on the subject of counting humans… Our world feels like an overpopulated place, but according to this fun analysis in Wait by Why, if we lived as densely as people do in Manhattan, all 7.3 billion of us would fit into New Zealand.
*Extract from The Age of Migration, 5th Edition by Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas and Mark J. Miller. Reproduced with permission from Palgrave Macmillan. For full details see here.
Hein de Haas
Hein is Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He was a founding member and director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a co-author of The Age of Migration, a leading textbook in the field of migration. You can find more information and free downloads of his publications on his website. He also maintains a blog – we recommend this entry titled “Human migration: myths, hysteria and facts“.
Sign up now for our newest course, A Migrant’s View, here. It’s a bit different than our other courses, focussing on both research about so-called “origin countries” (where migrants and refugees come from) and stories of arrival, waiting, and return. And don’t miss our next course on integration and diversity in Europe! Sign up here to receive the full series once it’s finished.