Understanding the impact that opinion has on migration policy
Whether it be Europeans crossing the Atlantic in the early 20th century, refugees fleeing war-torn Syria or highly skilled professionals moving to the West for work, migration has been – and always will be – an important part of the human story. Today, 214 million people, or 3.4 % of the global population, are migrants according to the UN. As such, migration is a very contested issue – and one that policy-makers around the world continue to grapple with. Research on the reasons why people move and the policy responses to this movement is abundant, yet we know surprisingly little about how policy-makers reach those responses. To find out, MIGPROSP – an EU-funded project granted by the European Research Council – is working to understand how policy-makers view international migration and how this view shapes the possibilities and limitations of migration regulations. “We need to know more about how key individuals within governance systems, institutions and organisations understand the issue of international migration,” says ERC grantee Andrew Geddes, Director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute in Italy. “What we learned is that how a policy-maker makes sense of migration will ultimately determine which migrants are allowed to enter a country, on what basis, and for how long.”
Getting from A to B
Whereas most migration research tends to focus on understanding why people move, MIGPROSP studied how governance systems make sense of migration. “We aimed to show that migration is not simply some kind of ‘external’ challenge to governance systems,” explains Geddes. “Instead, we wanted to show how governance systems, through their actions and inactions, inclusions and exclusions, judgements and misjudgements, play a key role in defining the challenges they as decision-makers face.” Researchers studied migration governance within Europe, North and South America, and the Asia-Pacific region, conducting over 400 interviews across 27 countries. Work included analysing European responses to the 2015 refugee crisis and the displacement of the Rohingya people in South-East Asia. Researchers also studied the surge in child migration along the US-Mexico border and the Trump administration’s response to the crisis. In South America, their work focused on the effects of Venezuelan displacement. “We tend to see crises like these as drivers of change when, in fact, responses to crisis are embedded within more everyday understandings of the causes and effects of migration,” says Geddes. For example, in Europe, the ‘normality’ of migration is understood as the potential for large-scale and potentially uncontrollable migration – an understanding that has played a key role in the development of EU policy since the end of the Cold War. In South-East Asia, where formal governance structures are not as developed as in the EU, migration is viewed as ‘temporary’, such as temporary ‘foreign’ workers or temporary protection for the displaced. “Whether accurate or not, these understandings have powerful effects on migration governance,” adds Geddes.
From research to action
With the project now finished, researchers are working to convert their findings into policy actions. “I hope that from our work we will develop a research agenda that is focused on the causes and consequences of cognitive bias in migration governance,” says Geddes. “Thanks to the understanding of how policy-makers make sense of migration obtained in this project, we are now better positioned to contribute to the global migration debate.”
Keywords
MIGPROSP, migration policy, migration, refugees, migrants, international migration