Final Report Summary - NORFACE PLUS (NORFACE Transnational Programme on Migration in Europe)
Executive Summary:
The NORFACE Plus Network Board granted in June 2009 funding to 12 transnational projects reviewed as scientifically best. The projects began their work in November 2009 – January 2010 and finished their work latest in June 2014. The Network Board also nominated a Programme Director in charge of the scientific coordination activities of the programme.
The NORFACE Migration Programme created synergies and networks that developed the subject of migration and provided the grounds for current and future collaborations. The scientific coordinator of the programme, prof. Christian Dustmann concludes: “The NORFACE programme created a research initiative on migration putting all academics specializing on migration under the same umbrella. This gave a platform for new academics to showcase their work as well as help many PhD students to complete their studies. It has also created many databases of primary data that will be given back to the academic community as well as a number of other academic outputs. It dramatically pushed forward the research on the topic of Migration in Europe which has taken off considerably in the last few years.”
The programme arranged five programme conferences. Especially the two international conferences in 2011 and 2013 were game-changing events: they brought together academics and the world of policy on the subject of migration and helped to create a legacy of the NORFACE-programme on migration. They demonstrated the tremendous progress that had been made during the program on migration research in Europe, thanks to the initiative, which opened the multidisciplinarity of the Migration studies in a new way and made Europe again a centre of the Migration studies. While academic presentations and discussions were in the core of the programmes, the wider societal and policy discussions were given a prominent place.
A significant part of the budget of the NORFACE research programme has been spent on collecting primary data sets, of both qualitative and quantitative nature. In 2013 NORFACE began a cooperation with GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. In the forthcoming years, GESIS will provide support and environment for storing and opening the research data collected during the programme. The extensive data collections are finished, and CILS4EU and THEMIS had already made their collections available to other scholars. Other projects will follow in due course.
Apart from the programme activities, each research project had individual research aims and results. Already, over 200 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, book chapters or monographs have been published with more than 300 other academic publications. More than 500 academic presentations have been given by scholars supported in the programme, and each project have also participated in policy discussions and media programmes. The NORFACE Discussion Papers series has brought the research to the attention of the academic world (over 100 publications) whereas the NORFACE Compact Publication provided an excellent testimony of this work to policy makers and the general public. However, the biggest contribution this programme offered to the future direction of the field are the valuable databases that were created by collecting primary data.
Project Context and Objectives:
NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe) transnational research programme on Migration in Europe: Social, Economic, Cultural and Policy Dynamics has aimed to explain new challenges Europe faces with migration. It has contributed to our theoretical understanding and knowledge and raised the level of comparative, multi-disciplinary and multi-level research on migration in Europe. The research has provided results with valuable knowledge to be used by policy makers at national, European and international level.
The total budget of the NORFACE Migration in Europe research programme amounts to 28.6 m€. The NORFACE partner councils have committed altogether 22.8 m€ to the common pot of the programme. In addition, a total of almost 6 million € of ERA-NET Plus funding is received from the European Commission 7th Framework Programme. The NORFACE Plus Network Board granted in June 2009 funding to 12 transnational projects reviewed as scientifically best. The Network Board also nominated a Programme Director in charge of the scientific coordination activities of the programme. The Programme Director started his duties in October 2008.
The general scientific objectives of the programme have been:
• To advance globally excellent theoretical and methodological disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and comparative research on migration which builds synergetically on a pan-European basis
• To take advantage of and develop the informal laboratory of experience, knowledge and data which migration in Europe currently presents
• To motivate and support excellence and capacity building for research on migration on a cross-national basis throughout the NORFACE countries
• To develop understanding and promote research-based knowledge and insight into migration for issues of societal, practical and policy relevance, with theoretical foundations but worked on jointly with relevant users and experts.
Migration is a high level social, economic and policy concern right across Europe. Persistent rates of international migration have become an essential element of the political and economic globalization process. Questions of high societal and political relevance have been raised in connection with these developments. There is a significant body of research in this area, within individual European countries, at the European level, and from other global regions, notably though not only North America. But the body of research has not yet formed a coherent cumulative and grounded body of knowledge which would allow us to understand more fully the current economic and social dynamics of migration, their impact, and even more importantly their potential future impact, on society, economy and polity. There is a critical need therefore to raise the level of European research to address these issues, a need to build a synergetic body of research which contributes strongly to our theoretical understanding and knowledge in the area of migration research.
The research topics of the programme have been designed to address this need through theory-guided, comparative, multi-level and time-referenced studies especially in relatively unexplored areas, or fields with unresolved issues. The programme has emphasised three main themes:
• Migration - Causes and Consequences,
• Integration,
• Cohesion and Conflict.
These areas and the issues taken up in them should not be conceived as separate phenomena but as parts of a more general social process. Different theoretical approaches and methodological procedures are necessary, making it indispensable for researchers to be aware of and compile contributions stemming from diverse social, economic and behavioural science disciplines. What comes to this research programme, the disciplines have included demography and geography, history, anthropology and ethnography, psychology, social psychology, language and cultural sciences, economics, political science, law, and sociology – in other words, almost the entire spectrum of the social sciences and related areas.
A significant part of the budget of the NORFACE research programme has been spent on collecting primary data sets, of both qualitative and quantitative nature. This data is made available for all scholars in migration studies. To ensure the data sets generated are of highest quality a panel of four experts from outside the NORFACE programme was set up in July 2009 and the programme opened a collaboration with GESIS in November 2013. The expert panel advises the project teams on data related issues and provides recommendations on the data collection design, the questionnaire etc., and GESIS provides support and environment for storing and opening the data collections of the programme.
The programme has been committed to ‘user engagement’, building on the knowledge gained from the original NORFACE ERA-NET. This has meant an ongoing awareness of the potential for take up of research findings by the various communities of migration policy and practice, and a willingness to engage those communities appropriately with the research agenda, research projects and research findings.
The scientific coordinator of the programme, prof. Christian Dustmann concludes at the end of the programme: “The NORFACE programme created a research initiative on migration putting all academics specializing on migration under the same umbrella. This gave a platform for new academics to showcase their work as well as help many PhD students to complete their studies. It has also created many databases of primary data that will be given back to the academic community as well as a number of other academic outputs such as discussion papers, book chapters and synergies. It also dramatically pushed forward the research on the topic of Migration in Europe which has taken off considerably in the last few years.”
Project public website address: http://www.norface-migration.org/
Project Results:
The NORFACE Network Board decided in its meeting 15th–16th June 2009 in Helsinki to grant funding to 12 transnational projects. The contract negotiations with the projects were finalized in July-September 2009 and all contracts were signed by 31st December 2009. Originally NORFACE had received 240 outline proposals. After the first review round 45 full proposals were submitted to NORFACE and found eligible. List of funded research projects is given in Annex 1.
The total funding of the projects and the scientific coordination activities amounted to € 28,658,000. The figure consists of contributions from the NORFACE partner councils totaling to € 22,830,000 and additional funding from the European Commission FP7 to NORFACE Plus project totaling to € 5,828,000. The European Commission funding was used to fund the research projects only and not the scientific coordination activities. The research program has been funded using the real common pot funding model.
NORFACE PLUS projects - timetable
PROJECT PI Beginning Months Orig. End Prolong. req. End date
SCIP Diehl 1.12.2009 48 30.11.2013 No 30.11.2013
TEMPO Facchini 1.11.2009 48 31.10.2013 Yes 1.1.2014
LINEUP Guveli 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 30.6.2014
CILS4EU Kalter 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 31.1.2014
SIMCUR Leyendecker 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 30.6.2014
TCRAfEu Mazzucato 1.1.2010 36 31.12.2012 Yes 21.12.2013
MD-RDE Nijkamp 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 31.1.2014
IMEM Raymer 1.11.2009 24 31.10.2011 Yes 30.4.2012
NODES Vaattovaara 1.10.2009 44 31.5.2013 Yes 31.1.2014
MI3 Wadsworth 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 30.6.2014
CHOICES Wahba 1.10.2009 24 31.10.2011 Yes 30.4.2012
THEMIS Bakewell 1.1.2010 48 31.12.2013 Yes 1.1.2014
Scientific Coordination
Prior this programme, the body of research in migration studies has not yet formed a coherent cumulative and grounded body of knowledge which would allow us to understand more fully the current economic and social dynamics of migration, their impact, and even more importantly their potential future impact, on society, economy and polity. There has been a critical need to raise the level of European research to address these issues, a need to build a synergetic body of research which contributes strongly to our theoretical understanding and knowledge in the area of migration research.
Therefore, NORFACE partners not only sought to fund separate research projects in this multidisciplinary field, but also stressed the importance of the scientific program coordination activities and collaboration as the Migration Program has been expected to provide a steep increase in cooperation between leading edge researchers from NORFACE partner countries. The NORFACE Network Board created a position for a scientific program director to achieve those goals, and to help build capacity for further research in the future.
The NORFACE Network Board appointed Professor Christian Dustmann, Professor of Economics at University College London as the scientific coordinator of the programme. Prof. Dustmann started his duties on 1st October 2008 and his term continued until 30th June 2014. Prof. Dustmann worked in close cooperation with the NORFACE Network Board.
The scientific coordination office sought to create synergies and networks that developed the subject of migration and provided the grounds for future collaborations. The office has created a number of activities and initiatives putting all academics specializing on migration under the same umbrella. This also gave a platform for new academics to showcase their work as well as help many PhD students to complete their studies. The communication across different disciplines was also the biggest challenge the program encountered, and the scientific office had to tackle. The scientific coordination office was also given the task to arrange the storage of the research data collected during the programme, and to find solutions on making this data available to all researchers.
Program conferences
The scientific office organized five major conferences bringing together all the academics involved in the NORFACE Migration program as well as in two of the conferences also the wider community of migration researchers. These conferences were the most important tools for creating synergy in-between then multidisciplinary and international projects funded in the programme as well as for creating cooperation with other relevant scholarly communities, policy makers and stakeholders.
The opening conference was held at University College London on the 25th- 27th March 2010. The conference introduced the research projects to each other and discussed the most important issues concerning the development of the program entity. The conference included team meetings and individual project presentations. Specific workshops provided fora for opening communication channels across the different projects and discussing innovative data collection strategies with a panel of data experts. More information is available at [http://www.norface-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=1].
A large interdisciplinary conference Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge, held on the 6th–9th April 2011 in London. The event was jointly organized by the NORFACE Research Program on Migration and the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM at University College London). The conference closed the UCL Migration Week, a series of lectures, panel discussions, conferences and exhibitions, which explored migration from a number of academic perspectives. For more information [http://www.norface-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=12].
The conference was attended by 430 scholars who work on migration across different disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, demography, anthropology, educational studies, geography, political science and development studies. Thus the scope of disciplines and possibilities of collaboration grew as the wider community of migration studies was brought into the conference. 231 papers were presented in parallel sessions and 32 papers as poster displays. The most important events were:
• 2 keynote speeches by George J. Borjas (Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) and Alejandro Portes (Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University)
• A high profile Policy Podium Discussion on “The Challenges to Policy Making Posed by the Diversity of Interests Affected by Immigration”
• A high profile Academic Podium Discussion on “The Role of Academic Research in the Public Debate on Migration”
• Special session on Norface Data for the Migration in Europe research projects
• Special session on The International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) Database
The first day of the conference was reserved for discussing the development of the research projects funded in the Migration in Europe-programme: all twelve projects presented their recent research work and development. Numerous researchers of the Migration in Europe -projects presented their individual studies also during the other sessions of the conference.
The conference’s main achievement was to bring together the most prolific scholars, representing the various and often contradicting approaches to Migration studies. The policy podium brought scholars and civil servants working with migration issues together to discuss on the current development of migration and how scholarly research may support society’s planning and decision-making. The academic podium also sought to clarify scholars’ possibilities to contribute to public discussion on migration.
The third event was hosted at the University of Mannheim on the 29th–31st March 2012, collaboratively with the CILS4EU research project [http://www.norface-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=69]. The conference was targeted to the scholars funded by the program. The workshop included overall presentations of all 12 projects as well as 48 individual presentations. The sessions mixed the various projects’ individual presentations for creating collaboration and exchange of ideas in-between the scholars.
4th Norface Migration Network Conference Migration: Global Development, New Frontiers was the biggest inter-disciplinary conference on the topic of migration to date. It had 500 participants, including 128 NORFACE project team members. Over 260 scientific presentations or posters were given during the conference. Overall, the organising committee received over 550 submissions, which shows that the demand for such an event was urgent.
The keynote speech of the conference was given by Prof. Richard Alba (The City University of New York) on Reproduction of inequality versus openings for social change: How should we think about the looming transition to diversity in western societies? One of the key features of the programme’s conference series has been the work on increasing North American and European scholars’ networks in migration studies.
A specific effort was put on merging academic studies and policy views together. Three discussion panels were arranged to express the multitude of European and global views and actions on the migration issues.
• Policy Podium “How Should Governments Best Address Trends in Migration”
• Policy Event “Migration: The Key Challenge for the EU”
Speakers included for example: Cecilia Malmström (EU Home Affairs Commissioner); Charles Clarke (Former UK Home Secretary); Marina Del Corral Téllez (Secretary General of Immigration, Ministry of Employment and Social Security, Spain); Peter Sutherland (UN Special Representative for Migration and Development); Jonathan Portes (Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research); David Metcalf (Chair of Migration Advisory Committee). The discussions targeted on how should governments best address trends in migration, and how does especially EU act on them..
Each project had been given a specific session to introduce their achievements. Also, ten principal investigators or team leaders (Claudia Diehl in SCIP, Ayse Guveli and Lucinda Platt in LineUp, Anthony Heath and Frank Kalter in CILS4EU, Valentina Mazzucato in TCRAf-Eu, Birgit Leyendecker, Brit Oppedal and Judi Mesman in SIMCUR, Peter Nijkamp in MD-RDE, ) were given a discussant’s role in the conference’s six academic panels. This assured a wide visibility of the programme’s scholars and their research work in the wider academic scheme.
This conference was the most important public event of the program. It brought together academics and the world of policy on the subject of migration. It helped to create a legacy of the Norface program on migration and demonstrated the tremendous progress that had been made during the program on migration research in Europe. The abstracts of the presentations, social media communication, important academic and policy events and a good number of interviews have been stored and made available at the conference website.
The fifth NORFACE conference was co-organized with the MI3 project in Berlin (1st–2nd November 2013). This was the final event of the program, bringing all the research projects together for estimating the achieved results and discussing the possible further cooperation and research needs. The conference had more than hundred participants and included 46 individual presentations from the 12 funded projects. The conference also included a panel discussion with the PIs, covering the development of the program and seeking lessons on the organization and scientific collaboration tasks of such a multidisciplinary and international program. The event also included a PhD student meeting and discussions regarding the storage of data that were produced in the course of the program as well as a Horizon 2020 presentation.
The scientific coordinator of the programme, prof. Christian Dustmann, emphasised in his beginning speech how the programme has created “new contacts and new initiatives”. While such achievements may sound self-evident, prof. Dustmann pointed out how both issues are in fact crucial for a wider and more coherent understanding of migration phenomena. According to him, the national partners of NORFACE in collaboration with the European commission have been able to create a programme, which has succeeded in bringing various disciplines and interests on migration studies together in an unforeseen way. Also, in its emphasis to concentrate on supporting new data collections, the programme has managed to create scientific data which is in most cases unique and will give immense possibilities to continue research efficiently in the forthcoming years.
The first round table discussion gathered all participants of the research programme together in order to learn from the researchers’ experiences on how the programme had worked and supported their activities, as well as for discussing on the future possibilities and challenges of migration studies. Each principal investigator was given a chance to present his/her views. The overall views of the projects were:
1. All PIs pointed out that the funding made a big difference to their and their research teams’ work. Some suggested that this Norface research programme has been essential for the decisive increase in migration related research across European countries over the last five years.
2. The multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary nature of the programme was pointed out as a positive approach in practical terms. The programme activities supported interaction of disciplines across teams, and through workshops and conferences.
3. The interdisciplinary efforts and their successes depend on the particular discipline. This might depend on the particular disciplines traditional cooperation activities, methodological similarities, conceptualisation, and research interests.
4. Most PIs expressed that concerning the programme activities targeted to bring the projects together and in contact with other scholars in migration studies, the two open conferences of the programme were extremely beneficial for the research projects.
5. To ensure a well-working cooperation in the research projects as well as among them, cooperative and instructional activities are needed in the beginning of the programme.
6. The relatively non-bureaucratic application procedure and administration during the programme was seen a big plus.
7. Many PIs mentioned that the programme working period fell short in the end, in particular as the programme sought to support a great effort on data gathering. PIs pointed out that the best phase in terms of research is starting only now, and it would be great if means were available to arrange conferences in near future in order to keep up with the further results and new research projects.
8. Funding younger scholars, and even younger PIs, was a very good feature of the programme.
A specific workshop was arranged for the PIs and the data experts of each project. The workshop – a presentation and Q&A – was held by Dr. Markus Quandt, the Head of RDC International Survey Programmes of GESIS – Data Archive for the Social Sciences.
Numerous PIs have mentioned in their final reports that these international and interdisciplinary conferences arranged in the program have been the most important feature of the program. In a unique way, they have offered a new view on understanding the complexity of migration studies and a possibility to interact and collaborate. Also, organizing such high profile conferences in Europe has meant that the emphasis of migration studies in global sense has moved stronger to the European academic community than previously.
Publications and other outputs
The scientific office hosted on its website the NORFACE Discussion Paper series, which run over 100 papers during the program [http://www.norface-migration.org/publrespapers.php]. Over 40 of these papers have already been published as peer-reviewed scientific articles, too. The series will continue to exist on the CReAM website. The NORFACE Compact Series, was set up to address policy makers as well as the general public [http://www.norface-migration.org/pages.php?id=33]. The compact series consisted of three volumes, including articles from all projects.
Throughout the program, the scientific coordination office has also produced NORFACE Migration Newsletter, which has disseminated the latest news and information about Norface Migration research program to the members of the Norface Migration mailing list. It has provided details on the past and future events, and has been especially useful for advertising Norface conferences.
The 12 research projects funded in the program have published their results in other relevant fora, too. In the final reports the projects have reported altogether 205 peer-reviewed scientific articles, book chapters or monographs. 135 of these are published in open access journals (4 publications) or are available at the institutional or disciplinary repositories (131 publications).
Primary data collection and storage
When setting up the programme, NORFACE emphasized the importance of collecting new research data on migration issues, as well as storing this data properly and making it available for other researchers. Nine of the funded projects have collected primary data using different data collection techniques, for the purpose of their research. The task for organizing data storage and open data activities was given to the scientific coordination office
At the start of the program, scientific co-ordination office reviewed the projects’ stand with respect to the data collection and preparation for publication. The office organized data workshops for all relevant projects in the first two conferences. The scientific coordinator prof. Christian Dustmann and Dr. Bernt Bratsberg (MI3) held presentations in the workshop Research Data Infrastructure in the Social Science, arranged by Norface II SA, German Data Forum and UK Data Forum in Berlin, 3rd–4th May 2012. Prof. Dustmann discussed about the programme’s actions to data storage and access and Dr. Bratsberg gave an example on how scholar can use and combine national data sets.
In the final conference of the program, Prof. Dustmann introduced collaboration with GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences. GESIS is the German partner of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). The coordination office at the Academy of Finland liaised with GESIS and signed a Memorandum of Understanding on 23rd of May 2014, regarding data storage as well as bringing in touch GESIS and the individual projects and coordinating these activities. To this date, CILS4EU has signed an archiving contract with GESIS and the first wave of data is already available to all scholars. SIMCUR will follow soon. THEMIS has archived at the UK Data Archive with forthcoming links to the programme’s website at GESIS. The agreement with the research projects state that research data must be made available two years after the completion of the data collection. The research data of all relevant projects should be available to all scholars interested latest in 2016.
PhD training and capacity building
The program funded altogether 65 PhD-students. 12 of these students worked at a university in the Great Britain, 14 in Germany, 15 in the Netherlands, 10 in Ireland, 3 in Sweden, 3 in Norway, 2 in Denmark, 2 in Finland, 1 in Poland, 1 in Portugal, 1 in Austria and 1 both in Germany and Ireland. 25 of these students finished their dissertations during the program.
PhD students were frequently among the presenters at the different workshops and conferences, thus providing them with the experience of presenting in front of an international audience, and receiving a wide range of comments from the audience on their research. At the last two conferences of the program, the scientific co-ordination office organized a PhD Breakfast which gave the students the chance to discuss with distinguished academics, as well as give feedback on their experience of being part of the NORFACE teams. They all reported that they benefited on many different levels from the conferences, and suggested adding PhD hosted events in the future, to further develop their skills and be able to present their work both to a peer group but also to groups of experienced academics.
Individual projects
The twelve projects have varied in their aims, working methods as well as their working periods, which means that they proceeded according to varying methods and timetables and have created their own individual research results:
CHOICES (PI Jackline Wahba): The project comprised of four partners located in University of Southampton (UK), NIDI (the Netherlands), Münster University (Germany) and University of Stockholm (Sweden). It focused on migrants’ choices and the constraints they face from an economic perspective, as well advanced the theoretical studies through contributing to the theoretical literature and carrying out policy evaluations using an integrated macroeconomic model created during the research project. The project also made methodological contributions by developing innovative econometric estimation techniques. The coverage of countries spanned from EU cross-country perspective to host country specific coverage of the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and labour sending countries such as Egypt and Mexico. CHOICES managed to publish three times more scientific publications than originally planned, to engage with policy makers and to address non-academic audience, too (e.g. college students through a feature article in the Economic Review, which was negotiated with the publisher to make publicly available on-line).
The project focused on migrants’ choices and the constraints they face from an economic perspective. It used rigorous state of the art quantitative techniques (econometrics) to answer key research questions. The project has also advanced the theoretical migration literature through contributing to the theoretical literature and carrying out policy evaluations using our integrated macroeconomic model. Finally, researchers have also made methodological contributions by developing innovative econometric estimation techniques.
CHOICES has contributed to a better understanding of the key drivers of migrants’ choices and the constraints they face, thereby enhancing the evidence base for policy formulation. The findings make important contributions to the migration literature and help in informing migration policy. Below we highlight some of those main results and their implications for policy:
Return Migration:
The findings of Biwaard, Schluter and Wahba suggest that unemployment leads to return migration. Moreover, getting a job after a spell of unemployment delays the return of migrants back to their country of origin. The longer the migrants are unemployed the higher the chance they leave. The findings challenge the perception that labour immigrants are attracted by the generosity of the welfare state in the Netherlands since almost half of recent labour immigrants leave if they experience unemployment. This suggests that voluntary return schemes might be more successful if they target recent immigrants as opposed to long established ones.
There is a strong influence of the return behaviour of other migrants of the same ethnic origin on the individual return behaviour of recent labour migrants. Another aspect that is highlighted in research is that the migration process cannot be viewed in isolation of other important life course processes of the individual migrant. The labour market and family formation/dissolution processes are both intertwined with the migration process which influences the assimilation of migrants. Those papers underscore the importance of social factors in affecting return migration.
Even after controlling for the endogeneity of the temporary migration decision, an overseas returnee is more likely to become an entrepreneur than a non-migrant. Although migrants lose their original social networks whilst overseas (an issue that has not been previously considered by economists), savings and human capital accumulation acquired abroad over compensate for this loss. Those findings are important for policymakers who are interested in encouraging migrants’ investments.
Illegal Migration:
Although illegal migrants from Mexico to the US experience a wage penalty, they are as likely as legal migrants to remit and are not hindered by their illegal status. This underscores the importance of remittances as a motive for migration.
Income/Consumption
Migrants and natives are likely to differ in terms of reservation wages and productivities which in turn drive wage differentials. However, those “migrant effects" are particularly pronounced among the unskilled and young, but that differences diminish with age and skill levels in Germany suggesting for policymakers that integration in the labour market takes place over time.
To overcome the problem that both earnings and consumption on an individual level over long time spans are hardly available in any panel data, they suggest an innovative method to measure perceived earnings risk from individual earnings and capital income data, while consumption data are not required. This method can also take into account the different sources of capital income, for instance divided into income from risk-free assets and from risky assets. These methods can be applied not only to dynamic settings in connection with migration but also to areas outside migration.
Social Networks:
The higher is the percentage of a given ethnic group living nearby in the UK, the higher is the probability of finding a job through social contacts but this effect decays very rapidly with distance and differ depending on the ethnic group considered. Though networks are a popular method of finding a job for the ethnic minorities in the UK, they are not necessarily the most effective either in terms of gaining employment or in terms of the level of job achieved, in particular Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants tend to lose out disproportionately from using personal networks. CHOICES provided an explanation for the reasons behind the negative relationship between social networks and the labour market outcomes of immigrants in the UK. It shows that the adverse effects found in the UK, is due to the importance of locality effects which confound social network effects.
There is a penalty to be paid for non-EU immigrants in Europe with a strong identity. Being a first generation immigrant leads to a penalty of about 17% while second generation immigrants have a probability of being employed that is not statistically different from that of natives. However, when they have a strong identity, second-generation immigrants have a lower chance of finding a job than natives. The analysis reveals that the relationship between ethnic identity and employment prospects may depend on the type of integration and labour market policies implemented in the country where the immigrant lives. More flexible labour markets help immigrants to access the labour market but do not protect those who have a strong ethnic identity.
Political Economy, Welfare & Immigration Policy
International migration plays a positive and significant role in improving the quality of political institutions in sending countries, an issue that has been understudied by economists.
CHOICES found strong support for generous welfare states attracting more unskilled immigrants (i.e. "magnet hypothesis") under the free-migration regime, and attracting more skilled migrants (“the fiscal burden hypothesis" under the restricted-migration regime. The work suggests that EU countries may be justified in linking eligibility of benefits by immigrants to previous social contributions when migration is free (unrestricted).
CHOICES contributed to the debate on the interplay between trade in goods and trade in factors (labour), highlighting its complementarities (as opposed to the current common wisdom belief that they are substitutes) both from an economic viewpoint (illustrating its novel role within the new literature in trade that stresses firm heterogeneity) and from an economic policy perspective (illustrating the trade-off between outsourcing low skilled tasks and opening borders to low-skilled migrants, when the survival of labour intensive firms is at stake).
CHOICES model international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. Because of imperfect information, firms statistically discriminate high-skilled migrants by paying them at their expected productivity. They examine how international migration affects the income of individuals in sending and receiving countries, and of migrants themselves and analyze under which conditions there is positive or negative self-selection of migrants.
Policy (Simulations)
On the theoretical front, CHOICES developed a different yet complementary approach to fundamental questions in the area of return migration. The setup developed enables us to bring out sharp insights and motivate well defined empirical questions within the field. For example, the result that positive selection requires a weak correlation in earnings process across locations motivates, on one hand, an obvious line of empirical investigation, and, on the other hand, calls for extensions of the theoretical setting to investigate the robustness of the result. Two such obvious extensions would involve endogenous earnings in an explicit labour market, and housing and durable consumption as credit collateral. A main drive of this project is its relevance for policy analysis. This setting can be applied to frame policy questions and conduct welfare evaluations in the context of specific countries and periods. The current focus is on return migration only, but for policy evaluation the framework can be extended to study the full cycle of the migration process.
On the whole, CHOICES have achieved more than what was planned for in terms of output. The findings have been highly publicised and have had coverage by the ESRC, Twitter, and NORFACE website. CHOICES have advanced the economics migration literature through both theoretical and rigorous empirical work. As a result of the involvement in the NORFACE project, Bijwaard has been invited to contribute to the European Migration Network Conference, Brussels, Sept 2010, to the discussion on current migration issues in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer and to the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) high level expert meeting Future migration Patterns and the Economic Crisis: An International Perspective, February 2012. Also, Wahba has been invited to become a member of the “International Migration Panel” of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).
CILS4EU (PI Prof. Frank Kalter): The overall aim of CILS4EU was to initiate and establish a data infrastructure project that provides comprehensive data on the integration of immigrant youths in European societies to the scientific community. The basis of this data infrastructure is longitudinal information that was collected on 14-year old children of immigrants and their native-born peers over three years in four selected European countries: England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This information was complemented by information about the youths’ parents with a cross-sectional parental survey during the first wave in order to enable researchers to study intergenerational integration processes in more detail.
Besides the concrete fieldwork in the different waves of data collection, the project activities spread to three general fields of activities that together are a fundamental precondition for strictly comparative data and therefore for the success of the data infrastructure project itself:
- sampling strategy and maintaining the survey population
- development of comprehensive measures and adaption to the different national contexts
- the preparation of the survey data.
The survey population was selected using a school-based sampling approach. School-based sample selection is comparably easy to implement in different countries in a similar way, ensuring the international comparability of the different samples, but also guaranteeing representative samples in each of the participating countries. Schools with higher shares of immigrant pupils were oversampled in order to achieve a sufficient number of immigrants. Within the selected schools, two school classes were sampled, with all students selected as the target population. Besides the practical advantages of school-based samples in order to achieve comparable samples, these sampling approaches provide context information, i.e. information about the immediate peers and the school environment, which are well-known determinants of the integration of immigrants and therefore essential for the planned data infrastructure project. Besides comparatively selecting the CILS4EU-sample, all country teams also adjusted their strategies and efforts in order to maintain the survey population over the different years.
With the aim of CILS4EU being to study integration processes among immigrant youths in different European countries, the starting point for the development of the instruments was to define more precisely which aspect of integration should be at the focus of the survey. The research team agreed on key outcomes on the four integration dimensions: cognitive-cultural, structural, social, and emotional-cultural integration. The research team thereby followed a very broad conception of the different dimensions and contexts so as to collect data that account for the diverse strands in integration research, which was an important factor for achieving the aim of the data infrastructure project. Besides this broad conception of the different dimensions, with questions measuring very different aspects in each dimension, several specific measures were included that allow for more in-depth analyses. For example, innovative sociometric instruments were included that enable the network structures within the classrooms to be measured in more detail and therefore social integration as a real interactional process to be assessed. This sociometric instrument has already attracted attention and will definitively be an important factor to stimulate the demand for the data.
The preliminary questionnaires for the parents and the students in each wave were constructed in English to facilitate cooperation between the project partners and to ensure the comparability of the instruments. Therefore, the instruments had to be translated into Dutch, German, and Swedish before they could be implemented in the respective countries. The project followed the TRAPD-approach that is also used in the European Social Survey.
After each wave of data collection, the data had to be entered and subsequently cleaned. One major, and for the two most recent waves still on-going, task was the cleaning and the preparation of the data in order to merge the different country-specific data sets into an international data set that, as a scientific use file, will be provided to the scientific community in the context of the data infrastructure project. The work on data entry, but especially the cleaning process, has turned out to be extremely time-consuming. The work for the first wave is already completed, resulting in a data set that is being distributed through the GESIS Data Archive shortly. The preparation of the second, and especially the third, wave is in progress.
An important precondition for the success of the data infrastructure project is an excellent documentation of the data and the different steps during primary data collection. A lot of efforts were and are still being undertaken to compile the documentation material but also more specific documents like a more detailed description of the procedure during the sociometric part of the survey, as well as of the resulting dyadic sociometric data. These summaries of the different work steps above demonstrate that the CILS4EU project will be a cornerstone when it comes to the provision of data allowing for strictly comparative research on immigrants’ integration in different European societies. The centralised data preparation with a strong synchronisation with all project teams has already resulted and will continue to result in data sets that are especially suited for cross-national comparisons.
Besides the activities around the establishment of a data infrastructure project and the promotion of the project and data, several research partners were also involved in the dissemination of the results of CILS4EU to other stakeholders and the general public.
The Swedish team took part in one governmental investigation into xenophobia, with a report entirely based on CILS4EU data. Furthermore, the Swedish team also used CILS4EU data as part of an investigation on child poverty for the National Board of Health and Social Affairs. Finally, the Swedish team has been invited to and participated in a hearing with the Swedish Ministry of Finance, on ethnic minority children’s educational attainment. In Germany, the Minister for Integration of the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg visited the home institution of the PI, the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), and was informed about the aims, design, progress and first results of CILS4EU, for example about some puzzling findings on the intergenerational transmission of religiosity. This meeting was very productive, and the minister asked researchers involved in CILS4EU whether it would be possible to conduct a smaller survey in the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg to assess the influence of a recently implemented specific educational reform focussing on the scholastic attainment of immigrant children.
In England, Anthony Heath was part of several national expert groups dealing with discrimination and ethnic disadvantages in education and the labour market. He has given several presentations at the House of Commons, Westminster. Prof. Heath was also engaged in international expert groups, giving presentations on affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies at the seminar of the OECD Expert Group on Migration and on attitudes to migration and integration” at a workshop on ‘Migration and integration: the future of our communities’ at the European Parliament in Brussels.
IMEM (PI Prof. James Raymer): The IMEM project consisted of ten researchers across three institutions: Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI), the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and the University of Oslo (Oslo). NIDI’s primary responsibility was collecting and assessing the international data on migration and on carrying out quality checks on our estimates. Oslo’s main responsibility was to create the framework for obtaining and including expert knowledge. S3RI’s main responsibility was to develop and implement the Bayesian model for migration flows. The successes of our model and quality of our estimated flows depended greatly on our working together to integrate the three parts.
IMEM created a methodology for estimating international migration flows that directly accounts for the main differences found in the measurement aspects of the reported data. Before this study, little was known about the effects of measurement, and no one had attempted to model the differences by considering the main aspects of duration, undercount, coverage and accuracy. IMEM has done so by including expert-based prior distributions in the model. IMEM has also combined the measurement model with a migration model, which allows an estimation of missing data. The estimated flows are consistent with the United Nations recommendation for the measurement of international migration. IMEM included measures of uncertainty for estimated flows, which can be used to assess the quality of the reported flows. In the area of combining data from different sources and missing data, it is important to be clear about the accuracy of the estimated figures. At the end of the project the model handled multiple time periods and soon after the funding period was finished IMEM also finalized the model that includes age and sex.
IMEM has produced a consistent and complete set of estimates that can be used by the user community. This work is especially relevant considering the expansions of the European Union in 2004 and 2007. For example, the results suggest that the official population totals for the EU and EFTA countries are about one million too high. The likely reason for the overcount is the double-counting of migrants in official population totals, which arises from the different duration of migration measures used and the general underreporting of emigration in the official statistics.
The main project event was a workshop, which brought together academics and persons responsible for migration data at national and international institutions. For this workshop, IMEM presented the model specifications, attainment of expert judgments and the assessment of the first set of estimates. The model has also been introduced at ca. 15 conferences to a wide array of audiences that included migration researchers, statisticians, demographers, geographers and to persons working with migration data at national statistical offices. The most important peer-reviewed scientific articles have been produced after the funding period finished.
IMEM has presented a modelling framework that brings together empirical data, covariate information and expert judgements to estimate migration flows amongst 31 countries in Europe from 2002 to 2008 by age and sex. This work provides an important foundation for both modelling and understanding international migration, particularly in situations where the data are inadequate or missing. IMEM has shown how data obtained from multiple sources with different measurements and collection systems can be combined together to provide a more complete and consistent picture of international migration.
LineUp (PI Dr. Ayse Guveli): The project explored migration processes, the multi-generational transmission of social, cultural, religious and economic resources, values and behavior. The research was based around Turkish immigrant and non-migrant families, their descendants in European countries and those who remained in Turkey. LineUp has also contributed greatly to developing the research design and the data collection instruments. What comes to the data collection itself, the project went beyond the original aims and collected data on 1500 more families than promised in the research proposal, increasing the number of families from 500 to 1992.
LineUp dataset provides the opportunity to study international migration from the following perspectives simultaneously: comparing migrant and non-migrants; comparing across generations; comparing between siblings and cousins; comparing within and between families; and comparing destination societies. Furthermore, the project has collected socioeconomic data, especially to include as background information in our regions chapter in the forthcoming monograph. This chapter introduces the socioeconomic conditions and the migration histories of the regions. The collection of regional data appeared to be a difficult and time-consuming task. Most of the data are on the province level and not on subprovince (ilçe) level and need to be collected from numerous records in various institutions such as Statistic Turkey, Home Office, local records etc.
The study is innovative. Although there have been studies in these individual fields, the simultaneous investigation of migrants and non-migrants in the origin region and country across more than three generations with complete genealogical data simply does not exist. There have been calls to extend the understanding of international migration to include multiple research sides and avoid terminology and concepts of the destination nation states aiming to create an ideal citizen. LineUp has the potential to answer this call and extend our scholarly understanding in international migration studies.
The data collection has been followed with data editing, cleaning, documentation and preparing the data for analysis. At the end of the funding period the project has moved toward publishing its results, and is for example currently about to sign a contract on scientific monograph with Palgrave Macmillan. The project has also organized many workshops, most notable one in Istanbul with invited influential international migration scholars from Europe, USA and Turkey.
MD-RDE (PI Prof. Peter Nijkamp): The project has set to study to what extent diversity among migrants – in terms of demographic and socio-economic characteristics and capabilities – contributes positively to economic welfare and development, and to what extent diversity influences inter-group and spatial socio-economic disparity.
Amongst the five partners, specific collaboration took place between the Finnish Labour institute of Economic Research and the University of Tartu to look at the Estonian migrants in Finland and at Estonian return migrants with a follow-up study. Also, University of Amsterdam and The Institute for Employment Research collaborated in merging data from both The Netherlands and Germany to specifically see whether results regarding diversity could be transferred from one country to another. All five countries also contributed to jointly produced edited volumes. Furthermore, the MD-RDE team endeavoured to interact with other NORFACE teams and with researchers working on similar topics at various international conferences. MD-RDE also organised events in Europe and a global workshop hosted by the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA) in New Zealand.
The PI’s research team at the University of Amsterdam co-ordinated this project, published extensively, and organised a number of activities to disseminate the results of the project. The interest in these activities is signalled by additional sponsorships obtained, such as from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Besides refereed journal articles, the project also yielded several books. Some PhD students employed by the project already successfully submitted or defended their theses. Outreach activities included participation in public debates on immigration policy. Some of the research, on the link between innovation and workplace diversity by Ceren Ozgen, Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot attracted international media attention, such as by the Wall Street Journal. In the end, the team established a deep understanding of the costs and benefits of cultural diversity on various markets in the Netherlands, such as the labour market, the housing market and the goods market (trade and foreign direct investment).
Research at The Institute for Employment Research (Germany) started with theory building focused on immigration, diversity and productivity at firm level, firm heterogeneity and human capital spillovers. One main challenge of the project was to handle the different levels of aggregation of effects of immigration and diversity. Hence the range of the analysis encompasses the meso-level (e.g. migrant diversity and regional disparity about the effects of the 12 new member states migrants to trade in Europe) up to the impact of migrant diversity at the firm level in Germany. The main achievements are combining different micro data sources with regional and firm information with the objective to derive regional and firm level effects of immigration and cultural diversity.
A large literature examines how labour markets react to the immigration-induced change in supply. The basic model of a competitive labour market suggests that – at least in the short run - higher levels of immigration should lower the wage of competing workers and increase the wage of complementary workers. However, the empirical literature is ambiguous; some studies claim that immigration has a substantial impact on wages, while other studies claim the impact is negligible. Our studies mainly refer to the presence of heterogeneous labour implying that the impact of immigration on the wage of any single (qualification) group of workers depends on how immigration affects the supply of every group of workers. That means our analysis allows for cross-effects among inputs in a nested CES production function framework taking into consideration that immigrants and natives within a skill group are imperfect substitutes. In general the project enabled a deeper understanding of the impact of diversity to local labour markets in Germany.
The team at the Essex University has analysed the impact of diversity from two distinct points of views: the impact of a (more) diverse society on people’s lives, and the impact of being diverse within a society (i.e. belonging to minority group). The analyses on the impact of diversity suggest that cultural diversity does not seem to have a relevant impact on wages of natives and that the positive impact estimated by previous studies may be related to heterogeneity of minority and majority people living in a certain area. Nevertheless, diversity does seem to have an impact on other aspects of people’s lives: white British living in more diverse areas report on average lower levels of life satisfaction than those living in less diverse areas. Life satisfaction of British people belonging to ethnic minorities and immigrants, however, do not seem to be correlated with the level of diversity or with the level of co-ethnics in the area. Across EU countries we find that the characteristics of the immigrant population residing in an area (the proportion of EU-non-EU immigrants and their labour market outcomes) have an impact on anti-immigration attitudes of natives.
The analyses of minorities suggest that in the UK most ethnic minorities experience disadvantage in terms of wages although their over-representation in the public sector mitigates such differences. The elimination of barriers to immigration from EU8 countries has changed not only the number, but also the characteristics of immigrants, who now locate in different regions and in different segments of the UK labour market. Despite such socio-economic differences across groups, our results also suggest that minorities do feel that they belong to the host country. People belonging to minority groups have a stronger sense of Britishness than the majority, but with relevant differences across minority groups and by generation. Also the white majority population, however, shows substantial heterogeneity in their identities.
The main findings of the research at the Tartu University team were (the country code in brackets indicate countries for Estonian evidence was obtained):
Spatial externalities of diversity in consumption and welfare: Immigrant diversity leads to a welfare gain for natives (NL, UK, DE, EE); the overall impact of cultural diversity on welfare is mainly positive, but small in magnitude (NL, UK, DE, EE, FI);
Diversity and migration patterns: Ethnicity, education, EU enlargement, the global economic crisis and austerity policies strongly impact on migration (EU, FI, EE); there is a danger of brain waste of well-educated immigrants in East-West labour flows, at least in the short run (EE, FI); push factors in migration include huge wage gaps, personal and family life, job conditions and work challenges (EE, FI); following the global financial crisis migration patterns are changing in Europe. Return and circular migration are increasing (EU, EE, FI); better integration in the host society does not necessarily reduce the probability of return migration (EE, FI).
Integration of diverse immigrants in the host society: migrants’ experience in a host country provides an earnings premium after return (FI, EE); differences in immigrant integration among countries can partly be explained by the level of these immigrants’ host-country-specific skills, including language skills, and by the institutional differences among these countries (EU).
Iinequality and attitudes towards diversity: European people’s attitudes towards immigrants vary depending on the personal characteristics of the respondents, people’s attitudes towards the country's institutions and socio-economic security, and country-specific conditions (EU, EE); the attitudes towards immigrants differ between majority and minority populations of the countries. Attitudes are more negative in countries with post-socialist path-dependence, and they are the lowest in Russia (EU, EE); attitudes towards immigrants are correlated more strongly with trust in institutions than with interpersonal trust (EU, EE).
Life satisfaction: Across Europe, ethnic minorities tend to be less happy and satisfied with their lives than ethnic majorities (EE).
The research focus of Labour Institute of Economic Research (Finland) has been on the causes and consequences of ‘East-West’ migration (brought about by the EU enlargement and the free movement of labour) both from the receiving and sending countries perspectives. In particular, the research group has analysed migration between Estonia and Finland in this context. From the host country perspective we have provided new research results on the welfare participation of the newly arrived Estonian immigrants and its determinants and on the net fiscal impact Estonian immigrants exert on the Finnish welfare state. Further, from the host country perspective the project has also presented new evidence on the determinants of outmigration of Estonian immigrants in Finland and the consequences of self-selection of Estonian outmigrants for the economic assimilation of immigrants. Related to labour mobility in the enlarged European Union, the team has also provided new cross country evidence on the characteristics and labour market performance after the EU enlargement of 2004 in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
From the source country perspective the research has contributed to earlier research by presenting new evidence on whether Estonian return migrants benefit from the experience gained in Finland in a form of wage premium and whether heterogeneity exists in the returns to returning by how well the return migrants performed in Finland. The team has also analysed other types of returns to return migration by focusing on occupational mobility of Estonian return migrants from Finland, and on the wellbeing consequences of return migration.
Overall results
Especially in larger cities, there is a positive effect of cultural diversity on amenities. This effect however is much smaller than the negative effect of the presence of immigrants on, for example, housing prices. This negative effect of cultural diversity is mainly associated with cultural diversity within the own local neighbourhood and not so much on the city level. On the other hand, there seems to be a positive effect of cultural diversity on wages, which points to positive productivity effects of cultural diversity and not so much to positive utility effects. However, the research also clearly indicates that different kind of people derives different benefits and dis-benefits from living and working in culturally diverse environments. This heterogeneity is something that does not have drawn a lot of attention in the literature.
From a theoretical point of view, the project shows that immigration rises average firm productivity and leads to welfare gains for natives. Furthermore, it shows that a higher migrant share may explain a higher average productivity in a region. The empirical studies at IAB suggest that the overall impact of cultural diversity is mainly positive, but small in magnitude, i.e. it yields net gains at the regional and firm level. Cultural diversity promotes innovation and productivity, but it depends on the skill level of the workforce. Cultural diversity of high-skilled has a positive impact, whereas cultural diversity of low-skilled is mostly neutral or negative. A further innovative contribution was to link the task approach by David Author to the question to the current debate concerning imperfect substitutability in the production process. By distinguishing labour horizontally according to job requirements, it contributed to the existing literature which so far differentiates labour at most vertically by formal qualification or by experience.
Results show an elasticity of substitution between migrants and natives in a range typically considered to indicate perfect substitution but not too far away from imperfect substitution. The estimations highlight the importance of differentiation by task and qualification. Hence the evidence of imperfect substitutability of highly qualified immigrant and native labour in routine tasks point at difficulties due to transferability of labour market relevant skills and qualification acquired abroad. Moreover, in particular for the medium qualified, integration into the labour market is hampered especially in interactive intensive tasks.
Much of the existing literature on the impact of diversity uses aggregated data at the level of regions or cities. MD-RDE UK team analysed the impact of diversity using individual data (combined with data from censuses, population estimates to measure diversity). The team has shown the importance of using individual data to be able to better take into account individual observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The use of individual data, and especially panel data – when available – allows us to better analyse how the impact of diversity varies across groups of people, for example, natives vs. people belonging to ethnic minorities vs. people born abroad.
The results and the contribution of MD-RDE has increased our understanding of the forces driving migration in an enlarged European Union, the costs and benefits of migration to the migrants themselves and to the sending and receiving countries. This contribution has been a collection of unique data on the Estonian return migrants from Finland, which makes possible to follow the same individuals before migration, during migration and after the return. The contribution of the project has been related to the study of frontier issues on migration, which so far have received relatively little attention in the earlier literature. In particular new research based information has been provided from the source country perspective, on return migrants and the returns to return migration. On the basis of the research results new ideas of the important future directions of the field such as paying more attention to modeling migration patterns of circular migration has been gained.
Finally, MD-RDE outcomes help to unpackage the role of migrant diversity in countries´ economic and social life, i.e. indicating remarkable cross-country differences in migration patterns, and the impact of migrant diversities in integration of multicultural societies. It impacts the research that supports development of immigrant integration policies, with an emphasis on country and region specific multidimensional (economic, social, cultural, political) environment and incompleteness of new migration strategies. Also, it outlines the necessity to concentrate future research on the possible impacts of incomplete migration strategies and shortcomings of current immigrant integration policies on personal and family levels and on intergenerational relations.
MI3 (PI Prof. James Wadsworth): The MI3 team has worked on two core themes of the Norface program (Integration, Conflict and Cohesion, as well as Migration - Causes and Consequences). Over the course of the project, the team published 21 papers in leading economic journals and additionally produced 18 working papers, most of which are currently in the review process with leading economic journals.
Much of MI3 research is based on unique, underexplored data sets that are administrative in nature and typically cover the entire population. One important research theme has been the study on the integration and assimilation of adult immigrants and their children across five different countries (UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark). The unique scope of the data made it possible not only to study the evolution of labor market outcomes of immigrants, but also focus on broader aspects such as the school performance of immigrant children, health, fertility, crime, marriage and residential choices. For example, an important question is how neighborhood characteristics (such as the size and quality of immigrants from the same country or ethnic group or the crime rate in the neighborhood) affect the assimilation and integration of immigrants and their children into the society. Answering this question is plagued by the endogenous sorting of immigrants to neighborhoods. To deal with this concern, MI3 exploited refugee placement policies in Denmark and Sweden which upon arrival randomly allocated refugees to neighborhoods. This research does not only push forward our knowledge on what helps immigrants to integrate into the society, but also contributes to the broader literature on peer effects, social interactions, and the role of networks in the job search process.
A second important question has been how immigration affects labor market outcomes of natives. Answering this question has been challenging, as migrants are likely to sort into areas or sectors that are doing well, biasing OLS estimates downward. MI3 research has exploited three sources of exogenous variation that so far has not been utilized: MI3 has revealed a commuting scheme introduced about one year after the fall of the iron curtain which allowed Czechs to work in designated areas in West Germany, but did not grant them residency. In a similar spirit, other sub-project exploited the substantial and sudden influx of Germans from former East Germany to West Germany after the fall of the iron curtain, and additionally utilizes the occupation structure of all East Germans (including those who stayed in East Germany) as a push factor to predict in which occupation East German migrants settle in West Germany.
Finally, MI3 also exploited differential regulations across sectors such as particular education requirements which make it difficult for immigrants to enter the sector, to predict in which sectors migrants locate.
NODES (PI Prof. Mari Vaattovaara): The project consisted of several multidisciplinary subprojects, which were designed to explore the underlying causes and impacts of ethnic residential segregation in the Nordic welfare context both from the perspective of individual migrant families and the receiving society. NODES conducted advanced longitudinal analyses of ethnic housing careers and a unique survey on mobility behaviour in a segregated landscape. This study has allowed a number of analyses of native responses to increasing ethnic diversity.
The project contextualised the Nordic welfare policy framework and practices, analysed the main differences and similarities of the welfare, housing, immigration and integration policies, immigration flows, and formulated first hypotheses on the linkages between the Nordic welfare setting and the dynamics of ethnic residential segregation. The project also explored the extent of structural integration of the selected minority groups into the local housing markets in the Nordic capital cities. Comparing the situation in Nordic countries produced new theoretical understanding of the impacts of national and local context on ethnic minorities’ housing mobility. The work on exploring native and immigrant households’ housing and neighbourhood careers and their reasons for moving also included extensive primary data collection.
The first of these subprojects explored the extent of structural integration of the selected minority groups into the local housing markets in the Nordic capital cities. The researchers analysed the spatial concentration and dispersal of immigrant groups over time, as well as compared the rates of entry to homeownership in order to understand the applicability of (spatial) assimilation and pluralist models in the Nordic context. The analyses of housing and neighbourhood careers were linked to longitudinal individual-level register data on family and work careers and the characteristics of residential neighbourhoods. Comparing the situation in Nordic countries produced new theoretical understanding of the impacts of national and local context on ethnic minorities’ housing mobility.
The next subproject advanced research knowledge on the dynamics of ethnic residential segregation by exploring the residential patterns and housing choices of the native-born residents. Previous Nordic research had indicated that selective migration among the natives (flight and avoidance) has an important effect upon the production and reproduction of ethnic residential segregation. The dynamics and motives behind “flight and avoidance” –like behavior had not been explored, however. The NODES team collected extensive survey data as well as conducted in-depth interviews among the native-born residents to understand the motives and reasoning behind the residential moves, and to gather the experiences of those residents who live in the most immigrant-dense areas.
Whereas this subproject explored native residents’ attitudes, mobility and housing choices, the third subproject focused on exploring the dynamics of ethnic segregation from the perspective of immigrants’ housing ambitions, efforts and preferences. The interlinked impacts of individual ambitions, social networks, culturally-inclined housing preferences, perceived and actual racism and discrimination, as well as perceived possibilities in the housing market were analysed on the basis of in-depth interview data. Immigrants of three different migratory statuses across the Nordic capitals were selected for the study.
NODES conducted advanced longitudinal analyses of ethnic housing careers. These analyses provide important knowledge for further research, but also for local planning and policy. The project has further conducted a unique survey on mobility behaviour in a segregated landscape. Similar analyses have, to our knowledge, not been conducted elsewhere. The register-based data available in the Nordic countries give a better opportunity than anywhere else to analyze these developments with such research design.
Most of the 16 NODES meetings included visits to local neighbourhoods and involved meetings with the local stakeholders. This broadened our understanding of the local context of our study areas in each country, increased the publicity of the NODES project, and helped to disseminate our research findings. The fact that some of articles produced in NODES have been the most downloaded from the prime national journals, and also nationally very visible in the news, will definitely raise more interest to the field from several perspectives and thus bring the issue of residential segregation to the focus of several new fields and new researchers as well. NODES can clearly demonstrate that the policy interest to these themes has increased during our research, even if in some countries (especially Sweden) the debate already long exists.
NODES also has substantially strengthened the Nordic research network on residential segregation. Policy-wise, the network has substantially shifted to concretely include the discussions on the themes. The project has been presented and discussed in the Nordic Mayer forum, for example. The future provides improved opportunities for planners and politicians who would like to learn more of their neighbors.
SCIP (PI Prof. Claudia Diehl): The project focused on early integration patterns of recent migrants to four Western European countries. Prior to this project, no survey among new migrants had been conducted in Europe. BY the end of the project, 8.586 new migrants had been interviewed. About half of them could be interviewed twice during the project period. This degree of panel attrition is about the same as in the US based New Immigrant Sample.
SCIP has produced an extensive material on the methods of collecting and handling data. A methods report will contain important information on the target population and on national sampling strategies, on the topics covered by the questionnaire, and on the design and results of the pretests. In addition, it will give an overview on the data collection procedure, on the process of interviewer selection and training, and on the quality (“fraud”) controls applied during and after data collection. The methods report will include information on data cleaning procedures and it will contain a list of original and edited variables as well as information on weighting procedures where they are relevant. Given the different sampling strategies in the four countries, the team decided to come up with harmonized national data files rather than with one dataset for the whole project.
Novel data have been collected in the SCIP project on a phase in the integration process that is as important as under-researched. The first years after arrival can be expected to be a very dynamic phase during which important experiences and decisions are made that influence a great deal what happens later in life in terms of migrants’ integration in different spheres of the receiving society. The design of the SCIP project enables users of the data to disentangle origin and destination effects that influence migrants’ early patterns of integration. Based on SCIP data we could show, for example, that in Germany, Turkish migrants’ comparatively low level of identification with the receiving country does not exist from the beginning of their stay but evolves over time – especially among those who feel discriminated against in Germany.
The cross-national approach of the project sheds light on the role of national contexts beyond the direct effects of individuals’ exposure to specific integration policies (e.g. language and integration classes). Methodologically, regression analyses with country dummies will show whether or not, ceteris paribus, migrants’ integration trajectories differ across countries. In addition, controlled qualitative comparisons using both most similar and most dissimilar system designs and focusing on instructive pairs of cases will enable the data users to discuss the role of macro-level factors (migration history, integration policy, church-state relations, labour market institutions) in explaining potential cross-country differences. For example, on the integrated and open Irish labour market human and social capital facilitates the labour market integration of Polish migrants whereas returns to human capital are far smaller and social capital tends to be toxic on the segmented and restricted German labour market. Furthermore, Poles in the Netherlands have been faced with a rather negative rhetoric from the radical right that even opened an Eastern European hotspot, where the Dutch could complain about Eastern European migrants. As this party was supporter of the minority government at the time, and one of the largest parties in the country, it is anticipated that their perceived discrimination is more widespread than in those countries without the parties that took such explicit stances against EU migrants. Preliminary results show that Poles in the Netherlands feel much more discriminated against than in the other countries included in SCIP.
The multi-ethnic approach allows researchers to systematically compare nationality groups that differ with respect to their socio-economic group status. Within each country (except for Ireland) we have surveyed a group that resembles the classical low-skilled labour type with a Muslim background (Turks in Germany, Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands, Pakistanis in the UK) that we can now compare with a more recent immigrant group with a higher social group status and Catholic background (Poles in all four countries). Van Tubergen, e.g. studied the extent to which the migrant groups in the Netherlands differed in their religious practice, comparing their pre- and post-migration religious practice. The approach also sheds light on the changing profile of the older migrant group, since Pakistanis recently arriving in the UK other than through family reunification tend to be skilled or students. The project thus allows differentiation between phases of migration and enables us to ascertain how integration of these new migrants differs from the established patterns of their settled compatriots.
Finally, SCIP collected longitudinal data. The project has not only surveyed half of the migrants included in our study twice during their first three years in the receiving country, but also collected a great deal of information about the pre-migration phase so that data, e.g. on migrants’ religious involvement or on their labour market situation, is available for three points of measurement. This design offers the unique opportunity to study the mechanisms that lead to well-described but not yet fully understood integration outcomes later in life – and within- and between group variation herein. For example, Polish migrants are far less social-conservative than comparable stayers in Poland. The SCIP design helped to establish that this is only to a small part attributable to acculturation processes in the host country. Social-progressive attitudes appear to influence the migration decision and destination choice. All the contributions to the special issue in Ethnicity apply this longitudinal approach.
In November 2013, the project closed with a large workshop that was held at the University of Konstanz, Germany. During this event, nine papers based on SCIP data were presented by the team members. Eight external experts from across Europe and Israel were invited to discuss and comment on the papers. All papers will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal “Ethnicities”. Reports for policy makers have been finalized or are currently prepared, e.g. the report ‘New in the Netherlands’, a report commissioned by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment/Department Integration and Society.
SIMCUR (PI Prof. Birgit Leyendecker): The aim of SIMCUR has been to uncover the processes underlying developmental resilience in children from Turkish immigrant families during the transition to primary and secondary school in three European countries - Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.
The development of children’s aspirations and expectation, their psychosocial adaptation as well as their academic achievement are important indicators of their social integration. SIMCUR has aimed to combine (1) a developmental perspective to examine the slope of growth curves on important indicators of the social integration of immigrant children, (2) a perspective on features promoting resilience and children’s positive development, and (3) an ecological perspective to understand how multiple levels such as families, schools, peers, and communities directly and indirectly interact and influence how children of immigrants negotiate these developmental and cultural transitions. Researchers expected that differences on the macro- and meso-levels across the three countries would provide a natural laboratory to understand the contribution of a society to the social integration, psycho-social adaptation and the academic success of these children.
The project has provided information both to scientific community and local sectors of education, immigration and social affairs of the three countries. The longitudinal design, involving three age cohorts, and targeting educational, acculturation, psychosocial and other developmental outcomes facilitates a holistic perspective on child development in immigrant context. Most importantly, the cross-cultural design has provided insight into the complexities of immigration, adaptation, and integration, and the limitations of smaller national (even local) samples in generalizing to broader populations.
There has been considerable interest in the SIMCUR project. The project generated much attention among the academic community as well as among the general public. At all three sites of research, the teams were invited to give presentations both within the academia (e.g for students and colleagues at other universities, and on national and international conferences) as well as for the general public.
TCRAf-Eu (PI Prof. Valentina Mazzucato): The project collected and analyzed qualitative and quantitative primary data to assess the effects of living transnationally on different family members: children and caregivers in the country of origin and migrant parents overseas.
A kick-off meeting and a first workshop were held to bring researchers together to develop common practices, guidelines and tools, discuss tools that had previously been developed, agree on ethical guidelines, and decide on ways of data sharing and synchronization. All programme activities were developed and preliminary tool development and testing were completed in 2010. Primary data collection was fully launched and completed in 2011. In 2012 data were cleaned and data sets synchronized so that comparative analyses could be conducted. Reports on individual migration flows (Angola-Portugal; Angola-Netherlands; Nigeria-Ireland; Nigeria-Netherlands; Ghana-Netherlands) as well as comparative flows (Angolans in Portugal and The Netherlands; Nigerians in Ireland and The Netherlands; Angolans, Nigerians and Ghanaians in The Netherlands) were conducted. All project related research activities have been completed and supervision was provided at all stages.
A comparison of the functioning and outcomes of TCRAs according to receiving and sending country contexts has been achieved. Main indicators for the contextual database were agreed upon by partners. Data entry templates were developed for surveys, protocols and instruction books were prepared for data entry agents. In 2011 the contextual database was developed, data entry and synchronizing have been completed. The integration of data from 4 work packages as well as the NWO-funded project (TCRA) followed in 2012. The contextual database was finalized containing more than 35 contextual indicators. Data analyses were conducted for all comparative papers.
The TCRAf-Eu project has contributed in various ways to shaping the field of migration studies and in particular transnational families. By including the approach, methods and findings in the teaching modules of various courses offered at Maastricht University as well as at seminar presentations at the Department of Applied Psychology at UCC and ICS at the University of Lisbon, the project has shaped the teaching content at both MA and PhD levels. Three PhDs and 3 post-doctoral researchers have received direct training in methods and approaches for the study of transnational families within the TRCAf-Eu project. Researchers from the 3 African partners have been included in the workshops and through the collaboration with the TCRA project, one researcher from Ghana has also received training and a PhD scholarship. At Maastricht University, a course on transnational migration has been instituted in the regular curriculum of the MA programme on Globalisation and Development Studies.
The key publications of the project have put transnational families on the research agenda of family studies, which have up to now, largely neglected this family form. Furthermore, a special issue is planned in another top social science journal (Social Science and Medicine) issuing from the final conference of the TCRAf-Eu project. This attests to the success of the TCRAf-Eu project in bringing transnational family research to the attention of family scholars and migration specialists at a high academic level.
The project is currently producing results that are also of policy interest. As a result we have produced one policy brief and are aiming to produce a second one. The brief has elicited interest from practitioners and members of the European Commission. It has also resulted in a full two-page article in one of the largest national newspapers in the Netherlands (de Volkskrant, June 13, 2013). The final TCRAf-Eu conference had a policy round table which was very well attended by people from civil society organizations, European institutions and consultancies and the media (March 28, 2013). Finally, the project has been publicized via local migrant media stations in The Netherlands, Portugal and in Ghana and has created greater awareness of the issues faced by migrants. The radio and television shows elicited discussions amongst the research population on the topic of raising children in the host country versus leaving them at home.
TEMPO (PI Prof. Giovanni Facchini): The researchers involved in the TEMPO project have carried out an extensive array of research activities involving temporary immigration patterns:
Firstly the project has studied the causes and consequences of migration. For example, distinguishing between Non-Turkish and Turkish immigrants, TEMPO project found that while among the latter, low skilled immigrants have the highest likelihood to stay in Germany, for Non-Turkish immigrants there exists a u-shaped relationship between human capital and outmigration. Another important study has derived from a temporary migration framework with heterogeneous agents a time-series model which has been estimated based on macro data for Germany. The authors find that migration stocks rather than migration flows form a cointegration relationship with explanatory variables such as the income differential, which supports the theoretical prediction of the temporary migration model with heterogeneous agents. Building on this model, the team has worked also on a theoretical framework which links the optimal investment in human capital to the duration of stay assuming that preferences or migration costs are heterogeneous.
What comes to integration of immigrants in the receiving country and impact on the length of stay, TEMPO has showed how crucial it is to understand and examine the role played by information flows between migrants and their network outside the country of immigration in determining migrant remittance behaviour. The patterns of assimilation of migrants in the destination country and the impact of the length of stay have also been studied. In particular, TEMPO has compared the patterns of unemployment duration between native Germans and foreign immigrants. The role of friendship ties with natives in explaining patterns of cultural assimilation in Germany has instead been analyzed in a joint work between the HWWI team and the CEPR team.
Finally, TEMPO has studied immigration policies and their roles in migration. It has demonstrated that skill-selective immigration policies increase incentives to invest in education in sending countries, but that sending countries suffer from increasing skill-selective immigration policies. A second project addresses instead the question of whether the contest for skills can result in a ‘tragedy of the commons’, i.e. in a reduction of the skill level of the immigrants in the long-term. Also, the project has observed that large numbers of illegal immigrants reside in many advanced destination countries with strict immigration policies, and therefore ask why are immigration policy targets announced, if they are not enforced. To address this apparent puzzle, TEMPO developed a political agency model with uncertainty on the migrants' supply, where an elected official can either have preferences congruent with the median voter, or prefer a larger number of migrants. They show that, if the incumbent prefers more migrants than the median, he might find it optimal to announce a binding quota to be re-elected, and strategically relax its enforcement, or choose an ineffective instrument like border control.
THEMIS (PI Prof. Oliver Bakewell): The overall aim of THEMIS has been to advance the concept of a migration system through a theoretically driven inquiry about the factors that condition the dynamics of migration system formation and decline. The basic research question for THEMIS has been: under what conditions do migration systems become established and under what conditions might they decline? THEMIS provided empirical findings to challenge the simplistic invocation of the migration system based on migrant networks leading to the perpetuation of migration flows once started by pioneer migrants. Also, the project has refined existing concepts and elaborated new ones that can help researchers analyse the conditions under which migration flows do become systemic and the breakdown of systems once started.
THEMIS introduced the notion of the migration corridor (between localities) as a way of getting beyond consideration of simple national bilateral movements. However, it rapidly became clear that it was extremely important to separate out different chronological and class/social and gendered layers of migration within each corridor – what we refer to as migration ‘waves’. Not only do we need to distinguish between such waves, we also have to analyse their interactions.
It has also become clear that the concept of a migration pioneer does not stand up very well to empirical enquiry. Furthermore, the project has explored many different aspects of the role of social networks in sustaining migration. Much of the current literature that has adopted cumulative causation as an explanation for migration dynamics tends to conflate feedback with the operation of migrants’ social networks. The THEMIS project results showed that it is important to distinguish such ‘direct feedback’ from ‘indirect feedback’. The latter is concerned with more extended causal processes.
The rising importance of new connections created by social media and information communication technologies (ICTs) became very evident in all the corridors. This highlighted the importance of distinguishing between the operation of pre-existing social networks of family and friends that may encourage or discourage people’s migration and (often virtual) social networks that potential migrants may join in order to migrate.
The project’s methodology has also made a valuable contribution to the field. THEMIS has been one of the first migration projects to use RDS methodology largely successfully with migrant populations
Project collaborations
The programme consisted of twelve independent research projects. One of the main tasks of the scientific coordination office was to create links and collaboration among these projects that came from various disciplines and approaches which may not traditionally discuss well together.
The most successful example of new collaboration was led by the TEMPO team (PI Prof. Giovanni Facchini) that collaborated with the MIDI-REDIE, SCIP and MI3 projects. Scholars participating in TEMPO and MI3 projects were also recently successful to receive funding in the NORFACE transnational research program Welfare State Futures. Three of the CILS4EU national teams are successfully continuing their work with funding received by Dutch, German and Swedish research councils. CILS4EU has also proved to become a role model for other countries who have decided to conduct similar studies: so far, Belgium started a very similar study in 2011, with Karen Phalet and Bart Meuleman as PIs. Also a Norwegian study is on the way, as the project team at the Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research received funding from the Norwegian Research Council for a "Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in Norway (CILS-NOR)" and will start 2015/2016 with data collection.
Furthermore, the previous contacts between research groups in SCIP and LineUp deepened the co-operation. The SCIP team participated in a conference in Istanbul in May organized by the LineUp project and in the THEMIS conference in Oxford in September 2013. They also initiated collaboration between Lubbers, Gijsberts (both SCIP) and Engbersen (THEMIS) as well as discussing possibilities to analyse migrant integration differences in a similar way as proposed by the SCIP project (register based sampling) and Engbersen’s project.
While Nordic academic connections have a long tradition. NODES gives an example on bringing new Nordic collaborators together and how such a regional and superficially similar countries offer a rich and important stage for migration studies not only for these respective countries, but also regarding the whole Europe.
THEMIS project gives an example on the projects’ contact outside the program itself. THEMIS has collaborated with international projects including the European funded ‘GEITONIES’ and ‘EUMAGINE’, ‘BELTS’ funded by the Portugese agency for Science and Technology and ‘PREMIG’ funded by the Research Council of Norway whilst also collaborating with SCIP on methodological matters and the Institute of Labour and Social Research in Norway
The scientific coordination office has also sought to arrange collaboration possibilities outside the program limits. For example, in September 2010 NORFACE Migration, CReAM and the World Bank jointly organized a smaller conference on Migration, Development and Global Issues. The conference featured presentations by the projects of the NORFACE Migration programme specified in economics as well as research on development and migration funded by the World Bank through the Multi-donor Trust Fund on Labor Markets, Job Creation, and Economic Growth.
These collaborations have demanded an effort for creating multi- and crossdisciplinary discussions and communication, a task given to the scientific coordination office at the beginning of the program.
The most important way the scientific coordination office supported the inter- and transdisciplinary aims of the program were the conferences and workshops. They all included keynote and invited speeches from representatives of all different disciplines involved in the program whilst both the Academic and the Policy Podia, brought closer together all the different disciplines, highlighting everyone’s contribution on the field. The mixed contributed sessions during the conferences, featuring papers under the same subject from different disciplines, were an important mechanism to inform researchers about similar work in other disciplines, and led to a lot of discussion by scholars from different disciplines. It initiated joint work, as well as common research proposals.
The Discussion Papers Series and the NORFACE Compact distributed the work of all the academics involved in the program to the rest of the teams as well as different networks and promoted the inter- and transdisciplinary character of the programme. Finally, the programme website has attracted people from all different disciplines and promoted those involved in the NORFACE Migration program.
Potential Impact:
The Programme’s overall activities on wider societal impact and dissemination activities have been steered by the scientific coordination office, led by Prof. Christian Dustmann (University College London). The most important, visible and highly estimated events for these activities were the two international conferences the office arranged.
The interdisciplinary conference ’Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge’ (6th-9th April 2011, London) was embedded in a week-long event ‘UCL Migration Week’ organized by CReAM and the UCL Grand Challenges Programme. It featured a series of events related to migration, such as Exhibitions, Lectures, Discussions and Film screenings. The conference included a Policy Podium, where high level practitioners, politicians and policy media representatives discussed migration related issues. Evan Davis, a British Economist, Journalist and Presenter for the BBC chaired the podium and discussants included Charles Clarke (former UK Home Secretary), Dr. Markus González Beilfuss (Director General of Immigration in the Spanish Ministry of Work and Immigration), David Goodhart (founder and editor of Prospect magazine), Professor Malcolm Grant (former President and Provost of University College London) and David Metcalf (Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee). The panel discussed the challenges to policy making from the diversity of interests affected by immigration. Furthermore, the Academic Podium chaired by Chris Giles (the economics editor of the Financial Times), comprised of George Borjas, Bob Gregory, Alejandro Portes and Mark Rosenzweig, discussed the role of academic research in the public debate of migration.
In April 2013, the Conference Migration: Global Development, New Frontiers took place in London. The conference featured three high level policy events, co-organised by the Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke, CReAM fellow and former UK Home Secretary, and was also sponsored by UCL Grants Challenges Programme, the European Migration Network, and University of Warwick’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy co-sponsored the event. The Policy Podia covered ‘How should Governments Best Address World Trends in Migration’ and ‘Migration: the Key Challenge for the EU’.
The scientific office maintained a website to represent the Norface Migration Programme [http://www.norface-migration.org/]. The website has provided a platform that showcased the programme, the individual projects, events organized by both the scientific office and the projects, publications and all the individual researchers involved in the programme.. All the invited sessions of the two conferences were recorded and the invited speakers and many participants were interviewed. The recordings are available to the public and interested academics on a permanent basis through the CReAM website [see http://www.cream-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=76 ]. There were 30 press briefings for selected papers and social media coverage [https://storify.com/IanPPreston/migration-global-development-new-frontiers].
The scientific office hosted on its website two publications series. The NORFACE Discussion Paper series reached over 100 working papers before the end of the programme [http://www.norface-migration.org/publrespapers.php]. It continued to exist on the CReAM website after the end of the programme. If the discussion paper series was mainly targeted to an academic audience, the NORFACE Compact Series was set up to address policy makers as well as the general public [http://www.norface-migration.org/pages.php?id=33]. The first issue, Migration: Moving into View (Spring 2012), reviewed a selection of research taking place within the NORFACE Migration programme. Migration: New Developments (Spring 2013) reported on research such as the impact of migrant networks and social media on migration decisions, communication flows and remittance behaviour, education and well-being of migrants’ children, the impact of immigration on productivity, wages and urban development and the role of immigration and welfare policies in shaping population flows. The last issue, Migration: Paths of Exploration (Spring 2014), introduced primary data collected by the NORFACE Migration project, the fieldwork experiences of the teams and summaries of ongoing projects. Scientific coordination office also delivered a regular email newsletter on the programme to all subscribers. Finally, the scientific office has also produced 20 peer reviewed scientific publications during the programme.
Each research project had their individual policy and dissemination activities. The 12 projects reported on ca. 500 academic publications and over 500 academic presentations. Each project have had media coverage and participated in policy discussions. Each project has also arranged thematic workshops or even conferences, usually including not only research team members but invited keynote speakers and other discussants and presentations. The activities are introduced herewith:
CHOICES
CHOICES engaged with policy makers and users throughout the project and had insightful feedback that helped to revise the research questions and focus on pertinent issues. CHOICES also disseminated the results using various channels including conference presentations, working papers, policy briefs, non-technical publications.
Engagement with Policymakers:
1. PI Prof. Wahba visited the OECD on 7th Sept 2010, and met with Jean-Christophe Dumont (Division of non-Member Economies and International Migration) and Jean-Pierre Garson (Head of the International Migration Division).
2. Wahba visited the World Bank in March 2010 and discussed the CHOICES project with Calgar Ozden, a senior economist in the Development Research Group's Trade and Integration team
3. Wahba attended a meeting at the British Academy in London, on “Engaging Academic Social Scientists in Government Policy Making and Delivery” 6 June 2011.
4. Bijwaard contributed to Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy expert meeting Future migration Patterns and the Economic Crisis: An International Perspective, Feb 2012.
5. Bijwaard gave an interview in CBS relatiemazagine 02/11 p18-19 (Magazine of Statistics Netherlands)
6. Policymakers were invited and contributed to the discussion of the CHOICES workshop at the Hague, April 2012.
Policy Briefs:
1. G. E. Bijwaard, C. Schluter and J. Wahba (2011) “Does Unemployment cause return migration?”, CPC Policy Briefing, June.
2. A. Razin and J. Wahba (2011) “Migration Policy and Welfare State in Europe”, CESifo DICE Report, Winter 4/2011.
3. A. Razin and J. Wahba (2011) “Capturing differences between free and controlled immigration: Country bilateral data”, Voxeu, March.
Engagement with wider audience:
PI Wahba contributed a piece in collaboration with sociologist Bindi Shah which examines aspects of international migration from two disciplines (economics and sociology) and highlights the new complementarities and similarities between the two disciplines. This was published in the Economic Review and posted on line to reach specifically college students and non-academics.
Bijwaard has been invited to contribute to the European Migration Network Conference, Brussels, Sept 2010, to the discussion on current migration issues in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer and to the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) high level expert meeting Future migration Patterns and the Economic Crisis: An International Perspective.
Dissemination:
Apart from 13 peer-reviewed articles or book chapters published during the funding period, CHOICES researchers also gave altogether 35 academic presentations in academic conferences and workshops. CHIOCES has also organised six seminars and workshops. Especially noteworthy is the Migrant’s CHOICES workshop at NIDI, The Hague, 13 April 2012. Around 35 participants (academics, policymakers (EC, OECD, and Dutch government) and officials (Statistics Netherlands)) attended. There were 10 presentations including a presentation from the OECD and participants from the TEMPO project.
CILS4EU
Given the overall aim of CILS4EU to establish an enduring data infrastructure project on the integration of immigrant children in different European societies, the main activities for dissemination and social impact have been concerned with setting up this infrastructure. This has been achieved in cooperation with GESIS. The first wave of the data is already available.
The Principal Investigator as well as the Co-Applicants have introduced the project at several “potential user”-oriented events, e.g. at the “Monday Seminar Series” at the Institute for Social & Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex, at the Conference “Economic Change, Quality of Life, and Social Cohesion” in Stockholm, at the “Colloquium of the Sociology Department” at the University of Trento or at the Colloquium of the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto. The project has been presented at several conferences and workshops, not only by the Principal Investigator and the Co-Applicants.
Besides these activities around the establishment of a data infrastructure project and the promotion of the project and data, several research partners were also involved in the dissemination of the results of CILS4EU to other stakeholders and the general public.
The Swedish team took part in one governmental investigation into xenophobia, with a report entirely based on CILS4EU data, see: “Jonsson, Jan O., Sara Brolin Låftman, Frida Rudolphi, and Per Engzell Waldén. 2012: ”Integration, etnisk mångfald och attityder bland högstadieelever.” Bilaga 6 (pp. 263-391) to the Governmental Commission, SOU 2012:74, Främlingsfienden inom oss. Stockholm: Fritzes”. Furthermore, the Swedish team also used CILS4EU data as part of an investigation on child poverty for the National Board of Health and Social Affairs: “Mood, Carina and Jan O. Jonsson. 2012: Ekonomisk utsatthet och välfärd bland barn och deras familjer 1968-2010. Report for the National Board of Health and Social Affairs.” Finally, the Swedish team has been invited to and participated in a hearing with the Swedish Ministry of Finance, on ethnic minority children’s educational attainment.
The Minister for Integration of the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg visited the home institution of the PI, the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, and was informed about the aims, design, progress and first results of CILS4EU. The meeting was very productive, and the minister asked researchers involved in CILS4EU if it were be possible to conduct a smaller survey in the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg to assess the influence of a recently implemented specific educational reform focussing on the scholastic attainment of immigrant children.
In England, Anthony Heath was part of several national expert groups dealing with discrimination and ethnic disadvantages in education and the labour market. In doing so he gave several presentations at the House of Commons, Westminster. Furthermore, Anthony Heath was also engaged in international expert groups. For example, he presented the paper “Affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies: an overview” at the seminar of the OECD Expert Group on Migration on ‘Ethnic Discrimination in OECD countries – incidence and policy implications’ in Paris. He also presented a paper on “Attitudes to migration and integration” at a workshop on ‘Migration and integration: the future of our communities’ at the European Parliament in Brussels.
It has become evident that the extensive data collection during CILS4EU comes at the price of a comparably small number of articles published to date with CILS4EU data. Nevertheless, the project has already published (or are accepted) 50 peer-reviewed articles and 13 other relevant scientific publications. The main, and probably one of the most visible, publications of the CILS4EU project will be a volume edited by Frank Kalter, Anthony Heath, Jan O. Jonsson, and Frank van Tubergen. The volume will be published in the Proceedings of the British Academy and will be titled “Growing Up in Diverse Europe”. The volume has been preliminarily accepted and will focus on the whole spectrum of CILS4EU. CILS4EU arranged altogether ten workshops, which included not only project researchers but also other experts of the research field as speakers and discussants.
IMEM
IMEM has presented its research in 19 national and international conferences, to a wide array of audiences that includes migration researchers, statisticians, demographers, geographers and to persons working with migration data at national statistical offices. During the funding period IMEM concentrated on creating the model. Publications will follow, although three working papers (under preparation for peer reviewed scientific articles) were already published.
IMEM arranged a workshop for introducing the results of the project to a wider academic audience (25-27 May 2011, Southampton). The event included 37 targeted participants from 12 countries. Prof. Joel E. Cohen (Rockefeller University) and Hania Zlotnik (Director of Population Division, United Nations) joined as special guest presenters. The workshop aimed at facilitating discussion and exchange of information amongst experts in international migration by focusing on the available data and various modelling approaches. IMEM was presented in detail and discussed, along with invited presentations by experts on migration data or on estimating migration flows.
LineUp
LineUp has been very active on seeking publicity to make people aware of the study and facilitate a good response. Mainstream media presentations, interviews and discussions include:
• TRT Haber (largest public television company of Turkey), an interview on LineUp project “Migration Histories of Turks in Europe” on 13 August 2011.
• Milliyet (mainstream Turkish Newspaper), an interview on “Turkish Migration to Europe and the Breivik’s killings” on 31 July 2011.
• Taraf (highly influential Turkish newspaper), an interview on “The 50th anniversary of Turkish migration to Europe” on 24 September 2011.
• Haber Turk (mainstream television channel), an interview on “The increase of far-right sentiments and migration in Europe” on 2 August 2011.
• Star Gazetesi (mainstream Turkish newspaper), an interview on “Integration debates in European countries and Turkey's EU membership” on 12 April 2010.
The researchers of LineUp have given altogether 54 academic presentations in national and international scientific conferencese. These include 8 invited or keynote lectures. LineUp organized a final workshop and invited leading scholars, including Prof Telles, Prof Phalet, Prof Essex, Prof De Valk, Prof DiPrete, Prof Ewing, Dr Creighton, Dr Ersanilli, Dr Akgunduz, Dr Aysan, to review the draft of the forthcoming project monograph in Istanbul 12-15 May 2014.
MD-RDE
German team in MD-RDE has been involved in the Nationaler Aktionsplan zur Umsetzung des Nationalen Integrationsplans, Dialogforum "Arbeitsmarkt und Erwerbsleben" (in coll. with Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs). In November 2012 the team had a meeting with the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency (FADA) in Berlin. The Co-PI Stephan Brunow (IAB) is member of the work group “AG E1: Securing the domestic labour force” of the program “Demographic Challenges for Germany” initialized by the Federal Government of Germany.
The interviews with scientists that were conducted in the framework of interviewing Estonian migrants in Finland by MD-RDE researchers from Tartu University were used as an input in Research and Innovation Policy Monitoring Program (http://www.tips.ut.ee/eng/?) in the framework of Mobility of Estonian Researchers in Europe. The interviews and their analysis were shared with specialists from the Estonian Research Council and Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.
The problems of regional disparities and their relationships to migrant diversity as well as attitudes towards immigrants of the Baltic States people were discussed during several meetings and seminars of Latvian and Lithuanian universities and research institutions. In September 2012 the members of Latvian Econometric Society visited the MD-RDE team at the University of Tartu, Department of Economics, to discuss problems of educational diversity and the relationship between regional disparities, innovation and education.
Ceren Ozgen was interviewed by Yvonne Prince (director of the Dutch research institute Panteia) on the impact of cultural diversity on innovation outcomes of the Dutch firms. Her findings for the Netherlands presented in co-authored papers with Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot are used as an input for the Panteia/EIM’s report “Meer innovatie door buitenlanders” (2012).
The media attention includes nine presentations of the project results, most notably:
• 15/2/2011: TV1 Breakfast show, interviewed by Petra Bagust on immigration and the ageing population around the world
• 12/5/2011: Wall Street Journal, article by Justin Lahart “McDonald’s Economics” on the research paper “Innovation and immigration in European regions” by Ceren Ozgen, Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot.
• 25 May 2012 – newspaper interview by Simon Day of The Guardian (UK) – article on the “New Right” and their assessment of the economic impacts of immigration
MD-RDE has reported 91 peer reviewed journal articles or book chapters and 44 working papers. Besides an active participation in programme conferences, the scholars participating in MD-RDE have given over 150 academic presentations in various scientific conferences during the project.
MD-RDE arranged 14 project workshops and was involved in arranging six international academic workshops. Most importantly, the workshop “How does culture matter”, on the relation between culture and the labour market productivity in Nuremberg (July 15-16, 2010) included two keynote papers: Jeffrey Alexander (Yale University, USA) titled “Post- Bourdieu: cultural sociology and economic life – for a strong program” and Peter Nijkamp (VU Amsterdam) with his contribution titled “Post- Florida: cultural diversity and socio-economic impact assessment “. All in all, 18 papers were presented in two days and around 60 participants took part at the workshop.
The International Conference: Increasing Heterogeneity in the Workforce and its Impact, December 6-7, 2012, in the Congress Centre of the Federal Employment Agency (BA), Nuremberg, Germany included two keynote speeches (Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: Does diversity enhance the long-term economic impact of migration?- Evidence from the US and Jeremy Dawson: What do we mean by diversity?) and 25 presentations. In April 2013, a Tinbergen Workshop on the Economics of Cultural Diversity was organized by Jacques Poot, Peter Nijkamp and Jessie Bakens. This was an international workshop where scholars from around the world presented research on the economics of cultural diversity. From the Workshop, a book will be published.
MI3
MI3 has disseminated its research output to the general public especially by summarizing the research in the NORFACE Compact Series. Also, the project has published a number of non-technical papers aimed at informing policy makers, like:
- Sarvimäki, Matti (2013): Muuttoliikkeet, työmarkkinat ja julkinen talous. in Martikainen, Saukkonen, Säävälä (toim.): Muuttajat: Kansainvälinen muuttoliike ja suomalainen yhteiskunta. Gaudemus. [Migration, labor markets and public finances]
- Sarvimäki, Matti - Ansala, Laura - Eerola, Essi - Hämäläinen, Kari - Hämäläinen, Ulla - Pesola, Hanna - Riihelä, Marja (2014): Maahanmuuttajien integroituminen Suomeen. VATT Analyysi 2. [Integration of immigrants to Finland]
- Damm, Anna P. “Nej, flygtninge bliver ikke mere ledige af at bo i et socialt udsat boligområde”, Berlingske Politiko, Nov. 30th 2013.
Besides the 31 scientific publications the project has reported, all team members have regularly presented their work to the academic community at the NORFACE Workshops and several international conferences (for example: ASSA Annual Meeting, EALE Conference, ESPE Conference, SOLE Annual Meeting, Verein für Socialpolitik Annual Conference, the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference, EEA-ESEM conference, CAED- COST Conference, IZA Annual Migration Meeting).
NODES
Members of the NODES project have had multiple active networks with the academic community and local stakeholders, which include both international and national academic networks, and local as well as national public institutions and NGOs. Researchers have had direct contacts with high-level state and municipal officers. NODES team has taken advantage of these contacts and presented the project outcomes to the academic community, public authorities and general public in various occasions in all four countries. The team members have, for instance, organised international seminars on the topics of housing and urban residential segregation. The NODES team members also get frequently approached by the national as well as international media concerning issues related to urban development and ethnic residential segregation in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Members of the NODES team have appeared in close to hundreds of interviews in the radio, TV, newspapers, and other types of journals during the entire project period.
The most important policy events and media presentations include:
- Principal Investigator Mari Vaattovaara gave several speeches and presentations on deprived urban neighbourhoods and urban renewal in the national TV and radio as well as at the meeting of five ministers in 2014.
- Prof. Terje Wessel presented the outcomes for the Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation (Norway).
- A research paper on “white flight” written by the Finnish NODES team was published in one of the most highly valued national academic journals in Finland, and it was ranked as the most frequently downloaded and read academic article of the journal in 2013
- Nodes team members in all four countries were interviewed several times for the national news at the outbreak of the neighbourhood violence in Sweden in May/June 2013.
- The Norwegian Nodes team was interviewed for the newspaper Aftenposten, presenting extensive results from NODES, see for example “Upwards, outwards, westwards: relocation of ethnic minorities in the Oslo region” (June 18 and 19, 2013). The story was picked by other newspapers.
- Norwegian Nodes team wrote a chronicle on the homepage of the Norwegian Broacasting Corporation relating to neighbourhood choices and intra-urban mobility. http://www.nrk.no/ytring/hvem-vil-vi-vaere-nabo-med_-1.10892287 other member of the Norwegian NODES team were also interviewed: http://www.nrk.no/fordypning/oslo---den-delte-byen-1.11314398
- The Finnish Nodes team participated in the public discussion of the existence of racism in Finland by writing a letter to an editor which presented Nodes outcomes in the biggest national newspaper: Vaattovaara, M., Vilkama, K. & Dhalmann, H. (2013). Asenteet maahanmuuttajiin muokkaavat metropolia. Vieraskynä. Helsingin Sanomat 21.2.2013.
- PI Mari Vaattovaara participated in the Future Report work of the Government of Finland in 2012.
- PI Mari Vattovaara and Co-PI Roger Andersson had prominent roles in a documentary for the Finnish TV on ethnic residential segregation in the Nordic countries. The programme was broadcasted in the national TV in Finland in October 2011.
- Co-PI H. S. Andersen presented the outcomes in the Ministry of Integration in Denmark in 2010.
Besides the 36 academic publications reported, NODES has also listed altogether 62 academic presentations and 16 project workshops.
SCIP
SCIP researchers have produced two reports commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (Gijsberts, Merove and Marcel Lubbers. 2013. Nieuw in Nederland. Het leven van recent gemigreerde Bulgaren en Polen. The Hague: SCP and a yet unnamed report based on data collection wave 2 that will be published in 2014).
Policy discussions have been addressed in four speeches at governmental meetings and workshops:
• Diehl, Claudia: Current Immigration Processes in Germany. Presentation to the Federal Minister of Interior Affairs. Berlin, October 2011.
• Koenig, Matthias: Conference “Free Movement and Participation for EU Citizens”, organized by the Dutch and German Ministries of the Interior in September 2012 in Rotterdam.
• Gijsberts, Merove: New immigrants from Poland and Bulgaria in the Netherlands. Directory Labour Relations. Ministry of Social Affairs, The Hague.
• Gijsberts, Merove and Marcel Lubbers. 2013. Invited by the WRR (Scientific Council for Government Policies) for the workshop ‘Labour migration in the EU’, October 10, 2013, The Hague.
Besides the 11 academic publications the project has already published, the project members have introduced their results in 26 national and international academic workshops and conferences. On November 28-30 2013, the project closed with a large workshop on “Socio-cultural Integration Processes of New Immigrants in Europe: First findings from the SCIP project” (University of Konstanz). Seven papers based on SCIP data were presented and external experts were invited to comment on the papers. Papers will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal “Ethnicities”.
A one-day workshop on Design, Implementation, and Analysis: An Exploration of Respondent Driven Sampling was held in London in May 2011. The workshop brought together statisticians and survey methodologists developing Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) with researchers using the method to survey immigrants. The seminar was part-funded by the Norface Migration Programme with additional support from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, the UK Longitudinal Studies Centre and the Economic and Social Research Council Research Centre on Micro-Social Change and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. The workshop has resulted in an edited book: Tyldum, Guri and Lisa Johnston, eds. (2014) Applying Respondent Driven Sampling to Migrant Populations, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
SIMCUR
The project has generated much attention among the academic community as well as among the general public. In Germany, research on immigrant children has received more and more attention over the last couple of years. As a member of the Scientific Counsel for the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, the PI is currently working on an expertise on immigrant families in Germany. The experiences of the SIMCUR project have also resulted in a handbook project on Positive Development of Minority Children. The project has invited scholars from the US, Canada and Europe to shed light on the resilience of immigrant children and on the multiple pathways of adaptation and well-being through interactions with families, peers, schools, neighborhoods and communities. Together with Natasha Cabrera (University of Maryland), Birgit Leyendecker is the co-editor of this Handbook.
Co-PI Brit Oppedal has been invited to present the SIMCUR project and findings from the study at Oxford university and at a conference in Berlin on the adaptation of Turkish immigrants in Europe, aiming at a much broader audience of school administrators, politicians and journalists. The Norwegian team (led by Co-PI Oppendal) also arranged monthly lunch seminars for PhD students and other interested researchers in the field of immigration and acculturation and, in collaboration with other research institutions, also organized a conference for immigrant NGO’s on health promotion among immigrants in Norway.
The project has produced altogether 26 academic publications (either published or accepted for publications) at the end of the funding period. The project researchers have reported about 37 academic presentations on their results in national and international conferences.
TCRAf-Eu
The project had contact with various stakeholders interested in the project: IOM Portugal; ACIDI; government agency responsible for bilateral relations between Angola and Portugal; Angolan embassy cultural services in Portugal; Angolan embassy in The Hague, RPD Africa for the phone-in show. The project has arranged a discussion with both academic audience as well as stakeholders of schools and Ministries at the Transnational Child Raising Arrangements Workshop Aburi, Ghana in Ghana , 4-5 July, 2012.
The project was introduced in two newspaper articles: Moeders en Vaders ver weg, Volkskrant, 13 June 2013 and De Keerzijde van migratie: gevolgen voor kinderen die achterblijven. Internationale Spectator 67(3): 31-37. The PI Prof. Mazzucato gave a TEDx pitch on the research topic in June 2013. First policy brief on TCRAf-Eu findings was published in 2013.
In order to secure the data collection activities, the project arranged a number of public information activities:
• Brochures to inform participants in the surveys about the project, its aims, the partner institutions and the contact people whom they can call for more information.
• A website (www.tcra.nl) where interested parties can obtain more information about the research, its aims, outputs and participating researchers.
• Radio and TV talk shows were organized with migrant communities in Portugal and Netherlands. Migrants spoke about the issues they experience with living in transnational families. The shows were a way to obtain qualitative information on the research topic and to provide feedback to the relevant research populations.
• Newspaper coverage about the TCRAf-Eu project in Spits Nieuws & Entertainment, July 2, 2010: ‘Grensverleggend migratieonderzoek’.
The project arranged a creative writing workshop with secondary school children in Ghana to develop student writing skills and write their stories about living in transnational families some of which are published on our website: Website: http://fasos-research.nl/tcra/2012/08/students-stories/
The project researchers have reported altogether 58 presentations in national or international conferences. The project organized a closing conference with a PhD workshop and a policy roundtable, which consisted of three thematic sessions on children, parents and caregivers, and media. For each session an expert panel was invited and we had an international and diverse group of participants, like policy-makers, NGO-members, professionals, academics and journalists.
TEMPO
The TEMPO researchers have presented their studies in a number of policy events, such as:
- Workshop “Tagung Deutsche(r) werden - Deutsche(r) bleiben?“, German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, Nuremberg, 2012.
- Workshop on “Demographic change and demand for qualified labour”, Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, Hamburg, 2013.
- Workshop “Moving for work - temporary and permanent labour migration”, German Ministry for Family Affairs, Berlin, 2012.
- Round Table discussion at the Conference “Internationality of Metropolitan Life and Economics” with national policy makers and business representatives, Hamburg, 2011.
- EU Integration Forum, Brussels, 2012.
The German team has provided direct policy advice to the Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs and to the board of the German Public Employment Services. The team is also involved in several activities providing policy advice to the European Commission and the OECD Working Party of Employment in the areas of migration and immigration policies.
The project has published six policy reports. Besides these reports, TEMPO researchers have published 55 academic publications. TEMPO arranged four academic conferences, which brought together the project members with a number of most important scholars of the field as keynote speakers incl. Frederic Docquier (Université Catholique de Louvain), David McKenzie (World Bank), Giovanni Peri (University of California-Davis), Dean Yang (University of Michigan), Hillel Rapoport (Bar-Ilan University), Imran Rasul (University College London) etc. Researchers of TEMPO have presented their findings in 29 international scientific conferences.
THEMIS
THEMIS project webpage has been set within the IMI, University of Oxford website (http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/projects/themis). THEMIS research has also been promoted via other THEMIS partner websites. Project updates were published in the IMI e-newsletter. News of THEMIS conference presentations and project publications featured in the PRIO Migration Research Group Update Newsletter December 2013.
Presentations to non-academic stakeholders:
• Scoping study reports and internal briefing papers disseminated to the informants interviewed.
• Updates on the project to Ukrainian, Brazilian and Moroccan embassies in Oslo, 2010.
• Sónia Pereira and Jennifer McGarrigle presented the results of the IGOT-UL scoping study to the acting Consul and economic advisor of the Moroccan Embassy in Lisbon during a meeting at the Luso-American Foundation, 2010.
• Promotion of THEMIS research amongst migrant communities in destination countries included articles published in relevant community-organization media so as to increase the profile of the project (e.g. in Brazilian News – a Brazilian community media in the UK; Chá com Leite (Brazilian internet gateway in UK); Ukrainska Dumka – a Ukrainian-speaking newspaper in the UK).
• Agnieszka Kubal made presentations about THEMIS to participants of a Brazilian Week seminar event, St. Peter’s College, Oxford; as part of an IMI Seminar Series event, University of Oxford; and at the Brazilian Migration to the UK Research Group (GEB) Annual Seminar, Brazilian Embassy, London (2010).
• “Oekraïne migratieland Nederland geen doelland voor gemiddelde”, Oekraïne Magazine [Ukraine Magazine], 16(3): 4-5, Autumn 2013. Article by Haijo Boomsma about the migration history from Ukraine to the Netherlands based on interview with Rianne Dekker and Marije Faber.
Besides publishing in the programme Working Papers and Impact-series, THEMIS researchers have published altogether 44 academic publications by the end of the programme. Besides the programme conferences presented their results in 35 academic conferences.
The project arranged two internal workshops and a final conference “Examining Migration Dynamics: Networks and Beyond”, University of Oxford, 24-26 September 2014. The call for papers attracted over 200 abstracts. There were 6 keynote papers (2 on each of the 3 main themes), 80 additional papers presented in 26 parallel sessions (including methodology sessions), plus opening and concluding plenary sessions. 15 papers were by team members based on THEMIS data (see below). 139 participants from 28 countries attended the conference with a high percentage taking an active part. See project website's conference webpages for full programme details and to access abstracts, shared papers and online video and audio recordings of presentations: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/research-projects/themis/conference2013. A news item on the THEMIS final conference published on the European Web Site on Integration by Alina Esteves is available at: http://ec.europa.eu/ewsi/en/news/newsdetail.cfm?ID_ITEMS=38268.
List of Websites:
Research programme homepage: http://www.norface-migration.org/
Scientific coordinator: Prof. Christian Dustmann (University College London)
email: c.dustmann@ucl.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/
Coordination office (Academy of Finland)
Coordinator, science adviser Jyrki Hakapää
email: jyrki.hakapaa@aka.fi
The research projects funded in the programme:
CHOICES
PI Prof. Jacklin Wahba (University of Southampton)
email: : j.wahba@soton.ac.uk
homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/jackiewahba/
CILS4EU
PI Prof. Frank Kalter (University of Mannheim)
email: kalter@uni-mannheim.de
homepage: http://lssw.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/english/People/Prof.%20Dr.%20Frank%20Kalter/
project webpage: http://www.cils4.eu/
IMEM
PI Pro. James Raymer (University of Southampton during the programme, later moved to
Australian National University)
email: james.raymer@anu.edu.au
homepage: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/raymer-j
project homepage: http://www.cpc.ac.uk/research_programme/?link=IMEM_project.php
LineUp
PI Dr. Ayse Guveli (University of Essex)
email: aguveli@essex.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/staff/profile.aspx?ID=131
MD-RDE
PI Prof. Peter Nijkamp (Free University, Amsterdam)
email: http://personal.vu.nl/p.nijkamp/
homepage: http://personal.vu.nl/p.nijkamp/
MI3
P Prof. James Wadsworth (Royal Holloway University of London)
email: J.Wadsworth@rhul.ac.uk
homepage: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/jonathan-wadsworth_65eda3c8-1a50-42be-8d02-7fce25c6e3b3.html
NODES
PI Prof. Mari Vaattovaara (University of Helsinki)
email: mari.vaattovaara@helsinki.fi
homepage: http://www.helsinki.fi/geography/Mari_Vaattovaara_eng.html
project homepage: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/nodesproject/
SCIP
PI Prof. Claudia Diehl (University of Konstantz)
email: claudia.diehl@uni-konstanz.de
project homepage: http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/153339.html
SIMCUR
PI Prof. Birgit Leyendecker (Ruhr University of Bochum)
email: birgit.leyendecker@rub.de
homepage: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/epsy/BL.html
project homepage: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/epsy/simcur-engl.html
TCRAf-Eu
PI Prof. Valentina Mazzucato (University of Maastricht)
email: v.mazzucato@maastrichtuniversity.nl
homepage: http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Profile/V.MAZZUCATO.htm
project homepage: http://fasos-research.nl/tcra/tcraf-eu/
TEMPO
PI Prof. Giovanni Facchini (Center for Economic Policy Research, London)
email: Giovanni.Facchini@nottingham.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/people/giovanni.facchini
THEMIS
PI Prof. Oliver Bakewell (University of Oxford)
email: oliver.bakewell@qeh.ox.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/about-us/people/oliver-bakewell
project homepage: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/projects/themis
The NORFACE Plus Network Board granted in June 2009 funding to 12 transnational projects reviewed as scientifically best. The projects began their work in November 2009 – January 2010 and finished their work latest in June 2014. The Network Board also nominated a Programme Director in charge of the scientific coordination activities of the programme.
The NORFACE Migration Programme created synergies and networks that developed the subject of migration and provided the grounds for current and future collaborations. The scientific coordinator of the programme, prof. Christian Dustmann concludes: “The NORFACE programme created a research initiative on migration putting all academics specializing on migration under the same umbrella. This gave a platform for new academics to showcase their work as well as help many PhD students to complete their studies. It has also created many databases of primary data that will be given back to the academic community as well as a number of other academic outputs. It dramatically pushed forward the research on the topic of Migration in Europe which has taken off considerably in the last few years.”
The programme arranged five programme conferences. Especially the two international conferences in 2011 and 2013 were game-changing events: they brought together academics and the world of policy on the subject of migration and helped to create a legacy of the NORFACE-programme on migration. They demonstrated the tremendous progress that had been made during the program on migration research in Europe, thanks to the initiative, which opened the multidisciplinarity of the Migration studies in a new way and made Europe again a centre of the Migration studies. While academic presentations and discussions were in the core of the programmes, the wider societal and policy discussions were given a prominent place.
A significant part of the budget of the NORFACE research programme has been spent on collecting primary data sets, of both qualitative and quantitative nature. In 2013 NORFACE began a cooperation with GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. In the forthcoming years, GESIS will provide support and environment for storing and opening the research data collected during the programme. The extensive data collections are finished, and CILS4EU and THEMIS had already made their collections available to other scholars. Other projects will follow in due course.
Apart from the programme activities, each research project had individual research aims and results. Already, over 200 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, book chapters or monographs have been published with more than 300 other academic publications. More than 500 academic presentations have been given by scholars supported in the programme, and each project have also participated in policy discussions and media programmes. The NORFACE Discussion Papers series has brought the research to the attention of the academic world (over 100 publications) whereas the NORFACE Compact Publication provided an excellent testimony of this work to policy makers and the general public. However, the biggest contribution this programme offered to the future direction of the field are the valuable databases that were created by collecting primary data.
Project Context and Objectives:
NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe) transnational research programme on Migration in Europe: Social, Economic, Cultural and Policy Dynamics has aimed to explain new challenges Europe faces with migration. It has contributed to our theoretical understanding and knowledge and raised the level of comparative, multi-disciplinary and multi-level research on migration in Europe. The research has provided results with valuable knowledge to be used by policy makers at national, European and international level.
The total budget of the NORFACE Migration in Europe research programme amounts to 28.6 m€. The NORFACE partner councils have committed altogether 22.8 m€ to the common pot of the programme. In addition, a total of almost 6 million € of ERA-NET Plus funding is received from the European Commission 7th Framework Programme. The NORFACE Plus Network Board granted in June 2009 funding to 12 transnational projects reviewed as scientifically best. The Network Board also nominated a Programme Director in charge of the scientific coordination activities of the programme. The Programme Director started his duties in October 2008.
The general scientific objectives of the programme have been:
• To advance globally excellent theoretical and methodological disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and comparative research on migration which builds synergetically on a pan-European basis
• To take advantage of and develop the informal laboratory of experience, knowledge and data which migration in Europe currently presents
• To motivate and support excellence and capacity building for research on migration on a cross-national basis throughout the NORFACE countries
• To develop understanding and promote research-based knowledge and insight into migration for issues of societal, practical and policy relevance, with theoretical foundations but worked on jointly with relevant users and experts.
Migration is a high level social, economic and policy concern right across Europe. Persistent rates of international migration have become an essential element of the political and economic globalization process. Questions of high societal and political relevance have been raised in connection with these developments. There is a significant body of research in this area, within individual European countries, at the European level, and from other global regions, notably though not only North America. But the body of research has not yet formed a coherent cumulative and grounded body of knowledge which would allow us to understand more fully the current economic and social dynamics of migration, their impact, and even more importantly their potential future impact, on society, economy and polity. There is a critical need therefore to raise the level of European research to address these issues, a need to build a synergetic body of research which contributes strongly to our theoretical understanding and knowledge in the area of migration research.
The research topics of the programme have been designed to address this need through theory-guided, comparative, multi-level and time-referenced studies especially in relatively unexplored areas, or fields with unresolved issues. The programme has emphasised three main themes:
• Migration - Causes and Consequences,
• Integration,
• Cohesion and Conflict.
These areas and the issues taken up in them should not be conceived as separate phenomena but as parts of a more general social process. Different theoretical approaches and methodological procedures are necessary, making it indispensable for researchers to be aware of and compile contributions stemming from diverse social, economic and behavioural science disciplines. What comes to this research programme, the disciplines have included demography and geography, history, anthropology and ethnography, psychology, social psychology, language and cultural sciences, economics, political science, law, and sociology – in other words, almost the entire spectrum of the social sciences and related areas.
A significant part of the budget of the NORFACE research programme has been spent on collecting primary data sets, of both qualitative and quantitative nature. This data is made available for all scholars in migration studies. To ensure the data sets generated are of highest quality a panel of four experts from outside the NORFACE programme was set up in July 2009 and the programme opened a collaboration with GESIS in November 2013. The expert panel advises the project teams on data related issues and provides recommendations on the data collection design, the questionnaire etc., and GESIS provides support and environment for storing and opening the data collections of the programme.
The programme has been committed to ‘user engagement’, building on the knowledge gained from the original NORFACE ERA-NET. This has meant an ongoing awareness of the potential for take up of research findings by the various communities of migration policy and practice, and a willingness to engage those communities appropriately with the research agenda, research projects and research findings.
The scientific coordinator of the programme, prof. Christian Dustmann concludes at the end of the programme: “The NORFACE programme created a research initiative on migration putting all academics specializing on migration under the same umbrella. This gave a platform for new academics to showcase their work as well as help many PhD students to complete their studies. It has also created many databases of primary data that will be given back to the academic community as well as a number of other academic outputs such as discussion papers, book chapters and synergies. It also dramatically pushed forward the research on the topic of Migration in Europe which has taken off considerably in the last few years.”
Project public website address: http://www.norface-migration.org/
Project Results:
The NORFACE Network Board decided in its meeting 15th–16th June 2009 in Helsinki to grant funding to 12 transnational projects. The contract negotiations with the projects were finalized in July-September 2009 and all contracts were signed by 31st December 2009. Originally NORFACE had received 240 outline proposals. After the first review round 45 full proposals were submitted to NORFACE and found eligible. List of funded research projects is given in Annex 1.
The total funding of the projects and the scientific coordination activities amounted to € 28,658,000. The figure consists of contributions from the NORFACE partner councils totaling to € 22,830,000 and additional funding from the European Commission FP7 to NORFACE Plus project totaling to € 5,828,000. The European Commission funding was used to fund the research projects only and not the scientific coordination activities. The research program has been funded using the real common pot funding model.
NORFACE PLUS projects - timetable
PROJECT PI Beginning Months Orig. End Prolong. req. End date
SCIP Diehl 1.12.2009 48 30.11.2013 No 30.11.2013
TEMPO Facchini 1.11.2009 48 31.10.2013 Yes 1.1.2014
LINEUP Guveli 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 30.6.2014
CILS4EU Kalter 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 31.1.2014
SIMCUR Leyendecker 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 30.6.2014
TCRAfEu Mazzucato 1.1.2010 36 31.12.2012 Yes 21.12.2013
MD-RDE Nijkamp 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 31.1.2014
IMEM Raymer 1.11.2009 24 31.10.2011 Yes 30.4.2012
NODES Vaattovaara 1.10.2009 44 31.5.2013 Yes 31.1.2014
MI3 Wadsworth 1.10.2009 48 30.9.2013 Yes 30.6.2014
CHOICES Wahba 1.10.2009 24 31.10.2011 Yes 30.4.2012
THEMIS Bakewell 1.1.2010 48 31.12.2013 Yes 1.1.2014
Scientific Coordination
Prior this programme, the body of research in migration studies has not yet formed a coherent cumulative and grounded body of knowledge which would allow us to understand more fully the current economic and social dynamics of migration, their impact, and even more importantly their potential future impact, on society, economy and polity. There has been a critical need to raise the level of European research to address these issues, a need to build a synergetic body of research which contributes strongly to our theoretical understanding and knowledge in the area of migration research.
Therefore, NORFACE partners not only sought to fund separate research projects in this multidisciplinary field, but also stressed the importance of the scientific program coordination activities and collaboration as the Migration Program has been expected to provide a steep increase in cooperation between leading edge researchers from NORFACE partner countries. The NORFACE Network Board created a position for a scientific program director to achieve those goals, and to help build capacity for further research in the future.
The NORFACE Network Board appointed Professor Christian Dustmann, Professor of Economics at University College London as the scientific coordinator of the programme. Prof. Dustmann started his duties on 1st October 2008 and his term continued until 30th June 2014. Prof. Dustmann worked in close cooperation with the NORFACE Network Board.
The scientific coordination office sought to create synergies and networks that developed the subject of migration and provided the grounds for future collaborations. The office has created a number of activities and initiatives putting all academics specializing on migration under the same umbrella. This also gave a platform for new academics to showcase their work as well as help many PhD students to complete their studies. The communication across different disciplines was also the biggest challenge the program encountered, and the scientific office had to tackle. The scientific coordination office was also given the task to arrange the storage of the research data collected during the programme, and to find solutions on making this data available to all researchers.
Program conferences
The scientific office organized five major conferences bringing together all the academics involved in the NORFACE Migration program as well as in two of the conferences also the wider community of migration researchers. These conferences were the most important tools for creating synergy in-between then multidisciplinary and international projects funded in the programme as well as for creating cooperation with other relevant scholarly communities, policy makers and stakeholders.
The opening conference was held at University College London on the 25th- 27th March 2010. The conference introduced the research projects to each other and discussed the most important issues concerning the development of the program entity. The conference included team meetings and individual project presentations. Specific workshops provided fora for opening communication channels across the different projects and discussing innovative data collection strategies with a panel of data experts. More information is available at [http://www.norface-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=1].
A large interdisciplinary conference Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge, held on the 6th–9th April 2011 in London. The event was jointly organized by the NORFACE Research Program on Migration and the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM at University College London). The conference closed the UCL Migration Week, a series of lectures, panel discussions, conferences and exhibitions, which explored migration from a number of academic perspectives. For more information [http://www.norface-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=12].
The conference was attended by 430 scholars who work on migration across different disciplines such as economics, sociology, psychology, demography, anthropology, educational studies, geography, political science and development studies. Thus the scope of disciplines and possibilities of collaboration grew as the wider community of migration studies was brought into the conference. 231 papers were presented in parallel sessions and 32 papers as poster displays. The most important events were:
• 2 keynote speeches by George J. Borjas (Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) and Alejandro Portes (Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University)
• A high profile Policy Podium Discussion on “The Challenges to Policy Making Posed by the Diversity of Interests Affected by Immigration”
• A high profile Academic Podium Discussion on “The Role of Academic Research in the Public Debate on Migration”
• Special session on Norface Data for the Migration in Europe research projects
• Special session on The International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) Database
The first day of the conference was reserved for discussing the development of the research projects funded in the Migration in Europe-programme: all twelve projects presented their recent research work and development. Numerous researchers of the Migration in Europe -projects presented their individual studies also during the other sessions of the conference.
The conference’s main achievement was to bring together the most prolific scholars, representing the various and often contradicting approaches to Migration studies. The policy podium brought scholars and civil servants working with migration issues together to discuss on the current development of migration and how scholarly research may support society’s planning and decision-making. The academic podium also sought to clarify scholars’ possibilities to contribute to public discussion on migration.
The third event was hosted at the University of Mannheim on the 29th–31st March 2012, collaboratively with the CILS4EU research project [http://www.norface-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=69]. The conference was targeted to the scholars funded by the program. The workshop included overall presentations of all 12 projects as well as 48 individual presentations. The sessions mixed the various projects’ individual presentations for creating collaboration and exchange of ideas in-between the scholars.
4th Norface Migration Network Conference Migration: Global Development, New Frontiers was the biggest inter-disciplinary conference on the topic of migration to date. It had 500 participants, including 128 NORFACE project team members. Over 260 scientific presentations or posters were given during the conference. Overall, the organising committee received over 550 submissions, which shows that the demand for such an event was urgent.
The keynote speech of the conference was given by Prof. Richard Alba (The City University of New York) on Reproduction of inequality versus openings for social change: How should we think about the looming transition to diversity in western societies? One of the key features of the programme’s conference series has been the work on increasing North American and European scholars’ networks in migration studies.
A specific effort was put on merging academic studies and policy views together. Three discussion panels were arranged to express the multitude of European and global views and actions on the migration issues.
• Policy Podium “How Should Governments Best Address Trends in Migration”
• Policy Event “Migration: The Key Challenge for the EU”
Speakers included for example: Cecilia Malmström (EU Home Affairs Commissioner); Charles Clarke (Former UK Home Secretary); Marina Del Corral Téllez (Secretary General of Immigration, Ministry of Employment and Social Security, Spain); Peter Sutherland (UN Special Representative for Migration and Development); Jonathan Portes (Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research); David Metcalf (Chair of Migration Advisory Committee). The discussions targeted on how should governments best address trends in migration, and how does especially EU act on them..
Each project had been given a specific session to introduce their achievements. Also, ten principal investigators or team leaders (Claudia Diehl in SCIP, Ayse Guveli and Lucinda Platt in LineUp, Anthony Heath and Frank Kalter in CILS4EU, Valentina Mazzucato in TCRAf-Eu, Birgit Leyendecker, Brit Oppedal and Judi Mesman in SIMCUR, Peter Nijkamp in MD-RDE, ) were given a discussant’s role in the conference’s six academic panels. This assured a wide visibility of the programme’s scholars and their research work in the wider academic scheme.
This conference was the most important public event of the program. It brought together academics and the world of policy on the subject of migration. It helped to create a legacy of the Norface program on migration and demonstrated the tremendous progress that had been made during the program on migration research in Europe. The abstracts of the presentations, social media communication, important academic and policy events and a good number of interviews have been stored and made available at the conference website.
The fifth NORFACE conference was co-organized with the MI3 project in Berlin (1st–2nd November 2013). This was the final event of the program, bringing all the research projects together for estimating the achieved results and discussing the possible further cooperation and research needs. The conference had more than hundred participants and included 46 individual presentations from the 12 funded projects. The conference also included a panel discussion with the PIs, covering the development of the program and seeking lessons on the organization and scientific collaboration tasks of such a multidisciplinary and international program. The event also included a PhD student meeting and discussions regarding the storage of data that were produced in the course of the program as well as a Horizon 2020 presentation.
The scientific coordinator of the programme, prof. Christian Dustmann, emphasised in his beginning speech how the programme has created “new contacts and new initiatives”. While such achievements may sound self-evident, prof. Dustmann pointed out how both issues are in fact crucial for a wider and more coherent understanding of migration phenomena. According to him, the national partners of NORFACE in collaboration with the European commission have been able to create a programme, which has succeeded in bringing various disciplines and interests on migration studies together in an unforeseen way. Also, in its emphasis to concentrate on supporting new data collections, the programme has managed to create scientific data which is in most cases unique and will give immense possibilities to continue research efficiently in the forthcoming years.
The first round table discussion gathered all participants of the research programme together in order to learn from the researchers’ experiences on how the programme had worked and supported their activities, as well as for discussing on the future possibilities and challenges of migration studies. Each principal investigator was given a chance to present his/her views. The overall views of the projects were:
1. All PIs pointed out that the funding made a big difference to their and their research teams’ work. Some suggested that this Norface research programme has been essential for the decisive increase in migration related research across European countries over the last five years.
2. The multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary nature of the programme was pointed out as a positive approach in practical terms. The programme activities supported interaction of disciplines across teams, and through workshops and conferences.
3. The interdisciplinary efforts and their successes depend on the particular discipline. This might depend on the particular disciplines traditional cooperation activities, methodological similarities, conceptualisation, and research interests.
4. Most PIs expressed that concerning the programme activities targeted to bring the projects together and in contact with other scholars in migration studies, the two open conferences of the programme were extremely beneficial for the research projects.
5. To ensure a well-working cooperation in the research projects as well as among them, cooperative and instructional activities are needed in the beginning of the programme.
6. The relatively non-bureaucratic application procedure and administration during the programme was seen a big plus.
7. Many PIs mentioned that the programme working period fell short in the end, in particular as the programme sought to support a great effort on data gathering. PIs pointed out that the best phase in terms of research is starting only now, and it would be great if means were available to arrange conferences in near future in order to keep up with the further results and new research projects.
8. Funding younger scholars, and even younger PIs, was a very good feature of the programme.
A specific workshop was arranged for the PIs and the data experts of each project. The workshop – a presentation and Q&A – was held by Dr. Markus Quandt, the Head of RDC International Survey Programmes of GESIS – Data Archive for the Social Sciences.
Numerous PIs have mentioned in their final reports that these international and interdisciplinary conferences arranged in the program have been the most important feature of the program. In a unique way, they have offered a new view on understanding the complexity of migration studies and a possibility to interact and collaborate. Also, organizing such high profile conferences in Europe has meant that the emphasis of migration studies in global sense has moved stronger to the European academic community than previously.
Publications and other outputs
The scientific office hosted on its website the NORFACE Discussion Paper series, which run over 100 papers during the program [http://www.norface-migration.org/publrespapers.php]. Over 40 of these papers have already been published as peer-reviewed scientific articles, too. The series will continue to exist on the CReAM website. The NORFACE Compact Series, was set up to address policy makers as well as the general public [http://www.norface-migration.org/pages.php?id=33]. The compact series consisted of three volumes, including articles from all projects.
Throughout the program, the scientific coordination office has also produced NORFACE Migration Newsletter, which has disseminated the latest news and information about Norface Migration research program to the members of the Norface Migration mailing list. It has provided details on the past and future events, and has been especially useful for advertising Norface conferences.
The 12 research projects funded in the program have published their results in other relevant fora, too. In the final reports the projects have reported altogether 205 peer-reviewed scientific articles, book chapters or monographs. 135 of these are published in open access journals (4 publications) or are available at the institutional or disciplinary repositories (131 publications).
Primary data collection and storage
When setting up the programme, NORFACE emphasized the importance of collecting new research data on migration issues, as well as storing this data properly and making it available for other researchers. Nine of the funded projects have collected primary data using different data collection techniques, for the purpose of their research. The task for organizing data storage and open data activities was given to the scientific coordination office
At the start of the program, scientific co-ordination office reviewed the projects’ stand with respect to the data collection and preparation for publication. The office organized data workshops for all relevant projects in the first two conferences. The scientific coordinator prof. Christian Dustmann and Dr. Bernt Bratsberg (MI3) held presentations in the workshop Research Data Infrastructure in the Social Science, arranged by Norface II SA, German Data Forum and UK Data Forum in Berlin, 3rd–4th May 2012. Prof. Dustmann discussed about the programme’s actions to data storage and access and Dr. Bratsberg gave an example on how scholar can use and combine national data sets.
In the final conference of the program, Prof. Dustmann introduced collaboration with GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences. GESIS is the German partner of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). The coordination office at the Academy of Finland liaised with GESIS and signed a Memorandum of Understanding on 23rd of May 2014, regarding data storage as well as bringing in touch GESIS and the individual projects and coordinating these activities. To this date, CILS4EU has signed an archiving contract with GESIS and the first wave of data is already available to all scholars. SIMCUR will follow soon. THEMIS has archived at the UK Data Archive with forthcoming links to the programme’s website at GESIS. The agreement with the research projects state that research data must be made available two years after the completion of the data collection. The research data of all relevant projects should be available to all scholars interested latest in 2016.
PhD training and capacity building
The program funded altogether 65 PhD-students. 12 of these students worked at a university in the Great Britain, 14 in Germany, 15 in the Netherlands, 10 in Ireland, 3 in Sweden, 3 in Norway, 2 in Denmark, 2 in Finland, 1 in Poland, 1 in Portugal, 1 in Austria and 1 both in Germany and Ireland. 25 of these students finished their dissertations during the program.
PhD students were frequently among the presenters at the different workshops and conferences, thus providing them with the experience of presenting in front of an international audience, and receiving a wide range of comments from the audience on their research. At the last two conferences of the program, the scientific co-ordination office organized a PhD Breakfast which gave the students the chance to discuss with distinguished academics, as well as give feedback on their experience of being part of the NORFACE teams. They all reported that they benefited on many different levels from the conferences, and suggested adding PhD hosted events in the future, to further develop their skills and be able to present their work both to a peer group but also to groups of experienced academics.
Individual projects
The twelve projects have varied in their aims, working methods as well as their working periods, which means that they proceeded according to varying methods and timetables and have created their own individual research results:
CHOICES (PI Jackline Wahba): The project comprised of four partners located in University of Southampton (UK), NIDI (the Netherlands), Münster University (Germany) and University of Stockholm (Sweden). It focused on migrants’ choices and the constraints they face from an economic perspective, as well advanced the theoretical studies through contributing to the theoretical literature and carrying out policy evaluations using an integrated macroeconomic model created during the research project. The project also made methodological contributions by developing innovative econometric estimation techniques. The coverage of countries spanned from EU cross-country perspective to host country specific coverage of the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and labour sending countries such as Egypt and Mexico. CHOICES managed to publish three times more scientific publications than originally planned, to engage with policy makers and to address non-academic audience, too (e.g. college students through a feature article in the Economic Review, which was negotiated with the publisher to make publicly available on-line).
The project focused on migrants’ choices and the constraints they face from an economic perspective. It used rigorous state of the art quantitative techniques (econometrics) to answer key research questions. The project has also advanced the theoretical migration literature through contributing to the theoretical literature and carrying out policy evaluations using our integrated macroeconomic model. Finally, researchers have also made methodological contributions by developing innovative econometric estimation techniques.
CHOICES has contributed to a better understanding of the key drivers of migrants’ choices and the constraints they face, thereby enhancing the evidence base for policy formulation. The findings make important contributions to the migration literature and help in informing migration policy. Below we highlight some of those main results and their implications for policy:
Return Migration:
The findings of Biwaard, Schluter and Wahba suggest that unemployment leads to return migration. Moreover, getting a job after a spell of unemployment delays the return of migrants back to their country of origin. The longer the migrants are unemployed the higher the chance they leave. The findings challenge the perception that labour immigrants are attracted by the generosity of the welfare state in the Netherlands since almost half of recent labour immigrants leave if they experience unemployment. This suggests that voluntary return schemes might be more successful if they target recent immigrants as opposed to long established ones.
There is a strong influence of the return behaviour of other migrants of the same ethnic origin on the individual return behaviour of recent labour migrants. Another aspect that is highlighted in research is that the migration process cannot be viewed in isolation of other important life course processes of the individual migrant. The labour market and family formation/dissolution processes are both intertwined with the migration process which influences the assimilation of migrants. Those papers underscore the importance of social factors in affecting return migration.
Even after controlling for the endogeneity of the temporary migration decision, an overseas returnee is more likely to become an entrepreneur than a non-migrant. Although migrants lose their original social networks whilst overseas (an issue that has not been previously considered by economists), savings and human capital accumulation acquired abroad over compensate for this loss. Those findings are important for policymakers who are interested in encouraging migrants’ investments.
Illegal Migration:
Although illegal migrants from Mexico to the US experience a wage penalty, they are as likely as legal migrants to remit and are not hindered by their illegal status. This underscores the importance of remittances as a motive for migration.
Income/Consumption
Migrants and natives are likely to differ in terms of reservation wages and productivities which in turn drive wage differentials. However, those “migrant effects" are particularly pronounced among the unskilled and young, but that differences diminish with age and skill levels in Germany suggesting for policymakers that integration in the labour market takes place over time.
To overcome the problem that both earnings and consumption on an individual level over long time spans are hardly available in any panel data, they suggest an innovative method to measure perceived earnings risk from individual earnings and capital income data, while consumption data are not required. This method can also take into account the different sources of capital income, for instance divided into income from risk-free assets and from risky assets. These methods can be applied not only to dynamic settings in connection with migration but also to areas outside migration.
Social Networks:
The higher is the percentage of a given ethnic group living nearby in the UK, the higher is the probability of finding a job through social contacts but this effect decays very rapidly with distance and differ depending on the ethnic group considered. Though networks are a popular method of finding a job for the ethnic minorities in the UK, they are not necessarily the most effective either in terms of gaining employment or in terms of the level of job achieved, in particular Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants tend to lose out disproportionately from using personal networks. CHOICES provided an explanation for the reasons behind the negative relationship between social networks and the labour market outcomes of immigrants in the UK. It shows that the adverse effects found in the UK, is due to the importance of locality effects which confound social network effects.
There is a penalty to be paid for non-EU immigrants in Europe with a strong identity. Being a first generation immigrant leads to a penalty of about 17% while second generation immigrants have a probability of being employed that is not statistically different from that of natives. However, when they have a strong identity, second-generation immigrants have a lower chance of finding a job than natives. The analysis reveals that the relationship between ethnic identity and employment prospects may depend on the type of integration and labour market policies implemented in the country where the immigrant lives. More flexible labour markets help immigrants to access the labour market but do not protect those who have a strong ethnic identity.
Political Economy, Welfare & Immigration Policy
International migration plays a positive and significant role in improving the quality of political institutions in sending countries, an issue that has been understudied by economists.
CHOICES found strong support for generous welfare states attracting more unskilled immigrants (i.e. "magnet hypothesis") under the free-migration regime, and attracting more skilled migrants (“the fiscal burden hypothesis" under the restricted-migration regime. The work suggests that EU countries may be justified in linking eligibility of benefits by immigrants to previous social contributions when migration is free (unrestricted).
CHOICES contributed to the debate on the interplay between trade in goods and trade in factors (labour), highlighting its complementarities (as opposed to the current common wisdom belief that they are substitutes) both from an economic viewpoint (illustrating its novel role within the new literature in trade that stresses firm heterogeneity) and from an economic policy perspective (illustrating the trade-off between outsourcing low skilled tasks and opening borders to low-skilled migrants, when the survival of labour intensive firms is at stake).
CHOICES model international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. Because of imperfect information, firms statistically discriminate high-skilled migrants by paying them at their expected productivity. They examine how international migration affects the income of individuals in sending and receiving countries, and of migrants themselves and analyze under which conditions there is positive or negative self-selection of migrants.
Policy (Simulations)
On the theoretical front, CHOICES developed a different yet complementary approach to fundamental questions in the area of return migration. The setup developed enables us to bring out sharp insights and motivate well defined empirical questions within the field. For example, the result that positive selection requires a weak correlation in earnings process across locations motivates, on one hand, an obvious line of empirical investigation, and, on the other hand, calls for extensions of the theoretical setting to investigate the robustness of the result. Two such obvious extensions would involve endogenous earnings in an explicit labour market, and housing and durable consumption as credit collateral. A main drive of this project is its relevance for policy analysis. This setting can be applied to frame policy questions and conduct welfare evaluations in the context of specific countries and periods. The current focus is on return migration only, but for policy evaluation the framework can be extended to study the full cycle of the migration process.
On the whole, CHOICES have achieved more than what was planned for in terms of output. The findings have been highly publicised and have had coverage by the ESRC, Twitter, and NORFACE website. CHOICES have advanced the economics migration literature through both theoretical and rigorous empirical work. As a result of the involvement in the NORFACE project, Bijwaard has been invited to contribute to the European Migration Network Conference, Brussels, Sept 2010, to the discussion on current migration issues in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer and to the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) high level expert meeting Future migration Patterns and the Economic Crisis: An International Perspective, February 2012. Also, Wahba has been invited to become a member of the “International Migration Panel” of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).
CILS4EU (PI Prof. Frank Kalter): The overall aim of CILS4EU was to initiate and establish a data infrastructure project that provides comprehensive data on the integration of immigrant youths in European societies to the scientific community. The basis of this data infrastructure is longitudinal information that was collected on 14-year old children of immigrants and their native-born peers over three years in four selected European countries: England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This information was complemented by information about the youths’ parents with a cross-sectional parental survey during the first wave in order to enable researchers to study intergenerational integration processes in more detail.
Besides the concrete fieldwork in the different waves of data collection, the project activities spread to three general fields of activities that together are a fundamental precondition for strictly comparative data and therefore for the success of the data infrastructure project itself:
- sampling strategy and maintaining the survey population
- development of comprehensive measures and adaption to the different national contexts
- the preparation of the survey data.
The survey population was selected using a school-based sampling approach. School-based sample selection is comparably easy to implement in different countries in a similar way, ensuring the international comparability of the different samples, but also guaranteeing representative samples in each of the participating countries. Schools with higher shares of immigrant pupils were oversampled in order to achieve a sufficient number of immigrants. Within the selected schools, two school classes were sampled, with all students selected as the target population. Besides the practical advantages of school-based samples in order to achieve comparable samples, these sampling approaches provide context information, i.e. information about the immediate peers and the school environment, which are well-known determinants of the integration of immigrants and therefore essential for the planned data infrastructure project. Besides comparatively selecting the CILS4EU-sample, all country teams also adjusted their strategies and efforts in order to maintain the survey population over the different years.
With the aim of CILS4EU being to study integration processes among immigrant youths in different European countries, the starting point for the development of the instruments was to define more precisely which aspect of integration should be at the focus of the survey. The research team agreed on key outcomes on the four integration dimensions: cognitive-cultural, structural, social, and emotional-cultural integration. The research team thereby followed a very broad conception of the different dimensions and contexts so as to collect data that account for the diverse strands in integration research, which was an important factor for achieving the aim of the data infrastructure project. Besides this broad conception of the different dimensions, with questions measuring very different aspects in each dimension, several specific measures were included that allow for more in-depth analyses. For example, innovative sociometric instruments were included that enable the network structures within the classrooms to be measured in more detail and therefore social integration as a real interactional process to be assessed. This sociometric instrument has already attracted attention and will definitively be an important factor to stimulate the demand for the data.
The preliminary questionnaires for the parents and the students in each wave were constructed in English to facilitate cooperation between the project partners and to ensure the comparability of the instruments. Therefore, the instruments had to be translated into Dutch, German, and Swedish before they could be implemented in the respective countries. The project followed the TRAPD-approach that is also used in the European Social Survey.
After each wave of data collection, the data had to be entered and subsequently cleaned. One major, and for the two most recent waves still on-going, task was the cleaning and the preparation of the data in order to merge the different country-specific data sets into an international data set that, as a scientific use file, will be provided to the scientific community in the context of the data infrastructure project. The work on data entry, but especially the cleaning process, has turned out to be extremely time-consuming. The work for the first wave is already completed, resulting in a data set that is being distributed through the GESIS Data Archive shortly. The preparation of the second, and especially the third, wave is in progress.
An important precondition for the success of the data infrastructure project is an excellent documentation of the data and the different steps during primary data collection. A lot of efforts were and are still being undertaken to compile the documentation material but also more specific documents like a more detailed description of the procedure during the sociometric part of the survey, as well as of the resulting dyadic sociometric data. These summaries of the different work steps above demonstrate that the CILS4EU project will be a cornerstone when it comes to the provision of data allowing for strictly comparative research on immigrants’ integration in different European societies. The centralised data preparation with a strong synchronisation with all project teams has already resulted and will continue to result in data sets that are especially suited for cross-national comparisons.
Besides the activities around the establishment of a data infrastructure project and the promotion of the project and data, several research partners were also involved in the dissemination of the results of CILS4EU to other stakeholders and the general public.
The Swedish team took part in one governmental investigation into xenophobia, with a report entirely based on CILS4EU data. Furthermore, the Swedish team also used CILS4EU data as part of an investigation on child poverty for the National Board of Health and Social Affairs. Finally, the Swedish team has been invited to and participated in a hearing with the Swedish Ministry of Finance, on ethnic minority children’s educational attainment. In Germany, the Minister for Integration of the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg visited the home institution of the PI, the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), and was informed about the aims, design, progress and first results of CILS4EU, for example about some puzzling findings on the intergenerational transmission of religiosity. This meeting was very productive, and the minister asked researchers involved in CILS4EU whether it would be possible to conduct a smaller survey in the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg to assess the influence of a recently implemented specific educational reform focussing on the scholastic attainment of immigrant children.
In England, Anthony Heath was part of several national expert groups dealing with discrimination and ethnic disadvantages in education and the labour market. He has given several presentations at the House of Commons, Westminster. Prof. Heath was also engaged in international expert groups, giving presentations on affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies at the seminar of the OECD Expert Group on Migration and on attitudes to migration and integration” at a workshop on ‘Migration and integration: the future of our communities’ at the European Parliament in Brussels.
IMEM (PI Prof. James Raymer): The IMEM project consisted of ten researchers across three institutions: Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI), the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and the University of Oslo (Oslo). NIDI’s primary responsibility was collecting and assessing the international data on migration and on carrying out quality checks on our estimates. Oslo’s main responsibility was to create the framework for obtaining and including expert knowledge. S3RI’s main responsibility was to develop and implement the Bayesian model for migration flows. The successes of our model and quality of our estimated flows depended greatly on our working together to integrate the three parts.
IMEM created a methodology for estimating international migration flows that directly accounts for the main differences found in the measurement aspects of the reported data. Before this study, little was known about the effects of measurement, and no one had attempted to model the differences by considering the main aspects of duration, undercount, coverage and accuracy. IMEM has done so by including expert-based prior distributions in the model. IMEM has also combined the measurement model with a migration model, which allows an estimation of missing data. The estimated flows are consistent with the United Nations recommendation for the measurement of international migration. IMEM included measures of uncertainty for estimated flows, which can be used to assess the quality of the reported flows. In the area of combining data from different sources and missing data, it is important to be clear about the accuracy of the estimated figures. At the end of the project the model handled multiple time periods and soon after the funding period was finished IMEM also finalized the model that includes age and sex.
IMEM has produced a consistent and complete set of estimates that can be used by the user community. This work is especially relevant considering the expansions of the European Union in 2004 and 2007. For example, the results suggest that the official population totals for the EU and EFTA countries are about one million too high. The likely reason for the overcount is the double-counting of migrants in official population totals, which arises from the different duration of migration measures used and the general underreporting of emigration in the official statistics.
The main project event was a workshop, which brought together academics and persons responsible for migration data at national and international institutions. For this workshop, IMEM presented the model specifications, attainment of expert judgments and the assessment of the first set of estimates. The model has also been introduced at ca. 15 conferences to a wide array of audiences that included migration researchers, statisticians, demographers, geographers and to persons working with migration data at national statistical offices. The most important peer-reviewed scientific articles have been produced after the funding period finished.
IMEM has presented a modelling framework that brings together empirical data, covariate information and expert judgements to estimate migration flows amongst 31 countries in Europe from 2002 to 2008 by age and sex. This work provides an important foundation for both modelling and understanding international migration, particularly in situations where the data are inadequate or missing. IMEM has shown how data obtained from multiple sources with different measurements and collection systems can be combined together to provide a more complete and consistent picture of international migration.
LineUp (PI Dr. Ayse Guveli): The project explored migration processes, the multi-generational transmission of social, cultural, religious and economic resources, values and behavior. The research was based around Turkish immigrant and non-migrant families, their descendants in European countries and those who remained in Turkey. LineUp has also contributed greatly to developing the research design and the data collection instruments. What comes to the data collection itself, the project went beyond the original aims and collected data on 1500 more families than promised in the research proposal, increasing the number of families from 500 to 1992.
LineUp dataset provides the opportunity to study international migration from the following perspectives simultaneously: comparing migrant and non-migrants; comparing across generations; comparing between siblings and cousins; comparing within and between families; and comparing destination societies. Furthermore, the project has collected socioeconomic data, especially to include as background information in our regions chapter in the forthcoming monograph. This chapter introduces the socioeconomic conditions and the migration histories of the regions. The collection of regional data appeared to be a difficult and time-consuming task. Most of the data are on the province level and not on subprovince (ilçe) level and need to be collected from numerous records in various institutions such as Statistic Turkey, Home Office, local records etc.
The study is innovative. Although there have been studies in these individual fields, the simultaneous investigation of migrants and non-migrants in the origin region and country across more than three generations with complete genealogical data simply does not exist. There have been calls to extend the understanding of international migration to include multiple research sides and avoid terminology and concepts of the destination nation states aiming to create an ideal citizen. LineUp has the potential to answer this call and extend our scholarly understanding in international migration studies.
The data collection has been followed with data editing, cleaning, documentation and preparing the data for analysis. At the end of the funding period the project has moved toward publishing its results, and is for example currently about to sign a contract on scientific monograph with Palgrave Macmillan. The project has also organized many workshops, most notable one in Istanbul with invited influential international migration scholars from Europe, USA and Turkey.
MD-RDE (PI Prof. Peter Nijkamp): The project has set to study to what extent diversity among migrants – in terms of demographic and socio-economic characteristics and capabilities – contributes positively to economic welfare and development, and to what extent diversity influences inter-group and spatial socio-economic disparity.
Amongst the five partners, specific collaboration took place between the Finnish Labour institute of Economic Research and the University of Tartu to look at the Estonian migrants in Finland and at Estonian return migrants with a follow-up study. Also, University of Amsterdam and The Institute for Employment Research collaborated in merging data from both The Netherlands and Germany to specifically see whether results regarding diversity could be transferred from one country to another. All five countries also contributed to jointly produced edited volumes. Furthermore, the MD-RDE team endeavoured to interact with other NORFACE teams and with researchers working on similar topics at various international conferences. MD-RDE also organised events in Europe and a global workshop hosted by the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis (NIDEA) in New Zealand.
The PI’s research team at the University of Amsterdam co-ordinated this project, published extensively, and organised a number of activities to disseminate the results of the project. The interest in these activities is signalled by additional sponsorships obtained, such as from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Besides refereed journal articles, the project also yielded several books. Some PhD students employed by the project already successfully submitted or defended their theses. Outreach activities included participation in public debates on immigration policy. Some of the research, on the link between innovation and workplace diversity by Ceren Ozgen, Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot attracted international media attention, such as by the Wall Street Journal. In the end, the team established a deep understanding of the costs and benefits of cultural diversity on various markets in the Netherlands, such as the labour market, the housing market and the goods market (trade and foreign direct investment).
Research at The Institute for Employment Research (Germany) started with theory building focused on immigration, diversity and productivity at firm level, firm heterogeneity and human capital spillovers. One main challenge of the project was to handle the different levels of aggregation of effects of immigration and diversity. Hence the range of the analysis encompasses the meso-level (e.g. migrant diversity and regional disparity about the effects of the 12 new member states migrants to trade in Europe) up to the impact of migrant diversity at the firm level in Germany. The main achievements are combining different micro data sources with regional and firm information with the objective to derive regional and firm level effects of immigration and cultural diversity.
A large literature examines how labour markets react to the immigration-induced change in supply. The basic model of a competitive labour market suggests that – at least in the short run - higher levels of immigration should lower the wage of competing workers and increase the wage of complementary workers. However, the empirical literature is ambiguous; some studies claim that immigration has a substantial impact on wages, while other studies claim the impact is negligible. Our studies mainly refer to the presence of heterogeneous labour implying that the impact of immigration on the wage of any single (qualification) group of workers depends on how immigration affects the supply of every group of workers. That means our analysis allows for cross-effects among inputs in a nested CES production function framework taking into consideration that immigrants and natives within a skill group are imperfect substitutes. In general the project enabled a deeper understanding of the impact of diversity to local labour markets in Germany.
The team at the Essex University has analysed the impact of diversity from two distinct points of views: the impact of a (more) diverse society on people’s lives, and the impact of being diverse within a society (i.e. belonging to minority group). The analyses on the impact of diversity suggest that cultural diversity does not seem to have a relevant impact on wages of natives and that the positive impact estimated by previous studies may be related to heterogeneity of minority and majority people living in a certain area. Nevertheless, diversity does seem to have an impact on other aspects of people’s lives: white British living in more diverse areas report on average lower levels of life satisfaction than those living in less diverse areas. Life satisfaction of British people belonging to ethnic minorities and immigrants, however, do not seem to be correlated with the level of diversity or with the level of co-ethnics in the area. Across EU countries we find that the characteristics of the immigrant population residing in an area (the proportion of EU-non-EU immigrants and their labour market outcomes) have an impact on anti-immigration attitudes of natives.
The analyses of minorities suggest that in the UK most ethnic minorities experience disadvantage in terms of wages although their over-representation in the public sector mitigates such differences. The elimination of barriers to immigration from EU8 countries has changed not only the number, but also the characteristics of immigrants, who now locate in different regions and in different segments of the UK labour market. Despite such socio-economic differences across groups, our results also suggest that minorities do feel that they belong to the host country. People belonging to minority groups have a stronger sense of Britishness than the majority, but with relevant differences across minority groups and by generation. Also the white majority population, however, shows substantial heterogeneity in their identities.
The main findings of the research at the Tartu University team were (the country code in brackets indicate countries for Estonian evidence was obtained):
Spatial externalities of diversity in consumption and welfare: Immigrant diversity leads to a welfare gain for natives (NL, UK, DE, EE); the overall impact of cultural diversity on welfare is mainly positive, but small in magnitude (NL, UK, DE, EE, FI);
Diversity and migration patterns: Ethnicity, education, EU enlargement, the global economic crisis and austerity policies strongly impact on migration (EU, FI, EE); there is a danger of brain waste of well-educated immigrants in East-West labour flows, at least in the short run (EE, FI); push factors in migration include huge wage gaps, personal and family life, job conditions and work challenges (EE, FI); following the global financial crisis migration patterns are changing in Europe. Return and circular migration are increasing (EU, EE, FI); better integration in the host society does not necessarily reduce the probability of return migration (EE, FI).
Integration of diverse immigrants in the host society: migrants’ experience in a host country provides an earnings premium after return (FI, EE); differences in immigrant integration among countries can partly be explained by the level of these immigrants’ host-country-specific skills, including language skills, and by the institutional differences among these countries (EU).
Iinequality and attitudes towards diversity: European people’s attitudes towards immigrants vary depending on the personal characteristics of the respondents, people’s attitudes towards the country's institutions and socio-economic security, and country-specific conditions (EU, EE); the attitudes towards immigrants differ between majority and minority populations of the countries. Attitudes are more negative in countries with post-socialist path-dependence, and they are the lowest in Russia (EU, EE); attitudes towards immigrants are correlated more strongly with trust in institutions than with interpersonal trust (EU, EE).
Life satisfaction: Across Europe, ethnic minorities tend to be less happy and satisfied with their lives than ethnic majorities (EE).
The research focus of Labour Institute of Economic Research (Finland) has been on the causes and consequences of ‘East-West’ migration (brought about by the EU enlargement and the free movement of labour) both from the receiving and sending countries perspectives. In particular, the research group has analysed migration between Estonia and Finland in this context. From the host country perspective we have provided new research results on the welfare participation of the newly arrived Estonian immigrants and its determinants and on the net fiscal impact Estonian immigrants exert on the Finnish welfare state. Further, from the host country perspective the project has also presented new evidence on the determinants of outmigration of Estonian immigrants in Finland and the consequences of self-selection of Estonian outmigrants for the economic assimilation of immigrants. Related to labour mobility in the enlarged European Union, the team has also provided new cross country evidence on the characteristics and labour market performance after the EU enlargement of 2004 in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
From the source country perspective the research has contributed to earlier research by presenting new evidence on whether Estonian return migrants benefit from the experience gained in Finland in a form of wage premium and whether heterogeneity exists in the returns to returning by how well the return migrants performed in Finland. The team has also analysed other types of returns to return migration by focusing on occupational mobility of Estonian return migrants from Finland, and on the wellbeing consequences of return migration.
Overall results
Especially in larger cities, there is a positive effect of cultural diversity on amenities. This effect however is much smaller than the negative effect of the presence of immigrants on, for example, housing prices. This negative effect of cultural diversity is mainly associated with cultural diversity within the own local neighbourhood and not so much on the city level. On the other hand, there seems to be a positive effect of cultural diversity on wages, which points to positive productivity effects of cultural diversity and not so much to positive utility effects. However, the research also clearly indicates that different kind of people derives different benefits and dis-benefits from living and working in culturally diverse environments. This heterogeneity is something that does not have drawn a lot of attention in the literature.
From a theoretical point of view, the project shows that immigration rises average firm productivity and leads to welfare gains for natives. Furthermore, it shows that a higher migrant share may explain a higher average productivity in a region. The empirical studies at IAB suggest that the overall impact of cultural diversity is mainly positive, but small in magnitude, i.e. it yields net gains at the regional and firm level. Cultural diversity promotes innovation and productivity, but it depends on the skill level of the workforce. Cultural diversity of high-skilled has a positive impact, whereas cultural diversity of low-skilled is mostly neutral or negative. A further innovative contribution was to link the task approach by David Author to the question to the current debate concerning imperfect substitutability in the production process. By distinguishing labour horizontally according to job requirements, it contributed to the existing literature which so far differentiates labour at most vertically by formal qualification or by experience.
Results show an elasticity of substitution between migrants and natives in a range typically considered to indicate perfect substitution but not too far away from imperfect substitution. The estimations highlight the importance of differentiation by task and qualification. Hence the evidence of imperfect substitutability of highly qualified immigrant and native labour in routine tasks point at difficulties due to transferability of labour market relevant skills and qualification acquired abroad. Moreover, in particular for the medium qualified, integration into the labour market is hampered especially in interactive intensive tasks.
Much of the existing literature on the impact of diversity uses aggregated data at the level of regions or cities. MD-RDE UK team analysed the impact of diversity using individual data (combined with data from censuses, population estimates to measure diversity). The team has shown the importance of using individual data to be able to better take into account individual observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The use of individual data, and especially panel data – when available – allows us to better analyse how the impact of diversity varies across groups of people, for example, natives vs. people belonging to ethnic minorities vs. people born abroad.
The results and the contribution of MD-RDE has increased our understanding of the forces driving migration in an enlarged European Union, the costs and benefits of migration to the migrants themselves and to the sending and receiving countries. This contribution has been a collection of unique data on the Estonian return migrants from Finland, which makes possible to follow the same individuals before migration, during migration and after the return. The contribution of the project has been related to the study of frontier issues on migration, which so far have received relatively little attention in the earlier literature. In particular new research based information has been provided from the source country perspective, on return migrants and the returns to return migration. On the basis of the research results new ideas of the important future directions of the field such as paying more attention to modeling migration patterns of circular migration has been gained.
Finally, MD-RDE outcomes help to unpackage the role of migrant diversity in countries´ economic and social life, i.e. indicating remarkable cross-country differences in migration patterns, and the impact of migrant diversities in integration of multicultural societies. It impacts the research that supports development of immigrant integration policies, with an emphasis on country and region specific multidimensional (economic, social, cultural, political) environment and incompleteness of new migration strategies. Also, it outlines the necessity to concentrate future research on the possible impacts of incomplete migration strategies and shortcomings of current immigrant integration policies on personal and family levels and on intergenerational relations.
MI3 (PI Prof. James Wadsworth): The MI3 team has worked on two core themes of the Norface program (Integration, Conflict and Cohesion, as well as Migration - Causes and Consequences). Over the course of the project, the team published 21 papers in leading economic journals and additionally produced 18 working papers, most of which are currently in the review process with leading economic journals.
Much of MI3 research is based on unique, underexplored data sets that are administrative in nature and typically cover the entire population. One important research theme has been the study on the integration and assimilation of adult immigrants and their children across five different countries (UK, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark). The unique scope of the data made it possible not only to study the evolution of labor market outcomes of immigrants, but also focus on broader aspects such as the school performance of immigrant children, health, fertility, crime, marriage and residential choices. For example, an important question is how neighborhood characteristics (such as the size and quality of immigrants from the same country or ethnic group or the crime rate in the neighborhood) affect the assimilation and integration of immigrants and their children into the society. Answering this question is plagued by the endogenous sorting of immigrants to neighborhoods. To deal with this concern, MI3 exploited refugee placement policies in Denmark and Sweden which upon arrival randomly allocated refugees to neighborhoods. This research does not only push forward our knowledge on what helps immigrants to integrate into the society, but also contributes to the broader literature on peer effects, social interactions, and the role of networks in the job search process.
A second important question has been how immigration affects labor market outcomes of natives. Answering this question has been challenging, as migrants are likely to sort into areas or sectors that are doing well, biasing OLS estimates downward. MI3 research has exploited three sources of exogenous variation that so far has not been utilized: MI3 has revealed a commuting scheme introduced about one year after the fall of the iron curtain which allowed Czechs to work in designated areas in West Germany, but did not grant them residency. In a similar spirit, other sub-project exploited the substantial and sudden influx of Germans from former East Germany to West Germany after the fall of the iron curtain, and additionally utilizes the occupation structure of all East Germans (including those who stayed in East Germany) as a push factor to predict in which occupation East German migrants settle in West Germany.
Finally, MI3 also exploited differential regulations across sectors such as particular education requirements which make it difficult for immigrants to enter the sector, to predict in which sectors migrants locate.
NODES (PI Prof. Mari Vaattovaara): The project consisted of several multidisciplinary subprojects, which were designed to explore the underlying causes and impacts of ethnic residential segregation in the Nordic welfare context both from the perspective of individual migrant families and the receiving society. NODES conducted advanced longitudinal analyses of ethnic housing careers and a unique survey on mobility behaviour in a segregated landscape. This study has allowed a number of analyses of native responses to increasing ethnic diversity.
The project contextualised the Nordic welfare policy framework and practices, analysed the main differences and similarities of the welfare, housing, immigration and integration policies, immigration flows, and formulated first hypotheses on the linkages between the Nordic welfare setting and the dynamics of ethnic residential segregation. The project also explored the extent of structural integration of the selected minority groups into the local housing markets in the Nordic capital cities. Comparing the situation in Nordic countries produced new theoretical understanding of the impacts of national and local context on ethnic minorities’ housing mobility. The work on exploring native and immigrant households’ housing and neighbourhood careers and their reasons for moving also included extensive primary data collection.
The first of these subprojects explored the extent of structural integration of the selected minority groups into the local housing markets in the Nordic capital cities. The researchers analysed the spatial concentration and dispersal of immigrant groups over time, as well as compared the rates of entry to homeownership in order to understand the applicability of (spatial) assimilation and pluralist models in the Nordic context. The analyses of housing and neighbourhood careers were linked to longitudinal individual-level register data on family and work careers and the characteristics of residential neighbourhoods. Comparing the situation in Nordic countries produced new theoretical understanding of the impacts of national and local context on ethnic minorities’ housing mobility.
The next subproject advanced research knowledge on the dynamics of ethnic residential segregation by exploring the residential patterns and housing choices of the native-born residents. Previous Nordic research had indicated that selective migration among the natives (flight and avoidance) has an important effect upon the production and reproduction of ethnic residential segregation. The dynamics and motives behind “flight and avoidance” –like behavior had not been explored, however. The NODES team collected extensive survey data as well as conducted in-depth interviews among the native-born residents to understand the motives and reasoning behind the residential moves, and to gather the experiences of those residents who live in the most immigrant-dense areas.
Whereas this subproject explored native residents’ attitudes, mobility and housing choices, the third subproject focused on exploring the dynamics of ethnic segregation from the perspective of immigrants’ housing ambitions, efforts and preferences. The interlinked impacts of individual ambitions, social networks, culturally-inclined housing preferences, perceived and actual racism and discrimination, as well as perceived possibilities in the housing market were analysed on the basis of in-depth interview data. Immigrants of three different migratory statuses across the Nordic capitals were selected for the study.
NODES conducted advanced longitudinal analyses of ethnic housing careers. These analyses provide important knowledge for further research, but also for local planning and policy. The project has further conducted a unique survey on mobility behaviour in a segregated landscape. Similar analyses have, to our knowledge, not been conducted elsewhere. The register-based data available in the Nordic countries give a better opportunity than anywhere else to analyze these developments with such research design.
Most of the 16 NODES meetings included visits to local neighbourhoods and involved meetings with the local stakeholders. This broadened our understanding of the local context of our study areas in each country, increased the publicity of the NODES project, and helped to disseminate our research findings. The fact that some of articles produced in NODES have been the most downloaded from the prime national journals, and also nationally very visible in the news, will definitely raise more interest to the field from several perspectives and thus bring the issue of residential segregation to the focus of several new fields and new researchers as well. NODES can clearly demonstrate that the policy interest to these themes has increased during our research, even if in some countries (especially Sweden) the debate already long exists.
NODES also has substantially strengthened the Nordic research network on residential segregation. Policy-wise, the network has substantially shifted to concretely include the discussions on the themes. The project has been presented and discussed in the Nordic Mayer forum, for example. The future provides improved opportunities for planners and politicians who would like to learn more of their neighbors.
SCIP (PI Prof. Claudia Diehl): The project focused on early integration patterns of recent migrants to four Western European countries. Prior to this project, no survey among new migrants had been conducted in Europe. BY the end of the project, 8.586 new migrants had been interviewed. About half of them could be interviewed twice during the project period. This degree of panel attrition is about the same as in the US based New Immigrant Sample.
SCIP has produced an extensive material on the methods of collecting and handling data. A methods report will contain important information on the target population and on national sampling strategies, on the topics covered by the questionnaire, and on the design and results of the pretests. In addition, it will give an overview on the data collection procedure, on the process of interviewer selection and training, and on the quality (“fraud”) controls applied during and after data collection. The methods report will include information on data cleaning procedures and it will contain a list of original and edited variables as well as information on weighting procedures where they are relevant. Given the different sampling strategies in the four countries, the team decided to come up with harmonized national data files rather than with one dataset for the whole project.
Novel data have been collected in the SCIP project on a phase in the integration process that is as important as under-researched. The first years after arrival can be expected to be a very dynamic phase during which important experiences and decisions are made that influence a great deal what happens later in life in terms of migrants’ integration in different spheres of the receiving society. The design of the SCIP project enables users of the data to disentangle origin and destination effects that influence migrants’ early patterns of integration. Based on SCIP data we could show, for example, that in Germany, Turkish migrants’ comparatively low level of identification with the receiving country does not exist from the beginning of their stay but evolves over time – especially among those who feel discriminated against in Germany.
The cross-national approach of the project sheds light on the role of national contexts beyond the direct effects of individuals’ exposure to specific integration policies (e.g. language and integration classes). Methodologically, regression analyses with country dummies will show whether or not, ceteris paribus, migrants’ integration trajectories differ across countries. In addition, controlled qualitative comparisons using both most similar and most dissimilar system designs and focusing on instructive pairs of cases will enable the data users to discuss the role of macro-level factors (migration history, integration policy, church-state relations, labour market institutions) in explaining potential cross-country differences. For example, on the integrated and open Irish labour market human and social capital facilitates the labour market integration of Polish migrants whereas returns to human capital are far smaller and social capital tends to be toxic on the segmented and restricted German labour market. Furthermore, Poles in the Netherlands have been faced with a rather negative rhetoric from the radical right that even opened an Eastern European hotspot, where the Dutch could complain about Eastern European migrants. As this party was supporter of the minority government at the time, and one of the largest parties in the country, it is anticipated that their perceived discrimination is more widespread than in those countries without the parties that took such explicit stances against EU migrants. Preliminary results show that Poles in the Netherlands feel much more discriminated against than in the other countries included in SCIP.
The multi-ethnic approach allows researchers to systematically compare nationality groups that differ with respect to their socio-economic group status. Within each country (except for Ireland) we have surveyed a group that resembles the classical low-skilled labour type with a Muslim background (Turks in Germany, Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands, Pakistanis in the UK) that we can now compare with a more recent immigrant group with a higher social group status and Catholic background (Poles in all four countries). Van Tubergen, e.g. studied the extent to which the migrant groups in the Netherlands differed in their religious practice, comparing their pre- and post-migration religious practice. The approach also sheds light on the changing profile of the older migrant group, since Pakistanis recently arriving in the UK other than through family reunification tend to be skilled or students. The project thus allows differentiation between phases of migration and enables us to ascertain how integration of these new migrants differs from the established patterns of their settled compatriots.
Finally, SCIP collected longitudinal data. The project has not only surveyed half of the migrants included in our study twice during their first three years in the receiving country, but also collected a great deal of information about the pre-migration phase so that data, e.g. on migrants’ religious involvement or on their labour market situation, is available for three points of measurement. This design offers the unique opportunity to study the mechanisms that lead to well-described but not yet fully understood integration outcomes later in life – and within- and between group variation herein. For example, Polish migrants are far less social-conservative than comparable stayers in Poland. The SCIP design helped to establish that this is only to a small part attributable to acculturation processes in the host country. Social-progressive attitudes appear to influence the migration decision and destination choice. All the contributions to the special issue in Ethnicity apply this longitudinal approach.
In November 2013, the project closed with a large workshop that was held at the University of Konstanz, Germany. During this event, nine papers based on SCIP data were presented by the team members. Eight external experts from across Europe and Israel were invited to discuss and comment on the papers. All papers will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal “Ethnicities”. Reports for policy makers have been finalized or are currently prepared, e.g. the report ‘New in the Netherlands’, a report commissioned by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment/Department Integration and Society.
SIMCUR (PI Prof. Birgit Leyendecker): The aim of SIMCUR has been to uncover the processes underlying developmental resilience in children from Turkish immigrant families during the transition to primary and secondary school in three European countries - Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.
The development of children’s aspirations and expectation, their psychosocial adaptation as well as their academic achievement are important indicators of their social integration. SIMCUR has aimed to combine (1) a developmental perspective to examine the slope of growth curves on important indicators of the social integration of immigrant children, (2) a perspective on features promoting resilience and children’s positive development, and (3) an ecological perspective to understand how multiple levels such as families, schools, peers, and communities directly and indirectly interact and influence how children of immigrants negotiate these developmental and cultural transitions. Researchers expected that differences on the macro- and meso-levels across the three countries would provide a natural laboratory to understand the contribution of a society to the social integration, psycho-social adaptation and the academic success of these children.
The project has provided information both to scientific community and local sectors of education, immigration and social affairs of the three countries. The longitudinal design, involving three age cohorts, and targeting educational, acculturation, psychosocial and other developmental outcomes facilitates a holistic perspective on child development in immigrant context. Most importantly, the cross-cultural design has provided insight into the complexities of immigration, adaptation, and integration, and the limitations of smaller national (even local) samples in generalizing to broader populations.
There has been considerable interest in the SIMCUR project. The project generated much attention among the academic community as well as among the general public. At all three sites of research, the teams were invited to give presentations both within the academia (e.g for students and colleagues at other universities, and on national and international conferences) as well as for the general public.
TCRAf-Eu (PI Prof. Valentina Mazzucato): The project collected and analyzed qualitative and quantitative primary data to assess the effects of living transnationally on different family members: children and caregivers in the country of origin and migrant parents overseas.
A kick-off meeting and a first workshop were held to bring researchers together to develop common practices, guidelines and tools, discuss tools that had previously been developed, agree on ethical guidelines, and decide on ways of data sharing and synchronization. All programme activities were developed and preliminary tool development and testing were completed in 2010. Primary data collection was fully launched and completed in 2011. In 2012 data were cleaned and data sets synchronized so that comparative analyses could be conducted. Reports on individual migration flows (Angola-Portugal; Angola-Netherlands; Nigeria-Ireland; Nigeria-Netherlands; Ghana-Netherlands) as well as comparative flows (Angolans in Portugal and The Netherlands; Nigerians in Ireland and The Netherlands; Angolans, Nigerians and Ghanaians in The Netherlands) were conducted. All project related research activities have been completed and supervision was provided at all stages.
A comparison of the functioning and outcomes of TCRAs according to receiving and sending country contexts has been achieved. Main indicators for the contextual database were agreed upon by partners. Data entry templates were developed for surveys, protocols and instruction books were prepared for data entry agents. In 2011 the contextual database was developed, data entry and synchronizing have been completed. The integration of data from 4 work packages as well as the NWO-funded project (TCRA) followed in 2012. The contextual database was finalized containing more than 35 contextual indicators. Data analyses were conducted for all comparative papers.
The TCRAf-Eu project has contributed in various ways to shaping the field of migration studies and in particular transnational families. By including the approach, methods and findings in the teaching modules of various courses offered at Maastricht University as well as at seminar presentations at the Department of Applied Psychology at UCC and ICS at the University of Lisbon, the project has shaped the teaching content at both MA and PhD levels. Three PhDs and 3 post-doctoral researchers have received direct training in methods and approaches for the study of transnational families within the TRCAf-Eu project. Researchers from the 3 African partners have been included in the workshops and through the collaboration with the TCRA project, one researcher from Ghana has also received training and a PhD scholarship. At Maastricht University, a course on transnational migration has been instituted in the regular curriculum of the MA programme on Globalisation and Development Studies.
The key publications of the project have put transnational families on the research agenda of family studies, which have up to now, largely neglected this family form. Furthermore, a special issue is planned in another top social science journal (Social Science and Medicine) issuing from the final conference of the TCRAf-Eu project. This attests to the success of the TCRAf-Eu project in bringing transnational family research to the attention of family scholars and migration specialists at a high academic level.
The project is currently producing results that are also of policy interest. As a result we have produced one policy brief and are aiming to produce a second one. The brief has elicited interest from practitioners and members of the European Commission. It has also resulted in a full two-page article in one of the largest national newspapers in the Netherlands (de Volkskrant, June 13, 2013). The final TCRAf-Eu conference had a policy round table which was very well attended by people from civil society organizations, European institutions and consultancies and the media (March 28, 2013). Finally, the project has been publicized via local migrant media stations in The Netherlands, Portugal and in Ghana and has created greater awareness of the issues faced by migrants. The radio and television shows elicited discussions amongst the research population on the topic of raising children in the host country versus leaving them at home.
TEMPO (PI Prof. Giovanni Facchini): The researchers involved in the TEMPO project have carried out an extensive array of research activities involving temporary immigration patterns:
Firstly the project has studied the causes and consequences of migration. For example, distinguishing between Non-Turkish and Turkish immigrants, TEMPO project found that while among the latter, low skilled immigrants have the highest likelihood to stay in Germany, for Non-Turkish immigrants there exists a u-shaped relationship between human capital and outmigration. Another important study has derived from a temporary migration framework with heterogeneous agents a time-series model which has been estimated based on macro data for Germany. The authors find that migration stocks rather than migration flows form a cointegration relationship with explanatory variables such as the income differential, which supports the theoretical prediction of the temporary migration model with heterogeneous agents. Building on this model, the team has worked also on a theoretical framework which links the optimal investment in human capital to the duration of stay assuming that preferences or migration costs are heterogeneous.
What comes to integration of immigrants in the receiving country and impact on the length of stay, TEMPO has showed how crucial it is to understand and examine the role played by information flows between migrants and their network outside the country of immigration in determining migrant remittance behaviour. The patterns of assimilation of migrants in the destination country and the impact of the length of stay have also been studied. In particular, TEMPO has compared the patterns of unemployment duration between native Germans and foreign immigrants. The role of friendship ties with natives in explaining patterns of cultural assimilation in Germany has instead been analyzed in a joint work between the HWWI team and the CEPR team.
Finally, TEMPO has studied immigration policies and their roles in migration. It has demonstrated that skill-selective immigration policies increase incentives to invest in education in sending countries, but that sending countries suffer from increasing skill-selective immigration policies. A second project addresses instead the question of whether the contest for skills can result in a ‘tragedy of the commons’, i.e. in a reduction of the skill level of the immigrants in the long-term. Also, the project has observed that large numbers of illegal immigrants reside in many advanced destination countries with strict immigration policies, and therefore ask why are immigration policy targets announced, if they are not enforced. To address this apparent puzzle, TEMPO developed a political agency model with uncertainty on the migrants' supply, where an elected official can either have preferences congruent with the median voter, or prefer a larger number of migrants. They show that, if the incumbent prefers more migrants than the median, he might find it optimal to announce a binding quota to be re-elected, and strategically relax its enforcement, or choose an ineffective instrument like border control.
THEMIS (PI Prof. Oliver Bakewell): The overall aim of THEMIS has been to advance the concept of a migration system through a theoretically driven inquiry about the factors that condition the dynamics of migration system formation and decline. The basic research question for THEMIS has been: under what conditions do migration systems become established and under what conditions might they decline? THEMIS provided empirical findings to challenge the simplistic invocation of the migration system based on migrant networks leading to the perpetuation of migration flows once started by pioneer migrants. Also, the project has refined existing concepts and elaborated new ones that can help researchers analyse the conditions under which migration flows do become systemic and the breakdown of systems once started.
THEMIS introduced the notion of the migration corridor (between localities) as a way of getting beyond consideration of simple national bilateral movements. However, it rapidly became clear that it was extremely important to separate out different chronological and class/social and gendered layers of migration within each corridor – what we refer to as migration ‘waves’. Not only do we need to distinguish between such waves, we also have to analyse their interactions.
It has also become clear that the concept of a migration pioneer does not stand up very well to empirical enquiry. Furthermore, the project has explored many different aspects of the role of social networks in sustaining migration. Much of the current literature that has adopted cumulative causation as an explanation for migration dynamics tends to conflate feedback with the operation of migrants’ social networks. The THEMIS project results showed that it is important to distinguish such ‘direct feedback’ from ‘indirect feedback’. The latter is concerned with more extended causal processes.
The rising importance of new connections created by social media and information communication technologies (ICTs) became very evident in all the corridors. This highlighted the importance of distinguishing between the operation of pre-existing social networks of family and friends that may encourage or discourage people’s migration and (often virtual) social networks that potential migrants may join in order to migrate.
The project’s methodology has also made a valuable contribution to the field. THEMIS has been one of the first migration projects to use RDS methodology largely successfully with migrant populations
Project collaborations
The programme consisted of twelve independent research projects. One of the main tasks of the scientific coordination office was to create links and collaboration among these projects that came from various disciplines and approaches which may not traditionally discuss well together.
The most successful example of new collaboration was led by the TEMPO team (PI Prof. Giovanni Facchini) that collaborated with the MIDI-REDIE, SCIP and MI3 projects. Scholars participating in TEMPO and MI3 projects were also recently successful to receive funding in the NORFACE transnational research program Welfare State Futures. Three of the CILS4EU national teams are successfully continuing their work with funding received by Dutch, German and Swedish research councils. CILS4EU has also proved to become a role model for other countries who have decided to conduct similar studies: so far, Belgium started a very similar study in 2011, with Karen Phalet and Bart Meuleman as PIs. Also a Norwegian study is on the way, as the project team at the Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research received funding from the Norwegian Research Council for a "Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in Norway (CILS-NOR)" and will start 2015/2016 with data collection.
Furthermore, the previous contacts between research groups in SCIP and LineUp deepened the co-operation. The SCIP team participated in a conference in Istanbul in May organized by the LineUp project and in the THEMIS conference in Oxford in September 2013. They also initiated collaboration between Lubbers, Gijsberts (both SCIP) and Engbersen (THEMIS) as well as discussing possibilities to analyse migrant integration differences in a similar way as proposed by the SCIP project (register based sampling) and Engbersen’s project.
While Nordic academic connections have a long tradition. NODES gives an example on bringing new Nordic collaborators together and how such a regional and superficially similar countries offer a rich and important stage for migration studies not only for these respective countries, but also regarding the whole Europe.
THEMIS project gives an example on the projects’ contact outside the program itself. THEMIS has collaborated with international projects including the European funded ‘GEITONIES’ and ‘EUMAGINE’, ‘BELTS’ funded by the Portugese agency for Science and Technology and ‘PREMIG’ funded by the Research Council of Norway whilst also collaborating with SCIP on methodological matters and the Institute of Labour and Social Research in Norway
The scientific coordination office has also sought to arrange collaboration possibilities outside the program limits. For example, in September 2010 NORFACE Migration, CReAM and the World Bank jointly organized a smaller conference on Migration, Development and Global Issues. The conference featured presentations by the projects of the NORFACE Migration programme specified in economics as well as research on development and migration funded by the World Bank through the Multi-donor Trust Fund on Labor Markets, Job Creation, and Economic Growth.
These collaborations have demanded an effort for creating multi- and crossdisciplinary discussions and communication, a task given to the scientific coordination office at the beginning of the program.
The most important way the scientific coordination office supported the inter- and transdisciplinary aims of the program were the conferences and workshops. They all included keynote and invited speeches from representatives of all different disciplines involved in the program whilst both the Academic and the Policy Podia, brought closer together all the different disciplines, highlighting everyone’s contribution on the field. The mixed contributed sessions during the conferences, featuring papers under the same subject from different disciplines, were an important mechanism to inform researchers about similar work in other disciplines, and led to a lot of discussion by scholars from different disciplines. It initiated joint work, as well as common research proposals.
The Discussion Papers Series and the NORFACE Compact distributed the work of all the academics involved in the program to the rest of the teams as well as different networks and promoted the inter- and transdisciplinary character of the programme. Finally, the programme website has attracted people from all different disciplines and promoted those involved in the NORFACE Migration program.
Potential Impact:
The Programme’s overall activities on wider societal impact and dissemination activities have been steered by the scientific coordination office, led by Prof. Christian Dustmann (University College London). The most important, visible and highly estimated events for these activities were the two international conferences the office arranged.
The interdisciplinary conference ’Migration: Economic Change, Social Challenge’ (6th-9th April 2011, London) was embedded in a week-long event ‘UCL Migration Week’ organized by CReAM and the UCL Grand Challenges Programme. It featured a series of events related to migration, such as Exhibitions, Lectures, Discussions and Film screenings. The conference included a Policy Podium, where high level practitioners, politicians and policy media representatives discussed migration related issues. Evan Davis, a British Economist, Journalist and Presenter for the BBC chaired the podium and discussants included Charles Clarke (former UK Home Secretary), Dr. Markus González Beilfuss (Director General of Immigration in the Spanish Ministry of Work and Immigration), David Goodhart (founder and editor of Prospect magazine), Professor Malcolm Grant (former President and Provost of University College London) and David Metcalf (Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee). The panel discussed the challenges to policy making from the diversity of interests affected by immigration. Furthermore, the Academic Podium chaired by Chris Giles (the economics editor of the Financial Times), comprised of George Borjas, Bob Gregory, Alejandro Portes and Mark Rosenzweig, discussed the role of academic research in the public debate of migration.
In April 2013, the Conference Migration: Global Development, New Frontiers took place in London. The conference featured three high level policy events, co-organised by the Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke, CReAM fellow and former UK Home Secretary, and was also sponsored by UCL Grants Challenges Programme, the European Migration Network, and University of Warwick’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy co-sponsored the event. The Policy Podia covered ‘How should Governments Best Address World Trends in Migration’ and ‘Migration: the Key Challenge for the EU’.
The scientific office maintained a website to represent the Norface Migration Programme [http://www.norface-migration.org/]. The website has provided a platform that showcased the programme, the individual projects, events organized by both the scientific office and the projects, publications and all the individual researchers involved in the programme.. All the invited sessions of the two conferences were recorded and the invited speakers and many participants were interviewed. The recordings are available to the public and interested academics on a permanent basis through the CReAM website [see http://www.cream-migration.org/eventdetail.php?id=76 ]. There were 30 press briefings for selected papers and social media coverage [https://storify.com/IanPPreston/migration-global-development-new-frontiers].
The scientific office hosted on its website two publications series. The NORFACE Discussion Paper series reached over 100 working papers before the end of the programme [http://www.norface-migration.org/publrespapers.php]. It continued to exist on the CReAM website after the end of the programme. If the discussion paper series was mainly targeted to an academic audience, the NORFACE Compact Series was set up to address policy makers as well as the general public [http://www.norface-migration.org/pages.php?id=33]. The first issue, Migration: Moving into View (Spring 2012), reviewed a selection of research taking place within the NORFACE Migration programme. Migration: New Developments (Spring 2013) reported on research such as the impact of migrant networks and social media on migration decisions, communication flows and remittance behaviour, education and well-being of migrants’ children, the impact of immigration on productivity, wages and urban development and the role of immigration and welfare policies in shaping population flows. The last issue, Migration: Paths of Exploration (Spring 2014), introduced primary data collected by the NORFACE Migration project, the fieldwork experiences of the teams and summaries of ongoing projects. Scientific coordination office also delivered a regular email newsletter on the programme to all subscribers. Finally, the scientific office has also produced 20 peer reviewed scientific publications during the programme.
Each research project had their individual policy and dissemination activities. The 12 projects reported on ca. 500 academic publications and over 500 academic presentations. Each project have had media coverage and participated in policy discussions. Each project has also arranged thematic workshops or even conferences, usually including not only research team members but invited keynote speakers and other discussants and presentations. The activities are introduced herewith:
CHOICES
CHOICES engaged with policy makers and users throughout the project and had insightful feedback that helped to revise the research questions and focus on pertinent issues. CHOICES also disseminated the results using various channels including conference presentations, working papers, policy briefs, non-technical publications.
Engagement with Policymakers:
1. PI Prof. Wahba visited the OECD on 7th Sept 2010, and met with Jean-Christophe Dumont (Division of non-Member Economies and International Migration) and Jean-Pierre Garson (Head of the International Migration Division).
2. Wahba visited the World Bank in March 2010 and discussed the CHOICES project with Calgar Ozden, a senior economist in the Development Research Group's Trade and Integration team
3. Wahba attended a meeting at the British Academy in London, on “Engaging Academic Social Scientists in Government Policy Making and Delivery” 6 June 2011.
4. Bijwaard contributed to Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy expert meeting Future migration Patterns and the Economic Crisis: An International Perspective, Feb 2012.
5. Bijwaard gave an interview in CBS relatiemazagine 02/11 p18-19 (Magazine of Statistics Netherlands)
6. Policymakers were invited and contributed to the discussion of the CHOICES workshop at the Hague, April 2012.
Policy Briefs:
1. G. E. Bijwaard, C. Schluter and J. Wahba (2011) “Does Unemployment cause return migration?”, CPC Policy Briefing, June.
2. A. Razin and J. Wahba (2011) “Migration Policy and Welfare State in Europe”, CESifo DICE Report, Winter 4/2011.
3. A. Razin and J. Wahba (2011) “Capturing differences between free and controlled immigration: Country bilateral data”, Voxeu, March.
Engagement with wider audience:
PI Wahba contributed a piece in collaboration with sociologist Bindi Shah which examines aspects of international migration from two disciplines (economics and sociology) and highlights the new complementarities and similarities between the two disciplines. This was published in the Economic Review and posted on line to reach specifically college students and non-academics.
Bijwaard has been invited to contribute to the European Migration Network Conference, Brussels, Sept 2010, to the discussion on current migration issues in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer and to the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) high level expert meeting Future migration Patterns and the Economic Crisis: An International Perspective.
Dissemination:
Apart from 13 peer-reviewed articles or book chapters published during the funding period, CHOICES researchers also gave altogether 35 academic presentations in academic conferences and workshops. CHIOCES has also organised six seminars and workshops. Especially noteworthy is the Migrant’s CHOICES workshop at NIDI, The Hague, 13 April 2012. Around 35 participants (academics, policymakers (EC, OECD, and Dutch government) and officials (Statistics Netherlands)) attended. There were 10 presentations including a presentation from the OECD and participants from the TEMPO project.
CILS4EU
Given the overall aim of CILS4EU to establish an enduring data infrastructure project on the integration of immigrant children in different European societies, the main activities for dissemination and social impact have been concerned with setting up this infrastructure. This has been achieved in cooperation with GESIS. The first wave of the data is already available.
The Principal Investigator as well as the Co-Applicants have introduced the project at several “potential user”-oriented events, e.g. at the “Monday Seminar Series” at the Institute for Social & Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex, at the Conference “Economic Change, Quality of Life, and Social Cohesion” in Stockholm, at the “Colloquium of the Sociology Department” at the University of Trento or at the Colloquium of the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto. The project has been presented at several conferences and workshops, not only by the Principal Investigator and the Co-Applicants.
Besides these activities around the establishment of a data infrastructure project and the promotion of the project and data, several research partners were also involved in the dissemination of the results of CILS4EU to other stakeholders and the general public.
The Swedish team took part in one governmental investigation into xenophobia, with a report entirely based on CILS4EU data, see: “Jonsson, Jan O., Sara Brolin Låftman, Frida Rudolphi, and Per Engzell Waldén. 2012: ”Integration, etnisk mångfald och attityder bland högstadieelever.” Bilaga 6 (pp. 263-391) to the Governmental Commission, SOU 2012:74, Främlingsfienden inom oss. Stockholm: Fritzes”. Furthermore, the Swedish team also used CILS4EU data as part of an investigation on child poverty for the National Board of Health and Social Affairs: “Mood, Carina and Jan O. Jonsson. 2012: Ekonomisk utsatthet och välfärd bland barn och deras familjer 1968-2010. Report for the National Board of Health and Social Affairs.” Finally, the Swedish team has been invited to and participated in a hearing with the Swedish Ministry of Finance, on ethnic minority children’s educational attainment.
The Minister for Integration of the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg visited the home institution of the PI, the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, and was informed about the aims, design, progress and first results of CILS4EU. The meeting was very productive, and the minister asked researchers involved in CILS4EU if it were be possible to conduct a smaller survey in the Federal State of Baden-Wuerttemberg to assess the influence of a recently implemented specific educational reform focussing on the scholastic attainment of immigrant children.
In England, Anthony Heath was part of several national expert groups dealing with discrimination and ethnic disadvantages in education and the labour market. In doing so he gave several presentations at the House of Commons, Westminster. Furthermore, Anthony Heath was also engaged in international expert groups. For example, he presented the paper “Affirmative action and anti-discrimination policies: an overview” at the seminar of the OECD Expert Group on Migration on ‘Ethnic Discrimination in OECD countries – incidence and policy implications’ in Paris. He also presented a paper on “Attitudes to migration and integration” at a workshop on ‘Migration and integration: the future of our communities’ at the European Parliament in Brussels.
It has become evident that the extensive data collection during CILS4EU comes at the price of a comparably small number of articles published to date with CILS4EU data. Nevertheless, the project has already published (or are accepted) 50 peer-reviewed articles and 13 other relevant scientific publications. The main, and probably one of the most visible, publications of the CILS4EU project will be a volume edited by Frank Kalter, Anthony Heath, Jan O. Jonsson, and Frank van Tubergen. The volume will be published in the Proceedings of the British Academy and will be titled “Growing Up in Diverse Europe”. The volume has been preliminarily accepted and will focus on the whole spectrum of CILS4EU. CILS4EU arranged altogether ten workshops, which included not only project researchers but also other experts of the research field as speakers and discussants.
IMEM
IMEM has presented its research in 19 national and international conferences, to a wide array of audiences that includes migration researchers, statisticians, demographers, geographers and to persons working with migration data at national statistical offices. During the funding period IMEM concentrated on creating the model. Publications will follow, although three working papers (under preparation for peer reviewed scientific articles) were already published.
IMEM arranged a workshop for introducing the results of the project to a wider academic audience (25-27 May 2011, Southampton). The event included 37 targeted participants from 12 countries. Prof. Joel E. Cohen (Rockefeller University) and Hania Zlotnik (Director of Population Division, United Nations) joined as special guest presenters. The workshop aimed at facilitating discussion and exchange of information amongst experts in international migration by focusing on the available data and various modelling approaches. IMEM was presented in detail and discussed, along with invited presentations by experts on migration data or on estimating migration flows.
LineUp
LineUp has been very active on seeking publicity to make people aware of the study and facilitate a good response. Mainstream media presentations, interviews and discussions include:
• TRT Haber (largest public television company of Turkey), an interview on LineUp project “Migration Histories of Turks in Europe” on 13 August 2011.
• Milliyet (mainstream Turkish Newspaper), an interview on “Turkish Migration to Europe and the Breivik’s killings” on 31 July 2011.
• Taraf (highly influential Turkish newspaper), an interview on “The 50th anniversary of Turkish migration to Europe” on 24 September 2011.
• Haber Turk (mainstream television channel), an interview on “The increase of far-right sentiments and migration in Europe” on 2 August 2011.
• Star Gazetesi (mainstream Turkish newspaper), an interview on “Integration debates in European countries and Turkey's EU membership” on 12 April 2010.
The researchers of LineUp have given altogether 54 academic presentations in national and international scientific conferencese. These include 8 invited or keynote lectures. LineUp organized a final workshop and invited leading scholars, including Prof Telles, Prof Phalet, Prof Essex, Prof De Valk, Prof DiPrete, Prof Ewing, Dr Creighton, Dr Ersanilli, Dr Akgunduz, Dr Aysan, to review the draft of the forthcoming project monograph in Istanbul 12-15 May 2014.
MD-RDE
German team in MD-RDE has been involved in the Nationaler Aktionsplan zur Umsetzung des Nationalen Integrationsplans, Dialogforum "Arbeitsmarkt und Erwerbsleben" (in coll. with Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs). In November 2012 the team had a meeting with the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency (FADA) in Berlin. The Co-PI Stephan Brunow (IAB) is member of the work group “AG E1: Securing the domestic labour force” of the program “Demographic Challenges for Germany” initialized by the Federal Government of Germany.
The interviews with scientists that were conducted in the framework of interviewing Estonian migrants in Finland by MD-RDE researchers from Tartu University were used as an input in Research and Innovation Policy Monitoring Program (http://www.tips.ut.ee/eng/?) in the framework of Mobility of Estonian Researchers in Europe. The interviews and their analysis were shared with specialists from the Estonian Research Council and Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.
The problems of regional disparities and their relationships to migrant diversity as well as attitudes towards immigrants of the Baltic States people were discussed during several meetings and seminars of Latvian and Lithuanian universities and research institutions. In September 2012 the members of Latvian Econometric Society visited the MD-RDE team at the University of Tartu, Department of Economics, to discuss problems of educational diversity and the relationship between regional disparities, innovation and education.
Ceren Ozgen was interviewed by Yvonne Prince (director of the Dutch research institute Panteia) on the impact of cultural diversity on innovation outcomes of the Dutch firms. Her findings for the Netherlands presented in co-authored papers with Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot are used as an input for the Panteia/EIM’s report “Meer innovatie door buitenlanders” (2012).
The media attention includes nine presentations of the project results, most notably:
• 15/2/2011: TV1 Breakfast show, interviewed by Petra Bagust on immigration and the ageing population around the world
• 12/5/2011: Wall Street Journal, article by Justin Lahart “McDonald’s Economics” on the research paper “Innovation and immigration in European regions” by Ceren Ozgen, Peter Nijkamp and Jacques Poot.
• 25 May 2012 – newspaper interview by Simon Day of The Guardian (UK) – article on the “New Right” and their assessment of the economic impacts of immigration
MD-RDE has reported 91 peer reviewed journal articles or book chapters and 44 working papers. Besides an active participation in programme conferences, the scholars participating in MD-RDE have given over 150 academic presentations in various scientific conferences during the project.
MD-RDE arranged 14 project workshops and was involved in arranging six international academic workshops. Most importantly, the workshop “How does culture matter”, on the relation between culture and the labour market productivity in Nuremberg (July 15-16, 2010) included two keynote papers: Jeffrey Alexander (Yale University, USA) titled “Post- Bourdieu: cultural sociology and economic life – for a strong program” and Peter Nijkamp (VU Amsterdam) with his contribution titled “Post- Florida: cultural diversity and socio-economic impact assessment “. All in all, 18 papers were presented in two days and around 60 participants took part at the workshop.
The International Conference: Increasing Heterogeneity in the Workforce and its Impact, December 6-7, 2012, in the Congress Centre of the Federal Employment Agency (BA), Nuremberg, Germany included two keynote speeches (Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: Does diversity enhance the long-term economic impact of migration?- Evidence from the US and Jeremy Dawson: What do we mean by diversity?) and 25 presentations. In April 2013, a Tinbergen Workshop on the Economics of Cultural Diversity was organized by Jacques Poot, Peter Nijkamp and Jessie Bakens. This was an international workshop where scholars from around the world presented research on the economics of cultural diversity. From the Workshop, a book will be published.
MI3
MI3 has disseminated its research output to the general public especially by summarizing the research in the NORFACE Compact Series. Also, the project has published a number of non-technical papers aimed at informing policy makers, like:
- Sarvimäki, Matti (2013): Muuttoliikkeet, työmarkkinat ja julkinen talous. in Martikainen, Saukkonen, Säävälä (toim.): Muuttajat: Kansainvälinen muuttoliike ja suomalainen yhteiskunta. Gaudemus. [Migration, labor markets and public finances]
- Sarvimäki, Matti - Ansala, Laura - Eerola, Essi - Hämäläinen, Kari - Hämäläinen, Ulla - Pesola, Hanna - Riihelä, Marja (2014): Maahanmuuttajien integroituminen Suomeen. VATT Analyysi 2. [Integration of immigrants to Finland]
- Damm, Anna P. “Nej, flygtninge bliver ikke mere ledige af at bo i et socialt udsat boligområde”, Berlingske Politiko, Nov. 30th 2013.
Besides the 31 scientific publications the project has reported, all team members have regularly presented their work to the academic community at the NORFACE Workshops and several international conferences (for example: ASSA Annual Meeting, EALE Conference, ESPE Conference, SOLE Annual Meeting, Verein für Socialpolitik Annual Conference, the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference, EEA-ESEM conference, CAED- COST Conference, IZA Annual Migration Meeting).
NODES
Members of the NODES project have had multiple active networks with the academic community and local stakeholders, which include both international and national academic networks, and local as well as national public institutions and NGOs. Researchers have had direct contacts with high-level state and municipal officers. NODES team has taken advantage of these contacts and presented the project outcomes to the academic community, public authorities and general public in various occasions in all four countries. The team members have, for instance, organised international seminars on the topics of housing and urban residential segregation. The NODES team members also get frequently approached by the national as well as international media concerning issues related to urban development and ethnic residential segregation in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Members of the NODES team have appeared in close to hundreds of interviews in the radio, TV, newspapers, and other types of journals during the entire project period.
The most important policy events and media presentations include:
- Principal Investigator Mari Vaattovaara gave several speeches and presentations on deprived urban neighbourhoods and urban renewal in the national TV and radio as well as at the meeting of five ministers in 2014.
- Prof. Terje Wessel presented the outcomes for the Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation (Norway).
- A research paper on “white flight” written by the Finnish NODES team was published in one of the most highly valued national academic journals in Finland, and it was ranked as the most frequently downloaded and read academic article of the journal in 2013
- Nodes team members in all four countries were interviewed several times for the national news at the outbreak of the neighbourhood violence in Sweden in May/June 2013.
- The Norwegian Nodes team was interviewed for the newspaper Aftenposten, presenting extensive results from NODES, see for example “Upwards, outwards, westwards: relocation of ethnic minorities in the Oslo region” (June 18 and 19, 2013). The story was picked by other newspapers.
- Norwegian Nodes team wrote a chronicle on the homepage of the Norwegian Broacasting Corporation relating to neighbourhood choices and intra-urban mobility. http://www.nrk.no/ytring/hvem-vil-vi-vaere-nabo-med_-1.10892287 other member of the Norwegian NODES team were also interviewed: http://www.nrk.no/fordypning/oslo---den-delte-byen-1.11314398
- The Finnish Nodes team participated in the public discussion of the existence of racism in Finland by writing a letter to an editor which presented Nodes outcomes in the biggest national newspaper: Vaattovaara, M., Vilkama, K. & Dhalmann, H. (2013). Asenteet maahanmuuttajiin muokkaavat metropolia. Vieraskynä. Helsingin Sanomat 21.2.2013.
- PI Mari Vaattovaara participated in the Future Report work of the Government of Finland in 2012.
- PI Mari Vattovaara and Co-PI Roger Andersson had prominent roles in a documentary for the Finnish TV on ethnic residential segregation in the Nordic countries. The programme was broadcasted in the national TV in Finland in October 2011.
- Co-PI H. S. Andersen presented the outcomes in the Ministry of Integration in Denmark in 2010.
Besides the 36 academic publications reported, NODES has also listed altogether 62 academic presentations and 16 project workshops.
SCIP
SCIP researchers have produced two reports commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (Gijsberts, Merove and Marcel Lubbers. 2013. Nieuw in Nederland. Het leven van recent gemigreerde Bulgaren en Polen. The Hague: SCP and a yet unnamed report based on data collection wave 2 that will be published in 2014).
Policy discussions have been addressed in four speeches at governmental meetings and workshops:
• Diehl, Claudia: Current Immigration Processes in Germany. Presentation to the Federal Minister of Interior Affairs. Berlin, October 2011.
• Koenig, Matthias: Conference “Free Movement and Participation for EU Citizens”, organized by the Dutch and German Ministries of the Interior in September 2012 in Rotterdam.
• Gijsberts, Merove: New immigrants from Poland and Bulgaria in the Netherlands. Directory Labour Relations. Ministry of Social Affairs, The Hague.
• Gijsberts, Merove and Marcel Lubbers. 2013. Invited by the WRR (Scientific Council for Government Policies) for the workshop ‘Labour migration in the EU’, October 10, 2013, The Hague.
Besides the 11 academic publications the project has already published, the project members have introduced their results in 26 national and international academic workshops and conferences. On November 28-30 2013, the project closed with a large workshop on “Socio-cultural Integration Processes of New Immigrants in Europe: First findings from the SCIP project” (University of Konstanz). Seven papers based on SCIP data were presented and external experts were invited to comment on the papers. Papers will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal “Ethnicities”.
A one-day workshop on Design, Implementation, and Analysis: An Exploration of Respondent Driven Sampling was held in London in May 2011. The workshop brought together statisticians and survey methodologists developing Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) with researchers using the method to survey immigrants. The seminar was part-funded by the Norface Migration Programme with additional support from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, the UK Longitudinal Studies Centre and the Economic and Social Research Council Research Centre on Micro-Social Change and the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. The workshop has resulted in an edited book: Tyldum, Guri and Lisa Johnston, eds. (2014) Applying Respondent Driven Sampling to Migrant Populations, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
SIMCUR
The project has generated much attention among the academic community as well as among the general public. In Germany, research on immigrant children has received more and more attention over the last couple of years. As a member of the Scientific Counsel for the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, the PI is currently working on an expertise on immigrant families in Germany. The experiences of the SIMCUR project have also resulted in a handbook project on Positive Development of Minority Children. The project has invited scholars from the US, Canada and Europe to shed light on the resilience of immigrant children and on the multiple pathways of adaptation and well-being through interactions with families, peers, schools, neighborhoods and communities. Together with Natasha Cabrera (University of Maryland), Birgit Leyendecker is the co-editor of this Handbook.
Co-PI Brit Oppedal has been invited to present the SIMCUR project and findings from the study at Oxford university and at a conference in Berlin on the adaptation of Turkish immigrants in Europe, aiming at a much broader audience of school administrators, politicians and journalists. The Norwegian team (led by Co-PI Oppendal) also arranged monthly lunch seminars for PhD students and other interested researchers in the field of immigration and acculturation and, in collaboration with other research institutions, also organized a conference for immigrant NGO’s on health promotion among immigrants in Norway.
The project has produced altogether 26 academic publications (either published or accepted for publications) at the end of the funding period. The project researchers have reported about 37 academic presentations on their results in national and international conferences.
TCRAf-Eu
The project had contact with various stakeholders interested in the project: IOM Portugal; ACIDI; government agency responsible for bilateral relations between Angola and Portugal; Angolan embassy cultural services in Portugal; Angolan embassy in The Hague, RPD Africa for the phone-in show. The project has arranged a discussion with both academic audience as well as stakeholders of schools and Ministries at the Transnational Child Raising Arrangements Workshop Aburi, Ghana in Ghana , 4-5 July, 2012.
The project was introduced in two newspaper articles: Moeders en Vaders ver weg, Volkskrant, 13 June 2013 and De Keerzijde van migratie: gevolgen voor kinderen die achterblijven. Internationale Spectator 67(3): 31-37. The PI Prof. Mazzucato gave a TEDx pitch on the research topic in June 2013. First policy brief on TCRAf-Eu findings was published in 2013.
In order to secure the data collection activities, the project arranged a number of public information activities:
• Brochures to inform participants in the surveys about the project, its aims, the partner institutions and the contact people whom they can call for more information.
• A website (www.tcra.nl) where interested parties can obtain more information about the research, its aims, outputs and participating researchers.
• Radio and TV talk shows were organized with migrant communities in Portugal and Netherlands. Migrants spoke about the issues they experience with living in transnational families. The shows were a way to obtain qualitative information on the research topic and to provide feedback to the relevant research populations.
• Newspaper coverage about the TCRAf-Eu project in Spits Nieuws & Entertainment, July 2, 2010: ‘Grensverleggend migratieonderzoek’.
The project arranged a creative writing workshop with secondary school children in Ghana to develop student writing skills and write their stories about living in transnational families some of which are published on our website: Website: http://fasos-research.nl/tcra/2012/08/students-stories/
The project researchers have reported altogether 58 presentations in national or international conferences. The project organized a closing conference with a PhD workshop and a policy roundtable, which consisted of three thematic sessions on children, parents and caregivers, and media. For each session an expert panel was invited and we had an international and diverse group of participants, like policy-makers, NGO-members, professionals, academics and journalists.
TEMPO
The TEMPO researchers have presented their studies in a number of policy events, such as:
- Workshop “Tagung Deutsche(r) werden - Deutsche(r) bleiben?“, German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, Nuremberg, 2012.
- Workshop on “Demographic change and demand for qualified labour”, Hamburg Chamber of Commerce, Hamburg, 2013.
- Workshop “Moving for work - temporary and permanent labour migration”, German Ministry for Family Affairs, Berlin, 2012.
- Round Table discussion at the Conference “Internationality of Metropolitan Life and Economics” with national policy makers and business representatives, Hamburg, 2011.
- EU Integration Forum, Brussels, 2012.
The German team has provided direct policy advice to the Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs and to the board of the German Public Employment Services. The team is also involved in several activities providing policy advice to the European Commission and the OECD Working Party of Employment in the areas of migration and immigration policies.
The project has published six policy reports. Besides these reports, TEMPO researchers have published 55 academic publications. TEMPO arranged four academic conferences, which brought together the project members with a number of most important scholars of the field as keynote speakers incl. Frederic Docquier (Université Catholique de Louvain), David McKenzie (World Bank), Giovanni Peri (University of California-Davis), Dean Yang (University of Michigan), Hillel Rapoport (Bar-Ilan University), Imran Rasul (University College London) etc. Researchers of TEMPO have presented their findings in 29 international scientific conferences.
THEMIS
THEMIS project webpage has been set within the IMI, University of Oxford website (http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/projects/themis). THEMIS research has also been promoted via other THEMIS partner websites. Project updates were published in the IMI e-newsletter. News of THEMIS conference presentations and project publications featured in the PRIO Migration Research Group Update Newsletter December 2013.
Presentations to non-academic stakeholders:
• Scoping study reports and internal briefing papers disseminated to the informants interviewed.
• Updates on the project to Ukrainian, Brazilian and Moroccan embassies in Oslo, 2010.
• Sónia Pereira and Jennifer McGarrigle presented the results of the IGOT-UL scoping study to the acting Consul and economic advisor of the Moroccan Embassy in Lisbon during a meeting at the Luso-American Foundation, 2010.
• Promotion of THEMIS research amongst migrant communities in destination countries included articles published in relevant community-organization media so as to increase the profile of the project (e.g. in Brazilian News – a Brazilian community media in the UK; Chá com Leite (Brazilian internet gateway in UK); Ukrainska Dumka – a Ukrainian-speaking newspaper in the UK).
• Agnieszka Kubal made presentations about THEMIS to participants of a Brazilian Week seminar event, St. Peter’s College, Oxford; as part of an IMI Seminar Series event, University of Oxford; and at the Brazilian Migration to the UK Research Group (GEB) Annual Seminar, Brazilian Embassy, London (2010).
• “Oekraïne migratieland Nederland geen doelland voor gemiddelde”, Oekraïne Magazine [Ukraine Magazine], 16(3): 4-5, Autumn 2013. Article by Haijo Boomsma about the migration history from Ukraine to the Netherlands based on interview with Rianne Dekker and Marije Faber.
Besides publishing in the programme Working Papers and Impact-series, THEMIS researchers have published altogether 44 academic publications by the end of the programme. Besides the programme conferences presented their results in 35 academic conferences.
The project arranged two internal workshops and a final conference “Examining Migration Dynamics: Networks and Beyond”, University of Oxford, 24-26 September 2014. The call for papers attracted over 200 abstracts. There were 6 keynote papers (2 on each of the 3 main themes), 80 additional papers presented in 26 parallel sessions (including methodology sessions), plus opening and concluding plenary sessions. 15 papers were by team members based on THEMIS data (see below). 139 participants from 28 countries attended the conference with a high percentage taking an active part. See project website's conference webpages for full programme details and to access abstracts, shared papers and online video and audio recordings of presentations: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/research-projects/themis/conference2013. A news item on the THEMIS final conference published on the European Web Site on Integration by Alina Esteves is available at: http://ec.europa.eu/ewsi/en/news/newsdetail.cfm?ID_ITEMS=38268.
List of Websites:
Research programme homepage: http://www.norface-migration.org/
Scientific coordinator: Prof. Christian Dustmann (University College London)
email: c.dustmann@ucl.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/
Coordination office (Academy of Finland)
Coordinator, science adviser Jyrki Hakapää
email: jyrki.hakapaa@aka.fi
The research projects funded in the programme:
CHOICES
PI Prof. Jacklin Wahba (University of Southampton)
email: : j.wahba@soton.ac.uk
homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/jackiewahba/
CILS4EU
PI Prof. Frank Kalter (University of Mannheim)
email: kalter@uni-mannheim.de
homepage: http://lssw.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/english/People/Prof.%20Dr.%20Frank%20Kalter/
project webpage: http://www.cils4.eu/
IMEM
PI Pro. James Raymer (University of Southampton during the programme, later moved to
Australian National University)
email: james.raymer@anu.edu.au
homepage: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/raymer-j
project homepage: http://www.cpc.ac.uk/research_programme/?link=IMEM_project.php
LineUp
PI Dr. Ayse Guveli (University of Essex)
email: aguveli@essex.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/staff/profile.aspx?ID=131
MD-RDE
PI Prof. Peter Nijkamp (Free University, Amsterdam)
email: http://personal.vu.nl/p.nijkamp/
homepage: http://personal.vu.nl/p.nijkamp/
MI3
P Prof. James Wadsworth (Royal Holloway University of London)
email: J.Wadsworth@rhul.ac.uk
homepage: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/jonathan-wadsworth_65eda3c8-1a50-42be-8d02-7fce25c6e3b3.html
NODES
PI Prof. Mari Vaattovaara (University of Helsinki)
email: mari.vaattovaara@helsinki.fi
homepage: http://www.helsinki.fi/geography/Mari_Vaattovaara_eng.html
project homepage: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/nodesproject/
SCIP
PI Prof. Claudia Diehl (University of Konstantz)
email: claudia.diehl@uni-konstanz.de
project homepage: http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/153339.html
SIMCUR
PI Prof. Birgit Leyendecker (Ruhr University of Bochum)
email: birgit.leyendecker@rub.de
homepage: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/epsy/BL.html
project homepage: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/epsy/simcur-engl.html
TCRAf-Eu
PI Prof. Valentina Mazzucato (University of Maastricht)
email: v.mazzucato@maastrichtuniversity.nl
homepage: http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Profile/V.MAZZUCATO.htm
project homepage: http://fasos-research.nl/tcra/tcraf-eu/
TEMPO
PI Prof. Giovanni Facchini (Center for Economic Policy Research, London)
email: Giovanni.Facchini@nottingham.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/people/giovanni.facchini
THEMIS
PI Prof. Oliver Bakewell (University of Oxford)
email: oliver.bakewell@qeh.ox.ac.uk
homepage: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/about-us/people/oliver-bakewell
project homepage: http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/projects/themis