New Migration Policy Centre (MPC) Corridor Reports

A new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) INTERACT report: "Integration policy and activities in Poland" by Renata Stefańska (Research Associate at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw)

This report aims to present integration activities undertaken by state and non-state institutional actors at the national and local level in Poland. Up to now, the issue of immigrant integration in Poland has been neither a social nor a political problem, which can be explained in particular by the fact that foreigners constitute only a small portion of Polish society.

New MPC Blog entry: "Terrorist attacks in Paris and migration: are they linked?" by Philippe Fargues, Director of the Migration Policy Centre

The terrorist attacks in which 17 innocents were killed in Paris between Wednesday 7 and Friday 9 January 2015 will soon reopen controversies about migration policies in Europe. To what extent are these attacks, though, really linked to migration?
Were the three perpetrators of the attacks migrants? Well, their parents were migrants, from Algeria and Senegal. But the terrorists themselves were not migrants. They were French citizens born in France. They had what is sometimes, ambiguously, called an “immigrant background”. The same applies to the French gunmen who committed killings in Montauban and Toulouse in March 2012 and in Brussels in May 2014.

A new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) Policy Brief: "When the best option is a leaky boat: why migrants risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean and what Europe is doing about it" by Philippe Fargues and Sara Bonfanti (Migration Policy Centre, EUI)

The Mediterranean Sea is the most porous border between Europe and its neighbours and the world’s most dangerous border between countries that are not at war with each other. Three facts emerge: sea routes to Europe are anything but new; places of embarkation and disembarkation have changed in relation to controls; and the risk of dying at sea has considerably increased over the last decade.

A new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) Policy Brief: "35 years of forced displacement in Iraq: contexualising the ISIS threat, unpacking the movements" by Cameron Thibos (Migration Policy Centre, RSCAS, EUI)

This brief situates the astonishing rise of the group Islamic State of Iraq and as-Sham (ISIS) within Iraq’s much larger history of violent displacement. Looking across the past 35 years, it argues that ISIS may be distinct inasmuch as it has taken and held territory from Syria and Iraq, its violence is ‘non-state’, and it espouses a radically retrogressive ideology. But it is neither unique in its level of brutality nor is it an unprecedented threat to the well-being of Iraqi citizens. 

A new MPC Working Paper "Tradable refugee-admission quotas : a policy proposal to reform the EU asylum policy" by Hillel Rapoport (Migration Policy Centre and Paris School of Economics) and Jesús Fernandez – Huertas (Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada (FEDEA))

The current EU Asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EU-wide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum-seekers coupled with a matching mechanism linking countries' and migrants' preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way towards addressing the shortcomings of the existing system. We illustrate this claim using the recent problems regarding relocation faced by the European Relocation from Malta (EUREMA) program.

The new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) Country reports of the INTERACT project (Researching Third Country Nationals’ Integration as a Three-way Process - Immigrants, Countries of Emigration and Countries of Immigration as Actors of Integration)

The new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) and the Gulf Research Centre (GRC) GLMM Explanatory note on "Demography, Migration, and Labour Market in Qatar" by Françoise De Bel-Air

Françoise De Bel-Air, Part-time Professor at the Migration Policy Centre, specialist of political demography of Arab countries

The new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) and the Gulf Research Centre (GRC) Explanatory note on "The Story of Remittance Flows from the GCC Countries" by George Naufal

George Naufal, Associate Professor of Economics at the American University of Sharjah and research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and Ismail H. Genc, Professor of Economics and Head of the Economics Department at the American University of Sharjah.

The new Migration Policy Centre (MPC) Blog entry "The Missed Opportunity of the “Ypres Guidelines” of the European Council Regarding Immigration and Asylum" by Philippe De Bruycker

On 27 June 2014 the European Council adopted the strategic guidelines for the legislative and operational planning of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice during the period 2014-2020. 

MPC Report on Migration Stereotypes

The European Commissioner for Home Affairs Cecilia Malmström and Prof. Philippe Fargues, the Director of the Migration Policy Centre (MPC), presented to the press the MPC Report “Is What We Hear About Migration Really True? Questioning Eight Migration Stereotypes” in Brussels on 11 July. 

MPC Publications

The Migration Policy Centre (MPC) is delighted to share with you the new Country reports of the INTERACT project (Researching Third Country Nationals’ Integration as a Three-way Process - Immigrants, Countries of Emigration and Countries of Immigration as Actors of
Integration):

A new MPC Working Paper "The fuzzy lines of international migration: a critical assessment of definitions and estimates in the Arab countries" by Philippe Fargues, Director of the Migration Policy Centre, RSCAS, EUI

Since emigration and immigration plug into the highly sensitive and subjective issues of nationhood and identity, the definition of what a migrant is and is not, and the dissemination of knowledge about international migration are themselves intrinsically subjective matters. Since statistics are produced out of data routinely collected by state administrations and because international migration moves individuals from one state to another, data on international migration are by their very nature difficult to collect and require international harmonisation of statistical procedures. 

A new MPC Working Paper "The fuzzy lines of international migration: a critical assessment of definitions and estimates in the Arab countries" by Philippe Fargues, Director of the Migration Policy Centre, RSCAS, EUI

Since emigration and immigration plug into the highly sensitive and subjective issues of nationhood and identity, the definition of what a migrant is and is not, and the dissemination of knowledge about international migration are themselves intrinsically subjective matters. Since statistics are produced out of data routinely collected by state administrations and because international migration moves individuals from one state to another, data on international migration are by their very nature difficult to collect and require international harmonisation of statistical procedures.

A new Migration Policy Institute Europe policy brief "Strengthening refugee protection and meeting challenges: The European Union’s next steps on asylum" by Madeline Garlick

As increasing numbers of asylum seekers and migrants undertake precarious journeys by land and sea to reach Europe, the European Union is at a key juncture in its asylum and migration policy-making cycle. The European Council will convene at the end of June to agree upon strategic guidelines intended to set the tone and parameters for future policy-making for the 2014-2020 period in the area of Justice and Home Affairs.

A new MPC Policy Brief "One million Syrians in Lebanon : a milestone quickly passed" by Cameron Thibos (Migration Policy Centre, RSCAS, EUI)

Lebanon received its one-millionth refugee from Syria on April 3rd, an event that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN’s refugee agency, called a “devastating milestone.”  Unfortunately, markers such as these only show the distance travelled but not how far is left to go. This one was quickly passed and there is still no end in sight.

A new MPC Policy Brief: "What does language transmission within mixed families tell us about integration and multilingualism in the EU?" by Anne Unterreiner (Migration Policy Centre, RSCAS, EUI)

There is a gap between EU multilingual policies and language policies for migrants. In this context, migration is not seen as an asset. Rather it is a problem to be solved through assimilation. Migrants’ multilingualism is, likewise, not considered an asset for society as a whole. In this context, research into the transmission of multiple languages within families is relevant for better understanding the processes under examination.

A new MPC Working Paper: "Regional out-migration patterns in Russia" by Zuzanna Brunarska (Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw)

Russian society has been perceived by many scholars as relatively immobile. Migration abroad is indeed not as common in Russia as it is, for example, in Ukraine or Moldova, whose citizens migrate abroad in large numbers to improve their living standards. Leaving aside the deliberations whether Russians are less mobile than other big world populations this text concentrates on differences between Russian regions in patterns of mobility focusing on migration outflows. Given the size of the country and socio-economic diversity of its regions, Russia constitutes an interesting object of investigations.

A new MPC Working Paper: "Labour Market Outcomes and Egypt’s Migration Potential" by Mona Amer (FESP, Cairo University) and Philippe Fargues (Migration Policy Centre, EUI)

Will the radical political changes Egypt has gone through since early 2011 have an impact on emigration from the country? This all depends on young Egyptian adults, who are the potential migrants of tomorrow. In order to understand the consequences of the Egyptian revolution might for migration, a questionnaire survey was conducted amongst Egyptian youth in 2013. The objective of this paper is to analyse the Egyptian labour market together with Egyptian migration to see whether changing conditions in the labour market, in particular after the revolution of 25 January 2011, may affect migration. 

The Migration Policy Centre (MPC) is delighted to present you a new INTERACT Position paper: "Civic participation and integration: a country-of-origin perspective" by Sonia Gsir (Centre d’études de l’ethnicité et des migrations (CEDEM), Université de Liège)

This paper offers an insight into how emigration countries influence immigrants in their host society. The main objective is to explore the following questions: first, whether and how emigration countries can influence the civic participation of immigrants in immigration countries and second, whether transnational links, in particular political transnational activities, have an impact on civic participation in receiving countries.