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A new article by IMI's Mathias Czaika and Hein de Haas that questions whether the world has really become more migratory with globalisation as often assumed, was recently published in the International Migration Review.

Although it is commonly believed that the volume, diversity, geographical scope, and overall complexity of international migration have increased as part of globalization processes, this idea has remained largely untested.

But now a new article by Mathias Czaika and Hein de Haas deals with the Globalisation of Migration based on research from IMI's DEMIG project. It analyses shifts in global migration patterns, using indices that simultaneously capture changes in the spread, distance, and intensity of migration. While the results challenge the idea that there has been a global increase in volume, diversity, and geographical scope of migration, main migratory shifts have been directional. Migration has globalised from a destination country perspective but hardly from an origin country perspective, with migrants from an increasingly diverse array of non-European-origin countries concentrating in a shrinking pool of prime destination countries. The global migration map has thus become more skewed. Rather than refuting the globalization of migration hypothesis, this seems to reflect the asymmetric nature of globalisation processes in general.