Migration Policy Institute: Researchers Struggling to Impact Policy

If you've been following along, you'll notice I cite a lot of research papers here along the lines of human migration and everything that comes with it: language, housing, politics, etc.

Yesterday the MPI published a paper based on survey results from 1,800 migration researchers across 100 countries. The conclusion is that the field broadly believes its work is falling short of its policy potential, aka failing to actually help governments create more humane, evidence-based, effective policies. The paper cites 3 main reasons:

Fragmentation across disciplines and geographies

Migration is an inherently interdisciplinary topic. A web of structural dynamics (like war, climate change, or just human psychology) cause migration, which then have corresponding social, economic, or political consequences for both the origin and destination countries. This means a migration researcher could be an anthropologist, or a climate scientist, or a sociologist, by training, and has to work with others to present a full picture. This is complicated by institutional factors that reward siloed or intra-departmental work.

Uneven access to reliable data

This one fell a bit flat for me in the sense that everyone is dealing with this problem. The authors propose a global, independent, curated, freely accessible platform for human migration but then don't really define what this would look like. Does this exist in any field? Maybe in the environmental sciences but they don't have to deal with the laws and incentives around data sovereignty, privacy, etc. Where humans are the subject of study, I imagine a globally unified dataset will be difficult to come by. However, I do think with advances in anonymization techniques something like a PANGAEA for migration might be possible in the mid-term.

Structural inequalities in whose voices are represented

An interesting reason I hadn't considered as much. To re-frame the authors statement here, I think policy is dictated now by the destination countries. The majority of the research, funding, and power is concentrated in Europe and the Americas, and as such is likely to center around topics related to housing crises, sociological rifts, religious conflict, etc. Researchers in the origin countries are likely to have a more complete understanding of local drivers of migration and better able to expand and bring nuance to policymakers' thinking in the global north.