The (de)globalization of migration: has the polycrisis period changed the patterns of global migration?

Migration is a hotly discussed issue, and while the magnitude of migration is a frequent topic of debate, there is less discussion about its patterns (i.e. the diversity of migration). Yet, there is accumulating evidence that higher cultural heterogeneity among immigrants – a result of more globalized migrants – has positive impacts on productivity growth and innovation in destination countries and thus, ultimately, affects monetary policy. But is migration really becoming more globalized (i.e. more heterogenous), or is there evidence for recent (de)globalization trends, often attributed to flows of goods and capital? We address this question by composing an index of the globalization of migration that comprises three dimensions of global migration, following Czaika and de Haas (2015): the intensity – or relative magnitude – of migration, its diversity with respect to origin and destination countries, and the average distance of migration routes. These dimensions are combined to obtain an index of migration globalization that allows us to assess not only the degree of migration globalization, but also each country’s integration in global migration processes. Using migration flow estimates for 1990–2020, we find that migration continued to become more globalized in the past three decades, but this upward trend started to flatten out after the period 2005–10. The intensity of global migration flows did not increase between 1990 and 2020. The spread of global emigrants across destination countries widened in these three decades, while the diversity of global immigrants with respect to their home countries changed little and remained at a high level. This constitutes a change in the trend seen in earlier decades, when migrants from increasingly different origin countries moved to a narrowing set of destination countries.