Friend-shoring in migration? Investigating the links between geopolitical fragmentation and global migration

Is there a migration-equivalent to friend-shoring, a concept often discussed in the context of global trade and capital flows? Does migration increase between countries that are growing geopolitically closer together and decrease between countries that are drifting apart? Our hypothesis is that geopolitical fragmentation increases the cost of migration, and thus migration increases as countries become geopolitical “friends” and decreases as they become “foes,” ceteris paribus. We address this hypothesis empirically with Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimations of migration gravity models with a full set of fixed effects. We use estimated data on global bilateral migration flows (1990–2020) and a UN-voting-based measure of geopolitical distance between countries. Our findings suggest that increases in geopolitical distance between two countries are indeed associated with lower migration between them. The estimated coefficient exhibits nonlinearities – it is stronger (more negative) for geopolitically close countries than for distant ones – and heterogeneities: it is stronger for migrants from relatively poor origins and for migrants moving to relatively poor destinations. We further find that cultural similarities between countries lower the estimated impact of geopolitical distance on migration. We illustrate the magnitude of the estimated coefficient by assessing how further geopolitical fragmentation could change immigration to the EU and find that possible implications are economically sizable.