Gulf Cooperation Council Migration: A Longitudinal Migrant Network Approach

International migration is attracting growing interest in academia and policymakers in both hosting and sending countries. International migration is central in improving living standards of migrants and their families, supporting the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the 2030 global development agenda, and has the potential to significantly boost world production. Although GCC migration is the third most important migration corridor in terms of total migrant stock, the topic has been underrepresented in the academic literature, which focuses mostly on South-North migration (Naufal 2015). The purpose of this paper is to fill this knowledge gap in two directions. First, the paper will be using an innovative dataset that estimates international migrant flow data instead of international migrant stock data. Migrant flow is more relevant as the changes in migrant stock are the outcome of demographic factors such as migrant births, migrant deaths, and migrant naturalization. Second, the paper will be applying network analysis to flow data. Recently, network analysis has been applied to other migration corridors, such as the US ( Charyyev et al., 2017 ) and Europe (Lenkewitz et. al 2019). Despite migration’s network character being established in migration studies, no research has so far been done on the GCC using network analysis. Two key preliminary findings emerge from this paper. First, it shows that the GCC corridor (made of six Arab Gulf countries) stands out as the most important migration corridor over the period 2005 to 2010 in terms of flow, and a close second over the period 2010 to 2015. When looking at just migrant stock data, the GCC’s significance is less pronounced. Second, after applying network analysis to migrant flow data, the paper reveals that the GCC is even more central to the global migration network when compared to its position with more standard econometric measures that ignore network effects. Our ranking measure is less destination biased than most migration literature (de Haas 2011). One potential explanation that the GCC (a net inflow destination leader) ranks even higher in a less destination-biased ranking measure is that over the past two decades, the GCC has emerged not only as a migration hub, but as a node strongly connected to other key international migration players. Future research can test network theories and identify regularities using (a) random graph methods, (b) strategic, game theoretic techniques, and (c) hybrid, statistical models. Such analysis can provide a network perspective to the more common analysis of push and pull factors between individual countries. Future research can also focus on individual GCC countries.