Migration Information Source
Virtually all major U.S. immigration policy reforms have faced lawsuits in recent years, giving federal judges wide latitude to shape national policy. The situation, which began during the Obama administration and has escalated, is a byproduct of congressional inaction and the emergence of immigration as a defining political wedge issue. This article tracks the trend, which has added new volatility to the immigration system with effects for millions, and places it in context.
High-skilled immigration represents a potential major benefit to Czechia, which has undergone rapid economic growth since the transition from communism. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of new Ukrainians, many of whom are well educated, marks a moment for the country to re-evaluate its integration policies, as this article details.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Sean Hur/DOD
Want to check a fact about U.S. immigration? Interested in putting recent trends into perspective? This article compiles authoritative, up-to-date information about the U.S. immigrant population and how it has changed over time. Data cover immigrants' demographic, educational, and linguistic characteristics; their top states of residence; enforcement activities; refugees and asylum seekers; naturalization trends; visa backlogs; and more.
A political crisis marked by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s growing authoritarianism has sparked the largest emigration in the country’s modern history. Hundreds of thousands have fled, including intellectuals, artists, and academics. They increasingly are heading beyond the traditional destination of Costa Rica, to the United States and beyond, as this article details.
Can haphazard, unplanned climate displacement be turned into voluntary, safe migration? Projects explicitly aimed at addressing internal and international climate migration are rare, but development organizations increasingly are turning their attention to supporting them. This article catalogues climate mobility projects around the world and examines their primary goals, whether to support the movement or stay of people or help at destination.
Pandemic-related U.S. policies have led to more than 2.6 million migrant expulsions at the U.S.-Mexico border, expanded public benefits to cover millions more U.S. residents, and offered free COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. Many of these policies are now likely to end as the Biden administration in May 2023 formally declares the pandemic to be over, although what comes next remains unclear.
Whether as migrant-sending or migrant-receiving locations—or both—many countries have rich, complex international and internal migration histories. MPI's online journal, the Migration Information Source, offers resources on more than 100 nations. Written by leading scholars, these articles delve into countries' migration histories, demographics, policymaking, and more.
Severe weather, rising seas, and other consequences of global climate change are affecting the way people live, work, and move around the planet. While there is no clear, direct line between the impacts of climate change and changing human movement, there are indications that the warming planet is indirectly creating or altering patterns of migration. Our podcast Changing Climate, Changing Migration dives deep into the intersection of climate change and migration to separate fact from fiction.
Looking for some of the most often-sought information on global migration? This statistics-rich article draws on the most current data sources to offer a primer on international migration, highlighting its types, the size of the migrant population and growth over time, and major sending and receiving countries and regions. Beyond looking at labor and humanitarian migrants and international students, the article examines remittances and more.
Recent Articles
Faith plays a significant role in the mental health and social integration of refugees and asylum seekers. Yet in Germany, concerns about Islam and migrants from Muslim-majority countries have complicated social cohesion efforts, particularly in the wake of the 2015-16 refugee and migration crisis.
Migration can help build resilience against the encroaching effects of climate change. Instead of being passive victims of environmental degradation, individuals sometimes move to gain money, knowledge, and skills that can fortify their household of origin. Migrant workers from Thailand demonstrate how and under what conditions this process works.
Despite a widespread perception that the Trump administration has drastically slashed legal immigration to the United States, a review of the data shows that temporary and permanent admissions during the period mostly followed previous trends—at least until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. This article examines trends in temporary, permanent, and humanitarian admissions during the administration, and the related policies that could take a more significant bite ahead if left unchanged.
Climate-induced migration can lead to tensions and violence between host communities and new arrivals. This conflict can flare up at various levels, including among rural farmers and herders in relatively peaceful countries such as Tanzania.
The nearly 11 million Mexican immigrants in the United States represent almost one-quarter of the country’s entire immigrant population, and as such are the largest foreign-born group. But their numbers have been declining, shrinking by 7 percent between 2010 and 2019. Among recently arrived immigrants, those from China and India now outpace Mexicans for the first time.
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While research shows immigrants in the United States become integrated over time, this is only a partial account of the changes that immigration brings. As newcomers reshape their communities, longtime residents themselves adjust to shifting social, economic, and political contexts—sometimes re-engaging with their own ethnic or cultural identities. This article explores this process of relational assimilation in Silicon Valley.
Together, Canada, Mexico, and the United States are home to nearly one-quarter of the world's migrants. Despite shifts in the profile of those who migrate and changing demographic realities across the region, such as population aging, perceptions and policies remain set in earlier eras. This article explores the intersection of migration and population dynamics in North America and the Northern Triangle of Central America.
After receiving more than 2 million asylum seekers in 2015-16, European countries are turning to the task of integrating the newcomers, including getting refugees into work. This article explores labor market integration of refugees in five Northern European countries—Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—drawing key lessons for today from the experiences of earlier groups of humanitarian arrivals.
The mental health of asylum seekers has emerged as an important issue following the 2015-16 European migration and refugee crisis. Many asylum seekers suffer from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and similar conditions—with implications not only for their well-being but also potentially for the outcomes of their claims and the integrity of the asylum system as a whole, as this article explores.
Chile's immigrant population has more than quadrupled since the country emerged from dictatorship in the early 1990s. As immigration has grown and moved away from its European roots to become more diverse, it has emerged as a hot-button political issue, complicating longstanding efforts to reform the country's 1975 immigration law. This article explores Chile's shift to the right on immigration, and how policies might evolve under the presidency of conservative Sebastián Piñera.
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In 2012, the United States granted humanitarian protection to more than 87,000 people, with grants of asylum up 19 percent and refugee admissions up 3 percent from a year earlier. This article provides a detailed look at the most recent refugee and asylum data in the United States, including country of origin, top states of settlement, and more.
More than 1 million people became lawful permanent residents (LPRs) of the United States in 2012, with family-sponsored immigrants accounting for two-thirds of those gaining a green card. This Spotlight examines federal statistics on foreign nationals who gained LPR status during 2012.
About 757,000 immigrants took U.S. citizenship in 2012, a 9 percent increase from the year before. As of 2012, 46 percent of the nation’s 40.8 million immigrants were naturalized Americans. This article examines the latest naturalization data available for the United States, including historical trends, data by country of origin and state of residence, as well as socioeconomic characteristics of the 18.7 million naturalized U.S. citizens residing in the United States in 2012.
Immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region residing in the United States are part of a migration flow that dates back several decades. The highly diverse MENA immigrant population has grown from about 50,000 in 1920 to nearly 961,000 in 2012. This article examines the latest data on immigrants from the MENA region in the United States, including population size, geographic distribution, admission categories, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
In 2011, India was the third largest country of origin for immigrants in the United States, after Mexico and China. The close to 1.9 million Indian immigrants in the United States accounted for almost 5 percent of the country’s total foreign-born population of 40.4 million. This article examines the latest data on Indian immigrants in the United States, including population size, geographic distribution, admission categories, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
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Paul Spoonley describes a massive economic and cultural shift caused by emigration from the Cook Islands to New Zealand.
Moldova is a small country facing huge emigration spurred mainly by economic hardships, according to Michael Jandl.
Judit Juhasz of examines the forces that have made Hungary into a sending, transit, and destination country for migration.
Long a country of emigration, immigration, and asylum, Turkey has also become a country of transit for immigrants, according to Kemal Kirisci of Boagazici University.
Marco Martiniello and Andrea Rea examine how immigration has made Belgium a multicultural society in perpetual renewal.
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MPI's Claire Bergeron and Faye Hipsman report on Democratic and Republican party platforms and their takes on immigration, new rules rendering DACA beneficiaries ineligible for Medicaid and CHIP, CBP's elimination of paper I-94 cards, and more.
Notwithstanding the opportunities for qualified unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as youth offered through the newly implemented deferred action program, the policy's success still faces implementation and other challenges. Muzaffar Chishti and Faye Hipsman examine the issues that remain unaddressed in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
The Obama administration’s decision to shield from deportation unauthorized immigrant youth who meet certain qualifications represents the boldest immigration policy undertaken by this White House. MPI’s Muzaffar Chishti and Faye Hipsman examine what comes next and explore some of the new policy’s unanswered questions and implementation challenges.
MPI’s Muzaffar Chishti, Faye Hipsman, and Claire Bergeron examine the potential outcomes to the Supreme Court’s decision on a key provision to Arizona’s SB 1070 law.
MPI's Muzaffar Chishti and Claire Bergeron report on the reaction to ICE's new detention reforms, the Supreme Court's recent decision in Vartelas v. Holder, the designation of Syria for TPS, and more.
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