Regional Population Meeting
Budapest (Hungary), 7-9 December 1998
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN THE UNECE REGION:
PATTERNS, TRENDS, POLICIES
by
John Salt
Migration Research Unit, Department of
Geography
University College London
London, United Kingdom
Unedited version prepared by John Salt for the Regional
Population Meeting (Budapest, 7-9 December 1998). The views
expressed in the paper are those of the author and do not imply
the expression of any opinion on the part of the Government of
Hungary, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, or
the United Nations Population Fund.
JOHN SALT is Professor of Geography at University
College London. He is Director of the Migration Research Unit at
UCL, UK Correspondent for the OECD’s SOPEMI Committee, and a
member of the Council of Europe’s Group of Specialists on
the Demographic Situation of National Minorities in Europe, and
its Reflection Group on Managing Migration in the Wider Europe.
He has been a member of the International Migration Committee of
the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population
(1986-90); the OECD Migration Steering Group; UN/ECE Ad Hoc
Advisory Committee on International Migration; IBG Working
Parties on Skilled International Migration and Geopolitics of
International Migration. In recent years he has been consultant
to the European Union, Council of Europe, OECD, UN/ECE, and
UNIDIR. In 1993 he received the Royal Geographical Society Edward
Heath Award for his contributions to the study of population and
migration in Europe.
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION IN THE UNECE
REGION: PATTERNS, TRENDS, POLICIES
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.
John Salt, Migration Research Unit, Department of
Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H
0AP
When the Iron Curtain lifted there were widely voiced
expectations of large scale shifts in population, and the term
"mass migration" came into common parlance. It is now
generally agreed that movements occurred on nothing like the
scale of the direst forebodings. Recorded migrations in Europe
seem to have peaked around 1992-93. A "stay-at-home"
philosophy in the countries of central and eastern Europe
combined with more stringent immigration controls in the West
served to create an effective prevention strategy.
Since 1994 a number of trends have manifested themselves in
the region. Europe remains an undoubted zone of immigration, but
with generally falling levels of recorded inflows. Three
interrelated but distinct migration regions have developed:
western Europe; central and castern Europe excluding the CIS
countries; the CIS. Each of these has a degree of
self-containment, though all of them are clearly enmeshed in a
global pattern of migration. Major political-military
perturbations have affected the flow regimes, notably in former
Yugoslavia and in several parts of the CIS. These have created
human rights difficulties and injected major uncertainties into
the policy-making process.
While recorded movements have generally declined in the last
few years, major questions surround the frequency of unrecorded
and irregular migrations. A commonly held view is that such moves
have increased, are increasing, and will continue to do so.
Unfortunately, evidence to substantiate such views is hard to
come by. As a problem is felt, and measures are developed to
counteract it, so its statistical presence becomes more open. It
is then a short step to it becoming "an increasing
problem".
What does seem clear is that, in central and eastern Europe
particularly, there has been growing amount of short-term,
short-distance movement across state boundaries. Most of this is
for the purposes of gaining a livelihood, and is associated with
the early phase of development of a market economy. It has taken
advantage of the openness of the informal sector, involving petty
trading, labour tourism and other novel forms of migration.
There also appears to have been a steady growth in the
migration of the highly skilled across Europe as a whole. While
the bulk of this movement is still westwards, the continent is
now seeing an increasingly complex pattern of "brain
exchange", akin to that long existing among the Western
market economies. On the horizon, however, are the rich sources
of expertise in the developing world, and increasing flows of
highly skilled between there and Europe can be expected. Economic
globalisation is already indicating the way forward.
The debates about immigration in North America adopt a
different starting point from those in Europe. In the former, the
main thrust of immigration has long been towards permanent
settlement, whereas in Europe most migration has, initially at
any rate, been temporary, albeit frequently leading to settled
immigrant communities. In the 1990s immigration debates in Canada
and the US seem (at least to a European observer) to have
increasing echoes of those across the Atlantic. Especially in the
US the "immigration ethos" is increasingly questioned.
The contribution of migrants to economic development is more
likely to be stressed, as is their impact on the jobs of
indigenous North Americans. If anything, the New World debate and
that in the Old World have moved closer together. Greater
government control (management?) of entry seems to be more
fashionable than a move towards a more liberal approach. How far
this feeling is driven by the perception that irregular migration
is causing governments to lose control of their borders is a
matter of conjecture.