Page - 18 - in options, Volume summer 2018

WHAT DRIVES MIGRATION? IIASA research is providing a scientific basis to help design evidence-based migration policies that will benefit Europe while ensuring humanitarian needs are met I n the summer of 2015, IIASA researchers living in Vienna had a front-row seat to a wave of refugees entering Europe from war-torn Syria and other regions including Africa and the Middle East. The train station where IIASA scientists catch the bus to work, was packed with people in transit. People stood in long ticket lines wrapping through the central hall for hours on end. Families slept on cots in a makeshift shelter and shared meals sitting on the station floor. For IIASA demographers, migration is one of the key variables in their work. Yet, for researchers who often work on a highly theoretical plane, the scene at the Vienna train station was a reminder of just how relevant their work can be—and a harbinger of how great the demand would soon become for science-based models of future migration. “Migration is one of the three basic components of demographic change,” explains IIASA World Population Program director Wolfgang Lutz, who is also the founding director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital. “Other than fertility—birth rates, and mortality—death rates, migration is the only way the size of a country’s population can change.” AN URGENT NEED FROM EU POLICYMAKERS Since the summer of 2015, migration has become an increasingly divisive issue across Europe. Some argue that refugees bring problems such as crime and terrorism, or that they can’t integrate well because of their different religions, languages, or education levels. Others argue that Europe actually needs more migration in order to shore up its social system, as declining fertility and longer lifespans have led to a greater proportion of older people in the population. Despite these popular but contradictory narratives, there is actually very little systematic analysis for projecting how migration will develop and what its impacts will be on Europe’s labor force and society, says Lutz. That is why in 2016, EU policymakers turned to IIASA to launch a new partnership for migration research. The Center of Expertise on Population and Human Migration (CEPAM) includes five researchers at IIASA and five at the European Union’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), who are conducting applied research that provides timely answers for policymakers’ urgent questions. “What we’re trying to do is look at the big picture and the long term. We are looking at the drivers of migration–what we call pull factors that entice people towards a new country, and push factors that drive people to leave their homes,” says Lutz, who is leading the partnership. The plan is to produce a set of scenarios that can show the potential impacts of different immigration policies, allowing policymakers to make educated decisions and smarter plans. Although only in its second year, the partnership has already produced several insights and new methods that could provide a more scientific basis for policymaking. At the core of these efforts www.iiasa.ac.atoptions ◼ summer 201818