International Migration Panel activities

November-December 2020 

On November 5, the IUSSP Panel on International Migration: Strengthening the Knowledge Base for Policy hosted a webinar on the "Priorities in research on international migration and mobilities: Implications of the COVID pandemic and its legacies." The WorldPop research team at the University of Southampton headed by Andrew Tatum set the stage with a presentation on “Assessing the effects of travel and contact reductions to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and resurgence.”

Alessandra Carioli, Jessica Floyd, Shengjie Lai, Corrine Ruktanonchai and Nick Ruktanonchai provided a comprehensive review of relationships between pandemics and human mobility with a critical analysis of data sources on mobility appropriate for testing relationships and modelling.  The team illustrated different approaches to modelling interventions and policies to mitigate disease spread at different spatial and temporal scales.  

IUSSP Panel member, Marie McAuliffe (IOM), and Ayman Zohry (Egyptian Society for Migration Studies) and former IUSSP Panel Chair, deepened the focus of the discussion by outlining requisite components of migration research and how that research can benefit theory and policy.  

Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, the University of Tehran and IUSSP Council member, provided a synthesis of the presentations emphasizing the importance of revisiting migration theory, concepts and measurement to inform policy at different scales of analysis.  He underscored the particular analytic assets of the population sciences as demonstrated in the WorldPop presentation integrating new forms of geographic and demographic data and modelling new patterns of international mobilities at variable geographic scales, disaggregated by gender, age, education.  Going forward, Abbasi-Shavazi argued for a demographic focus using dynamic data and innovative techniques for measuring and modelling both international mobility and immobility and engaging with other disciplines to understand the drivers and implications of migration and mobilities. 

The video recording of the webinar, the presentations and a record of the written Q&As are available here. 

Ongoing activities of the Panel include collaboration with the Specialized Technical Group on Migration of the African Union Commission concerning the piloting of a World Migration Survey (WMS) in Africa.  Members of the Panel participated in a session on the prospects of an African migration survey at the "Online African School of Migration Statistics”, 2-4 December, sponsored by IOM GMDAC, African Union Commission, Statistics Sweden and the Government of Germany.

Panel Member Marcela Cerrutti organized a round table discussion at the IX Congress of the Latin American Population Association (ALAP), on December 9th, entitled “Prioridades en investigación y en generación de información sobre migración internacional:perspectivas para una encuesta mundial sobre migración” (Research and data priorities on international migration: perspectives for a World Migration Survey, WMS). For more information on the ALAP session, click here.