Enhanced migration measures from a multidimensional perspective

Migration represents a constantly rising social and political concern for many governments. As a result, a better understanding of the drivers and dynamics of migration is important to ensure effective and successful migration governance. The EU-funded HumMingBird project intends to study the origins of migration and their interrelation with the tendency of people to emigrate. In this effort, the role migration data play is instrumental. Data will provide key information concerning drivers, geography, incentives and instruments related to the migration movements. The project aims to identify whether past migration policies succeeded, assess eventual lack in prediction, and calculate existing and future impacts of today's migration policies.

The significance of migration as a social, political and broader public concern has intensified significantly. Migration is increasingly seen as a high-priority policy issue by many governments, politicians and throughout the world.
As well as migration projections and scenarios that are essential for appropriate planning and effective policymaking, a deeper understanding of the root causes and drivers of migration and of their interrelation with people’s propensity to migrate is needed. Enhancing migration data is a crucial step to advance migration governance since better data is needed in order to accomplish sustainable social and economic development and national migrant data strategies are required to inform good policies. The project’s overall objective is to improve understandings of changing nature of migration flows and the drivers of migration, to analyse patterns, motivations and new geographies. Moreover, HumMingBird aims to calculate population estimates and determine emerging trends and future trends and accordingly to identify possible future implications of today’s policy decisions. Correspondingly, migration scenarios will be developed in a more forward looking manner that takes into account both quantitative and qualitative perspectives of different migration actors that might have an impact people’s decisions to migrate and consequent trends that will have an impact on our societies. Global scenarios will base on not only a realistic understanding of the drivers and dynamics of migration but also on the effects and effectiveness of past migration policies. Projects ambitions are to identify the uncertainties and reappraise, to explore the reasons why migration predictions may not hold and to demonstrate non-traditional data sources for migration research.