How migration really works

The facts about the most divisive issue in politics

Are borders beyond control? Are immigrants taking away jobs? Or do we badly need immigrants to boost growth and innovation?

As debates on immigration have reached fever pitch, so has political and media controversy. But what are the facts behind the headlines?

Migration is one of the most hotly debated, but also one of the least understood public issues. The main problem is not so much a lack of knowledge and data, but rather the polarized nature of the migration debate and its framing in simplistic pro- and anti-terms.

Indeed, debates have become so polarized that most nuance gets lost, with pro- and anti-migration camps routinely exaggerating the harms and benefits of migration by cherry-picking only the facts that fit their narrative.

That is not a debate. We deserve so much better.

This blog is here to change that.

I decided to start this blog to help readers to see through the myths and political spin that abound on this topic.

In How Migration Really Works, I will provide regular commentary on current migration events, with the aim to equip readers with an understanding of the trends, patterns, causes and impacts of migration, in a way that is firmly rooted in the best data and scientific insight.

This is urgent because the evidence reveals that almost everything that politicians, media and interest group tell us about migration is either simplistic, misleading or outright propaganda.

To overcome an increasingly polarized and toxic debate, we need an entirely new vision of migration, not as a ‘problem to be solved’, or as a ‘solution to problems’, but as it is.

My ultimate goal is to stimulating a real debate on migration, in which politicians no longer get away with propaganda or misguided policies that perhaps satisfy the desire for political showmanship – and may help them win the next election – but don’t solve any real problems and instead often make them worse.

This is the companion blog to my book How Migration Really Works. In this book, which has been translated in 14 languages, I debunk 22 popular right- and left-wing myths about migration.

More fundamentally, the book presents a new paradigm of migration. By necessity, this is a holistic view that tries to understand migration as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social, cultural and economic change affecting our societies and our world, and one that benefits some people more than others, can have downsides for some, but cannot be thought or wished away.

This is important, because understanding the central role in economic development and social transformation will lead us to a totally new way of understanding human mobility – a new paradigm on the very nature and causes of migration that belies almost everything that we are usually told on the subject.

I hope you will find my new Substack useful. To support me in my new adventure, and I would be very grateful if you can spread the news and let people now about this new source of independent information about migration. Thank you!