- Hi, I'm Sophia from Migration Matters.
We are a non-profit organization that wants
to empower you to have better, more nuanced
and more solutions-oriented conversations about migration.
We produce bite-size courses with academics,
practitioners, and the public.
What percentage of all the people in the world
do you think are migrants?
So, we got a lot of different answers
on the street that day, and most of them
were in the double digits.
It's not surprising given that the words we hear
in the media all the time connected to migrants,
asylum-seekers, and refugees are words like
influx, flood, wave, tide, pouring in.
So, we wanted to know:
Are we really living in an age of unprecedented migration?
So, we went to the source to find out.
We asked Hein de Haas,
one of the world's leading thinkers in migration.
- Hello. - Hi, good to meet you.
- Nice to finally meet you. - Hi, good to meet you.
My name is Hein de Haas and I got interested
in migration when I was 17 years old
and embarked upon a train journey to Morocco
because I was curious.
I wanted to see other countries outside of Europe.
And once in Morocco, I discovered
that so far away from home, there are people speaking Dutch
and this turned out to be migrants
who used to live in the Netherlands
and came back and spoke fluent Dutch to me.
And that really fascinated me
how societies so far away from each other
are connected through migration.
- He is a founding member and former director
of the University of Oxford's
International Migration Institute.
He's a current professor of sociology
at the University of Amsterdam,
and he has written a ton on this topic.
So, let's hear what Hein has to say.
- The number of migrants in the world
hasn't actually gone up.
I mean, absolute numbers have gone up,
but the world population also has gone up.
Half a century ago, about 3% of the world population
was an international migrant.
That's still the same percentage.
So, if we look at the longer term,
actually migration hasn't accelerated.
Of course, there's more migrants,
but there's also more people in the world.
- Okay, so there's more people in the world
which means there are more migrants,
but there aren't more migrants proportionally.
That makes sense, I guess.
But, we are living in a time of globalization
and people can travel and move more easily
than ever before.
That's got to be affecting things, right?
- All forms of mobility have gone up
like travel, commuting, business travel,
tourism, obviously, have spiked.
But, actually, migration in terms
of people changing residency
has been remarkably stable again.
Obviously, with growing interconnectivity between societies
in the world, people's awareness of other societies
will only increase in the future.
But that doesn't necessarily translate into more migration.
- Okay, hold up a second.
If the question isn't about the numbers,
then what is it about?
We can't ignore that people feel like
their societies are changing
through immigration and diversity.
- I think the more relevant question,
instead of asking will there be more or less migrants,
is asking where will future migrants come from and go to?
And there, we've seen things happening
over the last 50 years that nobody would have predicted.
Nobody would have predicted 50 years ago
that Europe would become the global migration destination
that currently attracts more people
than, for instance, the United States and Canada together.
So, in the future, migrants may come from
and go to very different countries than right now.
Take one example, China.
Many people think that most Africans
who want to leave the continent all go to Europe
or all want to go to Europe.
Well, first of all, the big majority
of Africans move within the continent
to prosperous countries.
But, actually what few people realize
is that more and more Africans
explore destinations outside of Europe,
and China is one of those new destinations.
What may also shift in the future
is the sources of migrant labor.
You know, after the last decade,
it's been countries like Mexico, Morocco,
Turkey, the Philippines who sort of played this role
of emigration countries and important sources
of both labor and family migrants
in North America and Europe.
- So, Hein's talking here about emigration with an "e",
which means the process of leaving one's home country
and settling or living in another.
Immigration with an "i" is the process
of entering another country.
- Well, those countries are also developing.
A country like Turkey, even before
the Syrian refugee crisis, had become already
a destination for labor and other migrants
going to Turkey, and the number
of Turks leaving Turkey had gone down.
- So, things are changing and they're hard to plan for.
Okay, we get it.
But, since Hein's head is full of understanding
about the trends and causes of migration,
we couldn't let him get off that easy.
So, we asked Hein if there's anything
we can be sure about when it comes
to the future outlook of migration.
- It's almost certain that the future outlook
of migration will be totally different
from the current one.
So, the danger is to take a Eurocentric view
and think that Europe will always remain
the center of the world and the global migration destination,
the same for North American countries.
Those may well shift in the future.
- So, we can't predict what's going
to happen in the future, but we can make
a few assumptions, right?
Like that people from poorer countries will want
to migrate to countries where they have more opportunities.
So, what can Hein tell us about that?
- Actually, the countries that are the poorest,
for instance, in Sub-Saharan Africa,
is the region with the lowest migration in the world.
Because fewer people have the resources
and the opportunities to move around,
even within the continent.
And certainly, when you look at migration
out of the continent, it's actually very low.
And the African countries with relatively high migration
to North America, to Europe, are the relatively stable
and relatively prosperous countries.
Like, for instance, South Africa,
or Senegal or Ghana.
These are the countries that have much higher percentages
of their populations living in the West.
But, of course, once a country and a society
becomes more attractive, stable, and wealthy,
it will start to attract more migrants.
- It makes sense not to be ethnocentric
when it comes to topics like migration,
but I always wonder how we can get people
to think about migration from beyond the personal
or the national level and to understand
and value these bigger trends around them.
If you want to learn more from Hein,
I recommend you check out his full course
with us, Migration 101.
It's free by the way.
It's available on YouTube and on our website.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
for all the latest videos. Like this video.
Please share it.
Let's get conversations going around this topic,
and I will see you in the next video.
For more infomation >> how many Chicken Dinners tonight? - Duration: 33:48. 
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