Almost half of migrants returned to their homeland over the past quarter century
Scientists from the University of Washington used a new method to assess the level of global migration and found that it has remained relatively stable since 1990 — place of residence times in the five-year period change 1.1 to 1.3 percent of the world population. The numbers of return migration — return home — was higher than previously thought: about 45 percent of people who have moved over the past quarter century in other countries, returned home.
Traditionally, data on migration are based on processing the immigration forms filled at points of entry, however, the authors note that this information often contains errors. Forms census also usually do not contain the date of the move/return to the country. American scientists have developed a new statistical method for estimating migration flows, which showed high reliability.
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Calculations have shown that migration flows are much higher than previously thought. First of all, the difference is due bad consider other methods return migration. For example, 2.1 million people, emigrants from Mexico to the United States accounted for about 1.3 million returned to Mexico.
Return migration is not well recorded statistics, because when you return to your country man no longer fills the migration documents. However, in the new study, the researchers approached the calculations in a different way: they compared pairs of countries, given data on population, births and deaths, the figures for migration to other countries. And so were able to find the unrecorded migration flows — returns home. In addition, the figures obtained are more accurate due to the fact that the authors examined the migration flows between developing countries, while most attention is given to moving to developed countries.
For example, the statistics greatly enlarged figures of migration from Ukraine to Russia, from Syria to Lebanon, from Bangladesh to India etc.
In General, over the five-year period, changes residence from 67 to 87 million people (according to earlier estimates, this figure was 34 to 46 million people). With the obvious peaks and drops of levels of migration between 1990 and 2015 was not observed.
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The researchers note that in absolute terms the number of migrants over this period from year to year slightly grew, but their share of world population remained at the same level, every five years, changed residence approximately every 80-th inhabitant of the planet.
Most of these cases is emigration, more than 60%. Still 26-31% is return migration, and only about 9% of transit migration. The largest flow of emigration in the last five years was from Syria, and the flows of return migration at the same time was primarily from the United States to Central and South America and from the Persian Gulf to South Asia.