United Nations International Migration Report

Transcript

MS. AUDREY SINGER: Good morning everybody. I want to welcome everybody to Brookings this morning for our panel discussion of the new report on international migration that's just been released by the United Nations Population Division. My name is Audrey Singer. I'm a Visiting Fellow at the Center of Urban and Metropolitan Policy here at Brookings and I'll be moderating the discussion today.

First I'd like to express my thanks for their support to our co-sponsors of this event, one of the newest policy shops on the block, the Migration Policy Institute. They are an independent non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to the study of the movement of people worldwide.

The UN report on international migration tells us that there are approximately 175 million people who are residing outside of their country of birth, which is about three percent of the world's population. This figure has more than doubled since 1970. In the past decade most of the growth in migrant stocks have taken place in the more developed regions of the world.

There are several ways national populations can change. The primary demographic drivers or population change within a country are birth and death, and we generally consider births and deaths to be permanent events so record keeping is fairly straightforward and most countries in the world have administrative systems to track these events.

Collecting information on the movement of people across borders, that is people leaving one country and entering another, is much harder. And it's much harder for many reasons including the fact that people can migrate more than once during their lifetime. In addition, countries do not usually keep track of persons leaving countries, and different countries have different definitions of who is considered a migrant.

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