What is Migration?

Internal and international ‘migration’

For demographic purposes, migration can be classified into two broad types: international and internal migration. In a general sense, ‘migration’ is the process of moving from one place to another. To migrate is to move, whether from a rural area to a city, from one district or province in a given country to another in that same country, or from one country to a new country. It involves action. International migration occurs when people cross state boundaries and stay in the host state for some minimum length of time. When people move within a country it is called internal migration. Migration from rural areas to urban locations within a country is called ‘urbanization’.

Collaboration with the private sector on new data to understand migration flows better

Capturing data on migration flows is extremely challenging for several reasons. For instance, while international migration flows are generally accepted as covering inflows (flows of migrants entering into a particular boundary) and outflows (flows of migrants leaving a particular boundary) into and from countries, there has been a greater fo-cus on recording inflows.

Source: Minora et al., 2023, World Migration Report 2024, Chapter 2

Over the past several years, collaboration with the private sector has introduced novel data sources to improve understanding of migration flows. For example, Meta’s Data for Good program has partnered with the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) to model displacement from weather-based events and triangulate official displacement data, as demonstrated after Typhoon Hagibis in Japan. Additionally, researchers from Harvard, the European Commission, and Meta have used aggregated social media data (Facebook Social Connectedness Index) to predict conflict-induced migration flows, such as those from the war in Ukraine. Meta and collaborators are also developing a global dataset to estimate international migration flows, particularly valuable for developing countries where data is often scarce. Partnerships like those with Meta have the potential to significantly improve the way migration statistics are calculated in the years to come.