Conference Agenda

This contribution offers an overview of the determinants of international migration – at the micro, meso and macro levels. Focusing on some of the drivers we place emphasis on the personal- and family-level processes that inform the migration decisions. The most common profile of people who intend to migrate is that of the young male (not exclusively!), more educated and with consolidated networks abroad. Regardless of the income level, the older individuals are, the less likely they are to express the desire to migrate.

In contemporary societies of both the Global North and South where a growing but still small proportion of the population is longing to be elsewhere, this propensity to migrate becomes an important driver of social change and development as a key aspect of the process of migration decision-making. Although the migration aspirations have often been labelled as poor determinants of migration, without them and the desires for change the other drivers would not lead to migration. These latter drivers are inherent in international disparities regarding demographic, social and economic structures and dynamics.

In parallel, the multiplicity of motivations and the complexity of contemporary migration dynamics have highlighted the limited explanatory capabilities of categorisations such as: forced, economic, seasonal, environmental,…migrant.

In this context there is an urgent need to reformulate the study of the drivers of international migration by going beyond the primacy of economic rationality and the sole logic of the push-pull models of international migration.

Drawing on the results of the EU-Horizon2020 FUME project, the contribution proposes an understanding of the patterns and drivers of international migration developed within the analytical framework of the aspiration/ability model. The key question of the project was: what contribution can the discussion on the drivers of international migration make to the formulation of narratives of future migration scenarios?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the largest and most dynamic refugee situation in Europe in decades. The EU reacted quickly and in an overall compassionate spirit to the emerging crisis. By activating the Temporary Protection Directive, it provided refugees from Ukraine with quick access to temporary residence permits and basic rights as regards welfare, health care, work and education.

As scholars have observed, the EU’s response to people fleeing from Ukraine has been significantly different from how it has behaved towards other refugee situations in the recent past and until today. The arrival of asylum seekers has for many years raised concerns, and policymaking has been characterized by attempts to control and limit their number. This is especially true since what is widely known as the refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015, which first prompted welcoming attitudes across several EU countries and then an upsurge of new deterrence strategies and political controversy.

This paper seeks to explore and explain the main differences between the EU’s management of the Ukrainian refugee emergency and other major refugee arrivals in the recent past. It then considers possible lessons that the handling of the Ukrainian refugee situation might hold for EU migration and asylum policies at large. The analysis shows that the Temporary Protection Directive is a useful tool in emergencies; that the EU visa regime plays a major role for facilitating – or obstructing – safe and legal access to EU territory; that secondary movements of people seeking protection can be a good thing rather than a problem; and that flexible models of responsibility-sharing between the EU Member States can work better than static models of solidarity.

The Russian war in Ukraine which has escalated in February 2022 to the whole territory of Ukraine has brought an unprecedented flow of Ukrainian refugees to Poland. According to UNCHR there are more than 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees in the world. Since the re-escalation of Russian war in Ukraine there has been recorded 16 million border crossings through Ukrainian-Polish border by November 2023 and till then nearly 1.6 applied for various asylum and protection status. Before the war there was already more than 1 million labour migrants from Ukraine in Poland. It means that in the short time the inflow of Ukrainian migrants to Poland was massive, as never experienced before. It shows also that Ukrainian refugees have had plenty of migrant networks in Poland which facilitated their arrivals. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly we are going to assess skills, explore resilience and learn about perceived social support by Ukrainian migrants and refugees in Poland as indicators for their labour market integration and a development of human resources, also needed after a return to Ukraine. Secondly, our aim is also methodological. The data is collected via a unique interactive portal My Migration (www.mymigration.academy) which is available in Ukrainian, English and Polish and gives an instant feedback to respondents. It uses world validated scales relevant for each topic. In social sciences we usually take information from our respondents, giving very little in return. By developing this portal both technologically and methodologically we wanted to change it and reciprocate our respondents who are in need of knowledge about their resources. Therefore My Migration portal opens avenues for research impact via making this instrument also used by practitioners, e.g. job advisors, NGO experts etc.

Our study investigates family dynamics among forced migrants from Eritrea and Syria to Germany. We analyse the partnership and childbearing patterns of women and men. We pursue the following research questions: 1) What are the union formation and fertility behaviours of refugees in the years before and after migration and during transit stays? 2) How are family events and forced migration trajectories interrelated? 3) Which demographic, socio-economic and migration-related factors are associated with diverse family dynamics of refugees? Our empirical analyses draw on data derived from the quantitative survey "Forced Migration and Transnational Family Arrangements - Eritrean and Syrian Refugees in Germany" (TransFAR) collected in 2020. This survey covers 1,450 respondents and is Germany-wide representative of recent refugees from two major countries of origin of forced migration to Germany. Our analytical strategy is threefold: First, we describe the patterns and prevalence of marriage and childbearing, taking a multisited perspective and accounting for several locations of the respondent: in the country of origin, in transit countries and in Germany at time of arrival as well as at time of the survey. Second, sequence analysis techniques are performed, accounting for marriage and fertility trajectories from 5 years before arrival to Germany to 5 years after arrival. Third, the associations between marriage-fertility trajectories and individual demographic, socio-economic and migration-specific factors as well as contextual characteristics are estimated. Preliminary results show that an important share of married individuals experiences a birth in the first years upon arrival in Germany, indicating that the partnership status at arrival is crucial for fertility outcomes at destination. Furthermore, we find considerable differences between genders.