Migration and Development
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Migration and Development People have always migrated to improve their lives. Today, movements from developing countries to other parts of the world are of intense interest to many policymakers. While most of the rich world migration debate focuses on how migrants affect the places they arrive in, CGD conducts rigorous, independent research to examine the effects on migrants and their places of origin. CGD research fellow Michael Clemens leads this research. For a development-focused comparison of the migration policies of 22 high-income countries, see CGD's Commitment to Development Index Rankings on Migration. See also Migration & Development blog posts. These sending-country impacts remain, for the most part, poorly understood. CGD works to address this problem in part by collecting and sharing important new datasets and by bringing empirical results to a debate that has too often been conducted in an evidence-free zone. We then use these findings to identify ways that rich-world immigration policy could be made more development-friendly. The CGD Commission on Migration Data We are also working to increase the availability of high quality data. In 2009 our Commission on Migration Data for Development Research (www.migrationdata.org) will issue recommendations on specific steps that countries and relevant international organizations can take to gather and share migration data in order to give researchers and policymakers a much clearer picture of who is moving where. Key Questions about Migration and Development Much of the quantitative research that has been conducted in the past touches on certain aspects of the sending-country impacts, especially workers' international remittances and their transactions costs. But the bulk of development impact lies elsewhere, and remains poorly understood. Open questions include:
Preliminary Answers
PublicationsDon't Close the Golden Door: Our Noisy Debate on Immigration and Its Deathly Silence on Development
Recent Commentary |




International migration has long been a central tool in the battle against global poverty and inequality, but the recent heated political debate over immigration reform has largely failed to recognize how migration shapes the development process. In this essay, research fellow Michael Clemens and co-author Sami Bazzi outline five major reasons why migration is a development issue in today’s world, and they suggest an agenda for the next U.S. administration to make U.S. migration policy work for the United States, for countries of origin, and for the migrants themselves.