The future of international migration: Developing expert-based assumptions for global population projections

This paper explores alternative future trajectories of international migration by applying a multiregional flow model to a new set of estimates of global bilateral migration flows developed by the second author. The innovations in population projections presented here are threefold: first, the projections are based on new flow estimates that are comparable at the world level rather than commonly used net migration measures; second, a set of alternative expert-based what-if scenarios is developed and a continuation of current trends until the year 2060 as the medium variant is assumed rather than assuming a convergence to zero net migration; third projections are carried out using directional migration probabilities in a multiregional cohort-component framework, where populations of all countries are projected simultaneously. A discussion of the baseline data, assumptions and model specifications is followed by a summary of key result on projected numbers of future migrants.