IMISEM

Every Immigrant Is an Emigrant: How Migration Policies Shape the Paths to Integration (IMISEM)

Every immigrant to a country is the emigrant of another. For the contemporary migrant, the migration policies in both “countries of origin” and “of destination” define their options to enter, settle and belong to them.

Our project adopted a comprehensive view of migration policy that includes both its emigrant/ emigration and immigrant/ immigration sides, bridging for the first time the two sides of migration policy. To wit, our question is: how does policy offer or hinder a path for migrants to become or remain an integral part of the polity? The policy and research communities have assumed these two sides exist, but the connections between them have rarely been analyzed. What has been analyzed in some more depth is the connection between different “stages” of migration which nation-states usually regulate and separate, typically, between entry (visas) and settlement (access to permanent residence) or between settlement/integration and the access to citizenship (via naturalization).

Our 32 reports make both kinds of analysis possible. For every case included in our sample, we present the official regulations that exist about entry, residency, and access to citizenship for immigrants, but also about exit; about rights, and duties of migrants living abroad; and about their possibility to retain citizenship -the stages that are relevant for emigrants. Our reports gather this cross-regional evidence collected systematically in the form of a questionnaire containing information on hundreds of indicators of migration policies across “sides” and “stages”. With these reports you can get to know the migration policies of these 32 political communities in depth, following the sources; you can compare policies of mobility, settlement and belonging for both immigrants and emigrants and analyze their coherence; you can also use the information to compare across cases or you can take the information contained in a single report and observe how these policies shape migrant trajectories that you might be interested in.

We hope that you will take the chance to explore one, several or many of these reports and enjoy the broadened perspective on the migration policy landscapes that they offer of the sample of cases that we chose from Asia, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean, to cover a wide breadth of migratory profiles and institutional contexts. For further information on our data collection process, open one of the reports and read our preface. For more on the theoretical framework that guided this effort, have a look at this Open Access GIGA Working Paper. For comments on specific data provided in a report, contact us. For the complete IMISEM Dataset (developed based on the info of these 32 cases): stay tuned!