World Bank, forward-looking migration policies increase the prosperity of countries where aging is fast

ROME – In the World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees and Societies from the World Bank the world seems divided in half: on the one hand the rich countries that welcome migrants and that age at the same time, intensifying the global competition of workers. On the other hand, low-income countries that are growing in population and increasingly need to create job opportunities for young people. Finding a balance between these two apparently opposing tendencies in the field of migration policies means contributing to increasing the levels of prosperity for both the host and departure countries.

demographic prospects. Over the next few decades, the proportion of working-age adults will drop dramatically in many places. Spain, now with a population of 47 million, will see fewer people able to work by more than a third by 2100, as its senior citizens, aged over 65, rise from 20 to 39 percent . At the same time, countries like Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia or Turkey may need more foreign workers because their population is no longer growing.

The forces driving migration. Cross-border movements are increasingly diverse and complex. Today, destination countries and countries of origin embrace all income levels. Places like Mexico, Nigeria and the UK, for example, send and receive migrants. The number of refugees has almost tripled in the past decade. Climate change is becoming yet another driver for people to leave their place of origin. Until now, most climate-driven displacement has taken place within nations themselves, displacing large numbers of people. Today things are changing: there is and is growing a real climate cross-border migration, dictated by the fact that about 40 percent of the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people, live in places exposed to climate impacts.

Improving policies to benefit from migrations. The way in which politics today deals with the migration issue not only fails to transform human movements into an opportunity, but also causes great suffering to people who move with difficulty. About 2.5 percent of the world’s population, or 184 million people, including 37 million refugees, now live outside their country of origin. The largest share, 43 percent, live in developing countries. The report underlines precisely the urgency of better managing the migratory phenomenon in order to favor development. The goal of the policy should be to create a match between the skills that migrant people can offer and the demands of the host society.

What countries of origin should do. They should make labor migration, the so-called economic migration, an integral part of their development strategy. They should reduce remittance costs, disseminate information about their citizens’ diaspora around the world, implement programs that facilitate the acquisition of globally in-demand skills so that their citizens, when they emigrate, can obtain better-paying jobs.

What destination countries should do. Encourage migration where the skills brought by foreigners are needed to fill gaps or job demands. Facilitate their inclusion in the social fabric and address the impact of the arrival of migrants when this creates tensions between citizens. In practice, the World Bank report underlines the crucial role played by development cooperation. In particular: targeted bilateral collaboration between the country of origin and the host country can serve to align the skills of migrants with the needs of the receiving society. Multilateral cooperation, on the other hand, should serve to share the costs of welcoming refugees. The last element on which the World Bank dwells is the need to listen to all the voices that are involved in the migration problem and which today, on the other hand, are still under-represented in the public debate: developing countries, companies and the sector private in general, migrants and refugees themselves.