Global migration crisis (Part 2): Climate change and migration patterns

This article is the second part of a series on the global migration crisis. You can find part one here.

After establishing that refugees are a natural global phenomenon, we now turn to their integration, the economic challenges and opportunities they create for host countries, and the growing role of climate change in shaping migration patterns. Aside from politicisations, experts agree that hosting migrants can be a win-win situation, however, this requires cooperation, data-driven policies which learn from past failures and an understanding of the new drivers which may alter our traditional views regarding migration.

Integration and regularisation

Refugee integration models range from full inclusion to more restricted statuses, often mirroring broader societal perceptions of migration within the host country’s sociopolitical context. This explanation is reflective of the difficulties in classifying the integration of refugees, as integration crosses several levels, and rarely is met equally in all of them. While accommodation location is one in which we see countries place migrants in small, agglomerated areas, or across various regions, the extent of integration as a whole is mostly determined by the level of regularisation.

Ana Maria Lara-Salinas, Migration and Health Specialist at the World Bank in Colombia, highlighted the critical role of regularisation in effective integration: “Nonetheless, in the integration of migrants, it is essential to understand the role of regularising their status. Integration can be hindered in multiple ways, such as leaving the task of regularisation to specific parts of the government, who will face their own limitations and policy challenges, such as having to deal with origin nations or having to prioritise security concerns above full integration.” Regularisation enables quicker access to public services and better job opportunities in the formal economy. It also helps mitigate negative externalities commonly linked to irregular migration. Regularisation, however, also crosses various dimensions, such as gender and labour participation.

Dimensions of integration and opportunity: gender and labour markets

Despite a nearly equal gender split among migrants (51.9% male to 48.1% female), women face significantly more barriers to formal employment, with an 18-percentage point gap in labour force participation. Despite the fairly equal percentages in terms of ‘who’ migrates, it tends to be males who end up working more (at least formally) than women, with an estimated 18 percentage point difference between them. The reasons are varied, such as women traditionally taking care of children, or obstacles which push women into informal, more precarious jobs, such as domestic work. Additionally, women who stay in their home countries while their spouses migrate tend to suffer similar labour market experiences. Esther Jimenez Atochero, Independent Researcher and formerly at the Migration Policy Institute, spoke to us about this phenomenon: “When these men leave, they leave a gap in the economies of the origin countries, that women then have to take on. The problem with that is that when these women take on these jobs, they get paid less, they get recognised less, and they struggle to achieve the means necessary for an adequate standard of living.” This gendered, labour aspect of migration aligns with additional challenges faced in the economic integration of migrants, namely, informality and lack of participation.

Speaking to Professor Toman Barsbai, at the University of Bristol’s School of Economics and previously at the University of St Andrews, he emphasised how host country economic conditions at the time of arrival shape labour market integration: “Economic conditions in host countries at the time of arrival are important for the path of economic integration. In recent research, we found that arriving during a recession forces immigrants to downgrade their occupations”. In general, it is estimated that only 60% of women and 77% of men migrants participate in the labour market of their host countries. While this may severely underestimate temporal labour market participation and that in informal sectors, which is quite common for migrants, it still shows how, despite many migrating in the search of economic opportunity, most face severe obstacles in accessing the labour market. The reasons for it are varied, and research regarding this is constantly appearing.

Speaking to Jiangnan Liao, Research officer at CReAM and PhD candidate in Labour Economics at UCL, she pointed out key findings from research by Foged et al. (2024a, 2024b) and Brell et al. (2020): “Gender disparities in labour market integration for refugees often arise due to differing migration paths, with many women entering through family reunification (…) Effective policies focus on ensuring independent legal status for women, enabling their full participation in the labour market”. She added that it is essential, though not exclusively for women, that host countries foster early labour market integration, pointing to a key example from Denmark: “In Denmark, policies that improve language training and match refugees to areas with labour shortages show positive long-term impacts on employment and earnings. Enhancements to existing programs should focus on expanding language training, improving skill recognition systems, and ensuring that refugees are placed in regions with strong labour markets for more robust long-term integration outcomes”.

Nonetheless, this is many times constrained by host country policies. Professor Barsbai noted that some key differences exist between how economic migrants and refugees are integrated in some countries’ labour markets: “For refugees, many host countries do not allow refugees to work in the first months after arrival. These employment bans are counter-productive. We have compelling evidence that they reduce employment and wages of refugees for many years after the ban ends. The bans hence slow down the economic integration of refugees and reduce their motivation to integrate early on”.

Work by the World Bank points out that these counterproductive policies increase informality, and that key differences regarding securing work rights exist between regions, both in terms of practicality (e.g. location of refugee encampments), as well as legally (e.g. lack of work permits, high fees for them). Nonetheless, the percentage of refugees with unrestricted (legal) access to formal employment has gone from 18% in 2019 to 45% in 2023, showing positive signs in terms of more open frameworks for their economic integration.

Climate Migration – a new driver and opening for labour market participation

Climate change-driven displacement, though mostly concentrated within borders, is also impacting trends in cross-border migration. Climate will have an increasingly important role in driving migration, but, additionally, it is already having sizeable effects on refugees and migrants aside from motivating some of them to migrate.

Dr Frank Laczko, former Director and Head of Research at the UN-IOM and Senior Adviser to the WHO’s Health and Migration Programme (Global Data Initiative), pointed out that: “The impact of climate change on migration patterns is becoming increasingly clear, and it’s an area where data collection still lags behind the urgency of the issue”.

Ryan Plano, formerly Project Officer at Climate Refugees and MSc in International Migration and Public Policy (2019) at the LSE, regards conceptualisation and legal recognition as a dimension of refugees and migration which climate blurs: “There’s no definition of climate refugees under international law. The existing refugee framework – based on the 1951 Refugee Convention – does not include climate. While there have been discussions about creating new protocols or reopening the convention, international law simply hasn’t kept pace with the realities of climate-induced displacement. This has and will make acting on it much harder”.

Another example of climate’s impact on migration comes from refugee and migrant settlements. Lawrence Huang, Policy Analyst at Migration Policy Institute, former Consultant at IOM, and MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, spoke to us about how climate change is impacting refugee settlements: “Migrants are often moving to refugee camps and informal settlements that are incredibly climate vulnerable, and there is some good evidence that East Africa’s refugee camps are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of drought and desertification, and that can undermine the potential economic benefits that refugees can bring to their host countries (…) if the places that they are living in are so climate vulnerable that they are being displaced so that they can’t farm or they can’t sort of develop their economic opportunities, that undermines their potential economic contributions”.

The lack of data, the challenges in international law, and the speed at which climate change is worsening some of the most challenging issues in the integration of refugees and migration shows how important it is that governments, citizens and other key actors start working towards getting better data, constructing better frameworks, and improving mitigation strategies for climate change-induced externalities of migration.

Nonetheless, Lawrence also mentioned that migrants are key in helping solve those same problems by participating in the green economy transition: “In Australia and Canada, about a quarter of clean energy or green transition jobs are already done by immigrant workers. We do not have green transitions without immigrant workers, that’s just not possible right now, so if we could scale up those jobs, by training migrants and refugees to access those jobs and making sure that we have safeguards and regulations on job quality and conditions [wages], I think there’s a real opportunity there”.

Addressing climate-driven migration requires proactive international collaboration to mitigate vulnerabilities while recognising the economic contributions migrants can make, particularly in green economy jobs.

In conclusion, integration requires careful and holistic regularisation, but also considerations of gender and labour market participation. New complexities are being brought by climate change, however, this also shows us how refugees and migrants present economic opportunities for host countries by, for example, helping in the green energy transition. Essential to all this is collaboration between public, private and multilateral stakeholders, who can prepare holistic, comprehensive policies prepared to solve current and future challenges in the field of refugees and migration.

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