Towards 2035 : Making Migration and Integration Policies Future Ready

No one knows with certainty how migration flows and integration trends will develop in the mid-term or long-term. In today’s world, however, the pace of change has accelerated to the point that legislation and regulation often react to novel circumstances, rather than anticipate them. It’s very hard to develop ‘future ready’ policies. What will drive migration flows in the future ? What will integration look like ? They are unlikely to be identical to the past, but we don’t have a crystal ball. Even the most sophisticated modelling cannot capture all the relevant drivers.

This paper provides policy makers with two guides to migration and integration policy making for the future. The first is an inventory of megatrends already underway and which will transform the environment for policy making. The second identifies weak signals of potential transformations and explores what would happen if these were to become major game changers. The scenarios include technological change ; a shift in the very way people think about “integration” ; the emergence of new stakeholders in migration and integration policy ; and rising importance of non-OECD countries as actors in migration and integration.

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