In advance of International Migration Day on Tuesday 18 December, explore this new OECD website on the integration of immigrants. If you click on the “Key information by country” button, you get a dropdown list of all OECD countries and for each, data and information on how a country compares to others in indicators ranging from housing and education to employment and income. The “More information by country and indicator” opens an Excel file with all the data.
Recent OECD reports on migration have highlighted a number of emerging trends:
A rapidincrease in high-skilled migration. A third of recent immigrants (those arrived in the past 5 years) are tertiary educated and on average immigrants in OECD countries are more qualified than the native born. For some countries such as Ecuador, Malawi, Afghanistan and Bulgaria, the number of highly-educated emigrants to OECD countries has doubled over the past decade. In total, about 26 million immigrants in OECD countries hold a university degree and about one million a PhD. Furthermore, currently there are nearly 3 million international students enrolled in OECD countries; over a quarter of them are either from India or China.
Growing number of migrant women, who migrate for employment, especially highly qualified women. Nearly 4 million women with higher education degrees settled in OECD countries between 2001 and 2006, 1.7 million of whom came from less-developed countries. In recent flows, the proportion of skilled migrants is in fact higher for women than for men (33% versus 31%).
A diversification of migration movements both in terms of destination and origin countries. Within Europe, because of the great recession, the resurgence of South-North movements as well as increasing returns.
A sharp rise in the number of native-born children of immigrants (15 years old and above). With over 48 million in all OECD countries, 19 million of them have parents born in countries outside the OECD area. Mexico has over 8 million descendents of immigrants living in OECD countries; the figure exceeds 1 million for descendents of immigrants from Turkey, India, Algeria, the Philippines and Morocco.