Mobility processes and practices

• MRCs have noticeable effects; there is evidence of a large reduction in individuals reporting the likelihood of migrating irregularly and a strong increase in individuals’ awareness of safe options and who to contact for assistance if they do migrate.
• The effects are consistent across different MRC locations and the types of services they provide, although magnitudes vary.
• These findings have implications for understanding how individuals decide to migrate and what interventions could effectively inform those decisions.

• Shrinking legal migration pathways significantly impact migrants in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central America and increase reliance on exploitative systems.
• In transit cities like Tijuana and Izmir, migrants live in a liminal state, which leads to both exploitation and agency, often marked by engagement in illicit activities.
• The complex realities of migration blur traditional distinctions, such as victim/exploiter and refugee/migrant, underscoring the limitations of current border-control policies and categorizations.

• Retrospective measurement is a form of collecting data about past events from participants by asking them to remember and report on those events after they have occurred.
• More than half of participants in the evaluation were scored on reintegration measures retrospectively. Returnees who were measured retrospectively gave more negative scores on several indicators of successful reintegration. 
• However, this— mostly non-statistically significant— effect is largely diminished when the small minority who report finding it difficult to remember the baseline period are removed. Suggestions are provided of how to use retrospective measurement. 

Public Attitudes to Migration 

Blame it on my youth: the origins of attitudes towards immigration 

• even subtle shifts in national politics can impact political orientations
• exposure to the principle of equality in the political climate during formative years positively affects immigration attitudes in adulthood even long after
• the interplay between attitudes and political context during formative years is important 

• To be more effective, communication on irregular migration should go beyond raising awareness or emphasizing security reasons, adopting a broader approach based on core values.
• Effective communication needs to tell stories that include facts and come from trusted sources. 
• Communicators need to check how well messages work right from the beginning to avoid any unexpected problems.

• mainly two factors are associated with attitudes to immigration: education (positively) and age (negatively)
• if an analysis lacks certain variables, part of their effect might be wrongly attributed to other explanatory variables
• economic factors are consistently less important than cultural factors in affecting attitudes to immigration

• Previous findings of the effects of values on attitudes to immigration and EU membership can be expanded to other policy areas, such as support for EU-wide benefits.
• Values of security and universalism have a small direct effect on whether people support EU-wide benefits. They have an indirect effect on how individuals self-identify politically, support for European integration and European identity.
• Individuals from countries who countribute more to the EU budget demonstrate higher levels of universalism and higher levels of support for EU-wide benefits.

• Using a conceptual framework developed by Robert Plutchik, 32 emotions are identified along with their theorised physiological reactions, possible stimuli, and behavioural societal effects.
• Emotional outcomes can be altered through different communication techniques, which can include storytelling, personal-based messages, facial expressions and body language, and aesthetics.
• Emotion-based communication in the field of migration, although widely used, is largely untested.

Labour Markets and Welfare States 

• The empirical analysis covering 29 countries between 2004-2015 reveals positive net fiscal impacts of EU migrants in Western European countries.
• Further, the study finds no major differences in the fiscal impacts of EU migrants across different welfare regimes in Western European countries 
• These findings challenge the common claim that advanced welfare states are incompatible with large-scale immigration because of adverse fiscal effects, and they also cast doubt on the idea that broad institutional characteristics of welfare states have substantial consequences for the fiscal impact of migration.

• Current EU regulations allow EU workers (i.e. mobile EU citizens who live and work in a Member State where they do not hold national citizenship) to “export” family benefits for their children and other family members resident in the home country.
• There is a fundamental tension between the 'employment-based' logic governing EU workers' access to benefits and the 'residence-based' logic underlying family policy in Member States, which contributes to political conflicts between and within EU Member States . 
• To reduce this tension, the paper makes the case for changing the principles for coordinating EU workers’ access to welfare benefits: It is the country where the child lives, rather than the country where the working parent/spouse is employed, that should bear the responsibility for providing child benefits.

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