Introduction

By the year 2000, the total population of people living outside their country of birth or citizenship reached approximately 160 million. Over the next few decades, we can expect to see larger and more diverse international migrant flows, driven by widening income inequalities across nations, improvements in transportation and communications, expanding formal and informal recruitment networks, sending-country policies that encourage and train people for work abroad, and structural changes in the economies and societies of migrant-sending and host countries. Continuing economic integration among nations may reduce economic pressures for international migration in the long run by bringing capital to would-be migrants in their home countries as an alternative to having people migrate to capital in developed countries. Nevertheless, in the short run, market liberalization is likely to create labour-market dislocations that intensify migration pressures.