Migrants, Refugees, and Societies

The World Development Report 2023, "Migrants, Refugees, and Societies," reframes one of the most polarized debates in development around a single practical question: not whether migration is good or bad, but how it can work better for global development. The Report focuses on people who live outside their country of nationality and lack its citizenship, about 184 million people worldwide (roughly 2.3 percent of the global population), of whom 37 million are refugees. It treats naturalized citizens as full members of their societies rather than as migrants, on the view that the absence of citizenship and its associated rights, not the act of having moved, is what creates distinct challenges. About 43 percent of these migrants live in low- and middle-income countries, a fact the Report uses to dispel the assumption that migration is mainly a high-income-country concern.

Its starting premise is that migration is necessary for countries at every income level, driven by widening divergences in wages, labor markets, demographics, and climate exposure. Demographic change is the central engine. High-income countries are aging quickly, and many middle-income countries are growing old before they grow rich, while low-income countries have booming young populations whose skills often do not yet match global labor demand. The Report illustrates this with Italy, whose population is projected to fall from 59 million to about 32 million by 2100, and Nigeria, projected to grow from 213 million to 791 million over the same horizon. Climate change compounds these pressures: about 40 percent of the world's population, some 3.5 billion people, live in places highly exposed to climate impacts, and the number of refugees has more than doubled over the last decade.

The analytical core is the Match and Motive Matrix, which combines two lenses that have rarely been integrated. From labor economics comes "match," the degree to which a migrant's skills and attributes meet a destination country's needs; the stronger the match, the larger the gains for the migrant, the destination, and often the origin country through remittances and knowledge transfers. From international law comes "motive," the circumstances of the move. People who flee a "well-founded fear" of persecution, conflict, or violence are refugees entitled to international protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and for them the host country's cost-benefit calculus no longer applies. Crossing these two dimensions produces four cases: economic migrants with a strong match, refugees with a strong match, refugees with a weak match, and distressed migrants who are neither refugees nor a strong fit.

When the match is strong, which the Report argues is true for the vast majority of migrants regardless of skill level or legal status, the benefits clearly exceed the costs and the policy goal is simply to maximize gains for all parties. Low-skilled migrants fill jobs locals will not take at prevailing wages, and high-skilled migrants raise productivity across sectors; foreign-born workers make up about 17 percent of health care workers in the United States, 12 percent in the United Kingdom, and 79 percent in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The Report stresses that much of the controversy is social and cultural rather than economic, that there is no "pre-migration" harmony to restore, and that gains grow when migrants hold legal status and formal rights so their wages and job quality converge faster with those of nationals. Origin countries gain most when they make labor migration an explicit part of a poverty-reduction strategy, lowering remittance costs, building globally demanded skills, and mitigating the loss of skilled workers (in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, the tertiary-educated are 30 times more likely to emigrate than the less educated).

When the match is weak, the costs to destination countries exceed the benefits, and the Report draws a sharp line between refugees and distressed migrants. Refugee situations, it argues, should be treated as medium-term development challenges rather than recurring humanitarian emergencies, because refugees remain in exile for an average of 13 years and the cost of serial emergency response is high. The recommended approach is to give refugees the right to work, support their access to jobs, allow internal mobility toward opportunity, and include them in national education and health systems, an approach already used in countries as different as Colombia, Niger, Poland, Turkiye, and Uganda. Because hosting refugees is a global public good, the costs should be shared, yet the support base is strikingly narrow: the vast majority of refugees live in about a dozen, mostly low- and middle-income, neighboring countries, three donors provide almost two-thirds of bilateral refugee financing, and four countries account for almost three-quarters of resettlements.

The hardest case is distressed migration, where people are neither refugees nor a strong match and often turn to irregular and dangerous routes; since 2014 nearly 50,000 people have died while attempting to migrate. Here the Report urges destination countries to reduce the need for such movements through development and expanded legal pathways, to extend complementary forms of protection to those who are not refugees but cannot be safely returned, and to carry out any returns humanely and in line with human rights conventions. Transit countries such as Mexico and Morocco, which become substitute destinations when borders tighten, need coordinated arrangements with destination countries rather than being left to cope alone.

The Report's concluding message is deliberately hopeful and operational. Making migration work better, it argues, requires doing things differently: bilateral cooperation (labor agreements, Global Skills Partnerships) to strengthen the match, and multilateral cooperation to set norms and share the costs of movements driven by fear. It calls for new financing instruments that let countries care for noncitizens predictably, better and more harmonized data, and the inclusion of voices usually absent from the debate, namely developing countries, the private sector, local authorities, and migrants and refugees themselves. Migration, the Report concludes, is neither universally good nor universally bad; it is complicated and necessary, and when well managed it is a powerful force for shared prosperity for migrants, refugees, those who stay behind, and origin and destination societies alike.