Migration Scenario Narratives

A considerable amount of literature has been published on global and migration scenarios in recent decades. Central to the migration scenarios and narratives are the concepts of migration drivers and migration dynamics. Demographic, economic, technological, social, political, and environmental developments and complex interrelations between these domains are considered essential in creating plausible future migration developments. This report provides a set of internally consistent and evidence-based qualitative scenario narratives.

The narratives are built on consistent demographic, socio-economic, environmental and political alternate futures generated for the EU and developing countries based on the qualitative and quantitative evidence gathered in the FUME project. Each narrative describes the future for the EU and developing countries in the short-term until 2030 and in the long-term between 2030 and 2050. These alternative futures are complemented by the potential changes in the future migratory demand and pressure from the expert survey conducted in the project and the characteristics of future migrants from the Delphi survey.

The Future Migration Scenarios for Europe (FUME) project aims to fill the knowledge gap in existing research concerning determinants for migration by investigating and evaluating migration patterns, motivations, and modalities at multiple geographical scales, from international through regional to local, and imagining possible futures. The population and migration projections, which aim to shed some light on the complex interactions of the drivers of migration and the migration outcomes, lay at the project's core. While migration projections require assumptions on the size and the characteristics of the future populations and assumptions on the future development of migration drivers, migration scenario narratives provide the qualitative reasoning behind these assumptions.