A system-thinking approach for migration studies: an introduction

ABSTRACT

Migration studies first took up a systems perspective in the 1970s to explain migration flows and their dynamics over time. Over the last decades, the dominant discourse and analysis in migration studies have remained constrained within the limits of the ‘migration system’. While the influence of the ‘wider environment’ on the migration system has been recognized, what the elements of the wider environment are and their mechanisms of influence remain poorly articulated. Through eight innovative contributions, this Special Issue seeks to contribute firstly, to unpacking the elements (i.e. the other systems) that constitute the ‘wider environment’ with which the components of the migration system (e.g. migrants, sending and receiving communities, institutions, policies, etc.) interact, and secondly, to disentangling the mutual influences between the migration system and this wider environment. This Special Issue as a whole suggests that the growing complexity of migration governance demands a complexity-based approach that acknowledges the multiple relations among systems. In this respect, the wider environment and its linkages with the migration system need to be better captured through an analytical approach based on system thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration system
• system thinking
• complexity
• mutual influences
• wider environment

1. Introduction

Human mobility – in all its facets including migration – has always been driven by a complex net of factors and motivations that, taken together, act as external or internal constraints or facilitators (De Haas, Castles, and Miller 2020). In this sense, the migration phenomenon can be considered as a system in itself. A system is ‘a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole’ (Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, n.d.). This definition implies that a system is composed of three parts: its elements, the interconnections among them and the scope toward which the elements work together as a whole (e.g. the blood system) (Arnold and Wade 2015). In other words, it is meaningless to study the single elements of a system without considering the interlinkages and the overall function that the system serves. Migration studies first took up such a system perspective in the 1970s to explain migration flows and their dynamics over time. Mabogunje (1970) initially used the concept of a ‘migration system’ to theorize rural-urban migration in Africa, and Kritz, Lim, and Zlotnik (1992) subsequently extended it to the analysis of international migration. The Migration System Theory emphasized the role of the ties shared between sending and receiving countries (DeWaard, Kim, and Raymer 2012). It recognized that linkages between countries can stimulate, maintain and direct international flows (Fawcett 1989) and that the resulting feedback mechanisms can influence the links between people, families and communities (Bakewell, de Haas, and Kubal 2012; Mabogunje 1970).

While analysed in a number of the contributions to this Special Issue, it is important to note that ‘migration regime’ is not synonymous with the ‘migration system’, as the former refers to the regulatory mechanisms (e.g. laws, policies, regulations) in migration governance (for a comprehensive overview of the usage of the concept of regime in migration studies see Rass and Wolff (2018) and Cvajner, Echeverría, and Sciortino (2018). Migration system, however, is understood as comprising not only the formal measures that govern migration flows but, more in general, the interrelationships that connect actors (both formal and informal), objects and countries across space, and time and the feedback loops that strengthen or weaken these links. This definition echoes Mabogunje’s (1970) which refers to migration systems as a complex of elements (e.g. individuals, groups and institutions) with their own attributes (demographic, economic, geopolitical, sociocultural, etc.) that interact through exchanges or relationships (e.g. migration flows, flows of information and financial capitals and goods etc.) (DeWaard and Ha 2019).

In a migration system perspective, not only is it important to understand the internal factors that drive the interactions among the system’s elements, but also the influence of the wider environment on its components, attributes and scope. This influence has been recognized in the literature (Bakewell 2014; Mabogunje 1970), but precisely what constitutes the wider environment and the channels through which this influence is exerted remains underexplored.

More recently, scientific and grey literature across a range of fields have started to adopt the term ‘system thinking’ to mean a ‘set of synergistic analytic skills used to improve the capability of identifying and understanding systems, predicting their behaviours, and devising modifications to them in order to produce desired effects (Arnold and Wade 2015, 675)’. The system-thinking approach uses a set of analytical concepts, such as feedback loops, transboundary and spillover effects and transmission pathways, to understand the mechanisms through which the interaction between a system’s components and among different systems shape a system’s dynamics and possible development (OECD/EC-JRC 2021). The main tenet of this theoretical perspective is that each action, decision or policy has side effects that can spill over across systems and geographical areas affecting what happens far away from the point of origin (e.g. the so-called butterfly effect).

By adopting a system-thinking perspective, this Special Issue intends to move the discourse around the migration system beyond the migration system’s boundaries. It will do so by looking at the mutual influences, feedback mechanisms and transboundary effects between the migration system and other societal systems. Thus, this Special Issue pursues two objectives:

1. Unpacking the elements (i.e. the other systems) that constitute the ‘wider environment’ with which the components of the migration system (e.g. migrants, sending and receiving communities, institutions, policies, etc) interact. Here, we understand the wider environment as consisting of other systems with their own components, dynamics and purposes.

2. Disentangling the mutual influences between the migration system and this wider environment. In the conceptualisation that we offer, components of the migration system are in perpetual movement across other systems generating a set of side effects and feedback loops. At the same time, the migration system is continuously influenced by what happens in the other systems. Therefore, we assume that the mechanisms and dynamics featured in the migration system cannot be understood without analysing this ‘dance of influences’.

This Special Issue features eight papers interrogating what happens at the interface between migration systems and a set of other systems, specifically, agri-food production, disaster risk management, labour market, global supply chain, family care, health care, social care and higher educational systems. It is important here to note the difference between a sector (e.g. the agri-food sector) which refers to a segment of the economy, and the system which has a much broader meaning. A single system can indeed be composed of several sectors (e.g. in the agrifood system we can identify, for example, the crops, livestock, forestry, aquaculture and fisheries sectors).

While the terms ‘feedback loops’ and ‘transmission pathways’ are not necessarily used explicitly in the papers, this collection of papers adds value to migration studies literature by systematizing and placing under the system-thinking lens, a burgeoning, but fragmented and under-theorized, body of literature examining the relationship between migration and other systems – what we term, following Carling (2017) – nexus-oriented scholarship. Some of that literature emerged in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which surfaced and made visible the connections between societal systems (Falkenhain et al. 2021; Marschke et al. 2021; Molinero-Gerbeau 2021; Tagliacozzo, Pisacane, and Kilkey 2021). The Covid-19 crisis did not create the links among societal systems; rather, it illuminated and intensified them (Tagliacozzo, Pisacane, and Kilkey 2021), making evident how risks can rapidly escalate and propagate across interdependent systems, possibly producing far-reaching knock-on effects and complete breakdowns of systems (Sillmann et al. 2022). In order to address the challenges associated with such systemic risk it becomes crucial to integrate different systems perspectives and foster system thinking (Sillmann et al. 2022). Thus, some of the papers in this Special Issue take as a point of departure the Covid-19 pandemic, and/or other ongoing crises such as Brexit and the war in Ukraine, to reflect upon the interconnections and interdependencies between migration and other systems.

In the endeavour of collating the contributions to form this Special Issue, we made some choices that we explicate here. Firstly, the adoption of a system-thinking perspective challenges us to step outside disciplinary silos and to collaborate across knowledge domains. Thus, the Special Issue is intended to be interdisciplinary, reflecting the joint effort of experts from different disciplinary paths and fields.

Secondly, we sought to develop a global outlook by including case studies and authors from different parts of the world. These include Australia, UK, Singapore, Poland, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Italy and Sweden. A particular effort was made to contribute to the agenda of decolonizing migration studies by involving authors from the so-called ‘Global South’, and by shifting the focus solely on Global South-Global North migration toward the recognition of the particular dynamics of South-South, North-North, East–West and internal migration (see the papers by: Anderson, Khadka, and Ruhs 2024; Cheng et al. 2024; Hussein, Kilkey, and Tawodzera 2024; Kaczmarczyk 2024; Tagliacozzo, Ayeb-Karlsson, and Ahmed 2024).

Thirdly, we encouraged contributions that feature a comparative analysis of between-country dynamics (see the papers by Corrado, Pisacane, and Ferrari 2024; Kilkey and Baldassar 2024; and Davda et al. 2024), or between different social groups in the same country (see the paper by Hussein, Kilkey, and Tawodzera 2024). Such comparative analysis makes it possible to reflect upon which dimensions of the interactions between the migration systems and connected societal systems are context-specific and which transgress social and geographical boundaries.

Fourthly, we sought contributions that extend the focus beyond unskilled labour migration – to date, the main point of interest in scholarship on intersections between migration and other systems (e.g. see Anderson and Ruhs 2010). Thus, papers include case-studies of skilled migration (Davda et al. 2024), as well as migration routes beyond labour, such as family-related migration (Kilkey and Baldassar 2024), international student mobility (Cheng et al. 2024) and humanitarian migration (Tagliacozzo, Ayeb-Karlsson, and Ahmed 2024). Incorporating a wider range of ‘migrant categories’ responds to the diversification of human mobility that is part of the increasing complex migration realities globally (Geddes 2021; Triandafyllidou 2022). It also allows us to reflect on how categories are not mutually exclusive – for example, labour and family (Kofman and Raghuram 2015) – or binaries – for example economic migrant / refugee (King 2002), and to take into account the continuum between categories.

Finally, we aimed to contribute to challenging migration studies’ tendency towards methodological nationalism, a tendency resting on a ‘container’ theory of society that locks the conceptualization and analysis of society within the territorial and institutional boundaries of the nation state (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002). A number of papers, therefore, spotlight the role of transnational systems, including the paper by Anderson, Khadka, and Ruhs (2024), which focuses on the role of global supply chains in producing a migrant workforce beyond the nation state, and the paper by Kilkey and Baldassar (2024) which examines the role played by transnational systems of familial-based care in sustaining migrants’ social reproduction in countries of destination.

This introductory paper is organized as follows. First we briefly describe the literature on system thinking, its origin, theoretical development and practical applications, including the challenges. We then reflect on the relevance of system thinking to migration studies, given especially the complexification of migration patterns wrought by processes of economic, social, political and cultural globalization, and the challenges this presents for migration governance. Following that, we turn to examine some of the ways system thinking has entered migration studies, focusing on both the migration systems literature and the nexus-oriented literature. We continue the paper by explaining how the papers in this Special Issue are informed – although in different ways – by the system-thinking perspective. We then move on to articulate the new analytical lens emerging from the papers, which we propose can inform future migration research. We conclude by highlighting some limitations of the Special Issue and, in light of those, some future avenues of research.

2. System thinking

2.1. The importance of a system-thinking approach in today’s word

Human societies are, and have always been, complex machines and the interdependencies among societal systems, trends and dynamics is a constant in human history. However globalization – as it emerged from the nineteenth century – marks an intensification of the interrelationships. According to ILO (2003) ‘globalisation refers to the progressive integration of economies and societies. It is driven by new technologies, new economic relationships and the national and international policies of a wide range of actors, including governments, international organizations, business, labour and civil society’. The interconnectedness of today’s societies and societal systems poses a set of challenges from an analytical, policy-making and governance perspective. Nonlinearities and time and space lapses between cause and effects make it difficult to learn from the past and apply traditional knowledge generation approaches focused on a specialized knowledge of domains or sectors. The spillover consequences of policies and governance mechanisms adopted in one system into other connected systems make it easy to lose control over the chain of a policy’s impacts. In such an interlinked world, system thinking becomes an essential tool for understanding, governing and predicting the behaviour of systems and their linkages provided that the illusion of absolute control is abandoned to make room for a complexity-based and probabilistic approach (Ison and Straw 2020). Arnold and Wade (2015) define system thinking as ‘a set of synergistic analytic skills used to improve the capability of identifying and understanding systems, predicting their behaviours, and devising modifications to them in order to produce desired effects. These skills work together as a system’ (675). Thus, the authors conceive system thinking as a system per se, having its own characteristics and purpose. Its features involve the analysis of the interconnections among elements, the identification of the feedback loops and the understanding of how they impact the system’s behaviour and possible development (Arnold and Wade 2015). System thinking does not look at the single components of a system to understand it, but rather at the way in which these components work together. Making a naturalistic metaphor, it is not interested in the study of the single trees in a forest but pays attention to the forest as an ecosystem in itself with its own dynamics (Reynolds and Holwell 2010; Richmond 2000).

As an analytical tool, system thinking allows us to work with, rather than against, the complexity of today’s societal challenges and knowledge domains. However, this entails an effort in terms of multidisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration. This collaboration is an essential enabler of system thinking and of the ability to collect insights into systems’ properties, emergent behaviours and potential pervasive (and systemic) risks (Hynes et al. 2020). Voulvoulis et al. (2022) suggest that in order to address the sustainability challenges of the future, we need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of multiple disciplinary perspectives, altering the boundaries between fields. Talking about the energy sector, Laimon et al. (2022) highlight that it consists of many components connected in a complex manner and whose behaviour is influenced by economic, social and environmental aspects, as well as by a variety of external factors. Working with this complexity involves not only putting together experts from different disciplines, but also diverse societal actors with very different worldviews and interests, creating spaces for mutual learning and cross-sector fertilization in a multistakeholder perspective (Laimon et al. 2022; Voulvoulis et al. 2022).

Things are no way easier if we focus on the policy-making domain. For policy makers, system thinking should be incorporated both in the policy formulation processes and in the everyday governance and decision-making. As for the former, attention needs to be paid to the links that connect a system’s policy with other policies in the same system and in other systems, and to the transmission channels of a policy’s effects (OECD-EC/JRC 2021). Given that, in a system-thinking perspective, it is important to understand how components work together in interaction networks (Reynolds and Holwell 2010), policy-making has to account for how policies will or should work together to achieve the desired outcome. As highlighted by Johar, ‘we need a new governance model which acknowledges our global interdependence at all scales and focuses on the quality, diversity and integrity of feedback in all its natures, whilst recognizing the future is real-time and negotiatory. For us to move forward, we need massive reform of our model of governance reinventing it for the twenty-first century’ (Johar 2018; cited in Ison and Straw 2020, 15). However, system thinking is not an off-the-shelf tool; rather, it requires a training and learning process that allows policy makers to move beyond their own disciplinary lens and to incorporate the set of synergetic skills at the basis of an effective policy formulation (Voulvoulis et al. 2022).

Even when links among systems are made visible and system thinking is applied, two major issues can emerge. The first one is that system thinking often focuses on global issues and dynamics (e.g. climate change-related issues) and fails to integrate cross-scale perspectives and cross-systems’ local and regional feedbacks (Bi et al. 2021). In other words, system thinking is not only important to understand high level and abstract issues; rather, the skills set it furnishes us with should be brought down to local level lived realities.

The second, and linked, issue is the difficulty for decision makers to translate system thinking into everyday decision-making (Barquet et al. 2021). According to Barquet et al. (2021), knowledge uptake and capacity building are two key drivers of this process. In particular, in terms of capacity building, decision makers need to increase their ability to ‘map and navigate the complexities of interconnected problems, multi-level governance, multi-organizational settings, cross-cutting issues, policy networks, inter-dependencies, and linkages’, and ‘to integrate competing and opposing forms of knowledge and coordinate the multiplicity of organizations and interests to form a coherent policy fabric’ (1558).

2.2. Systems thinking in migration studies

Migration is inextricably linked to complex and varied processes of societal change (Castles 2010). As a key driver of social transformation, globalization through the growing interdependence and interconnectedness it forges, in the context of uneven economic development, has fostered the intensification, multiplication and diversification of international migration in recent decades (De Haas, Castles, and Miller 2020; Talani 2021). The ever more complex character of international migration in terms of, for example, its geographies, temporalities, categories and intersectionalities, poses challenges for approaches to migration governance. ‘The term “migration governance” goes beyond government to designate the interaction and networking between public and private actors, both in horizontal (non-hierarchical) and vertical (hierarchical) ways in the governing of migration flows and migrant integration processes. It recognizes that relevant actors include not only national authorities but also civil society, employers, trade unions, various intermediaries like travel or employment agencies, education institutions, and formal and informal networks’ (Triandafyllidou forthcoming). For Triandafyllidou (forthcoming), the key challenge for migration governance is to relate it the ‘wider dynamics of an increasingly interconnected international environment’ (Triandafyllidou forthcoming). In this respect, a system thinking perspective may be useful.

System thinking is apparent in the migration system literature introduced in Section 1 above. Most prominent is the attention to feedback mechanisms – feedback from earlier migration is understood as playing a critical role in shaping subsequent patterns of international movement between two countries/regions. Such feedback is mainly conceptualized as operating between actors as they initiate and grow migration networks that connect ‘origin’ and ‘destination’ societies (DeWaard and Ha 2019). While Bakewell (2014) argues the need to widen analysis of feedback mechanisms beyond actors and networks, he constrains this to feedback between elements within the migration system. These elements, which are seen as interacting, are defined as including ‘flows of people, ideas and goods, institutions in the sense of discourses and associated practices (e.g. ‘culture of migration’, smuggling, inequality), and strategies as in plans for action by particular actors (e.g. individual and household strategies; policies of governments, private businesses, and civil society organizations) – which relate to the migration between localities’ (pg. 310). While the ‘wider environment’ is acknowledged to have influence, as we noted above, what constitutes the wider environment and the channels of its influence are underexplored. This is a key shortcoming given the challenge referred to above that is confronting migration governance (Triandafyllidou forthcoming).

A different way that some of the tenets of system thinking have been taken up in migration studies is through the notion of ‘nexus’. Stern and Öjendal (2010, 10) define nexus as a ‘network of connections between disparate ideas, processes or objects; alluding to a nexus implies an infinite number of possible linkages and relations’. What Sørensen (2012, 67) has called ‘nexus thinking’ first entered migration studies through efforts to capture the relationship between migration and development, two policy fields that had traditionally been thought about separately, despite their inextricable links. Since the introduction of the ‘migration-development nexus’ by Sørensen, Van Hear, and Engberg-Pedersen (2003), migration studies has undergone what Carling (2017) refers to as a process of ‘nexification’. Nexification captures the proliferation of studies exploring the nexus between migration and other policy fields (e.g. security, asylum, trade, agriculture, citizenship and education), processes (e.g. ageing, climate change, urbanization and integration) and phenomena (e.g. weather, conflict, crime and left-behind).

In this Special Issue, we understand these other policy fields, processes and phenomena as part of the wider environment with which migration systems interact. Despite the rapidly expanding number of nexus-oriented studies reported by Carling in 2017, and observable since, we contend that in the main, these analyses remain isolated attempts to understand dual relationships between systems, and that there remains further work to be done to capture the complex net of connections and interdependencies that exist in natural societal settings. Moreover, unlike in other contexts – e.g. sustainability (Estoque 2023) – there is very limited explicit discussion in those studies of what constitutes a nexus-informed analytical approach, and how it contributes to the examination of the mutual influences and overlapping and crossing areas between migration and other societal systems.

Carling’s (2017) short commentary is one of the few pieces of writing to set out some of the key features of nexus thinking. For him, a nexus approach serves to capture the complex interdependencies between usually two (but sometimes more) policy fields, processes or phenomena, which affect each other in multiple ways and where causality is multi-directional rather than linear. As Carling (2017: no page number) asserts, ‘talking of a nexus makes sense because the complex two-way relationships are hard to disentangle’. Writing about the agricultural-migration nexus, King, Lulle and Melossi (2021) conceive a nexus as ‘a kind of nodal or connected system with multiple linkages and relationships’ (52). Further insights come from Sørensen (2012) who alerts us to the importance of attending to the relations of power and inequalities inherent within a nexus. Reflecting specifically on the migration-development nexus, Sørensen highlights the marginalization of migrant-sending developing countries vis-à-vis migrant-receiving countries in the Global North, and notes the privileging of migration interests over those of development. Such asymmetrical relations play out discursively, as well as materially, and raise questions around how discourses come to frame the interdependencies within a nexus in particular ways, and with what consequences for what is made visible and what remains hidden in analysis of the nexus (Carling 2017). Often the lived experiences of migrants, their families and their communities are elided in processes of discourse creation (Geddes 2021), leading Sørensen (2012) to advocate combining micro – and macro-level perspectives in nexus thinking. In this vein, a nexus approach, therefore, not only draws our attention to unequal relations between systems, places and actors, but also allows us to take the agency of migrants – who respond to, contest and circumvent systems – into account, thus helping to avoid perceiving migrants merely as passive actors, and countering tendencies of over-simplification and of victimization. Indeed, recognition of migrants’ agency to ‘navigate the migration field’ is central to Triandafyllidou’s (2022) proposal for a ‘messy governance approach’ in order to deal with increasingly complex migration realities globally.

Inspired by the above insights, and drawing on the contributions of the wider system-thinking scholarship, in this Special Issue we aim to reflect more explicitly on what constitutes a system-thinking analytical approach in migration studies. Our rationale is that, in doing so, we will be able to contribute firstly, to unpacking the elements (i.e. the other systems) that constitute the wider environment with which the components of migration systems interact, and secondly, to disentangling the mutual influences between migration systems and the wider environment.

3. The special issue papers: unpacking the wider environment and disentangling the mutual influences between systems and migration governance

This Special Issue comprises eight contributions that explore what we understand as the wider environment that interacts with the migration system, casting light on the mutual influences between systems. The Special Issue papers touch upon the main systems connected to migration governance on a multiple geographical and scale level, including national, European and global. Cross-country comparison is featured in a number of the papers to highlight how the interplay between systems can be context-dependent. At the same time, papers make evident that some mechanisms of interaction can be replicated across contexts and countries, or that mechanisms can vary within the same country depending on social positioning, such as migrants’ legal status and ethnicity.

For example, in the first comparative contribution from Hussein, Kilkey, and Tawodzera (2024) titled ‘The vulnerability of Central & Eastern European and Zimbabwean migrant home care workers’ wellbeing in the UK: the intersectional effects of migration and social care systems’, the authors examine how the social care sector and migration system in England intersect to configure migrant care workers’ (MCWs) wellbeing experiences. The contribution focuses on a range of social care settings (live-in, home care and assisted living) and two groups of MCWs – those who, at the time of fieldwork (2019), were European Union (EU) citizen-workers – from Central & Eastern Europe – and those who originated outside the EU – from Zimbabwe. The paper draws on existing literature on migrant workers’ wellbeing to conceptualize MCWs’ wellbeing as an intersectional space between social care and migration systems. Drawing on an empirical qualitative study, the analysis highlights that migration shapes MCWs’ wellbeing through two distinct mechanisms. First, the migration experience interacts with the same underlying factors that influence all care workers’ dimensions of wellbeing at work. Second, migration, and the specific profile of migrant social care, add a new layer of factors that influence MCWs’ wellbeing. The latter is affected by structural systems, such as the migration regime, and by systemic challenges, such as the experience of inequalities and racism, exacerbated by the migration regime.

Keeping the focus on cross-country comparison, the contribution by Cheng et al. (2024) focuses on the nexus between migration governance and higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The paper ‘Migration governance and higher education during a pandemic: Policy (mis)alignments and international postgraduate students’ experiences in Singapore and the UK’, addresses spatial and temporal disjunctures that significantly impact how international students navigate these systems. Using the lens of international student mobility and drawing on a comparative qualitative study between Singapore and the UK (specifically, London), the authors explore international students’ experiences, firstly as (mis)alignments between migration governance and pandemic-induced mobility regulation, and secondly, as tensions between mobility regulations and institutional measures adopted by universities in Singapore and the UK. In both contexts, pandemic governance often compounded the complexities of migration policies, creating additional barriers for international students. In navigating these new challenges, international students adaptively draw on various resources while also imagining new possibilities presented by the otherwise challenging circumstances. With respect to the cross-border movement of international students, migration governance and higher education systems indeed intersect in complementary, as well as contradictory, ways that produce alignments as well as tensions via policy reversals, mobility constraints and differentiated access to institutional support.

The paper from Kilkey and Baldassar (2024) focuses on familial care-labour mobility and migration governance. In particular, the paper ‘Conditioning grandparent care-labour mobility at the care-migration systems nexus: Australia and the UK’, highlights familial care-labour mobility as an additional mechanism for connecting care and migration systems across borders, taking as case-studies grandparent care-labour mobility between China and Australia and between India and the UK. Drawing on the care circulation framework, the authors argue that a focus on these informal global care chains helps to bridge the more macro structural level approaches of the frameworks that focus on paid care labour with the more micro-level transnational family care approaches. The contribution is focused specifically on grandparent care-labour mobility as a growing phenomenon in scholarship, arguing that while it is ‘familial’, ‘informal’, ‘private’ and ‘invisible’, its dynamics and the lived experiences of those entwined within it, are mediated at the system level, and particularly at the care-migration systems nexus. The study examines how the care-migration system nexus is shaped by the prevailing logic of neoliberalism and ensuing patterns of stratification within care and migration systems. The authors argue that COVID-19 revealed this relatively hidden aspect of the global care economy – the informal care chains – and they highlight the need for a transnational ethics of family care to govern the care-migration systems nexus.

The final comparative paper is the contribution from Davda et al. (2024) which focuses on highly skilled migrants in the health sector. In particular, the paper ‘Migrant dentists, health system responses and future challenges: a case study of the United Kingdom and Australia’, undertakes a comparative analysis of the professional integration of migrant dentists in the two countries, and health system responses, while explaining implications for future health workforce governance. The paper presents a first multi-country study to analyse the professional integration of migrant dentists through the lens of health workforce and migration governance. The data were based on qualitative interviews with migrant dentists in both countries, along with registration and examinations data and policies at that time. The UK and Australia are high-income countries that have relied on, and continue to rely on, migrant dentists. The health systems and migration governance in both countries have responded to reduce the reliance on migrant dentists by increasing the number of local graduates over the past two decades. This study shows that Australia appears to have been more successful than the UK in reducing its dependence on migrant dentists. More recently, the combination of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, has reduced the flow of migrant dentists to the UK, although the long-term impact is yet to be determined. As the migration of dentists is likely to continue, health system policies that provide effective training and support to aid the professional integration of migrant dentists from low and middle – income countries in particular have emerged from this study as a key priority.

Other contributions in the Special Issue shed light on the dynamics of the labour market, which is highly influenced by geo-political tensions and global power relationships. The three papers tackling labour market issues do so from different perspectives, focusing on migrant workers in a low-income country (Malaysia), on migrant workers in an EU widening country (Poland) and on migrant workers in two European countries, one Southern (Italy) and one Northern (Sweden).

The contribution from Anderson, Khadka, and Ruhs (2024) titled ‘Demand for migrant workers: institutional system effects beyond national borders’, explores how wealthy countries’ reliance on migrant workers is not restricted to migrants working within their borders, but extends, through global supply chains, to migrants employed in lower-income countries. The paper provides an exploratory discussion of how migration, labour, and trade systems interact to argue for the expansion of research on dependence on migrant labour – a ‘widening of the lens’ – beyond national system effects, to incorporate transnational processes. Using the Covid-19 pandemic and associated concern with the provision of essential goods and services, the paper analyses how the employment of migrants in global supply chains and the societal resilience of higher-income countries is shaped by trade policies and agreements regulating flows of essential products across countries; by labour markets and conditions in low and middle-income countries producing essential products for export; and by migration systems within low – and middle-income countries. The contribution reveals how national systems and institutions interlock with those of other states, as well as transnational and international institutions, illuminated by the case study of the Malaysian production and export of rubber gloves, an essential good during the Covid-19 pandemic, that is heavily dependent on migrant labour.

The paper by Kaczmarczyk (2024) focuses on the Ukranian-Polish migration system, examining the nexus between migration governance and labour market at the crossing of two recent crises: COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. The paper ‘COVID-19 and labour market adjustments: policies, foreign labour and structural shifts’, analyses one of the most dynamically evolving migration processes in contemporary Europe – (largely temporary) labour migrants in Poland. Along with a structural demand for foreign workers, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed reluctant labour adjustments and economic changes. The paper aims at assessing the changing dynamics of migrants’ participation in the Polish labour market before and during the pandemic (based on available macro-level data) and disentangling what was the role of overall structural shifts (i.e. mobility between sectors of the economy) and implementing policy measures. These processes are presented in the context of the transition of Poland from being a net emigration to a net immigration country. Kaczmarczyk (2024) points to the role of the labour market as a system that links two migration systems: one related to the large-scale migration of Poles after 2004, and the other, the immigration system. The role of the labour market became crystal clear during the pandemic. Despite the very fact that the ‘essential workers’ rhetoric was almost absent in the Polish public discourse, foreign workers – and Ukrainian workers in particular – played a significant role in securing the continuous operation of many sectors of the Polish economy. The paper shows that the role of migration in Poland has changed along with the transition from a net-sending into a net-receiving country, but still, it worked as a safety valve during the pandemic (as compared to the post-2004 period when the outflow of Poles contributed – to some extent – to the structural changes in the labour market). The author claims that this was possible because of liberal rules regarding international movements and work abroad. In addition, it is argued that despite the lack of clear (and explicit) migration policy, most of the observed trends over the past few years are explained in terms of spillovers and compounding effects of the initial liberalization of labour policies (the simplified procedure) and cascading effects of a very liberal approach to foreign labour. All of those processes are likely to have a very significant impact on the functioning of the Polish labour market in the future.

The paper by Corrado, Pisacane, and Ferrari (2024) draws attention to the relationship between migration governance and intensive agrifood production through a comparative perspective on two countries: Italy and Sweden. The paper ‘The agri-food system structural dependence on migrant workers in the European Union: policy responses, migration regimes and labour demand in Italy and Sweden’, compares the two countries in terms of the interplay between labour shortages in agriculture and the policies facing migrant workers’ exploitation within their respective agrifood systems. The methodology encompasses scientific and grey literature review, newspaper articles and policy documents from public and private actors, along with interviews with agrifood employers’ associations and trade unions. The cases show how labour shortages are politically constructed and have become a key issue in the possibility for migrants to integrate within the current corporate-environment food regime. There are clear indications that a shift in agriculture is reshaping migration policymaking, with important consequences for how labour migration is being redefined and for the future of agrifood systems in Europe. The authors conclude that national migration policy responses are politically conditioned by the way governments use state mechanisms and regulation to implement decisions produced by ideological positions on the future of labour, agriculture and food supply at the national level.

Finally, the paper by Tagliacozzo, Ayeb-Karlsson, and Ahmed (2024) titled ‘An integrated governance framework to map out and act on the interdependencies between human mobility and disaster risk’, elaborates on the importance to design and adopt an integrated governance to manage the risks and opportunities arising from the interactions between human mobility (HM) and disaster risk (DR) management. The analysis of HM and DR governance frameworks at the international and national levels (including through the case study lens of Bangladesh) shows that some progress has been made in integrating aspects of HM into DR governance and vice versa. However, respective frameworks are developing in parallel and further points of convergence and overlap still need to be adequately addressed. The authors advocate that the policy integration process can be guided and facilitated by combining two conceptual frameworks originating in the HM and DR governance fields: the human mobilities perspective and the systemic risk approach. The paper concludes by proposing an HM-DR governance framework informed by these perspectives and steered by an interagency standing committee.

4. Towards a systems-thinking approach for migration governance

The analysis and results discussed in the Special Issue papers suggest an increasing interconnection and interdependence of migration systems with the governance of other societal systems. This consideration calls for a new lens of analysis within migration scholarship to unpack the relationships between migration and other systems and the dynamics that emerge from this interaction. Echoing Triandafyllidou’s (2022) approach that advocates a vision of global migration governance inscribed in the paradigm of risk society and the need to go beyond this paradigm, acknowledging and embracing complexity and uncertainty, this Special Issue’s analytical perspective revolves around the notion that the governance of migration cannot be analysed, planned and evaluated as a self-standing political strategy. The growing complexity of migration governance calls for a system thinking approach that acknowledges the multiple relations among systems.

The analytical lens we are offering identifies a number of systems composing the wider environment with an impact on the migration system. Here, we build on and adapt the ecological system theory of Bronfenbrenner (1979), which differentiates between micro, meso, exogeneous and macro levels. In our conceptualization, the micro-level pertains to the functioning of the single elements of the systems, namely, in our case, to the mechanisms that intervene in the functioning of the migration system. In the meso-level, we take account of the other systems interacting with the migration one. As shown in Figure 1, we take into consideration eight main systems: (i) the labour market system; (ii) the global supply chain system; (iii) the family care system; (iv) the health care system; (v) the social care system; (vi) the higher education system; (vii) the disaster risk governance system; and (viii) the agrifood production system. The interaction between the identified systems and migration systems has a direct impact on migration governance and could take place at different geographical scales spanning from very local and national level, to the global, including global supply chains, transnational high skilled migrants’ mobility and the global agrifood labour market.

Figure 1. A new analytical perspective to unpack the system thinking approach for migration governance. Source: Authors' conceptual design and Monia Torre graphic design.

On the exogenous-level, single systems and their interlinkages are heavily influenced by exogenous events and shocks (e.g. global crises) that can activate the latent nexus among systems, revealing linkages among systems and making them more salient. Recent and ongoing crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brexit process, the Ukraine war and the risks associated with the climate emergency have highlighted the interconnections of migration policy with other systems’ policy domains. These interconnections can only be understood if mechanisms underpinning mutual influences are identified. At a more macro-level, power hierarchies and relationships between countries and regions shape systems’ dynamics and mutual influences.

Drawing on the system thinking literature and terminology, some key mutual influence mechanisms that we identified in the case studies presented in the Special Issue papers are the following: feedback loops, spillover effects, causal effect and joined-up effect, system intersectionality, additionality effect, cascading effects and compounding effects. Feedback loops are intended as a process in which the output or result of an action is fed back into the system, which in turn affects subsequent actions or decisions. Spillover effects refer to the unintended consequences of a policy or action that affects parties not directly involved in the action. Causal effect refers to the difference in outcomes that can be attributed to a specific intervention. Joining up is the process of integrating or connecting policy/variables in order to better understand a phenomenon or make more accurate predictions. Intersectionality refers to the interconnected nature of social identities and how they interact to shape an individual's experiences of vulnerability at the systems’ nexus. In our perspective, systems can interact on multiple levels producing different intersectional vulnerabilities at systems level compared with at the individual level. Additionality refers to the extent to which a particular policy or intervention leads to additional intended benefits or outcomes. Cascading effects pertain to the unintended effects of a policy that trigger a series of consequences or events that progressively spread and intensify. Finally, compounding effects refer to the effects of a policy or decision that are amplified over time.

We contend that this collection of mutual influence mechanisms provides a novel toolkit to migration studies to more explicitly disentangle the mutual influences between migration systems and the wider environment. Moreover, we argue that specifying these mutual influence mechanisms is an important step to design and implement system-thinking informed policies to govern migrations. At the same time, identification of these mutual influence mechanisms, and their naming, provide a new lexicon for migration studies that captures the growing importance of system interdependencies in migration governance.

5. Future directions for research

While making a number of important contributions to the development of system thinking-approach in migration studies, there are some areas that remain rather under-explored in this Special Issue, and which would constitute fruitful avenues for further research. The power relations inherent in and between systems are sometimes hinted at in the papers, but rarely explicitly examined. More work is required on what shapes these and with what outcomes, including across time and space. Likewise, the power structures governing relationships between countries are partially addressed in some papers. Such asymmetrical relations between migrant countries of origin and of destination, for example, are critical in determining migrants’ legal status and conditions of incorporation in the destination countries, and can also generate specific migration outcomes. Further work, therefore, is required to situate national level migration governance mechanisms within global geo-political power hierarchies.

Whilst the Special Issue includes some case studies from the so-called Global South, the dominant emphasis in the collection is on the migratory dynamics from the Global South to the Global North. However, literature shows that most migration journeys are short-distance and occur between countries in the Global South (Gray and Mueller 2012; Ratha and Shaw 2006), and there is increasing migration scholarship on South-South migrations (for example, see Sampaio and Amrith 2023). Moreover, as evidenced in the paper by Anderson, Khadka, and Ruhs (2024), centering South-South migration movements between low – and middle-income countries brings new analytical insights, such as the importance of emigration policies in shaping migrants’ experiences. The implication, however, is not only that more research is needed to investigate mechanisms of migration along the South-South axis, but also that in studies of South–North migration, more attention should be devoted to elements of the migration system in sending countries’ and how they intersect with those in receiving countries. Also, migration is often short-term and cyclical with people moving to other areas/countries for a few months/years and then returning to their home countries (e.g. circular migration) (Parreñas 2010). On the other hand, migrants create long ties among spaces and places. Understanding how interconnections among systems work across spaces and places located at multiple scales and nodes should be a further area of study. Such future work could usefully respond to the challenge to unsettle the dominant sending-receiving country/origin-destination country dichotomy that does not reflect the complex positioning of countries within contemporary global migration flows, nor how migrants’ envision and navigate their migration journeys (Triandafyllidou 2022). This requires more attention to the (related) dynamics of onward migration (Della Puppa, Montagna, and Kofman 2021) and multisited transnationalism (Ahrens and King 2023). Likewise, it can be relevant to examine how interlinkages between migration systems and other systems work in the face of crises and how to reinforce those connections that foster systems’ resilience (Anderson, Poeschel, and Ruhs 2021).

Finally, as highlighted in the sections above, this Special Issue has suggested a set of concepts and vocabulary that has scope, we would argue, for application in migration studies. Further research could usefully refine, tighten and nuance those concepts. For example, some of the concepts may refer to different levels and scales of analysis. This is the case with the intersectionality concept that often refers to individual variables (e.g. socio-economic and legal status, race, gender, age etc.) that can affect the migrant’s journey and incorporation in the destination country. On the other hand, system thinking pertains to the functioning of the linkages and mutual influences between systems of, for example, racism and patriarchy. More analysis is needed to understand how these different levels and scales of intersectionality influence each other. This Introduction, and the Special Issue as a whole, suggest that attending to the further refinement and development of the concepts proposed here is an important agenda for migration researchers given the complexification of migration realities and the wider environment, and the challenges this poses for migration governance.

Contribution statement

All the three guest editors contributed equally to the editorial work on this Special Issue.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the authors for their great contribution in building the Special Issue and for participating in the two preparatory workshops held on line on the 1st October 2021 and on 16th February 2022. A great thanks goes to the scholars who served as reviewers for individual papers and the overall Special Issue. Monia Torre and Azzurra Malgieri (National Research Council of Italy – CNR) have supported this introductory paper by drawing the figure. We would like to thank Cristiana Crescimbene and the team at CNR, Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies, that supported the organization of the in person meeting held in Rome, 26th and 27th January 2023. This meeting allowed us as guest editors to finalize the Special Issue and to draw together the main elements of this introductory paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).