PARIS — Perceptions of the impact of migration in some countries are so distorted that their citizens estimate that there are as many as three times the number of immigrants living there than is actually the case, a global migration body says in a report being released on Tuesday.
In “World Migration Report for 2011,” the International Organization for Migration, a 132-member intergovernmental body based in Geneva, warns that misinformation about migration fans “harmful stereotypes, discrimination and xenophobia.”
William Lacy Swing, director general of the organization, said that accurately informing the public about migration might be “the single most important policy tool in all societies faced with increasing diversity.”
This, he added, is particularly important in times of economic stress, when negative perceptions tend to surface.
“Migration is often the catch-all issue that masks public fears and uncertainties relating to unemployment, housing and social cohesion in host countries,” Mr. Swing said.
People in destination countries tended to significantly overstate the size of the migrant population, the organization said, based on polling from an annual survey, “Trans-Atlantic Trends.”
The actual percentage of migrants in Italy in 2010 was around 7 percent, the report said, “yet polls showed that the population perceived this percentage to be around a staggering 25 percent.”
Some surveys in the United States showed that the public believed that immigrants made up 39 percent of the population in 2010. That estimate, the report said, was “a far cry” from the actual 14 percent. “Estimates tend to be even higher for irregular migrants,” Mr. Swing said, referring to refugees, people who have entered a country illegally and those who overstayed their visas.
Perceptions about the availability of employment and a belief that migrants take jobs away from citizens were commonly found in the polls. But the organization said that the news media rarely followed up the issue with employers.
“While there is growing recognition that migrants can build cross-border social capital, that increasing cultural diversity can provide impetus for the stimulation of entrepreneurship, or that culturally diverse work forces are among the most profitable, the overall perception of migrants in many societies tends to be negative,” the report said.
Mr. Swing said migration was “highly desirable” if managed intelligently and humanely, calling it “both a reality and a necessity.”
The report also reviewed migration trends and major policy developments in the 2010-11 period.
Despite a common perception in the news media that Europe “risked being swamped by a flood of migrants from Africa,” it said that the percentage of Africans migrating abroad remained relatively modest in 2010, when 64 percent of sub-Saharan African migration took place within the region itself.
In all, about 30 million Africans, or 3 percent of the population, live abroad, according to the World Bank.
Meanwhile, foreign workers in Europe suffered higher unemployment in 2010 than their counterparts in the citizenry. While Spaniards suffered 18.1 percent unemployment in 2010, the rate for foreigners in Spain was 30.2 percent, the organization’s data show. In Germany, migrants were nearly twice as likely as locals to be jobless (12.4 percent versus 6.5 percent) during the summer of 2010. Europe, for its part, was the generator of new outflows, with net emigration from Ireland reaching 60,000 people at the end of 2010, after 7,800 in 2009.
The United States was host to about 43 million foreigners in 2010, representing 13.5 percent of the total population, according to the World Bank. About 11.6 million came from Mexico, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The estimated number of irregular migrants in the United States was steady, at 11.2 million in 2010, after a two-year decline from a peak of 12 million in 2007, the report quoted the Pew Hispanic Center as saying.
Five of the world’s top 10 emigration countries in 2010 were in Asia: Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan and the Philippines. Most were temporary labor migrants who headed to the Middle East and the Gulf states.
Higher oil prices helped the Middle East and North Africa recover from the global economic downturn in 2010, with foreign workers attracted to the Gulf region by rising salaries.
Still, the organization said, “the humanitarian crisis in Libya and the unsettled conditions in some neighboring countries are likely to have the greatest impact on remittance-receiving countries in South Asia, which have an estimated 11 million expatriate workers living in the region.”
Oceania was host to six million international migrants in 2010. Although accounting for less than 3 percent of the total number of migrants worldwide, this number represented 16.8 percent of the region’s total population, about 35 million. For Australia and New Zealand, the percentages were higher still — migrants represented 21.9 percent and 22.4 percent, respectively, of their total 2009 population, according to U.N. figures.
