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The project has provided recommendations on, for example, how to improve communication with migrants.Ī third project – ITFLOWS – focuses on producing accurate predictions and forecasts of migration and asylum flows, and developing workable approaches to the phenomenon by creating a deeper understanding of it. There is a need to improve the management of arrivals to the European Union, and once they arrive, improve their integration into different member states This sort of information would complement existing border-control practices, according to Dr Aitana Radu, project researcher and expert in information policy and governance at the University of Malta. For example, MIRROR found that sometimes migrants have a tendency to be wary of European countries’ pandemic-related health measures, including quarantines. The database that the project built can be used by humanitarian organisations or governmental agencies to draw links between beliefs and types of behaviour. Using freely available information, while paying particular attention to influential social and mass media, the project developed a set of tools to inform policymakers, border-control agencies and others to help improve their policies. To the extent that there is a general tendency, it leans towards larger, better-known countries such as the UK and Germany.Ī twin project of PERCEPTION, called MIRROR, also looked at migrants’ perceptions to get a better understanding of how migrants perceive Europe as a destination. The project found that when there are no family connections or diaspora, most migrants make little distinction between possible destinations in Europe. We wanted to understand the influence that narratives and perceptions of Europe have on migration and why people move and how ‘There is a misperception from the European side about this, though not the organisations that work directly with migrants.’ Nonetheless, migrants have ‘a fairly realistic understanding of the journey to Europe, in particular the dangers that await them,’ said Bertel. They might also present a rosier picture to those back home so as not to worry relatives, she said. ‘Migrants can have a more positive idea about the situation in Europe than reality and can be disappointed by harsh realities such as not being welcomed by the society or having difficulty finding a job,’ said Bertel. It also investigated mass media and social media that migrants relied on. PERCEPTIONS conducted more than 100 in-person interviews with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers about the sources of information they used and their views of Europe. ‘We wanted to understand the influence that narratives and perceptions of Europe have on migration and why people move and how,’ said Diotima Bertel, social scientist at Vienna, Austria-based research company SYNYO and coordinator of a project called PERCEPTIONS. The new film – due to be released in November – will tell the story from the migrant’s point of view.įor all the media attention and heated political debate that migration generates, policymakers often operate without fully comprehending the behaviour of migrants themselves. This can lead to misunderstandings, such as during the Covid-19 pandemic when some migrants feared going to health authorities for a vaccination. We often have little knowledge or understanding about how migrants perceive Europe and how they are viewed by Europeans. Follow the link to learn more about the Dystopia movie. Dystopia will centre on an African migrant woman in Spain and her experience of poverty, homelessness and exploitation. Now, a European research project into the attitudes of migrants to Europe is set to release a feature film based on the undocumented migrant experience. Whatever way migration happens, the large numbers in play disguise personal stories. Without migrants, the EU population as a whole would have contracted by half a million in 2019. Regular, documented migration is an everyday phenomenon for EU countries and goes largely unremarked upon. Their harrowing and sometimes tragic journeys attracted widespread media coverage, yet net immigration to the European Union through regular channels in 2020 was also around a million people. With the Syrian war forcing many families to seek refuge, this was an exceptional year for people who arrived without documentation. In 2015, more than a million people arriving in Europe applied for asylum, the biggest annual total since the Second World War.
