People movement is part of human nature. For as long as we have known, the drive to explore new surroundings, flee from threat and improve our circumstances has produced flows of migration.
The growth of settled nation states with strongly controlled borders over the last two centuries has obscured this reality. But the growth of mobility brought by newer forms of globalisation is bringing human mobility back into the spotlight.
Around 150 million people in the world live outside the country in which they were born. Most of this human movement occurs within regions and in developing countries. In Europe, we tend to pay little attention to population movement in other parts of the world, other than brief bursts of attention in our dominant media outlets, usually during famine or war.
