Patterns and causes of global migration, its economic and social impacts, and the governance of international movement.

What this dot point is asking

WJEC wants you to describe global migration patterns, explain their causes, analyse the impacts on source and host areas, and consider how international migration is governed, with located examples.

The answer

Patterns and causes

Migration follows push factors (unemployment, poverty, conflict, persecution, environmental hazard) and pull factors (jobs, higher wages, safety, family, services). Globalisation deepens these flows through trade, cheaper transport, communications and labour demand, producing major corridors such as movement towards Europe and North America, and large flows of labour migrants to the Gulf states, where foreign workers make up the great majority of the workforce in countries such as Qatar and the UAE.

Impacts on source and host areas

For host areas, migrants fill labour shortages, support growth and add cultural diversity, but can strain housing, schools and health services and fuel political tension. For source areas, remittances boost incomes and unemployment may fall, but the loss of skilled and young workers (brain drain) and family separation are real costs. Remittances are huge: globally they exceed $600$ billion US dollars a year, dwarfing aid for many developing countries. Impacts vary with the type of migrant (skilled, unskilled, refugee) and the scale of the flow.

Governing migration

Migration governance is multi-scalar. Nation states set immigration policy, visas and border controls; regional blocs such as the EU historically enabled free movement, a major driver of EU migration to the UK before Brexit; and international frameworks (the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the UNHCR, global compacts) address refugees and asylum. Governance is contested because states balance economic needs, security, humanitarian duty and public opinion, and cooperation is uneven, as the 2015 European migrant and refugee crisis showed when EU states disagreed over sharing responsibility for arrivals.

Examples in context

Example 1. EU labour migration to the UK. Free movement within the EU produced one of the largest recent migration flows into the UK, with hundreds of thousands of central and eastern European workers arriving after 2004. The flow illustrates economic push and pull, two-sided impacts (filling UK labour shortages and remitting income home, set against housing and political pressures and source-country brain drain), and the role of governance: free movement enabled the flow, and the end of free movement after Brexit in 2020 replaced it with a points-based system, showing how policy reshapes migration.

Example 2. Labour migration to the Gulf states. Countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates depend on migrant labour, mostly from South and South-East Asia, for the great majority of their workforce, especially in construction and services. Migrants send home large remittances, but the kafala sponsorship system has drawn international criticism over workers rights and conditions, highlighted around the 2022 Qatar World Cup. The Gulf case shows migration driven by strong economic pull, major source-country remittance dependence, and the governance challenge of protecting migrant workers, a clear contrast to free-movement migration within the EU.

Try this

Q1. Distinguish between a push factor and a pull factor in migration. [2 marks]

• Cue. Push factors drive people away from a source area (unemployment, conflict); pull factors attract them to a destination (jobs, safety).

Q2. Explain one negative impact of out-migration on a source country. [3 marks]

• Cue. A brain drain removes skilled and young working-age people, reducing the workforce and tax base and leaving an ageing population behind.