Migrating to the European Union: Determining Factors

Migration is a phenomenon connected with human behaviour. Indeed, people frequently move from their place of birth to find better socio-economic settings. The European Union is a fine example to study migrant flows continuously arriving from all parts of the world. In this paper, I performed an empirical test for some theories of perpetuation of international movement. I assumed that networks of people from Africa, Asia and Latin America could be determining factors for their perpetual inflows to EU. To do so, I constructed a database from various sources: UNDESA2, World Bank Database 2017, OECD.Stat3 and CEPII4. I took total inflows rate per 10,000 inhabitant as dependent variable. Then I linked it to a set of independent variables from both origin and destination. Findings showed geographical distance clearly influences new inflows. In contrast, neither socio-economic indicators nor proxy variables selected for social networks could predict further immigration flows. I concluded that micro and meso data analyses are essential to obtain statistically significant results for social connections.