Jun 16, 2026 · 47 min · 10 segments
Immigration is a major issue in the contemporary world, a - if not the - driver of nationalist movements the world over. It is impossible to think about nationalism today, religious or otherwise…
Alan ManningGuest
Nick SpencerHostNo entities detected.
I'd like to start with numbers, but you rightly say up front in the book that you can't really do that until you've tackled definitions.
How is a migrant formally defined, and what different kinds of migrant are there?
So the UN definition of what is called a long-term migrant, to be more precise, is someone who is living outside their country of birth and is gonna be resident in their other country for more than 12 months.
If you're living somewhere else between six and 12 months, you'd be classed as a short-term migrant, and anything less than six months you'd just be a visitor.
When we read on the news about, uh, the latest migration figures, they're actually strictly speaking what's called long-term net migration.
It's actually been over five years since the government has published any statistics on short-term migration.
In the world as a whole, about three hundred million migrants, so this is about 3.5% of the world's population.
Very unequally because there are many more migrants as a share of the population in high-income countries like, like the UK where the figure is closer to 15%.
There is a really important distinction which is so often lost and elided in this debate between migration or migrants and refugees.
Just pull apart the difference in definitions there, but also the difference in numbers because when we're talking about migration numbers and refugee numbers, they're obviously very different, and the countries of destination are also very different, aren't they?
So, um, refugees are people who have had to flee their home country because of persecution and are seeking sanctuary, um, elsewhere.
They're sort of concentrated primarily actually in what are called haven countries, which are the sort of safe countries closest geographically to their origin countries.
They're trying to leave their country fast and, you know, this is the first safe haven.
But there are also quite large numbers in high-income countries, uh, like the UK.
So there are some countries then that have high levels of migrants in the broader sense of it but also high levels of refugees.
I'd like to start with numbers, but you rightly say up front in the book that you can't really do that until you've tackled definitions.
How is a migrant formally defined, and what different kinds of migrant are there?
So the UN definition of what is called a long-term migrant, to be more precise, is someone who is living outside their country of birth and is gonna be resident in their other country for more than 12 months.
If you're living somewhere else between six and 12 months, you'd be classed as a short-term migrant, and anything less than six months you'd just be a visitor.
When we read on the news about, uh, the latest migration figures, they're actually strictly speaking what's called long-term net migration.
It's actually been over five years since the government has published any statistics on short-term migration.
In the world as a whole, about three hundred million migrants, so this is about 3.5% of the world's population.
Very unequally because there are many more migrants as a share of the population in high-income countries like, like the UK where the figure is closer to 15%.
There is a really important distinction which is so often lost and elided in this debate between migration or migrants and refugees.
Just pull apart the difference in definitions there, but also the difference in numbers because when we're talking about migration numbers and refugee numbers, they're obviously very different, and the countries of destination are also very different, aren't they?
So, um, refugees are people who have had to flee their home country because of persecution and are seeking sanctuary, um, elsewhere.
They're sort of concentrated primarily actually in what are called haven countries, which are the sort of safe countries closest geographically to their origin countries.
They're trying to leave their country fast and, you know, this is the first safe haven.
But there are also quite large numbers in high-income countries, uh, like the UK.
So there are some countries then that have high levels of migrants in the broader sense of it but also high levels of refugees.
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