HeinDe Haas, How Migration Really Works: A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics, Basic Books, 2023. 464 p., $35.00.

In his 2023 book, How Migration Really Works, sociologist and geographer Hein de Haas distills decades of social science research about immigration to explain the causes and impacts of immigration to lay audiences. In doing so, he battles deeply engrained ideas about why people migrate, the size of migration flows, immigrant integration, and immigrants’ overall impact on host societies. Many people—and even some academics and many politicians—hold “commonsense” assumptions about immigration and the problems they cause. For example, many believe that immigration is at an all-time high; immigrants from poor countries move out of desperation to take advantage of public benefits in rich countries; strict border control is needed to prevent host countries from being overrun by immigrants; immigration enforcement is effective at reducing undocumented immigration; and immigrants are changing host countries for the worse by increasing crime, segregation, unemployment, and refusing to assimilate. De Haas brings the weight of social science research to explain “how immigration really works.” The book is divided into three sections that cover the cause and scale of immigration flows, the impact of immigration on host and sending countries, and the way immigration issues are leveraged by politicians and social influencers. Within each section, de Haas describes several “myths” about immigration and then presents evidence that often paints a much more nuanced picture. Although each chapter can be read independently, a few themes run through the book. First and foremost, de Haas argues that global migration follows predictable patterns that are independent of immigration policies. For example, de Haas explains that out-migration from poor countries tends to be very low because immigrants need resources to move, meaning that immigrants tend not to move out of desperation. However, emigration increases as economic development increases and eventually peaks when the country reaches midlevels of economic development. At still higher levels of economic development, emigration tends to decline, and the country becomes an immigrant-receiving country due to the rising demand for low-skilled labor in high-income countries. Given the strong economic, social, and demographic forces underlying global migration flows, immigration and border enforcement policies rarely have the desired effect of reducing immigration. These points underscore the view that immigration is a natural part of global economic development and not a crisis to be feared or prevented. In this way, the book makes a similar argument as made by Massey, Durrand, and Malone's Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (2002) about migration between Mexico and the United States, except that de Haas focuses on migration across the globe. Another important theme of the book is that the impact of immigration on host and sending societies—whether positive or negative—tends to be small and temporary. For example, de Haas argues that today's levels of immigration are not particularly unusual by historical standards, especially when considering the massive outmigration from Europe to the Americas and Australia in the 1800s and early 1900s. Similarly, he argues that the impact of immigrants on the unemployment rates of natives in the host society is small and, if anything, leads to slightly lower unemployment rates. And, to the degree that immigrants bring cultural traditions and foods with them, the immigrants and their children and grandchildren tend to change more than does the host society. Societal outsiders tend to become insiders, and immigrants usually adapt to their host societies over time and across generations. This is particularly likely when immigrants are included in the host society's institutions as full-fledged citizens. A third important theme of the book is that immigration is more a political crisis than an economic or social crisis. De Haas argues that most people have balanced understandings of immigration and its impact on their communities. Yet on both the right and the left, politicians, advocates, and some academics exaggerate the overall size and likely impact of immigration to gain support for their causes, whether to raise support for humanitarian or environmental causes or to use immigrants as scapegoats for social and economic problems that are unrelated to immigration (e.g., crime, unemployment). The book may face criticism for being overly dismissive of the impact of immigration on host societies. For example, it may not help to argue that immigrants bring a net gain to the nation for people who live in communities that bear the largest cost of immigration (e.g., the additional expenses of educating immigrants’ children). Additionally, the academic contributions of How Migration Really Works are relatively limited. The book integrates a lot of research and organizes it in an easily digestible way but does not present new research or data. The key strength of How Migration Really Works is that it is a highly accessible text. It is written for a lay audience regardless of background in social science, immigration policy, or statistics. The entire text could be assigned to an undergraduate course devoted to immigration, or a single chapter could be assigned to a unit in a course. The book provides commonsense arguments. For example, it does not simply assert that immigrants do not take away jobs from natives based on statistical evidence but explains why this is the case (i.e., immigrants expand the economies that they join, they both work and are consumers, they are also often entrepreneurs who create jobs, and so on). The book is also nonpartisan and therefore is likely to generate lively discussion. It takes right-wing politicians to task for catastrophizing immigration and exaggerating its negative impacts even though immigration helps meet labor force demand. At the same time, the book takes left-leaning politicians to task for framing immigrants as victims without free will, exaggerating the number of refugees, and using the threat of mass climate migration to bolster support for action on climate change.