Humanitarian Migrants’ Non-Metropolitan Settlement and Subsequent Internal Migration

To accommodate the influx of humanitarian migrants and address rural depopulation, many countries promote non-metropolitan settlement amongst incoming humanitarian migrants. Yet many humanitarian migrants subsequently leave their initial non-metropolitan settlement locations, which raises questions about the effectiveness of non-metropolitan settlement policies and the factors influencing humanitarian migrants’ relocation decisions. Within this context, this research note leverages Australian population-level administrative data from the Person Level Integrated Data Asset (PLIDA) to generate novel insights. Specifically, we analyse aggregate data comprising 3.4 million annual bilateral internal migration flows between 87 local labour markets for humanitarian migrants from different origin countries over the 2011–2019 period, comparing their patterns to those for the general Australian population and other migrant groups. Our findings indicate that non-metropolitan areas experience net losses of humanitarian migrants to metropolitan areas, and that humanitarian migrants relocate to regions with greater employment opportunities, better education options, and larger co-ethnic networks. Importantly, the patterns and determinants of internal migration for humanitarian migrants often differ to those observed for other migrant groups as humanitarian migrants are less responsive to labour- and housing-market conditions, but more responsive to co-ethnic networks. Altogether, our results highlight the difficulty of stimulating non-metropolitan population growth via humanitarian migration, with implications for other receiving countries.