Previous research on the determinants of international migration has largely focused on objective factors, such as income. We instead use subjective well-being (SWB) to explain international migration desires, an expressed willingness to migrate. We find that individuals with higher SWB have lower international migration desires. At the individual level, the SWB-migration relationship appears to be more robust than the income-migration relationship. At the country level, national average SWB better indicates international migration desires for rich countries, while income performs better for poor countries. We thus demonstrate the feasibility of employing subjective measures to study at least one aspect of an important social outcome, migration. JEL codes: F22, O15, I31

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Turkey’s accession to the European Union has turned out to be a very long saga. One of the concerns in Europe is that Turkey’s membership would open the way for millions of immigrants from Turkey arriving in Western European member states, as was believed to be the case with Eastern European enlargement in the 2000s. This paper focuses on migration flows and causes of human mobility while drawing upon the Gallup World Poll on migration in Europe with particular reference to the data on desire to migrate permanently from Turkey and to Turkey. The Gallup World Poll is an on-going project surveying residents in more than 150 countries on a variety of topics including international mobility. The full data set includes over 400,000 face-to-face interviews conducted in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Despite exceptions with different sample sizes, in each of the 160 countries 3,000 cases were collected as part of a larger survey. Turkish respondents have lower desire to emigrate compared to the rest of the world while Iranians and Germans are top groups who desire to migrate to Turkey. The data shows that Turkey has been a growing economy and attracting immigration while also producing emigration. Turkey’s overall socio-economic and political record suggests that the desire to migrate from Turkey will continue despite recent economic advances. Nevertheless, the Gallup data shows that the level of desire to migrate in Turkey is remarkably lower than many neighbouring countries and Europe.

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Using independently sampled Gallup World Poll survey data from 140 countries, we explored the relationship between interpersonal contact and attitudes toward migrants from a perspective not typically found in the social psychological literature. We hypothesized that respondents who report personally knowing a migrant living in their home country would be more accepting of migrants generally (using a three-item Migrant Acceptance Index (MAI) score) than respondents who do not know a migrant. Results supported our hypothesis in 134 of the 140 countries suggesting that the strong relationship between interpersonal contact and attitudes toward migrants is near-universal. We also quantified migrant acceptance at the country level, finding a wide spectrum of attitudes toward migrants. Low acceptance countries were located primarily in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and high acceptance countries were located in Northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. We discuss these results in the context of interpersonal contact theory (Allport, 1954) and the larger context of global migration.

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