Using future age profiles to improve immigration projections

Abstract

Young adults migrate more than older people. As populations in many countries get older, this may affect out-migration—and thus immigration to other countries. This is not usually accounted for in projections of future immigration, even though considerable ageing is expected globally. We show how United Nations projections of future age profiles in origin regions can be combined with those regions’ emigration rates by age group to improve national projections of immigration to a destination country, exemplified by Norway. Using various methods for projecting future migration, we show that projected immigration tends to be lower when taking expected ageing in origin regions into account. This may have a considerable effect on population projections: for Norway, taking changing age profiles in origin regions into account in immigration projections would have an effect on the projected population of Norway equivalent to that of reducing the fertility assumptions by 0.1 children per woman.