Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Assessing Migration Patterns in Uruguay and Latin American Countries

Victoria Prieto Rosas (MPIDR / Programa de Población, Universidad de la República, Uruguay), Emanuele Del Fava, Maciej Danko, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with Julieta Bengochea, Camila Montiel (both: Programa de Población, Universidad de la República, Uruguay), Gabriel Barasch (Neuronal, Buenos Aires, Argentina), Martín Pedemonte (University of the Republic, School of Engineering, Montevideo, Uruguay)

Detailed Description

Over the last several years, Latin America has been experiencing rapid increases in regional migration, mainly due to rising flows of Venezuelans, Haitians, Colombians, Cubans, and Central Americans. Census data provide information about historical trends. However, as censuses are conducted only every 10 years, they cannot capture new patterns of flows in a timely manner. The emergence of new migration systems has thus been investigated mainly using household survey data and administrative data on residence permit or asylum applications.

This project seeks to shed new light on recent migration patterns using all available data. Its main objectives are:

1. To produce a new set of consistent migration flow estimates by sex and age. These estimates are based on historical census data, and provide a broad description of past international migration patterns within Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of directionality and volume of migration flows, and of demographic profiles of migrants.
2. To quantify international migrants in Uruguay and their characteristics at different levels of granularity. We do so by complementing estimates obtained from surveys and administrative registers with those generated from digital traces, such as estimates made available via the advertisement platforms of major social media companies.
3. To carry out online immigration surveys that involve recent immigrants in Uruguay. We do so by using the Meta advertising platform as a recruitment tool to target what would otherwise be a hard-to-reach population of interest.

In one of our studies, we consolidated data from the International Migration in Latin America (IMILA) collection to provide a harmonized dataset with five-year migrant stocks, by country of birth, country of residence five years before, and sex, for 12 Latin American and Caribbean destination countries. We compared this dataset with other existing sources and provided an overview of the Latin American and Caribbean migration system for the periods 1995–2000 and 2005–2010.  In a related study, we leveraged Facebook advertising data as a proxy to identify immigration patterns in various countries in Latin America, and to assess biases in digital trace data. Moreover, we conducted an online survey via Facebook to investigate the reliability of Facebook data when a user is labeled as an expat from a certain country. Our results showed that the accuracy of such matches varies from 89% to 92%, with the best performance being observed for respondents from Cuba and Dominican Republic.

The project was developed from a formal collaboration between the Department of Digital and Computational Demography and the Population Program at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, where an ANII-MPG independent research group, headed by Victoria Prieto, was established. The initiative was jointly funded by the MPIDR and the National Agency of Research and Innovation (2019-2024). This ANII-MPG agreement enables outstanding early-career scholars in Uruguay with several years of postdoctoral experience to establish their own research group in collaboration with researchers at a Max Planck Institute. The project has contributed to the formation of a local interdisciplinary research group on Digital and Computational Demography funded by the Scientific Council of the University of the Republic (2023-2028).

Publications

Wang, Z.; Prieto Rosas, V.; Márquez Scotti, C.; Bengochea Soria, J.:

The social inclusion of migrants between policy and practice: lessons from Uruguay

International Migration Review 58:2, 898–908. (2024)    

Bengochea Soria, J.; Del Fava, E.; Prieto Rosas, V.; Zagheni, E.:

Leveraging census data to study migration flows in Latin America and the Caribbean: an assessment of the available data sources

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2021-019. (2021)