’The role of social benefits for migration is overestimated’

What factors determine which countries people migrate to? Tim Müller from the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM) has analysed this in a study of 160 countries. According to the study, important pull factors for migration are not so much social benefits, but rather good job opportunities, democratic conditions and the national language. In your "Junior Research Group Migration and the Welfare State", you analysed the hypothesis that refugees prefer to migrate to countries with good welfare systems. Why is that? Tim Müller: The argument has played a major role in the political and public discourse on migration - usually with populist intentions - since the 1990s. I'm not sure whether the thesis is relevant in the everyday lives of individual people. In our study, which is currently still in the peer review process, we analysed the influx of migrants in general - not that of specific groups such as the low or highly educated or humanitarian migration in acute crises. To what extent has the question of whether social benefits and immigration are linked been researched so far? Müller: There is some research, but the findings vary greatly.