The Individual Level: Sorting Effects
This chapter explores what drives the decision of an individual to migrate to a particular place (migrant sorting). The authors do so by studying the mechanisms, empirical evidence, and policy implications of migrant sorting in the context of environmental conflict-induced migration. Predicting the sorting outcome of migration processes is very complex, because many different factors play a role: the type of environmental onset, the type of conflict, the individual propensity to migrate among different groups of society, the selection pattern of migrants, the attractiveness of destinations with respect to various characteristics, as well as national and international migration governance. The authors highlight that this has important implications for governance since host countries can adjust their immigration policies. Such adjustments, in turn, feed back into individual sorting decisions.