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How Migration Really Works review: Prepare to have your mind changed

Hein de Haas’s decades-long study of global migration should leave you rethinking what you thought you knew about this most divisive subject

By Simon Ings

8 November 2023

Migrants cross the Rio Grande at the US-Mexico border in Piedras Negras, Coahuila state, Mexico, on Friday, Oct. 6, 2023. Mexico, along with President??Joe Biden's administration and the??United Nations, is considering setting up a temporary program to help pre-screen tens of thousands of migrants for US entry eligibility as border crossings increase again. Photographer: Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Migrants cross the Rio Grande in Mexico, en route to the US

Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg via Getty Images

How Migration Really Works
Hein de Haas (Viking Books)

EVERYONE who starts geographer Hein de Haas’s How Migration Really Works will have opinions about migration – few will finish with their preconceptions intact.

Drawing on three decades of research from his time at the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, de Haas shows that everything we think we know about migration is wrong.

This isn’t because migration is an especially complex matter, but because economic and political interests, on both the left and the…

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