Migration Flows Prediction Models and their Impact on the ‘Politicalness’ of Everyday Lives in Host States: the PreMiGro case

The migration issue is a dominant topic in the political scene Europe-wide, transforming the “equilibrium between political stability and change” in an unprecedented manner. This situation poses the challenge to provide reliable prediction of future trends of migration flows to politicians in order for them to comprehend migration dynamics and orient their decisions and related legislation towards optimum solutions to manage the flows and the population of immigrants, leading to a “political culture of consensus”. Greece is at the center of this necessity due to – mainly – two reasons. First, its geopolitical location as a ‘first step’ country for migrants and second due to its – proven- inability to handle massive migration flows as a result of its fragmented migration policy. In this sense, the present paper concerns the presentation of the objectives, the adopted tools, and the research directions for a funded project (Managing Migration in Greece: Construction of a Start-Up Pilot Prediction Model for Migration Flows and Development of Policy Scenarios for the Greek Migration Policy (PreMiGro)) that revolves around the development of a start-up pilot prediction model of short and long term migration flows in Greece using machine-learning tools. The model, which is of an experimental character, will be constructed on the basis of a multi-parametric data set, concerning historical number of immigrants to Greece associated with country of origin and its political status. The framework of the model will be a properly trained scheme based on state-of-the-art machine learning models. The end result of the project will be an evidence based policy tool that will lead to policy scenarios that in turn will tackle societal challenges that affect the ‘politicalness’ of everyday lives. A main aspect that will be explored here is the continuity/discontinuity of the migration policy in Greece in terms of migrant and refugee arrivals for the period 1990-2022, and its direct or indirect impact on the political culture as regards the Greek migration policy making as well as the perception of the migration issue from the Greek people.