A working paper is where research lives before the world reads it. Big questions deserve answers straight from the experts. So, this season, we open up. Across five episodes, host Tim Phillips sits down with the researchers behind the projects at RFBerlin.
In the first episode Prof. Tommaso Frattini (Deputy Director of CReAM at RFBerlin) and Dr. Giacomo Battiston (Senior Research Officer at RFBerlin) tell what happens before someone decides to migrate.
Anyone who migrates weighs the costs against the benefits: a journey that can cost thousands USD and carry real risk of violence, set against the promise of higher wages or simply safety. But do people know the true odds before they set out? And when governments respond with tougher borders or information campaigns, does any of it change the decision, or just move it somewhere else?
Drawing on a field experiment with students in Guinea and on evidence from Europe’s borders, Frattini and Battiston tell that migration isn’t a single choice but a chain of them. Better information can genuinely shift the decision: when potential migrants learn the real risks, many become less willing to go. Enforcement is more slippery. When the EU-Turkey deal closed the Eastern Mediterranean route in 2016, migrants didn’t stop; within months they reappeared on the deadlier Central Mediterranean crossing. A policy that looks like a success at one border can leave the overall picture unchanged, and the journey more dangerous. As the researchers put it, migration is an investment, costs borne now for benefits hoped for later, sometimes for one’s children rather than oneself. To know whether a policy works, you have to follow the whole journey, not just count arrivals at one border.
Resources mentioned in the episode:
📄 Informing Risky Migration: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Guinea, by Giacomo Battiston, Lucia Corno and Eliana La Ferrara
📄 Securing European Borders: Enforcement, Politics and Externalization, by Francesco Fasani and Tommaso Frattini
📄 Rescue on Stage: Border Enforcement and Public Attention in the Mediterranean Sea, by Giacomo Battiston
Learn more about migration research at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) at RFBerlin.
