By Dr. Anastasia Aldelina Lijadi, Ph.D.  

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Migration is part of everyday life in our globalized world. People cross borders for safety, work, education, family, love, or the hope of a better future. Yet despite how common migration has become, we continue to grapple with fundamental questions: Who is moving? Where are they going? And how do they adapt—not only when they arrive, but also when they return? These questions lie at the heart of the work of Families in Global Transition (FIGT), where mobility is understood not just as movement across borders, but as a deeply relational and transformative human experience.

Tracking Migration in Real Time

One of the persistent challenges in migration research has been the lack of timely, comparable data. Traditional migration statistics are often slow to emerge and can fail to capture sudden changes driven by conflict, policy shifts, or global crises. A recent IIASA-led study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), addresses this gap by using privacy-protected data from over three billion Facebook users to track international migration flows monthly. This approach offers one of the most detailed global snapshots of migration to date, capturing movements across 181 countries (see linked Figure 1).

Why does this matter? Because migration data shapes real lives. Governments rely on these insights to plan housing, education, labor markets, and health services. Humanitarian and development organizations depend on them to anticipate and respond to displacement, conflict, and climate-related risks. Behind every data point lies a family navigating transition.

Figure 1. Estimate international migration flows is 2022. Adapted from Chi, Abel, Johnstons, Giraudy & Bailey (2025), Measuring global migration flows using online data. Proceeding National Academy of Science USA, 122 (18) e2409418122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409418122  

The study estimates that 39.1 million people migrated internationally in 2022—24% higher than pre-COVID-19 levels. While this represents only 0.63% of the population in the countries studied, each number reflects a significant life transition: new jobs, new schools, family separation or reunification, and often profound emotional and psychological change. The United States recorded the largest net inflow of migrants, while Ukraine experienced the greatest outflow following Russia’s invasion. Migration remains most intense between neighboring countries and within regions such as Europe and Latin America, although long-distance corridors—particularly labor migration from South Asia to the Gulf—continue to play a critical role. After a sharp pandemic-related decline, migration rebounded strongly in 2022, reminding us how sensitive human mobility is to global crises and political decisions.

Stateless Citizenship

If migration asks where people move and how they adapt, statelessness compels a deeper, systemic question: what happens when movement is not a choice and legal belonging is never secured? From a United Nations perspective, statelessness is both a protection and development concern. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) reports that an estimated 4.4 million people worldwide are officially stateless, with millions more living in situations of undetermined or precarious nationality. Statelessness severely restricts access to education, healthcare, decent work, legal protection, and full participation in society. Without legal identity documentation, stateless individuals are frequently excluded from national disaster preparedness and response systems, risk-reduction strategies, and social protection mechanisms—placing families at heightened risk during crises.

Within this context, I strongly resonate with Vivian Chiona, founder of Expat Nest, and her call—raised at the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) Forum 2026—to advance the concept of “stateless citizenship” and center the lived experiences of children and families from stateless communities, including Assyrians. With roots extending to ancient Mesopotamia, Assyrians have endured centuries of displacement, marginalization, and exclusion from secure nationality, while sustaining rich linguistic, cultural, and communal traditions. Their experiences mirror those of other stateless or effectively stateless populations, such as the Rohingya, the Bedoon, and marginalized communities in parts of the Balkans and Côte d’Ivoire.

Drawing on my research on place identity among highly mobile children (Lijadi & Van Schalkwyk, 2017), I argue that for children growing up without stable nationality, identity formation is not diminished but actively negotiated. It is shaped through family systems, multi-local belonging, and forward-looking agency—often generating resilience rather than fragmentation. Aligned with UNDRR and FIGT commitments to inclusion, protection, and child-centered approaches, these insights underscore the urgent need to integrate stateless children and families into global migration, development, and identity frameworks—transforming invisibility into recognition, and research into meaningful, rights-based support.

Beyond Migration: The Experience of Sojourners

Not all mobility is driven by necessity or long-term settlement. Sojourners are individuals and families who move abroad by choice for a limited period, often from relatively privileged backgrounds, with the expectation of eventual return. Students, diplomats, international professionals, and globally mobile families commonly fall into this category. Yet even when mobility is planned and voluntary, adaptation—and re-adaptation—can be profoundly complex.

These emotional realities are explored in Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir’s book Readaptation Narratives in “Sojourner Literature”: The Dis- and Re-Orientation of Returning Home, presented at the FIGT Forum 2026. Pálsdóttir introduces sojourner literature as a distinct genre within transnational writing and focuses on readaptation narratives that examine what happens after return. Drawing on novels from across cultures, she shows that coming home is rarely straightforward. Sojourners often experience grief, ambiguous loss, identity shifts, and a persistent sense of in-betweenness. Home has changed—or they have. By bridging literary analysis and psychology, her work challenges existing readaptation frameworks and highlights the need for more nuanced language to capture the emotional complexity of return.

Why This Matters for Families in Global Transition

For Families in Global Transition, mobility is never only about crossing borders. It is about how families sustain relationships, construct identity, and cultivate belonging across time, place, and circumstance. Large-scale migration data helps us understand global patterns, while lived experiences—especially stories of displacement, statelessness, and return—help us understand people. Together, these perspectives remind us that mobility is not simply a policy issue or a statistic; it is a deeply human process that continues long after the journey itself, shaping families, identities, and futures across generations.

References:

G. Chi, G.J. Abel, D. Johnston, E. Giraudy, & M. Bailey, Measuring global migration flows using online data, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (18) e2409418122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409418122 (2025).

V. Chiona. What It’s Like to Be a Cross-Cultural Kid from a Stateless Nation The Assyrian? Forum presentation at Family in Global Transition (FIGT) Forum 18-19 April 2026. 

A.A. Lijadi &  .G J. Van Schalkwyk, Place identity construction of Third Culture Kids: Eliciting voices of children with high mobility lifestyle, Geoforum, Volume 81, (2017)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.02.015https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718516300719

K.H. Pálsdóttir, Readaptation Narratives in 'Sojourner Literature: 'The Dis- and Re-Orientation of Returning Home, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, ISBN978-3-032-01339-2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01340-8 (2025)