PageRanking Countries in the Migrant Crisis
This past year, Europe has seen the greatest influx of migrants in decades. Close to 600,000 people have arrived from war-torn countries or places of oppression in hope of a safer housing situation as well as job opportunities and a future for their children. However, countries of the European Union, especially so-called frontline states, so those that first register refugees such as Hungary and Greece, are insufficiently equipped to process and house the continuous stream of new arrivals before they move on. The European Commission now agreed on a redistribution mechanism which allocates a certain number of migrants to participating countries, which then integrate them into their society. Despite this plan, some countries including Hungary fear the pull of larger, wealthier countries will counteract any attempts at integration.
The directed movement of migrants in the current crisis closely resembles the links between webpages and so the concept of PageRank can also be applied to this situation. Migrants move from a less desirable country, with a lower PageRank, to one with a higher PageRank in the European Union. Yet this migration pattern graph is not strongly connected as there are no links from Europe back to the countries of origin. Europe thus acts as a migrant sink, continuously increasing its population with every new migrant wave. As of today, equilibrium values have not been reached since the source countries have not exhausted their possible migrants yet by having a population of zero. But since there is no return migration, the European Union is attempting to redistribute migrants and so shift from the basic PageRank update rule to something similar to the scaled PageRank update rule, where migrants are redistributed among sink states and those from countries considered safe are sent home.
While this strategy may be successful in the short term, countries are not webpages and migrants are not web links. Even now, Hungary is warning about the effects of an intra-European PageRank, where Germany is more desirable than smaller countries, which can lead to integration issues. A virtual solution can unfortunately not be applied to a real problem.
Migrant crisis: Why EU deal on refugees is difficult