This paper studies international migration from a complex-network perspective. We define the international migration network (IMN) as the weighted-directed graph where nodes are world countries and links account for the stock of migrants originated in a given country and living in another country at a given point in time. We characterize the binary and weighted architecture of the network and its evolution over time in the period 1960–2000. We find that the IMN is organized around a modular structure with a small-world binary pattern displaying disassortativity and high clustering, with power-law distributed weighted-network statistics. We also show that a parsimonious gravity model of migration can account for most of observed IMN topological structure. Overall, our results suggest that socioeconomic, geographical, and political factors are more important than local-network properties in shaping the structure of the IMN.

• Received 29 January 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.88.012812