The World Bank's 2023 world development report: A missed opportunity to recognize that all migrants have rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2023 World Development Report (WDR, 2023), Migrants, Refugees, and Societies, is a vast resource-intended by its author as a 'message of hope' (World Bank, 2023: 15)-for policymakers responding to human migration across international borders and seeking to understand that 'well-managed' migration can be a 'powerful force for prosperity' (Ibid).The World Bank's focus on this topic is welcome.A greater focus on human rights would have enhanced its message.While the report makes general reference to international human rights law and its application to protect migrants' rights, as well as to those protections due to migrants under international refugee law, the WDR 2023's treatment of rights overall is muddled and surprisingly limited.Most concerning, the report does not clearly take the view that all migrants have a set of basic human rights.It does argue, however, that migration contributes most to prosperity when migrants are given basic rights and social protections within host states.This is an important message for policymakers but begs the question of how widely these and other rights and protections are enforced, and thus how politically complex it might be to put this view into practice.As set out below, the short shrift given to international law also cloud's the report's effort to develop novel categorizations of migrants.In addition, new findings from the Migrant Rights Database (MRD), 1 hosted at Cornell University with the support of its Migrations Initiative, help contextualize the WDR 2023's findings and recommendations as they intersect with human rights law (Migrant Rights Initiative, 2023).MRD data show that while it is now possible to evaluate the rights protections of migrants in national law across countries, regardless of their legal status, states are only doing a middling job protecting labour, health and education rights, the social protections on which the WDR 2023 focuses on in some detail.These data thus reinforce the WDR 2023s emphasis on the importance of securing such rights and social protections in order to ensure the prosperity gains from migration can be more broadly enjoyed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".