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1. The Internetization of International Migration

   https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12371  

   Pesando, Luca Maria; Rotondi, Valentina; Stranges, Manuela; Kashyap, Ridhi; Billari, Francesco C. (December 2020, Population and Development Review)

   Abstract The Internet has revolutionized our economies, societies, and everyday lives. Many social phenomena are no longer the same as they were in the pre‐Internet era: they have been “Internetized.” We define theInternetizationof international migration, and we investigate it by exploring the links between the Internet and migration outcomes all along the migration path, from migration intentions to actual migration. Our analyses leverage a number of sources, both at the micro‐ and the macro‐level, including the Gallup World Poll, the Arab Barometer, data from the International Telecommunication Union, the Italian population register, and unique register data from a migrant reception center in Southern Italy. We also distinguish betweeneconomicmigrants—those who leave their country of origin with the aim of seeking better economic opportunities elsewhere—andpoliticalmigrants—those who are forced to leave their countries of origin for political or conflict‐related reasons. Our findings point to a consistently positive relationship between the diffusion of the Internet, migration intentions, and migration behaviors, supporting the idea that the Internet is not necessarily a driving force of migrationper se, but rather an enabling “supportive agent.” These associations are particularly relevant for economic migrants, at least for migration intentions. Further analyses underscore the importance of the Internet in providing a key informational channel which helps to define clearer migration trajectories. 

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2. Taking a Language Detour: How International Migrants Speaking a Minority Language Seek COVID-Related Information in Their Host Countries

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3555600  

   Gao, Ge; Zheng, Jian; Choe, Eun Kyoung; Yamashita, Naomi (November 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Information seeking is crucial for people's self-care and wellbeing in times of public crises. Extensive research has investigated empirical understandings as well as technical solutions to facilitate information seeking by domestic citizens of affected regions. However, limited knowledge is established to support international migrants who need to survive a crisis in their host countries. The current paper presents an interview study with two cohorts of Chinese migrants living in Japan (N=14) and the United States (N=14). Participants reflected on their information seeking experiences during the COVID pandemic. The reflection was supplemented by two weeks of self-tracking where participants maintained records of their COVID-related information seeking practice. Our data indicated that participants often took language detours, or visits to Mandarin resources for information about the COVID outbreak in their host countries. They also made strategic use of the Mandarin information to perform selective reading, cross-checking, and contextualized interpretation of COVID-related information in Japanese or English. While such practices enhanced participants' perceived effectiveness of COVID-related information gathering and sensemaking, they disadvantaged people through sometimes incognizant ways. Further, participants lacked the awareness or preference to review migrant-oriented information that was issued by the host country's public authorities despite its availability. Building upon these findings, we discussed solutions to improve international migrants' COVID-related information seeking in their non-native language and cultural environment. We advocated inclusive crisis infrastructures that would engage people with diverse levels of local language fluency, information literacy, and experience in leveraging public services. 

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3. Population structure drives cultural diversity in finite populations: A hypothesis for localized community patterns on Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile)

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250690  

   Lipo, Carl P.; DiNapoli, Robert J.; Madsen, Mark E.; Hunt, Terry L. (May 2021, PLOS ONE)

   Esteve-Altava, Borja (Ed.)

   Understanding how and why cultural diversity changes in human populations remains a central topic of debate in cultural evolutionary studies. Due to the effects of drift, small and isolated populations face evolutionary challenges in the retention of richness and diversity of cultural information. Such variation, however, can have significant fitness consequences, particularly when environmental conditions change unpredictably, such that knowledge about past environments may be key to long-term persistence. Factors that can shape the outcomes of drift within a population include the semantics of the traits as well as spatially structured social networks. Here, we use cultural transmission simulations to explore how social network structure and interaction affect the rate of trait retention and extinction. Using Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) as an example, we develop a model-based hypothesis for how the structural constraints of communities living in small, isolated populations had dramatic effects and likely led to preventing the loss of cultural information in both community patterning and technology. 

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4. Pathogen evolution following spillover from a resident to a migrant host population depends on interactions between host pace of life and tolerance to infection

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.14075  

   Torstenson, Martha; Shaw, Allison K. (April 2024, Journal of Animal Ecology)

   Abstract Changes to migration routes and phenology create novel contact patterns among hosts and pathogens. These novel contact patterns can lead to pathogens spilling over between resident and migrant populations. Predicting the consequences of such pathogen spillover events requires understanding how pathogen evolution depends on host movement behaviour. Following spillover, pathogens may evolve changes in their transmission rate and virulence phenotypes because different strategies are favoured by resident and migrant host populations. There is conflict in current theoretical predictions about what those differences might be. Some theory predicts lower pathogen virulence and transmission rates in migrant populations because migrants have lower tolerance to infection. Other theoretical work predicts higher pathogen virulence and transmission rates in migrants because migrants have more contacts with susceptible hosts.We aim to understand how differences in tolerance to infection and host pace of life act together to determine the direction of pathogen evolution following pathogen spillover from a resident to a migrant population.We constructed a spatially implicit model in which we investigate how pathogen strategy changes following the addition of a migrant population. We investigate how differences in tolerance to infection and pace of life between residents and migrants determine the effect of spillover on pathogen evolution and host population size.When the paces of life of the migrant and resident hosts are equal, larger costs of infection in the migrants lead to lower pathogen transmission rate and virulence following spillover. When the tolerance to infection in migrant and resident populations is equal, faster migrant paces of life lead to increased transmission rate and virulence following spillover. However, the opposite can also occur: when the migrant population has lower tolerance to infection, faster migrant paces of life can lead to decreases in transmission rate and virulence.Predicting the outcomes of pathogen spillover requires accounting for both differences in tolerance to infection and pace of life between populations. It is also important to consider how movement patterns of populations affect host contact opportunities for pathogens. These results have implications for wildlife conservation, agriculture and human health. 

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5. How U.S. ‘Cultural Defaults’ Challenge American Public Health and What Public Health Officers Can Do About It

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101792  

   Markus, Hazel Rose; Tsai, Jeanne L; Uchida, Yukiko; Maitreyi, Amrita; Yang, Angela (March 2025, SSM - Population Health)

   As practitioners and scientists reflect on what can be learned from COVID, we argue that cultural defaults—commonsense, rational, and taken-for-granted ways of thinking, feeling, and acting —played an important role in how countries responded to the pandemic, and help explain why the United States suffered 4-6 times more deaths per 100,000 people compared to the East Asian countries of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Drawing on a recent review and theoretical integration, we describe six pairs of contrasting cultural defaults that were common in how the U.S. and some East Asian nations responded to the pandemic: (1) optimism-uniqueness vs. realism-similarity, (2) single vs. multiple causes, (3) expression of high vs. low arousal emotions, (4) influ-ence-control vs. wait-adjust, (5) personal choice-self-regulation vs. social choice-social regulation, and (6) pro-motion vs. prevention. These historically-derived defaults are often outside of individual awareness, but are reflected in and reinforced by institutional practices and policies, the media, and everyday interactions. They are infused with cultural values, understood as the “right way” to be or behave, and are adaptive in their respective contexts. Importantly, both constellations of cultural defaults are viable depending on the problem to be solved. We then provide six specific ways in which public health officers might productively consider these and other cultural defaults when preparing for the next crisis and planning how to effectively motivate people to protect their own and others’ health. Our hope is to facilitate efforts to include a focus on culture within the scope of the social determinants of health and to encourage more partnerships between behavioral scientists and public health practitioners. Recognizing the cultural defaults of the various “publics” they seek to protect is critical as U.S. public health officers aim to promote health for all, a significant and complex challenge in the increasingly individualistic U.S. 

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