The Migration Infrastructure Assessment (MIA) evaluates how digital systems and various infrastructures shape migration corridors across five interconnected pillars. It maps each pillar across the three developmental stages to diagnose where corridors support or constrain people on the move.

The framework primarily focuses on destination countries within a corridor, examining both the effects of migration on receiving communities and on the people on the move themselves. This dual lens recognises that digital infrastructures mediate not only access to services and rights but also shape host community perceptions, resource allocation by the state and social cohesion. This requires the user to clearly identify the relevant corridor and its specific migrant population.

The five pillars function as interdependent dimensions for a diagnosis, where each shapes and reinforces the other. Analysing these pillars together reveals whether corridors exhibit alignment or fragmentation and where interventions might create cascading impact.

The framework has been constructed with diverse geographies, jurisdictions, and communities in mind.

• For practitioners and system builders: Identifying and accounting for interlinkages between the various spheres influencing migration and migration technologies.
• For policymakers and multilaterals: Analysing corridors of interest to reveal pain points and opportunities for regulation and capacity-building.
• For academia: Laying the foundation for more comparative studies and practice-oriented initiatives at the intersection of migration and technology.

Through MIA, researchers, government officials, civil society and advocacy groups, and international organisations can hope to answer questions like:

• Is my research study capturing the lived realities of people on the move? What are these indicators?
• How can policies on migration in my country reflect the aspirations of people on the move?
• What are some best practices I can adapt to my geography? Is there another migration corridor resembling a similar digital infrastructure, information landscape, and policy environment?

During the development of the MIA, we tested it by extracting abstracted instances from our research across six different corridors and situating them within the framework. This iterative process revealed whether varied real-world conditions could be coherently placed within the pillars and stages to understand if it adequately captured observed dynamics. Testing across the six corridors ensured the framework would accommodate different scenarios, from contexts where digital systems barely exist to those where they are pervasive but governed opaquely, alongside contexts where community agency is actively suppressed to those where it is formally recognised. This iterative refinement ensured that MIA is grounded in lived realities rather than theoretical abstraction.

• Effective use of the framework requires the user to have clarity on two foundational parameters - the corridor under examination and the specific migrant population being analysed, along with the necessary intersectionalities that may fluctuate results of the assessment.
• The framework anchors its analyses in destination countries, examining how receiving countries affect both people on the move and host countries. Origin and transit country conditions presently fall outside this scope.
• By design, the framework assesses corridors across a defined period rather than dynamic changes. For instance, political shifts, including electoral transitions and policy reversals, can rapidly alter a mature information landscape to a nascent one. Periodic reassessment is encouraged to build a richer understanding of these situations.
• The pillars operate at a corridor level and do not disaggregate experiences within it. As lived realities are shaped by intersecting factors such as gender, class, ethnicity, disability and others, a single corridor may function differently for distinct groups.

Taken together, these design choices establish a starting point rather than a ceiling. The framework will evolve iteratively with feedback from stakeholders across diverse contexts and is meant to be tested and validated over time.