The End of Free Movement and International Migration

This paper examines how the end of free movement following Brexit in January 2021 reshaped non-transient international migration flows involving the UK. Using a novel dataset of monthly bilateral migration flows from 2019 to 2022 constructed from Facebook user location data covering 181 countries with high spatial and temporal resolution, we estimate a gravity model framework to assess post-Brexit changes in migration patterns. We find that the end of free movement significantly reduced migration between the UK and EU countries, while migration from non-EU countries to the UK increased. Migration from the UK to non-EU countries also declined. These findings illustrate that Brexit reconfigured the geography and composition of international migration flows.