Our study employs the network approach to the problem of international
migration. For the last years, migration has been drawn a lot of attention and has been
examined from many points of view, however, very few studies considered it from the
network perspective. The international migration can be represented as a network (or
weighted-directed graph) where the nodes correspond to countries and the edges
correspond to migration flows. The main focus of our study is to reveal a set of critical or
central elements in the network. To do it, we calculated different existing centrality
measures. Unfortunately, these measures do not take into account individual properties
of nodes as well as interaction intensities between different nodes. Thus, there have
been designed several long-range interaction (LRI) indices that consider these features.
LRI indices are based on two main ideas: the first one is the analysis of the influence
between nodes through paths between them and the second one is the analysis of the
influence with the help of simulations. Another important issue is to analyze the
evolution of the network and to examine how a set of critical elements is changed over
time. In our research the United Nations International Migration Flows Database
(version 2008, 2015) was used. The database provides the annual dyadic estimates of
migration flows between countries from 1970 to 2013. As a result, we obtained an
information on critical elements of the network and showed how it is changed in
dynamic.