Abstract
<p>Migration—a defining process in human development—is a profound contemporary challenge involving hundreds of millions of people every year. The process exposes individuals to profound biosocial challenges connected to heightened risk of psychiatric disorders and decreased mental well-being. To date, this risk has been understood largely within a framework of socio-cultural factors, such as acculturative stress, discrimination, and socioeconomic adversity. Here we propose to broaden this scope by incorporating the physical environmental and neurobiological dimensions of migration, which remain comparatively underexplored despite recent advances in environmental neuroscience.For this purpose, we conducted a systematic synthesis of evidence at the intersection of migration, environment, and neurobiology, pre-registered on the Open Science Framework and reported according to PRISMA 2020. Searches of PubMed, PsycINFO, and Scopus yielded 16,910 unique records, from which 94 studies (1989–2026, 19 countries) met inclusion criteria: 64 (68%) environment-focused, 21 (22%) brain-focused, and 9 (10%) integrating both.Environment-focused studies showed that neighborhood deprivation, segregation, and social fragmentation were consistently linked to poorer mental health, while green/blue space access and neighborhood cohesion were often protective; urbanicity showed inconsistent associations. Brain-focused studies, concentrated in trauma-exposed refugees, implicated fronto-limbic and large-scale network systems in threat processing, emotion regulation, and stress-sensitive neurobiology, but rarely measured physical environmental exposure directly. The few studies integrating environment and neurobiology centered on extreme exposures—high-altitude relocation, war-related toxicants, occupational pesticides—demonstrating that environmental embedding in the migrant brain is empirically tractable, while leaving everyday environmental transitions (housing, urbanicity, pollution, green space) unexamined at the neurobiological level.Together, these findings suggest that migration-related vulnerability is not a fixed property of migrant status itself but is shaped by the environmental conditions of movement and settlement. We propose a neuroecological research agenda that reframes the central question from whether migrants differ from non-migrants to which environmental transitions, for whom, and under what conditions, foster adaptation, vulnerability, or resilience.</p>