In this IMR Country Report, we draw attention to Costa Rica as a strategic location for expanding research and theory on migrants in need of protection (MNP), who have migrated abroad primarily to evade an imminent threat to their survival. MNP constitute an increasing share of all international migrants in Costa Rica and worldwide, yet research on these migrants and their migration dynamics remains comparatively underdeveloped relative to research on migrants who relocate abroad primarily in pursuit of material gains, social status, or family reunification. As we highlight, Costa Rica is an instrumental site to deepen understandings of MNP populations and migration dynamics because its large and rapidly growing MNP population is incredibly diverse with respect to national origins, demographic characteristics, and underlying motivations for migration. This diversity presents ample opportunities to better understand heterogeneity in the different types of threats MNP seek to evade; how and why MNP incorporation is shaped by individuals’ demographic attributes and pre-migration threats; and how the social networks of various MNP subpopulations develop and overlap with time. Moreover, the geographic concentration of MNP in two regions in Costa Rica lends itself to primary data collection among this population and generates opportunities for estimating local MNPs’ demographic characterization, even in the absence of a reliable sampling frame.
Family stress theories posit that individual family members are positioned to adapt to external stressors differently and that these differences can strain family systems. Analyzing in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of migrant mothers in Costa Rica, we investigate how families adjust to the stressors of international displacement. Three stages of family stress adjustment emerged from our analysis: (1) parents’ prioritization of safety, (2) parents’ and children’s grappling with new legal, economic, and social circumstances, and (3) parents’ protracted uncertainty in one or more of these realms concomitant with children’s feeling resettled. A fourth stage of (4) convergent parent and child resettling also emerged, but only among select families who enjoyed stable financial or emotional support from extended kin or local institutions in Costa Rica. Parents’ perceptions of their security, and social, economic, and legal circumstances contributed to the progression between stages of stress adjustment.
Demographic research tends to track child mortality conditions with annualized death rates, paying little mind to how these annualized rates reflect in the lives of the surviving population. Yet, demography’s age-old interest in how exposure to child mortality affects individuals’ perceptions, decisions, and behaviors, and ultimately macro-level population processes, raises questions about how pervasive intimate experiences of child death remain across the globe—particularly in low- and middle-income countries where declines in mortality are recent. In this paper, we document women’s experiences of under-five mortality in 50 low- and middle-income countries, focusing comprehensively on experiences in their immediate natal or conjugal family in the form of sibling or offspring death. Specifically, we analyze Demographic and Health Survey Program data on 1.05 million women spanning three decadal birth cohorts to document women’s life-course exposure to under-five sibling or offspring death, the intergenerational clustering of these experiences, and how they are (not) changing across cohorts. The results show an exceedingly high, and often stable, percentage of women have experienced under-five sibling and offspring deaths. Moreover, women’s risk of offspring death is often strongly associated with their history of sibling death; this strong intergenerational clustering has remained stable, or has grown larger, across cohorts in most countries.
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