Objectives. We study migrant remittances among households surveyed in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, testing expectations derived from the new economics of labor migration (NELM) and from the historic‐structural approach.
Methods. We applied logistic regression analyses to survey data collected by the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project, focusing on the contrast between Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Results. In Mexico, remittances seem to be associated with the patriarchal traditional family, but in the Dominican Republic we verified the opposite. Receipt of remittances is positively associated with degree of development among Mexican households, but the association is negative in the Dominican Republic. In addition, Mexican remittances are negatively associated with the number of businesses in the local community.
Conclusions. In Mexico, as predicted by NELM, the cohesive patriarchal family ensures the flow of remittances as part of a household strategy of risk diversification. Dominican remittances, however, seem to be mostly determined by lack of opportunities and household need.
Migrant remittances from the United States to Mexico have grown at an impressive rate in recent years. Using a decomposition technique, I attribute the growth in remittances, for the 1990-2004 period and subperiods within it, to a migration effect, a remitting propensity effect and an average amount effect. Results show that while migration growth was the main force driving remittance growth for most of the 1990s, in the new century remittance growth cannot be simply attributed to migration growth. Mexican migrants are becoming more likely to remit and are remitting larger amounts. This reflects both a change in the composition of the Mexican population in the United States and new modes of immigrant incorporation, consistent with the assimilation and the transnational narratives. Macroeconomic oscillations play an important role in explaining remittance growth as well.
We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquaintance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effective at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with practical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.
In this analysis we investigate the degree to which the absence of effective pension systems may generate motivations for international migration as a means of self-financing retirement.Using ethnosurvey data gathered in selected Mexican communities and US destination areas, we estimate models to predict the odds of US migration from indicators of relative wages and whether or not jobs in Mexico were covered by that country's social security system. We find that by holding constant the binational differential in expected wages, the odds of out-migration were much higher for male household heads working in jobs that were not covered by social security compared with those working in jobs that enjoyed such coverage. Subsequent analyses showed that the odds of receiving a pension in old age were systematically higher for former US migrants, and that the likelihood of pension receipt rose steadily as the number of US trips and amount of US experience accumulated.
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