Emigration from the USA: Multiplicity survey evidence

Abstract

Special national surveys in the 1980s give the only recent data about emigrants from the USA, based on asking residents about their parents, siblings, and children living outside the USA who ever lived here. Each of the three surveys yielded an initial or minimal estimate of at least one million surviving emigrants. Adjusting for probable omission of emigrants without a resident immediate relative, the number of emigrants surviving as of 1990 is likely to exceed two million and, with alternative assumptions, could exceed three million. Due to inherent uncertainties in differing methodologies for measuring emigration for the past three decades, the implied level of emigration of permanent residents for the 1980s may be similar to previous levels. This finding contradicts popular belief of a simple direct association, i.e., that increasing immigration levels would be associated with increasing emigration levels. Emigration levels result from population heterogeneity on such characteristics as origin country, location and strength of familial ties, and reasons for coming to the USA, and associated probabilities of emigration. For many of the post-1965 immigrant cohorts, there is one or more decades during which emigration may yet occur.

A Manifesto for Quantitative Multi-sited Approaches to International Migration

“… The absentee approach corresponds to a monosited strategy usually applied at the household level, in migration‐focused surveys and also in some censuses ( e.g., in Morocco or Senegal): Members of households in a given country are questioned about absentees living abroad. Although more common in sending countries (where households are questioned about “their” migrants), this approach also applies to destination countries (where migrants can be asked about their left‐behinds)(Woodrow‐Lafield, ). A methodological issue is that there is no standardized definition of absentees/migrants.…”

Surveying Across Borders: The Experiences of the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study

“…Recent years have seen efforts to include specific migration and emigration modules into established surveys, developed new forms of multiplicity sampling by collecting information on non-resident household members (e.g. Lien 2016;Woodrow-Lafield 1996), and applied this additional information for demographic modelling of emigration (e.g. Willekens et al 2017).…”

Reconstructing trends in international migration with three questions in household surveys

“…The reference to the future is thus not at all clear when talking about a household: Does it refer to the group, the place, or the head? 9 See also Woodrow-Lafield (1996) for estimates of US emigration based on a multiplicity sampling method, using data collected on parents, siblings, and children. Indirect methods developed in the 1970s and 1980s also collect migration data on children or siblings (Zaba 1987), but only on the number of migrants among children or siblings.…”