Life Paths of Migrants: A Sequence Analysis of Polish Migrants’ Family Life Trajectories

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe family-life dynamics of international migrants have become a core topic in demographic studies over the past decades (Kulu & Gonzalez-Ferrer 2014). These studies have focused on different aspects of family-life behavior. For instance, previous research shows that international migration and partner selection are frequently interrelated (Milewski 2003), that moving over long distances influences the stability of a union (Frank & Wildsmith 2005, Boyle et al. 2008, and that migration may alter fertility behavior (Milewski 2007, Lindstrom & Giorguli Saucedo 2002. Many of these studies have focused on the impact of migration on a specific event in the life course. By focusing on events, however, one may miss a deeper insight into the life course, which is unfortunate as life-course theory emphasizes that different events in the life course are not separate experiences, but are linked to one another (Giele & Elder 1998).The main research objective of this paper is to go beyond this event-oriented approach and to provide a more integral picture of the link between migration and family behavior. We develop an empirically grounded typology of partnership, fertility, and migration behavior by applying sequence analysis. This technique can be seen as complementing to the often applied techniques of event history analysis: whereas event history analysis concentrates primarily on causal effects for transitions from one state to another, sequence analysis is an approach aimed at exploring and describing actual life-course trajectories and has more descriptive value (Aisenbrey & Fasang 2010, Billari 2001. Although sequence analysis has increasingly been used in life course research over the past decade (e.g., Aassve et al. 2007, Billari et al. 2006, Bras et al. 2010, Elzinga & Liefbroer 2007, the technique has been relatively little applied in the migration literature. The application of sequence analysis also in the field of migration studies is however a fruitful approach, as it offers a digestible overview of the complex interrelationship between migration and family dynamics. Poland is part of the European Union (EU) since 2004 and Polish migrants are thus free to settle in other EU member states (with some initial barriers on the labor market after EU entry). In this regard, Polish migrants differ strongly from migrants from outside the EU for whom it is much more difficult to travel back and forth between the Netherlands and their country of origin due to compulsory visa requirements (Dagevos 2011). A crucial question of the relatively new intra-European migration flows is therefore whether these migrants will stay temporarily or whether they will settle permanently. Besides economic reasons for returning to the country of origin, the family context also plays a crucial role in the return decisions of immigrants (Dustmann 2003). We will pay specific attention to this and study the permanence of settlement in relation to family trajectories. The trajectory-based approach 5 applied in this study is particul...

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