Networks and migrants’ intended destination

Abstract

Networks and Migrants' Intended Destination * Social networks are known to influence migration decisions, but connections between individuals can hardly be observed. We rely on individual-level surveys conducted by Gallup in 147 countries that provide information on migration intentions and on the existence of distance-one connections for all respondents in each of the potential countries of intended destination. The origin-specific distribution of distance-one connections from Gallup closely mirrors the actual distribution of migrant stocks across countries, and bilateral migration intentions appear to be significantly correlated with actual flows. This unique data source allows estimating origin-specific conditional logit models that shed light on the value of having a friend in a given country on the attractiveness of that destination. The validity of the distributional assumptions that underpin the estimation is tested, and concerns about the threats to identification posed by unobservables are substantially mitigated.

Who’s About to Leave? A Global Survey of Aspirations and Intentions to Migrate

“…Aspirations and intentions to migrate have been analysed from both qualitative and quantitative angles (Docquier et al, ; Thulin and Vilhelmson, ; Gubert and Senne, ; Van Hear et al, ; Carling and Schewel, ; Carling and Collins, ; Dao et al, ; Williams et al, ). Many quantitative studies have tapped into the Gallup World Poll (among others, see Esipova et al, ; Docquier et al, ; Esipova et al, ; Cai et al, ; Bertoli and Ruyssen, ; Dao et al, ; Tjaden et al, ), but other examples have focused on, e.g. Latinobarometro, Arab Barometer (Graham and Markowitz, ; Falco and Rotondi, ), or ad hoc surveys (van Dalen, Groenewold, and Fokkema, ; van Dalen, Groenewold, and Schoorl, ; Williams et al, ).…”

“…While the role of networks in facilitating immigration is well-known (Beine et al, 2011), having a relative or friend abroad has also been found to increase the attractiveness of a country for potential migrants (Bertoli and Ruyssen, 2018;Manchin and Orazbayev, 2018). Manchin and Orazbayev show that the role of networks is stronger when friends and family who are abroad also send remittances (2018).…”

“…Having aggregated countries by income level and geographical areas, this article estimates the likely factors associated with individual aspirations and intentions to migrate. Based on the academic literature, the article focuses on two sets of such factors: first, individual demographic characteristics and socio‐economic conditions (van Dalen, Groenewold, and Schoorl, ; Docquier et al, ; Dao et al, ; Bertoli and Ruyssen, ); and, second, subjective well‐being (Graham and Markowitz, ; Chindarkar, ).…”

Female migration: A way out of discrimination?

“…Our study takes a new approach by making use of a subjective measure of gender discrimination to examine both migration intentions and further migration behavior regardless of destination. Unlike most studies disentangling the impact of gender imbalances on migration, we mostly rely on a micro level dataset and exploit the variation across individuals for a large number of countries (see also Bertoli and Ruyssen, 2016;Dustmann and Okatenko, 2014;Manchin and Orazbayev, 2016). The newly available GWP provide a unique and largely unexplored database on individual migration decisions as well as perceptions of gender discrimination and respondents' economic and demographic characteristics for 148 countries in the world between 2009 to 2013.…”

The statistical properties of the networks of emigrants: the Ecuadorian case

“…Historically, Ecuadorians have been concentrated in very few countries (see Table 2), a result that holds for many other cases (Bertoli and Ruyssen, 2018). Therefore, the network across the borders is not extensive, which increases the probability of one or at most two distance-one connections among migrants and intending migrants.…”