Migration changes how families form and dissolve, and how we conceptualize the family. This has implications for thinking about how we model the migration decision when individuals are unable to picture the counterfactual families they may have. Differences in marital status can induce two otherwise identical individuals to make different migration decisions. It also has implications for attempts to causally estimate impacts of migration, when the family composition changes with the migration decision itself. We show empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread, and that the traditional model of a fixed family sending off a migrant who remains part of that same family only describes a minority of migrants moving from developing countries to the U.S. This paper draws out lessons from thinking about counterfactual families for empirical research and for migration policy.
Authors
- Bibliographic Reference
- Simone Bertoli, David McKenzie, Elie Murard. Migration, Families, and Counterfactual Families. 2023. ⟨hal-04328275⟩
- HAL Collection
- Université de Clermont
- HAL Identifier
- 4328275
- Institution
- ['Institut de Recherche pour le Développement', 'Banque Mondiale', 'University of Trento [Trento]']
- Laboratory
- ["Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International", 'Banque Mondiale']
- Published in
- France
Table of Contents
- Introduction 5
- How the family affects the migration and remittances decision and their impacts 8
- Implications for migrant selection 10
- Implications for identifying migration impacts on other family members 12
- Implications for the role of remittances 14
- But migration (and the prospect of migration) can change the family 15
- Migration and the prospect of migration can affect whether a marriage occurs in the home location 15
- People can migrate specifically to get married 15
- Migration may affect the stability of marriages and lead to (or prevent) family dissolution 16
- Migration can lead to new marriages being formed and change who individuals marry 17
- Migration can also change other members of the family, such as children and other household members 18
- Evidence from the American Community Survey 19
- New empirical evidence on marital changes with migration 19
- Transnational marriages are largely a temporary phenomenon 22
- Robustness to return migration 23
- How do Counterfactual Families Change Migration Decisions and Impacts 25
- Migration decisions can be dynamically and locationally inconsistent 26
- The inability to picture these counterfactual families can result in a bias towards not-migrating 27
- Anticipated changes in marital status and migration decisions 27
- Descriptive evidence from the ENOE 29
- Estimating the impact of migration on other family members may be ill-defined 30
- Which parts of migration research are most and least affected by these issues? 32
- Conclusions 33
- Appendix 48
