Migration, Family Formation and Fertility in the Americas

2020 ◽  
pp. 019791832092335
Author(s):  
David P. Lindstrom ◽  
Anairis Hernandez-Jabalera ◽  
Silvia Giorguli Saucedo
Keyword(s):  
International Migration ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
Marital Dissolution ◽  
Marital Stability ◽  
Low Fertility ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
First Birth ◽  
Migration Experience ◽  
Early Migration

In many low- and medium-income countries that are the traditional sources of international migrants, total fertility rates have dropped to levels at or near replacement. In this context of low fertility, we expect migration’s effects on fertility to operate primarily through marital timing and marital stability. We examine the effects of international migration on age at first marriage, union dissolution, timing of first birth, and completed fertility, using retrospective life-history data collected in Mexico and eight other Latin American countries by the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) and the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP). Using discrete-time hazards and Poisson regression models, we find clear evidence that early migration experience results in delayed marriage, delayed first birth, and a higher rate of marital dissolution. We also find evidence among women that cumulative international migration experience is associated with fewer births and that the estimated effects of migration experience are attenuated after taking into account age at union formation and husbands’ prior union experiences. As fertility levels in migrant origin and destination countries continue on their path toward convergence, migrant fertility below native fertility may become more common due to migration’s disruptive effects on marital timing and marital stability and the selection of divorced or separated adults into migration.

scholarly journals Late, But Not Too Late? Postponement of First Birth Among Highly Educated US Women

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Nitsche ◽  
Hannah Brückner
Keyword(s):  
Family Formation ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
College Education ◽  
Postgraduate Education ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Low Fertility ◽  
First Birth ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Postponement

AbstractWe examine the link between the postponement of parenthood and fertility outcomes among highly educated women in the USA born in 1920–1986, using data from the CPS June Supplement 1979–2016. We argue that the postponement–low fertility nexus noted in demographic and biomedical research is especially relevant for women who pursue postgraduate education because of the potential overlap of education completion, early career stages, and family formation. The results show that women with postgraduate education differ from women with college education in terms of the timing of the first birth, childlessness, and completed fertility. While the postponement trend, which began with the cohorts born in the 1940s, has continued among highly educated women in the USA, its associations with childlessness and completed parity have changed considerably over subsequent cohorts. We delineate five distinct postponement phases over the 80-year observation window, consistent with variation over time in the prevalence of strategies for combining tertiary education and employment with family formation.

scholarly journals Social Capital and International Migration from Latin America

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
María Aysa-Lastra
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Latin America ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Weak Ties ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Strong Ties ◽  
Direction Of Effects ◽  
The Cost

We combine data from the Latin American Migration Project and the Mexican Migration Project to estimate models predicting the likelihood of taking of first and later trips to the United States from five nations: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Peru. The models test specific hypotheses about the effects of social capital on international migration and how these effects vary with respect to contextual factors. Our findings confirm the ubiquity of migrant networks and the universality of social capital effects throughout Latin America. They also reveal how the sizes of these effects are not uniform across settings. Social capital operates more powerfully on first as opposed to later trips and interacts with the cost of migration. In addition, effects are somewhat different when considering individual social capital (measuring strong ties) and community social capital (measuring weak ties). On first trips, the effect of strong ties in promoting migration increases with distance whereas the effect of weak ties decreases with distance. On later trips, the direction of effects for both individual and community social capital is negative for long distances but positive for short distances.

scholarly journals International Migration Experience and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Mexico

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Thomas Wassink
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Lower Probability ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
Migration Experience ◽  
Entrepreneurial Entry ◽  
Annual Probability ◽  
Sending Areas

This study investigates the effect of international migration experience on entrepreneurship in sending areas. To identify prosperous businesses that create jobs and encourage economic development, this study isolates businesses other than street-vending enterprises with non-family employees. Retrospective life history data from the Mexican Migration Project (N = 11,789 persons & 146,372 person-years) was used to estimate the annual probability of becoming an entrepreneur across 170 Mexican communities between 1975-2017. This study found that (1) any prior migration experience increases the probability of entrepreneurial entry relative to non-migrants; (2) accumulated months of migration experience are positively associated with the probability of entrepreneurial entry; (3) undocumented status is associated with a lower probability of entrepreneurial entry. The positive effect of accumulated migration experience on entrepreneurship suggests that international migrants can accumulate human and financial resources that are essential to early stage entrepreneurship. Thus, entrepreneurship represents an important pathway through which international migration can encourage economic development in less developed regions. At the same time, the results suggest that immigration policies in receiving countries can undercut migrants’ capacities to mobilize resources and contribute to economic development upon return. These findings suggest that target migration creates a win-win by addressing labor shortages in receiving countries, while transferring resources to sending areas that enable economic mobility and development.

Migration vs. development? The case of poverty and inequality in Mexico

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agustín Escobar Latapi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Opportunity Cost ◽  
Inequality Index ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
And Migration

Although the migration – development nexus is widely recognized as a complex one, it is generally thought that there is a relationship between poverty and emigration, and that remittances lessen inequality. On the basis of Latin American and Mexican data, this chapter intends to show that for Mexico, the exchange of migrants for remittances is among the lowest in Latin America, that extreme poor Mexicans don't migrate although the moderately poor do, that remittances have a small, non-significant impact on the most widely used inequality index of all households and a very large one on the inequality index of remittance-receiving households, and finally that, to Mexican households, the opportunity cost of international migration is higher than remittance income. In summary, there is a relationship between poverty and migration (and vice versa), but this relationship is far from linear, and in some respects may be a perverse one for Mexico and for Mexican households.

Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Single Word ◽  
The Social ◽  
Made In

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”

scholarly journals The roads more or less traveled - A sequence analysis of family formation and parenthood for a cohort of Danish women born in the 1970s

2017 ◽  
pp. 47-66
Author(s):  
Tinne Steffensen
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Analysis ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Low Fertility ◽  
Age At First Birth ◽  
Assisted Reproduction Technologies ◽  
Ideal Family ◽  
First Child ◽  
Civil Status

Relatively low fertility and an increased age at first birth, along with the development of assisted reproduction technologies have increased attention to when and how many times Danish women give birth. While some argue that family formation has become increasingly plural and differentiated, others maintain that the nuclear family remains the ideal family for the majority of women. In this article, I investigate family formation trajectories for a random sample of 1,500 women born in 1973 and 1974. For this sample, I perform sequence analysis of longitudinal registry data on civil status, fertility, education and income through the ages 22 to 37. Focusing on timing, order and duration in the sequences studied, I identify seven distinct clusters (i.e. typologies) of family formations in Denmark. The majority (68 percent) of the women’s trajectories represent varieties of the nuclear family. For all clusters, my results confirm the event of the first child as a constituting factor of the nuclear family, which often precedes marriage. However, the identified clusters also show great variation when it comes to age at birth of first child, socio-economic status and overall turbulence in their trajectories.

scholarly journals Study of the Migratory Return: Analysis to the Condition of the Returned Migrant in the Educational and Labor Reintegration and the Entrepreneurship as an Area of Opportunity

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Iris E. Betanzos
Keyword(s):  
International Migration ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Exploratory Research ◽  
Migration Process ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Third ◽  
Evolution And Development ◽  
Theoretical Line ◽  
Indispensable Tool ◽  
Latin American Countries

Studies on the educational and labor reintegration of migrants returned to Latin American countries have gained importance due to the economic and social implications of rehabilitation. In this article, the return of the migrant was considered part of the migration process. An exploratory research of publications in different international journals was carried out; when consulting the referenced articles, it was identified that at the time of return the migrant presents and perceives a moral, social, educational and work imbalance. From the deficiencies found in the theoretical lines studied - Educational reinsertion, Labor reintegration - the third theoretical line was included the importance of relating the concept of entrepreneurship as an area of opportunity for returned migrants. The results of the analysis of the studies and theoretical frameworks of international migration, showed great similarities of the phenomenon in different geographical spaces, being an indispensable tool to understand their different forms, evolution and development both in the countries of origin and destination.

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