Migration, Household Behaviour and Community Differentiation

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Migration, Household Behaviour and Community
Differentiation

• Rapporteur Sangeetha Madhavan

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Order of Discussion

• Presentation/critique of overview paper
• Presentation/critique of case studies
• Drawing out common themes for discussion
• Theoretical Issues
• Methodological Issues

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Tales of Migration without Wage Differentials
Individual, Family and Community Contexts

• Oded Stark

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Key Features of the Model

• the transmission of tastes through imitation
  technology younger cohorts imitate older
  ones which in turn generates more and more
  migrants
• origin of taste the taste for migration is
  hard wired in populations at earlier stages of
  evolution and is transmitted genetically with
  populations that are further along the
  evolutionary path, taste is transmitted
  culturally
• return migration exists because of higher
  purchasing power at home the higher this is and
  the higher the destination wage is, the shorter
  the migration duration is likely to be

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Features continued

• marriage facilitates migration through
  diversification and risk reduction
• community facilitates migration through an
  aversion to relative deprivation brought on by
  greater variation in incomes
• concludes with a set of concrete testable
  predictions based on the above assertions

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Comments/Criticisms

• debatable whether culture tradition and
  taste are synonymous terms culture is a very
  dynamic entity and one that has quite varying
  effects on different members of a community
  (gender, age, status) Stark conceptualizes
  taste as something static and predetermined
• starts by saying that culture has not been
  accounted for properly yet offers a
  sociobiological explanation that taste for
  migration is predetermined
• the sociobiological explanation put forth for the
  origin of taste suggests that all societies will
  follow a similar model and does not allow for
  enormous variation in historical, political and
  economic contexts that most certainly play a role
  in determining peoples motivations to move

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Comments continued

• Households and communities are marked by various
  forms of stratification (gender, age)
• the assertion of marriage facilitating migration
  does not take into account the very different
  norms around gender roles/marriage systems that
  exist across societies
• migration is taken to be a monolithic category

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Highly Prevalent Circular Migration Households,
Mobility and Economic Status in Rural South
AfricaMark Collinson, Steve Tollman, Kathy Kahn
and Sam Clark
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Description

• objective to identify correlates of both
  temporary and permanent migration
• Data from the Agincourt DSS (longitudinal) and a
  temporary migration module
• Much attention paid to differentiating permanent
  from temporary migration
• Relative economic status index created from
  household assets module

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Highlights

• no link between economic status and occurrence of
  perm. migration but there is a strong correlation
  between eco. status and the occurrence of temp.
  migration
• most mobile sex-age category for perm. migration
  is women aged 15-25 (mostly linked to marriage)
• notable increase in temp. migration for women
  over time
• interesting that higher wage employment does not
  necessarily increase chances of remitting
• person who has been a migrant longer is more
  likely to remit

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Response to Stark

• unclear whether one can explain the movement
  described in Agincourt as motivated by taste
  given the role of the apartheid state in social
  engineering
• the role of marriage in facilitating migration is
  questionable given declining rates of marriage,
  increasing age at marriage and a very fluid
  system of cohabitation and union formation that,
  in itself, is part of a survival strategy for
  both men and women
• duration of migration difficult to tell in a
  context of high intensity movement in which
  people are constantly moving back and forth

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The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Childrens Living
Arrangements and Migration in Rural South Africa

• Victoria Hosegood and Kathleen Ford

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Description

• attempt to link HIV/AIDS related mortality with
  childrens living arrangements and mobility
• also uses DSS data (ACDIS) but from KwaZulu Natal
  province
• the ACDIS system has probably gone farther than
  most data collection systems in accounting for
  the complexity of household formation and
  dissolution

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Highlights

• 76 and 48 of recent maternal and paternal
  orphans, respectively, were due to AIDS
• children more likely to migrate as single
  individuals or with one or two people rather than
  with an entire household
• very little evidence of child headed households
• both parental migration and mortality are
  associated with child migration especially
  maternal
• a large number of children belong to households
  to which their parents do not belong
  co-membership does not mean co-residency

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Response to Stark

• how would the imitation technology work in this
  scenario where children are highly mobile and
  move as part of a survival strategy?
• how would a risk aversion strategy function in
  a high HIV prevalence context?

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Migration, Cumulative Causation and Gender
Evidence from Thailand

• Sara Curran, Filiz Garip, Chang Chung and
  Kanchana Tangchonlatip

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Description

• aims to replicate studies of cumulative causation
  that have mostly been done in the Mexican-US
  context and to examine the gendered aspects of
  migration at multiple levels of aggregation
  within Thailand
• cumulative causation theory asserts that
  migration propensities in the origin communities
  grows with each additional migrant and can,
  therefore, yield higher than expected levels of
  migration
• one of the first studies to apply a theory
  developed for international migration to the
  context of internal movement

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• men and women experience migration differently
  which in turn, will affect the ways in which
  accumulated migration experience impacts on the
  social organization of the origin and destination
  communities
• uses 10 year retrospective longitudinal data from
  22 villages in one district of NE Thailand
• models include new measures of accumulated
  migration (number of trips)

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Highlights

• high rates of womens temp. migration are a
  deterrent for mens out migration
• support for the cumulative causation theory in
  that each additional trip (net of village
  migration prevalence rates) increases the odds of
  being a migrant
• individual migration experience is more important
  for women than for men but household migration
  experience is more important for men
• number of migrant months experienced by villagers
  decreases the odds of being a migrant for both
  men and women

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Response to Stark

• the imitation technology is mediated by gender
  and level of aggregation and not simply by
  following in the footsteps of older cohorts of
  migrants
• the extent of return migration is also mediated
  by gender roles which partly determine the
  quality of ties between sending and receiving
  communities
• the role of the community is also mediated by
  gender and appears to have less of an effect than
  the household context
• marriage decreases the odds of being a migrant
  quite dramatically

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Internal Migration in Cuba in XXth Century An
Overview

• Norma Rodriguez and Raul Castellon

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Description

• Documents the historical context of internal
  migration in Cuba in the XXth century
• Uses census data and internal migration survey
  (1995)
• Particularly interested in changes in destination
  patterns and motivations to move
• Only paper to consider migration patterns from a
  macro perspective

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Highlights

• The first major change in internal migration
  patterns took place after 1959 when there was
  development of other regional centers migrants
  went to these centers instead of Havana
• Concurrently, there was emphasis on developing
  rural towns by investing in infrastructure
• Economic crisis in the 1990s changed the trend
  once again through the implementation of
  migratory regulation law that limited entrance
  into Havana especially the high density
  municipalities
• Enormous variation in inmigration patterns across
  municipalities due to differences in investment
  patterns by the government

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Response to Stark

• How does the role of the state mediate the
  development of taste?
• How would the relative deprivation hypothesis
  work in a context of tight economic regulation
  and a restrictive labour market?

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Theoretical Issues

• Dominance of dichotomies
• Migrant-Resident
• Urban-Rural
• Stayer-Mover
• Sending Receiving
• Permanent Temporary
• Measures of Social Connectedness
• Importance of Social Capital
• Role of Gender
• Role of the State

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Methodological Issues

• Use of Longitudinal Data
• Use of Qualitative Data
• Levels of Analysis