Migration, Household Behaviour and Community Differentiation

Rapporteur: Sangeetha Madhavan

Order of Discussion

• Presentation/critique of overview paper

• Presentation/critique of case studies

• Drawing out common themes for discussion

• Theoretical Issues

• Methodological Issues

Tales of Migration without Wage Differentials: Individual, Family

and Community Contexts

Oded Stark

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;

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

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 people’s motivations to move

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

Highly Prevalent Circular Migration: Households,

Mobility and Economic Status in Rural South Africa

Mark Collinson, Steve Tollman, Kathy Kahn and Sam

Clark

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

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

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;

The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Children’s Living Arrangements

and Migration in Rural South Africa

Victoria Hosegood and Kathleen Ford

Description• attempt to link HIV/AIDS related mortality with

children’s 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;

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

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?

Migration, Cumulative Causation and Gender: Evidence from

Thailand

Sara Curran, Filiz Garip, Chang Chung and Kanchana Tangchonlatip

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

• 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)

Highlights• high rates of women’s temp. migration are a deterrent

for men’s 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

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

Internal Migration in Cuba in XXth Century: An Overview

Norma Rodriguez and Raul Castellon

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

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

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?

Theoretical Issues

• Dominance of dichotomies Migrant-Resident

Urban-RuralStayer-MoverSending – ReceivingPermanent – Temporary

• Measures of Social Connectedness• Importance of Social Capital• Role of Gender• Role of the State

Methodological Issues

• Use of Longitudinal Data

• Use of Qualitative Data

• Levels of Analysis