What Makes the Privileged Move? Updating Migration Theory for Emigration from Developed Economies

Andreas Ette, Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB)
Nils Witte , Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB)

International movements by people from developed economies are a puzzle for the classic canon of migration theories, which generally focus on flows from less to more developed regions. Available scholarship on this form of international mobility is theoretically disparate and hampered by the lack of appropriate data. We contribute both at the level of theory and at empirical level. Conceptually, the paper links existing theories about international and internal migration with studies about expatriates and their global work experience within a life course framework to improve our understanding of international migration processes from developed economies. Empirically, the paper draws on the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS) which provides data representative of German citizens who moved abroad between 2017 and 2018. We combine this information with reference data for non-migrants: the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), an established panel survey of the German resident population. These pooled data provide a sound basis for modelling emigration decisions and testing the theoretical framework. We differentiate first-time emigration and repeated international movements to account for path-dependencies through the life course. Furthermore, we estimate separate models for men and women to account for the gendered structure of the life course. Preliminary findings indicate that emigration from developed economies is a highly selective process that is largely dependent on the situation in different domains of life (e.g. fertility, employment) which are relevant for understanding these particular types of international mobility.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 66. Drivers of international migration