International Migration Review

Migration systems shape social life, including the timing and sequencing of key demographic behaviors such as marriage, childbearing, and household formation. Existing research has linked migration and marriage in Mexico through various mechanisms but provides less guidance on whether aspirations for migration and marriage are closely linked. Given that union formation is itself distinct within migration contexts, this article focuses on adolescents' plans for marriage and the extent to which migration aspirations shape the desired timing of their own union formation by examining how four distinct measures of migration aspirations are related to adolescents' ideal ages at marriage in rural Jalisco, Mexico...

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected public attitudes toward immigration? Long-term evidence in Europe and the United States suggests attitudes to immigration are relatively stable and, in some cases, becoming more favorable with high volatility instead of the perceived importance of the issue. However, theoretically a global pandemic could exacerbate people's fears of outsiders or that migration may contribute to the disease. By contrast, attitudes could remain stable if their distal drivers prove to be robust enough to withstand the shock of COVID-19...

Emerging evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has extracted a substantial toll on immigrant communities in the United States, due in part to increased potential risk of exposure for immigrants to COVID-19 in the workplace. In this article, we use federal guidance on which industries in the United States were designated essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, information about the ability to work remotely, and data from the 2019 American Community Survey to estimate the distribution of essential frontline workers by nativity and immigrant legal status...

Every government in the world introduced restrictions to human mobility - that is, the movement of persons across and within state borders - in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such restrictions thus constituted a global phenomenon, but they were by no means globally uniform; rather, they varied significantly between and within states, as well as over time. This research note presents different data sources for studying the drivers and outcomes of mobility restrictions, highlighting specific ways in which the data can be used...

As with all social processes, human migration is a dynamic process that requires regular theoretical reflection; this article offers such reflection as related to the role of the natural environment in contemporary migration research and theory. A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental contexts are increasingly shifting social and ecological realities in ways that are consequential to migration theory. We review some of this evidence, providing examples applicable to core migration theories, including neoclassical economic and migration systems perspectives, the "push-pull" framework, and the new economics of labor migration...

In this IMR Country Report, we draw attention to Costa Rica as a strategic location for expanding research and theory on migrants in need of protection (MNP), who have migrated abroad primarily to evade an imminent threat to their survival. MNP constitute an increasing share of all international migrants in Costa Rica and worldwide, yet research on these migrants and their migration dynamics remains comparatively underdeveloped relative to research on migrants who relocate abroad primarily in pursuit of material gains, social status, or family reunification...

A considerable literature explores whether the fertility of migrants from high-fertility contexts converges with that of women in lower fertility destinations. Nonetheless, much of this research compares migrants' reproductive outcomes to those of native-born women in destination countries. Drawing on research emphasizing the importance of transnational perspectives, we standardize and integrate data collected in France (the destination) and in six high-fertility African countries (the senders). We show that African migrants in our sample had higher children ever born (CEB) than native French women but lower CEB than women in corresponding origin countries...

In the United States, there is a wide academic achievement gap, beginning in early childhood, between children with more and less educated parents. However, we know little about the differences in size and trajectories of achievement gaps associated with parental education and nativity. Drawing on two US education datasets that enable me to follow a cohort of children from kindergarten to high school, I estimate the size and trajectories of standardized test-score gaps associated with parental education, separately for children of native-born and immigrant parents...

How should migration scholars navigate tensions between our ethical responsibilities to research participants and growing "open science" calls for data transparency, replication, and accountability? We elaborate a three-step process to navigate these tensions. First, researchers must understand core principles behind open-science initiatives and the mandates of research ethics boards, especially those related to privacy, confidentiality, and protection from harm, and take them seriously. Second, migration researchers must think beyond routinized or mandated procedures to carefully consider the unique vulnerabilities of migrants in their study, which depend on socio-political context...

Day laborers are a highly vulnerable population, due to their contingent work arrangements, low socioeconomic position, and precarious immigration status. Earlier studies posited day labor as a temporary bridge for recent immigrants to achieve more stable employment, but recent studies have observed increasing duration of residence in the United States among foreign-born day laborers. This article draws on 170 qualitative interviews and a multi-venue, year-long street corner survey of 411 day laborers in the Denver metropolitan area to analyze how duration in the United States affects day laborers' wages, work, and wage theft experiences...

This article explores the identification patterns of South American immigrants to the United States, as measured via Hispanic/Latino ethnicity and ancestry reporting on the US Census. Using data from the 2006-2010 and 2011-2015 American Community Survey, my analysis reveals four main findings. First, I show significant heterogeneity in identity patterns and in sociodemographic, immigration, and geographic characteristics between South American and Mexican immigrants in the United States. Second, I find that Southern Cone immigrants do not report Hispanic/Latino ethnicity and "birth-country" ancestry (ancestry that is concordant with birth country, such as Colombian or Chilean) to a greater extent than Andean immigrants, in favor of reporting more distal "ancestral-origin" ancestries (i...

The 2017 revitalization of the controversial Security Communities program, which requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration officials in the United States, has made it urgent to better understand such enforcement programs' effects on the well-being of Latinas/os, especially the foreign-born. Social isolation from increased immigration enforcement can have significant impacts on economic, social, and health outcomes among Latina/o immigrants and non-immigrants. This article analyzes the gendered impacts of different levels of increased local involvement in immigration enforcement on social isolation, using a survey of over 2000 Latinas/os in four large US cities, all considered to be traditional destinations...

The study of social capital has been one of the strongest areas of recent advance in migration research, but there are still many questions about how it works and why it has varying effects in studies of different places. In this article, we address the contextual variation in social capital's effects on migration by considering migration brokers. We argue that destinations for which migration is logistically difficult to arrange give rise to brokerage industries and hypothesize that brokers in turn substitute for the informational capital typically provided by social networks...

Taking an origin-destination linked approach, we compare remittance behaviors of Fuzhou-US and Mingxi-Europe migrants. We find that different mechanisms predict propensity to remit and the amount of remittances. Altruistic remittance is more consistent with the remitting propensities of migrants from the poorer Mingxi region but is also reflected in the remittance amount of migrants from Fuzhou, where there is higher economic disparity and where people who fail to consume lavishly are socially sanctioned. When emigration is risky, circuitous, and expensive, we find, migration cost drives the remittance amount...

Migration of household members is often undertaken to improve the well-being of individuals remaining in the household. Despite this, research has demonstrated inconsistent associations between migration and children's well-being across sending areas and types of migration. To understand the degree to which different types of migration and migrants are associated with schooling, we analyze comparable data across three African countries differing in prevalence, type, and selectivity of migration. Results suggest that recent migration is differentially associated with left-behind children's school enrollment across settings...

U.S. President Trump's administration has vowed to boost immigration enforcement to get rid of "bad hombres," or undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Using past data on the alleged detention motives for a representative sample of Mexican deportees, we evaluate how prior widespread and prioritized enforcement has fared in that regard. We find that while the early sweeping approach to enforcement raised deportees' propensity of being detained for minor offenses, the trend reversed with prioritized enforcement...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Mexican immigrants enjoy a substantial mortality advantage over non-Hispanic whites in the US, although their health declines with greater duration of residence. Many previous studies have suggested this advantage reflects higher levels of social support among Mexicans in enclave communities with high co-ethnic density. As the Mexican-origin population in the US has grown, it has expanded outside traditional gateway cities in California and Texas to new destinations throughout the US, and it has become increasingly important to understand how settlement in new destinations impacts the health of Mexican immigrants...

We examine whether migration affects the gender division of household tasks and participation in leisure within origin-country households using survey data from the Republic of Georgia. Our theoretical framework identifies two sets of mechanisms whereby migration might influence gender differences in home activities: migrant experience effects and migrant absence effects. We test for both types of effects on the probability that men and women perform gender atypical household tasks and engage in leisure activities by comparing households with and without currently absent and return migrants using probit regressions...