Short-term migration and temporary foreign workers: Is it possible to produce estimates of short-term migration?
Julie Jefferies and Emma Wright
Office for National Statistics
Over the last decade there has been significant interest in the level of international migration to and from the UK. In particular, this interest has grown following the accession of 10 countries to the European Union in May 2004, 8 of which were Central and Eastern European countries.
This presentation will cover work which ONS is carrying out to research the estimation of short-term migration flows to and from the UK. The first phase of the research (currently underway) has several strands including work to review the definitional issues and user needs in relation to short-term migrants. Alongside this, the data sources available to estimate or quality assure short-term migration flows are being assessed. The second phase of the research will assess the feasibility of producing estimates of short-term migration flows. Feasibility is likely to depend on several factors, including data quality, suitability of reason for visit information and seasonality issues. Interactions between short-term and long-term migration estimates will also need to be taken into account. ONS expects to report on this work by the end of 2006.
Email: julie.jefferies@ons.gsi.gov.uk
Geographical and labour mobility in the European Union.
Letizia Mencarini and Ettore Recchi
University of Florence
The main aim of this study is a parallel outline of geographical and job mobility of EU citizens. The issue of job mobility is dealt with in two different research traditions: labour economics and the sociology of stratification. Economists' interest in job mobility has been revived by the 'end of jobs for life' debate and the capacity of labour markets to reallocate efficiently a more flexible workforce. By contrast, the sociologist's focus is rather concentrated on the hierarchical aspect of job mobility - i.e., careers and movements between occupational levels or social classes. Very few international comparative studies on actual turnovers exist and all these studies are seriously limited by the use of different national datasets, which makes comparisons possible only at an aggregate level and hinders the use of control variables. Analysis of homogeneous international datasets (in this case the European Community Household Panel [ECHP]) is likely to circumvent these limits.
In operational terms, we intend to give an outline of geographic mobility and an outline of work mobility of European citizens in the EU Member States and an assessment of the possible statistical relationship between the two forms of mobility. The latter analysis is a test of the broader hypothesis by which more flexible labour markets fit with higher rates of spatial movements of the workforce, both within and across countries (i.e., from and to different Member States).
Email: mencarini@ds.unifi.it
Globalisation, population mobility and the impact of migration on population.
Philip Rees
University of Leeds
This paper updates a presentation on the same theme given at an ESRC/ONS Seminar in July 2006. Four themes within this extensive topic are developed: the position of the UK in the global mobility system over several decades; recent trends in international migration to the UK; the impact of international migration on the UK population and the differences across UK regions in the future change in ethnic groups consequent on international migration.
The position of the UK in the global migration system is described, using UN statistics on country of birth that have been used by Dorling and colleagues.
International migration statistics recently published in August 2006 are reviewed, reported and interpreted. The differing media views on the recent high levels of immigration are compared.
International migrant inflows to the UK have long term implications. The likely impacts of international migration on the future UK population are reviewed drawing on recent national and academic projections.
These impacts will differ across UK regions. The final part of the paper presents some indicative results for projections of ethnic groups by thirteen UK regions (the Government Office Regions of England, but with London split into Inner and Outer London together with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland).
Email: p.h.rees@leeds.ac.uk
Consuelo Martin
Centre for Emigration Studies, University of Havana
Cuba's external migration is analysed in its concrete historical context, describing its general characteristics, means of exodus, countries of destination, social representations, and the effects on Cuban daily life. The theoretical framework is the family as the protagonist of the migration process, a proposal developed with a methodological strategy for applied research and verified through the results of studies carried out in Havana City from the 1990s to the present.
Email: consuelomartin@yahoo.com
PowerPoint presentation
Adriana Carolina Silva1, Juan Carlos Guataqui Roa2
Universidad Militar "Nueva Granada", Colombia, 2Universidad del Rosario
The internal migrations in Colombia have caused a demographic transformation, because they have been focused on just a few urban centres. These migratory movements are influenced by the "available" opportunities of work, as well as by increased armed conflict. Additionally, the migrants are largely unskilled and so are forced to locate in low remuneration jobs or in the informal sector, thereby becoming economically marginalised. This paper examines some characteristics of the migrants that live in the main cities of Colombia, taking into account their profiles and their impact on urban unemployment from 2001 to 2005.
The paper shows that migrants to the cities have high probabilities of being absorbed by the labour market. Drawing on data from the Continuous Survey of Households, Logit Analysis is used to consider the probability of an individual being in employment, taking account of people's age, educational level, migrant status, partnership status and number of employed people in the household. This is carried out both for all the population and according to the reason of migration (forced displacement and economic migration). In addition, an analysis of the determinants of income is undertaken using the Mincerian model, incorporating the variable of recent migration and correcting for income selection with the Heckman log likelihood method.
Email: acsilva@umng.edu.co
Metropolitan deconcentration and new alternative attraction regions in Mexico, 1970-2000
Angélica E. Reyna Bernal
Universidad Autόnoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Mexico
The traditional internal migratory pattern in Mexico since 1930 has been movement from rural areas to the largest cities: Mexico, Guadalajara, Monterrey and Puebla, contributing to a marked concentration of population in the central region of the country. However, the censuses of 1980 and 1990 gave evidence of a change in this pattern, with loss of attraction of Mexico City's metropolitan area and the growth of small and medium cities.
This paper examines the migratory flows of two contrasting regions that act as an alternative to those dominated by the great metropolis. First, the coastal regions that form the most peripheral parts of Mexico, with 114 medium and small cities now representing one third of the National Urban System. The acceleration of coastal urbanization is very recent and is directly caused by labour immigration associated with the petroleum, tourist, fishery and harbour industries related to the opening of international global commerce. Second, the Hidalgo-Tlaxcala-Puebla region, close to Mexico City and Puebla. This receives part of the outmigration from Mexico City and has a strong commuting links with it. This work involves a GIS-based analysis of migration data from the national censuses of 1970 to 2000.
Email: areynabo4@yahoo.com.mx
In-migration to Cornwall: Stepping off the treadmill?
Stuart Burley
University of Plymouth& Cornwall County Council
There is little debate over the claim that Cornwall is a county of extreme economic deprivation. Measures of GDP, GVA and earnings indicate that Cornwall is the poorest county in England regardless of the fact that it lies within the relatively prosperous South West region. Despite the economic profile, Cornwall has experienced one of the highest rates of population growth in Britain over the last 30 years which has been solely the result of in-migration. Cornwall therefore serves as a contradiction to both classic and contemporary migration theory. Classic migration theory has spoken of the dominance of the economic motive in the propensity for people to migrate but the consistently high rate of in-migration to the poorest county in Britain contradicts this logic. Moreover, Cornwall is a rural and peripheral area and the population growth from in-migration is indicative of the counter-urbanisation trend witnessed within many peripheral areas of developed nations. Contemporary migration literature and counter-urbanisation theory has suggested that rural and peripheral areas benefit economically from such migration but Cornwall displays little sign of this. This poses the question as to why it is the case that Cornwall has been the recipient of high levels of in-migration yet it remains poor. Analysis of in-migrant characteristics provides one possible explanation.
The paper uses data from the ONS Longitudinal Survey and the Cornwall County Council Peoples Panel Survey. The longitudinal aspect of the data allows for analysis of the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the in-migrant population, both before and after moving to Cornwall. Evidence shows that the majority of in-migrants were doing well economically before moving and, in most cases, were more dynamic than people in Cornwall. However, post-move this trend is reversed with in-migrants sharing an economic status similar to, if not worse than, the long-term population. It is therefore argued that unlike most migration, in-migrants to Cornwall are less motivated by economic concerns than by lifestyle considerations resulting in a decrease in the quantity and quality of labour market participation.
Email: stuart.burley@plymouth.ac.uk
Cecilia Macintyre
General Register Office for Scotland
The current approach to estimating migration in Scotland, uses data provided from the NHSCR system for transfer of health records between health boards as the primary source. However information at the lower level is provided by comparing two extracts from a patient management system called the Community Health Index. A recent change to the health board boundaries has taken place with the abolition of Argyll and Clyde, which may have implications on the future supply of data from these sources, and in preparation for this some detailed comparisons have been done to explore the implications of relying on the community health index source alone. The findings from this work will be presented.
Email: cecilia.macintyre@gro-scotland.gsi.gov.uk
The indirect estimation of elderly migrant flows in England and Wales.
Guy Abel
University of Southampton
Migration statistics in England and Wales may be obtained from the Census and the Office of National Statistics (ONS), whose figures are derived from the NHSCR and Health Authority Patient Registers. The regularity and detail of these data sources differ. Indirect estimation techniques illustrated in this presentation are applied to bridge these differences allowing the regular total in-and-outflow data of the ONS to duplicate the detailed desegregation of flows found in the Census. Two indirect estimation techniques are compared; Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) and the Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithms to calculate migration counts by origin and destination of Local Authority Districts grouped according to Office of National Statistics categorisations. Both sets of estimates are shown to be equivalent. These techniques are then expanded to predict migration counts by a third discrete variable, Limiting Long Term Illness. Here differences arise due to a lack of information regarding a sufficient statistic for a third discrete variable in the ONS in-and-outflow data.
Email: gja104@soton.ac.uk
Socio-spatial contexts of second generation immigrant progress: Understanding local labour market structures and intergenerational mobility.
Jamie Goodwin-White
University of Southampton
Studies of immigrant economic progress lack a coherent understanding of how immigrants' position within unequally-structured local labour markets affects their social mobility. In this paper, I employ a network-driven focus on the structural dynamics of intergenerational occupational segmenting in U.S. metropolitan areas in to generate more complete knowledge on the economic trajectories of immigrants and their adult children in local labour markets. The proposed paper suggests approaches and answers to the following three questions:
1) To what extent do the adult children of immigrants experience the occupational segmenting that their immigrant parents' generation does? How are these related?
2) Why and how does this vary across metropolitan labour markets?
3) What are the returns in terms of absolute and relative wages to immigrant labour market segmentation? How do these returns differ for their adult children?
Email: j.goodwin-white@soton.ac.uk
Penny Kane
University of Melbourne
The huge explosion in the number of internal migrants in China, which reached some 126 million people by 2000, is often pictured - even by some Chinese themselves - as a largely male phenomenon, in which men move to work in the towns and cities while their wives stay to work the family land, raise their children and care for the elderly. In fact, however, surveys show that women have been 40 per cent or more of the migrant total in some cities, and that proportion is growing.
This paper draws on a number of recent Chinese studies, carried out in various Chinese provinces, to present a fuller picture of the women, both married and single, involved in the migration stream. From these studies we can obtain indications of their educational levels and their types of employment, their incomes, living expenses and living conditions, as well as their remittances to their families, and the attitudes of those families and of others in the sending communities to their female migrant members.
In the context of China's population policies, sexuality and child-bearing among these migrant women is of particular interest. The sexual attitudes and behaviour of single women, including their attitudes (and those of their rural families) to premarital sexual activity; the proportion indulging in such activity; and their age at first intercourse, are explored. Their levels of knowledge about contraception and STDs and how to access appropriate services are identified, as well as the proportion of accidental pregnancies and their outcomes. Other reproductive health challenges arise amongst married migrant women, whose antenatal and delivery health care strategies are explored in the context of service availability and constraints.
Email: pskane@braidwood.net.au
Putting Sweden on the map of internal migration modelling.
Stamatis Kalogirou
London School of Economics
At BSPS 2005 we presented a comparative study on migration behaviour between England and Wales (E&W), and Japan with special attention to geographical variations in out-migration determinants. The aim of this paper is to add Sweden on the map of this study and to examine if previous differences / commonalities apply in the case of Sweden.
We use the same methodology as previously (Kalogirou, 2005b). We use heat maps (Kalogirou, 2005a) to study temporal trends of migration for the Swedish capital city of Stockholm. We use Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to look at local out-migration models for local authorities in Sweden. Kalogirou (2003) during his doctoral studies built upon existing work to examine local models of internal migration using GWR (Fotheringham et al., 2000; 2002). In Japan, in recent years there has been a major contribution to this area. Nakaya (2001) modelled destination choice for migrants also using GWR. A recent paper by Yano et al. (2003) allowed comparisons to be made between the migrant behaviour in Britain and Japan. However, there is a lack of such a study in Sweden. The most relevant work in Sweden has been presented by Hedberg (2003) and Niedomysl (2004). Here, we built on existing experience to introduce this analysis in Sweden.
We need to note that Sweden is a very rich country in terms of population data. Any person that moves address is recorded as a migrant in the Swedish registry data. Aggregate data are published annually as the last census was in 1991. The data source for both migration and the explanatory variables for Sweden come mainly from Statistics Sweden (SCB, 2005).
Overall the results of local models are novel in Sweden and rather not in line with those found for England and Wales, and Japan. The most interesting finding is the role divorce plays in the decision to migrate.
Email: s.kalogirou@lse.ac.uk
The settling behaviour of the foreign population in Italy.
Stefania Rimoldi and Laura Terzera
Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca
Since 1980, immigration to Italy has become so substantial that it has noticeably affected the structure and the dynamics of the total population. Through data drawn from a recent (2005) survey on both legal and illegal foreigners - carried out by Fondazione ISMU on behalf of the Welfare Ministry - the paper aims to explain the settling behaviour of the main ethnic groups of foreign immigrants focusing on the Southern provinces. We have two objectives. One consists of verifying whether the distribution of foreign immigrants in the provinces is affected by spatial autocorrelation, giving particular attention those ethnic groups which are more spatially concentrated. The other is to explain these differences in settling behaviour in the light of their characteristics (e.g. time of arrival, legal status, socio-economic peculiarities) of each ethnic group
Email: stefania.rimoldi@unimib.it
Residential mobility and migration of the separated.
Peteke Feijten and Maarten van Ham
University of St. Andrews
Separation has become a rather common life event over the last few decades. It is a stressful event for those who experience it, not least because separation involves a residential move of at least one of the ex-partners. Separation is known to have a disruptive effect on the housing careers of those involved, mainly because a decrease in resources causes (temporary) downward moves on the housing ladder. Little is known about the geographies of residential mobility behaviour of the separated. Do the separated show distinctive geographical behaviour, in the sense of frequency, distance and direction of residential relocations? This paper investigates the hypothesis that the separated move more often than singles and people in intact couples, are less likely to move over long distances and move more often to cities than people in intact couples. Special attention was paid to gender differences, differences between those with and without children and whether any effect of separation on spatial housing careers is lasting or temporary. Applying hazard analysis on retrospective life course data for the Netherlands, this study shows that the separated move more often than others and this effect lasts up to five years after separation. Separated fathers move less often over long distance than married fathers. And moves of the separated are more often to cities than moves of people in a relationship, but not more often than moves of singles.
Email: maarten.vanham@st-andrews.ac.uk