• Alex Savin
• March 25, 2022
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Migration for Work and Income Change

Migration for work can happen for various reasons, war, economic reasons as well as personal or even medical reasons. The movement of people leaves traces not only on their lives but also on their environment. In modern times migrations most often happen in search of better income and better living standards.

Spatial Patterns of Migration for Work and Income

Migration for work in the 21st century has become a popular way for individuals from impoverished developing countries to obtain sufficient income for survival. This income is sent home to family members in the form of remittances. It has become an economic staple in some developing countries, namely the Philippines and those in Latin America. There are a number of theories to explain the international flow of capital and people from one country to another.

One of the most recognizable and important changes occurring in the West is rapid population growth. This article intends to address questions about whether patterns of population growth and income migration are associated with “new” and “old” West economies. Rural restructuring in the U.S. has created a group of counties with service-based economies. In the Mountain West, several counties with service-based economies are located in areas with high levels of environmental or natural amenities, creating what has been termed the “New West.” Migration to the rural parts of the Mountain West, and the income transfers associated with migration, are increasingly concentrated within these New West counties. Rapid population growth, the changing characteristics of in-migrants, and their spatial concentration in New West counties provide a basis for conflicts over what the rural West is becoming.

This thesis explores the changing patterns of employment and income assimilation among male immigrants to Sweden. In brief, the results of this work are that immigrants have been facing an increasingly difficult time integrating into the Swedish economy. The problems result from shifts in production and organization, which led to shifting labor demand. This shift in order has had negative consequences for immigrants, with those who are culturally most similar to native Swedes performing much better than those with greater cultural distance. Using OLS and logistic regressions, the fact that there has occurred a shift in income and employment performance between 1970 and 1990 is made evident. It is also fairly clear that this shift has not been to the benefit of immigrants. The immigrant experience in the Swedish labor market over the past thirty years is deterioration and increasing difficulty.

As reported in the 1970 Census of Population, the earnings of foreign-born adult white men are analyzed through comparisons with the native-born and among the foreign-born by country of origin, years in the United States, and citizenship. Differences in the effects of schooling and post-school training are explored. Although immigrants initially earn less than the native-born, their earnings rise more rapidly with U.S. labor market experience. After 10 to 15 years, their payments equal, and then exceed, that of the native-born. Payments are unrelated to whether the foreign-born are U.S. citizens.

Migration for workFrom Rural Areas of Poor Countries

Evidence is presented elsewhere that intra-rural inequality is a major cause of rural-urban migration: better-off villagers tend to be ‘pulled’, and worse-off villagers “pushed”, from the same subset of relatively ‘unequal’ villages. This research argues that townward emigration, and its after-effects (remittances, return migration), increase interpersonal and inter-household inequality within and between villages. As for rural labor productivity, the neoclassical expectation (that townward migration increases it) rests on special definitions and doubtful assumptions. Fortunately, in most of the poorer developing countries, rural-urban migration is much smaller, less permanent, and more likely to set up countervailing economic-demographic pressures restoring the rural population share, than received opinion about ‘the urban crisis’ suggests. The migration for work does not equilibrate between urban and rural sectors, largely because of externalities and compositional factors; but it does smooth itself, largely because individuals behave rationally and learn quickly. As so often, the lesson for development studies is not that ‘markets fail’. It is that, under conditions of both poverty and structural inequality, they function — but with generally unacceptable, misery-preserving consequences.

This article provides a critical review of existing studies about how migration alters women’s position in the course of social change. Two major goals are accomplished:

1. The conceptual and methodological issues that bear on the assessment of changing gender relations are distilled from the existing literature.
2. We delineate three alternative outcomes for migrant women using the distribution-redistribution analytical framework for heuristic purposes, although we acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing among them empirically.
3. We provide a selective review of case studies illustrating alternative outcomes for migrant women in Africa and Latin America.

The concluding discussion summarises the major findings to distinguish issues that cross-cut social settings from those that are country-specific.

Conclusion

People migrate for various reasons. Migrations can affect their lives as well as the lives of the community they move to. If good choices are made migration for work can make a significant and positive change in their income.