Returning from greener pastures? How exposure to returnees affects migration plans

Daniel Auer and Max Schaub

World Development, 2023, vol. 169, issue C

Abstract: Information and networks have long been hypothesized to be crucial elements of the formation of emigration intentions. Returnees are a prime source of information about life as a migrant. In this study, we contribute to an emerging literature on the influence of returnees on the formation of migration decisions using representative geolocated data from 5,000 respondents and more than 47,000 family members and relatives from Senegal and The Gambia, two countries with high emigration rates in the past. We demonstrate that the presence of return migrants in a respondent’s vicinity is exogenously conditional on the current number of emigrants. This allows us to circumvent the endogeneity of personal networks and to estimate the effect of returnees on individual emigration intentions. Migration intentions are substantially lower when emigrants who returned from Europe are present in the area. This does not apply to returnees from another African country. Further analyses reveal that migrants who returned from another African country improve the economic situation of families, while non-family returnees from Europe have no lasting economic impact but instead salter people’s negative perceptions of migration. We infer that exposure to returnees depresses emigration plans because potential migrants become more aware of the risks of the migration journey and the stigma attached to returning unsuccessfully.

Keywords: International migration; Emigration plans; Return migration; Networks; Information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X23001092
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:169:y:2023:i:c:s0305750x23001092

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106291

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().