Family and Community Obligations Motivate People to Immigrate—A Case Study from the Republic of the Marshall Islands

Ryo Fujikura (), Mikiyasu Nakayama, Daisuke Sasaki, Irene Taafaki and Jichao Chen
Additional contact information
Ryo Fujikura: Faculty of Sustainability Studies, Hosei University, Chiyodaku, Tokyo 102-8160, Japan
Mikiyasu Nakayama: Global Infrastructure Research Foundation, Minatoku, Tokyo 105-0001, Japan
Daisuke Sasaki: International Research Institute of Disaster Science, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8577, Japan
Irene Taafaki: College of the Marshall Islands, Delap-Uliga-Djarrit, Majuro Atoll 96960, Marshall Islands
Jichao Chen: Graduate School of Public Policy and Social Governance, Hosei University, Chiyodaku, Tokyo 102-8160, Japan

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: A questionnaire survey was conducted in the Marshall Islands among 308 citizens of Majuro in order to analyze the factors that led them to immigrate. Using the results from the questionnaire items that indicate the motivations for emigration as independent variables, we extracted the factors with significantly high correlation coefficients; they suggest that the desire to escape from the many obligations within the family and regional community are predominant push factors for migrating overseas while the economic disparity between the United State and their home countries are predominant pull factors. Independently, the Permutation Feature Importance was used to extract the salient factors motivating migration, which provides similar results. Furthermore, the result of structural equation modeling verified the hypothesis that an escape from many obligations and economic disparity is a major motivation for migration at a significance level of 0.1%.

Keywords: Marshall Islands; immigration; motivation; family and community obligations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/8/5448/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/8/5448/ (text/html)

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:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:8:p:5448-:d:1119480

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().