Understanding the Emigration of the Second Generation: Patterns and Explanations

Petra de Jong , Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)

Prior research frequently addressed the social mobility of the children of immigrants. However, we know much less about the geographical mobility of this so-called ‘second generation’, that is, their international migration patterns. In the absence of reliable data on actual migration behavior, previous research mainly relied on survey data capturing the intention of the second generation to ‘return’ to the country of origin of their parents. From these analyses, it remains unclear to what extent ‘return’ intentions of the second generation translate into actual behavior, whether their moves are permanent, and which selection processes shape the composition of these migration flows. Furthermore, we lack information on the destination of second generation-emigrants. To address these knowledge gaps, this study introduces unique, full population data from the Dutch population registers, to investigate which individuals are selected into emigration among the Turkish, Moroccan and German second generation born in the Netherlands between 1980 and 1999. By means of a repeated event history analysis, we investigate which factors predict initial emigration from the Netherlands, as well as the likelihood that an individual returns to the Netherlands. In these analyses, we include mobility patterns of the second generation to their parents’ country of birth as well as moves to other destinations.

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 Presented in Session 68. Out-Migration: Measures, Causes and Consequences