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About Annual Meeting
Legal Status, Networks and Migration between Senegal and Europe
Tue, August 19, 8:30 to 10:10am, TBAAbstract
Unauthorized migration from Africa is a major public and policy concern in Europe, yet quantitative scholarship is extremely limited. This paper aims to widen understanding of the determinants of authorized and unauthorized migration. Specifically, it seeks to understand the role of migrant social capital in migrations of different legal statuses and advances prior work by clarifying mechanisms, testing social capital theory against complementary explanations, and distinguishing between legal status at entry and at initial stay. The empirical quantitative literature has largely neglected legal status at migration; the one exception analyzed a set of extremely restricted indicators. This paper applies discrete-time event history analysis to the longitudinal MAFE-Senegal data (2008) collected in Africa (Senegal) and Europe (France, Italy and Spain). Specifically, I employ a competing risks (multinomial logistic) model to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized 1st-time migration entry into Europe, as well as legal status (authorized, unauthorized, visa overstay) at initial stay. Results indicate that, for the case of Senegal, authorized migrations reflect household migration strategies, while unauthorized migrations do not. Instead, unauthorized migration appears to be an individual project, supported by friendship rather than family networks. Visa overstays and authorized migrations are most strongly supported by migrant networks, although all migrations are heightened by friendship networks. Cousin migrant networks encourage authorized entry, while friendship networks encourage both authorized and unauthorized entry. In terms of legal status at initial stay, visa overstay has high migrant social capital requirements and is very sensitive to migrant networks and their resources.