Why Do Most Never Migrate? Selectivity in Attitudes and Triggering Events For Odds/Speed of Emigration"

• In Event: 20463 - Population Processes Across the Life Course

Abstract

The typical approach to studying migrant selectivity is to compare how immigrants in migrant-destination societies differ in traits from everyone in the migrant-origin society (Feliciano 2005; Hatton and Williamson 2005; Kapur 2010). However, this conventional approach in fact does not rigorously assess selectivity because 1) policymakers are often more interested in those who have the potential to emigrate than everyone in the migrant-origin populations, 2) immigrants have changed in the process of migration, and 3) many potential migrants never migrate. In contrast, I develop and apply a new survey design for more rigorously assessing selectivity in a migrant-origin society by comparing data from potential emigrants to data from emigrants before they emigrated. I apply both Cox proportional hazard survival models and survival duration models to Hong Kong residents who lived through the legitimacy crisis of the Hong Kong government 2019-2021, its repression of those protests, and its imposition of a National Security Law. My results demonstrate that selectivity in both who migrates and the number of months between when they considered emigrating and emigrated in terms of 1) individual-level traits, 2) subjective attitudes, and 3) how triggering participants found specific historical events. Based on 4585 survey responses I collected from Hong Kong and outside of Hong Kong in 12 different migrant-destination societies, I found Hong Kongers were more likely to emigrate if they were married, were more concerned about politics, the poorer their self-reported mental health, the more their family supports their migration, the fewer years they worked at their current job, and for those triggered to emigrate by the tear gassing of protestors by Hong Kong police at Prince Edward Station, the Polytechnic University siege, the 21-day hotel quarantine, and the implementation of National Security Education. The number of months between when they considered migrating and emigrated was greater the more concerned they were about politics, the more family members they had in Hong Kong, the poorer their mental health, the greater their social support in Hong Kong than abroad.

Author

• Jacob Richard Thomas, Corvinus University of Budapest