Intending to Move: Explaining Gendered Differences in Central American Migration

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and Migration

Abstract

Understanding the drivers of migration has become a critical issue for migration scholars and policymakers alike. As the conventional migration patterns between Central America and the U.S. have become decidedly more unconventional and mixed in recent years, identifying the distinct factors that lead one to consider leaving their home has become an essential first step in exploring the political, economic, and social consequences of these mixed migration flows. More specifically, there is growing evidence that women and men are driven to migrate by a distinct set of factors that imply fundamentally different policy strategies to addressing the causes of migration. In this paper, we offer an innovative approach to identifying and better understanding these distinct drivers of migration, with a particular focus on the role that distinct gendered interactions with state institutions in contexts of high crime and violence play in the emigration decision. In addition, we introduce a more nuanced approach to measuring emigration intentions that allows for a more precise estimation of individuals who not only have a desire to leave their country but give every indication that they will put those emigration intentions into action.
Despite the steady increase of women migrants arriving at the U.S. border from northern Central America over the past ten years, scholars and policymakers alike continue to lean on largely gender-neutral assessments of the push factors that are driving so many to leave their homes. Such factors as crime, food insecurity, natural disaster, and interactions with the state are implicitly understood, and explicitly modeled, as having similar effects on the emigration plans of men and women. In this paper, and our larger research agenda of which this study is a part, we contend that many of the forces that lead individuals to emigrate act in distinct ways on men and women. Such life experiences as being the victim of a crime, being asked for a bribe by a police officer, or not having enough food to feed one's family manifest themselves in fundamentally different ways for men and women and, in turn, play differential roles in their respective emigration calculations. In this paper, we endeavor to explore these ideas through a gendered analysis of the ways in which one's experience with their criminal justice system – from their perceptions of it to their interactions with it – have distinct influences on the emigration decisions of men and women.
We are able to employ greater analytical leverage on these questions through analysis of newly collected survey data from the summer of 2022 across Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. The survey for this project was specifically designed, in part, to assess in more fine-grained ways the emigration intentions and motivations of survey respondents. One area in particular that these novel survey data shed greater light on is the degree to which those individuals reporting emigration intentions plan to put those intentions into action.
Scholars have long relied on a "yes/no" emigration intentions survey item as a means to model migration behavior. The dichotomous nature of this measure, however, has greatly limited its utility as a way to identify those individuals who are more/less likely to actually put their emigration plans into action in the foreseeable future. Over the course of the summer of 2022, nationally representative surveys in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador were carried out that included a series of items designed to more fully reveal the emigration plans of those who reported intentions to emigrate. Through analysis of these survey data we are able to better identify those individuals who are more likely to put their emigration plans into action. With this more finely-tuned measure of emigration intentions, we are able to examine the propositions that (1). Security-related attitudes and experiences play a more powerful role in the emigration calculus of women due, in large part, to the distinct, gendered responses of state actors to security issues experienced by men and women. As a consequence of this more powerful security dimension to the emigration plans of women, they will be more likely to have taken concrete steps in preparation to migrate than men. In other words, all else equal, women will be more likely than men to be "security migrants," and thus will be closer (at the time of the survey) to putting migration plans into action than men.

Authors

• Jonathan T. Hiskey, Vanderbilt University

• Abby B. Cordova, University of Notre Dame

• Diana Orces, Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)

• Mary Fran T. Malone, University of New Hampshire