International Migration Decision-Making and Destination Selection Among Skilled Migrants

Migration, Commuting, or a Second Home? Insights from an Experiment Among Academics

In the last decades, more complex types of residential mobility, such as second homes, arose while one-way relocations declined. Existing studies that address migration and commuting as being substitutes often face problems of endogeneity or lack of data regarding decision-making on different types of residential mobility. In contrast, we investigate decision-making on migration, commuting, and establishing a second home by using a factorial survey experiment, which allows for the accounting of both endogeneity bias through randomisation and complexity in decision-making through treatment variation. Hypothetical job offers were presented to a sample of academic staff of a Swiss university (ETH Zurich) in order to examine the intended types of residential mobility and their drivers. Referring to the concept of loss aversion, the utility of a second home can exceed the joint utilities of migration and commuting particularly when the total loss of the current residence bears intolerable costs caused by location-specific capital, and daily commuting bears prohibitive costs caused by a lengthy distance. Analyses show that the migration intention is mainly caused by low migration and high transition costs and the commuting intention is mainly caused by low transition costs and high migration costs. Establishing a second home is indeed more intended with simultaneously higher migration and transition costs. In sum, a second home may be understood as a substitute for one-way relocations and daily commuting, yet primarily under conditions of extremely high or irreversible migration costs and unsustainable transition costs.

Modeling American Migration Aspirations: How Capital, Race, and National Identity Shape Americans’ Ideas about Living Abroad

Recent scholarship proposes a “two-step” approach for better understanding mechanisms underlying the migration process, suggesting we study migration aspirations separately from migration behavior and that the one does not always translate directly into the other. Research on aspirations, however, concentrates on the Global South, despite growing migration flows originating in the Global North. Here, we fill this gap, drawing on a nationally representative online survey we commissioned in 2014 in the United States. Bivariate analysis shows that fully one-third of Americans surveyed reveal some aspiration to live abroad, a plurality of those primarily for the purpose of exploration. Multivariate analysis suggests that certain elements of cultural and social capital, including the networks Americans have with prior and current US citizen migrants, structure these aspirations, in tandem with strength of national attachment. Further, both cultural and economic aspects of class, alongside race and national attachment, shape where American aspirants envision going and why. While the existing literature addresses the motivations and profile of American migrants already living abroad, ours is the first study to examine Americans’ aspirations prospectively from the point of origin, thereby connecting the literature on Global North migration flows to that on migration aspirations.