Seminar Summary – 16th International Conference on Migration and Development

By Claire Paul

From October 2-3, 2023, the French Development Agency (AFD), World Bank Development Group (DECGR), Boston University Global Development Policy Center (GDP Center), BU Institute for Economic Development (IED) and BU Human Resources Policy Institute (HRPI) jointly sponsored the 16th International Conference on Migration and Development, hosted at Boston University.

The conference was devoted to investigating ways in which international migration affects economic and social change in developing countries. Topics included the effects of migration on poverty, inequality and human capital formation; social networks and migration; migration and globalization; and migration and institutional, technological, demographic and cultural change in sending countries, today and in the past.

GDP Center Director Kevin P. Gallagher and Human Capital Initiative Core Faculty Member Patricia Cortes gave welcome remarks. The conference hosted keynotes speakers Gordon Hanson, Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Natalie Bau, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-Los Angeles.

In his keynote address, Gordon Hanson set out to investigate the role of migrant labor in absorbing shocks in the United States economy.

Internal migration in the United States has historically been low compared to other countries. Hanson explained that migration’s stark upfront costs typically dissuade internal migration of native workers, but less so for foreign-born workers. As immigrants typically pay a substantial cost to move to the United States, the costs of internal migration are comparatively small. Immigrant workers are thus more responsive to job opportunities than native-born workers. Hanson argued that the superior mobility of immigrant workers helps local labor markets adjust to system-wide shocks. If immigrant workers are in places most affected by shocks, they provide protection from economic downturns.

Hanson was motivated to apply his investigation to long-term shifts in labor market conditions: namely, the shock that the United States manufacturing industry experienced when China joined the World Trade Organization and Chinese imports flooded the US, dealing a near-fatal blow to the American manufacturing industry.

Hanson noted that the initial exposure to the Chinese trade shock resulted in substantial regional declines in manufacturing employment. With little adjustment in non-manufacturing employment and static population headcounts, the Chinese trade shock resulted in a declining regional employment rate. This in turn led to negative spillover effects for the region and general social breakdown.

After establishing the economic breakdown of the manufacturing industry, Hanson’s investigation shifted its focus to local concentrations of immigrant workers. Hanson found that the largest waves of immigration into the United States happened after the firmly-established manufacturing industry had little job growth, meaning few migrants chose to locate in manufacturing regions. Accordingly, when the trade shock hit, immigrants were in the wrong places to protect domestic workers.

The second keynote presentation by Natalie Bau focused on the practice of dowry in India, specifically as an instrument to provide retirement support to parents in the case of migration.

Bau’s presentation opened with a focus on an understudied cost of migration: old age support. In India, which Bau highlighted as a country with strong family values, male children traditionally have resided near their parents to support them in old age, a phenomenon known as patrilocality. There has been a decline in patrilocality in recent years, as young couples are increasingly moving to urban areas for greater job opportunities. Mobile money and electronic transfers are still widely underutilized in India, meaning that when children move away, elderly parents lose critical income-sharing capabilities at a time when they themselves can no longer work. Bau’s research set out to investigate if dowries can mitigate these costs of migration, by allowing grooms to transfer resources to his parents before migrating to cities.

Bau surveyed families across India to understand the ownership of dowry resources. She found that while dowry-giving from parents is almost universal, dowry-receiving, although common, is not. Consistent with dowry as a mechanism for income sharing, dowry receiving occurs more when sons migrate. Comparing areas with different dowry cultures confirms that in counties with historically stronger dowry traditions, men are more likely to migrate after marriage.

In all, the two-day conference brought together leading academics and experts to investigate ways in which international migration affects economic and social change in developing countries.

*

Never miss an update: subscribe to the Human Capital Initiative newsletter.