Social Capital & Cumulative Migration

Remittances & Economic Inequality

Diverse Mechanisms of Migration

Curriculum Vitae

Open Scholar Website

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Papers

Filiz Garip

Associate Professor of Sociology

Biographical Note

Filiz Garip received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.S.E in Operations Research & Financial Engineering both from Princeton University. Her research spans the fields of migration, economic sociology and inequality, and broadly addresses three questions:

• How does social capital, defined as resources available through social ties, lead to divergent migration patterns?
• How do remittances, funds or goods sent back by migrants, influence the economic landscape in origin communities?
• How can we characterize the diverse mechanisms underlying migration across different periods or contexts?

A series of articles, listed below, grapple with these questions in two settings: internal migration in Thailand and international migration between Mexico and the United States.

(Links to the copies of the published papers are provided at the end of the page. Posting of these papers for downloading is intended for educational purposes only and adherence to copyright laws is assumed. Please send email to obtain the latest versions of the unpublished work.)

Professor Garip's full bio, cv, publications and course information are available at http://scholar.harvard.edu/garip.

1. SOCIAL CAPITAL AND CUMULATIVE MIGRATION

Sociologists have long studied processes that lead to cumulative advantage, where an initial favorable position provides perpetual gains, and leads to persistent, and often increasing, inequalities over time. The articles below identify such a process in the case of migration. Specifically, the articles demonstrate how resources available through social ties can have differential effects across groups and settings, and generate striking variations in aggregate migration patterns over time. This cumulative mechanism can explain why migration becomes a mass phenomenon in some regions of the world, while it remains minimally diffused in similar others, an empirical fact that cannot be accounted for with the existing economic and sociological theories of migration.

Social Capital and Migration: How Do Similar Resources Lead to Divergent Outcomes?
Filiz Garip. 2008. Demography 45(3): 591-617.
Winner of the 2006 Best Student Paper Award of the ASA Population Section.

This article investigates how migrant social capital differentially influences individuals' migration and cumulatively generates divergent outcomes for communities. To combine the fragmented findings in the literature, the article proposes a framework that decomposes migrant social capital into resources (information about or assistance with migration), sources (prior migrants), and recipients (potential migrants). Analysis of multilevel and longitudinal data from 22 rural villages in Thailand shows that the probability of internal migration increases with the available resources, yet the magnitude of increase depends on recipients' characteristics and the strength of their ties to sources. Specifically, individuals become more likely to migrate if migrant social capital resources are greater and more accessible. The diversity of resources by occupation increases the likelihood of migration, while diversity by destination inhibits it. Resources from weakly tied sources, such as village members, have a higher effect on migration than resources from strongly tied sources in the household. Finally, the importance of resources for migration declines with recipients' own migration experience. These findings challenge the mainstream account of migrant social capital as a uniform resource that generates similar migration outcomes for different groups of individuals or in different settings. In Nang Rong villages, depending on the configuration of resources, sources, and recipients, migrant social capital leads to differential migration outcomes for individuals and divergent cumulative migration patterns in communities.

Intergroup Inequality from the Diffusion of Practices with Network Externalities through Differentiated Networks: Applications to the Digital Divide in the U.S. and to Rural/Urban Migration in Thailand
Paul DiMaggio and Filiz Garip. 2010. Accepted for publication at American Journal of Sociology

We describe a common but largely unrecognized mechanism that reproduces and exacerbates intergroup inequality: the diffusion of valuable practices with network externalities through social networks differentiated in membership with respect to characteristics associated with adoption. We examine two cases. In the first, the diffusion of Internet use, network effects increase the utility of adoption to friends and relatives of prior adopters. Employing observed data on the relationship between cost and adoption and on scale effects on price, and using agents recruited from the 2002 General Social Survey, our agent-based model demonstrates positive, monotonic relationships, given externalities, between homophily bias and intergroup inequality in equilibrium adoption rates. In the second, rural/urban migration in Thailand, network effects reduce risk to persons whose networks include prior migrants. Using longitudinal individual-level migration data, we find that network homophily interacts with network externalities to induce inequality in migration rates among otherwise similar villages.

Model Comparison and Simulation for Hierarchical Models: Analyzing Rural-Urban Migration in Thailand.
Filiz Garip and Bruce Western. 2010. Forthcoming in Handbook of MCMC, Edited by Galin Jones, Steve Brooks, Xiao-Li Meng, and Andrew Gelman. CRC Press.

Sociological research often examines the effects of social context with hierarchical models. In these applications, individuals are nested in social contexts - like school classes, neighborhoods or villages- whose effects are thought to shape individual outcomes. Although applications of hierarchical models are common in sociology, analysis usually focuses on inference for fixed parameters. Researchers seldom study model fit or examine aggregate patterns of variation implied by model parameters. We present an analysis of Thai migration data, in which survey respondents are nested within villages and report annual migration information. We study a variety of hierarchical models, investigating model fit with DIC and posterior predictive statistics. We also describe a simulation to study how different initial distributions of migration across villages produce increasing inter-village inequality in migration.

Gendered Migrant Social Capital: Evidence from Thailand.
Sara Curran, Filiz Garip, Chang Chung, and Kanchana Tangchonlatip. 2006. Social Forces 84(1): 225-255.

Employing longitudinal data from Thailand to replicate studies of cumulative causation, we extend current knowledge by measuring frequency of trips, duration of time away, level of network aggregation (village or household), and sex composition of migrant networks and estimating a model of prospective migration among men and women in Thailand. We find that trips and duration of time away have distinct influences upon migration; that household level migrant networks are more influential than village level migrant networks; that female migrant networks and male migrant networks have different influences upon migration outcomes; and, that migrant social capital influences men and women's migration differently. Our elaboration provides significant quantitative evidence for how gender and family variously imbue migration dynamics.

Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration.
Sara Curran, Steven Shafer, Katherine Donato, and Filiz Garip. 2006. International Migration Review 40(1): 199-223.

Sociology scholarship has evolved over the last thirty years to demonstrate the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. We describe the intellectual evolution of this scholarship and note that most empirical and theoretical insights are based in studies employing qualitative methods. We then evaluate leading quantitative migration scholarship through systematically coding all of the articles that have been published in the leading Sociology journals between 1994 and 2004: American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Social Forces. We find little evidence that gender is treated as a constitutive element in quantitative migration studies in Sociology during the 1990s and early 21st century and continue to find one-fifth of the migration studies failing to acknowledge the sex composition of their sample. We conclude that migration scholarship continues to be methodologically segregated vis-à-vis gender and offer suggestions for integration in future research.

Increasing Migration, Diverging Communities: Changing Character of Migrant Streams in Rural Thailand.
Filiz Garip and Sara Curran. 2010. Population Research and Policy Review 29: 659-685.

This paper studies how increasing migration changes the character of migrant streams in sending communities. Cumulative causation theory posits that past migration patterns determine future flows, as prior migrants provide resources, influence, or normative pressures that make individuals more likely to migrate. The theory implies exponentially increasing migration flows that are decreasingly selective. Recent research identifies heterogeneity in the cumulative patterns and selectivity of migration in communities. We propose that this heterogeneity may be explained by individuals' differential access to previously accumulated migration experience. Multi-level, longitudinal data from 22 rural Thai communities allow us to measure the distribution of past experience as a proxy for its accessibility to community members. We find that migration becomes a less-selective process as migration experience accumulates, and migrants become increasingly diverse in socio demographic characteristics. Yet, selectivity within migrant streams persists if migration experience is not uniformly distributed among, and hence not equally accessible to, all community members. The results confirm that the accumulation and distribution of prior migrants' experiences distinctly shape future migration flows, and may lead to diverging cumulative patterns in communities over time.

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2. REMITTANCES AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

Remittances, funds and goods sent by migrants to origin families and communities, amount to more than a quarter billion US dollars annually and comprise an increasingly vital component of economic outcomes in the developing world. The articles below investigate the motivations for and implications of remittance behavior in Thailand and between Mexico and the United States. The findings show that the determinants and consequences of remittance behavior depend on migrants' characteristics, as well as their prior migration experiences, and ignoring this dependence, as in most prior work, leads to faulty conclusions.

An Integrated Analysis of Migration and Remittances: Modeling Migration as a Mechanism for Selection.
Filiz Garip. 2010. Under review.

Prior work has modeled individuals' migration and remittance behavior separately, and reported mixed empirical support for various remittance motivations. This study offers an integrated approach, and considers migration as a mechanism for selection in a censored probit model of remittance behavior. This approach leads to dramatically different conclusions about the determinants of remittance behavior in the Thai internal migration setting. To the extent that these determinants capture different remittance motivations, as prior research has presumed, the analysis also provides varying support for these motivations. These result suggest that migration and remittance behavior are interrelated, and it is crucial for an analysis of remittance behavior to control for the selectivity of migration.

Repeat Migration and Cumulative Remittances as Mechanisms of Wealth Inequality in Mexico.
Filiz Garip. 2010. Under review.

Migrant remittances are one of the largest sources of external finance for many developing countries in the world. To evaluate the distributional impact of these flows in origin communities, prior research focused on how migrants' selectivity by wealth varies with migration prevalence in a community. This study advances prior work by demonstrating that the selectivity pattern changes over an individual's migration career. Based on data from 17,531 household heads in 119 Mexican communities surveyed by the Mexican Migration Project, the findings show that first-time migrants are selected from poor households, which, over repeated migration trips and cumulative remittances, reach levels of wealth to surpass households without migrants. This dynamic leads to increasing wealth disparities between households with and without migrants.

The Impact of Migration and Remittances on Wealth Accumulation and Distribution in Rural Thailand.
Filiz Garip. 2010. Under review.

This paper studies the impact of internal migration and remittance flows on wealth accumulation and distribution in 22 rural villages in Nang Rong, Thailand. Using data from 943 households, the study constructs indices of household productive and consumer assets with principal components analysis. The changes in these indices from 1994 to 2000 are modeled as a function of households' prior migration and remittance behavior while correcting for potential selectivity bias with propensity score matching. The findings show that rich households face a decrease in productive assets due to migration of their members, while poor households with migrants gain productive assets and improve their relative status in their communities. These results suggest an equalizing effect of migration and remittance flows on wealth distribution in rural Thailand.

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3. DIVERSE MECHANISMS OF MIGRATION

There are various theories to explain why individuals migrate, but in most empirical applications, researchers present a single narrative that best fits the data at hand. This dilemma is encountered in many empirical applications in sociology: while multiple mechanisms may account for the same outcome, conventional methods allow us to select one mechanism based on the average pattern in the data. The article below provides a novel approach to address this issue and to characterize the heterogeneity in migration behavior. This approach leads to novel insights to evaluate the Mexico-U.S. migration stream and provides new directions for future research and policy.

Discovering Diverse Mechanisms of Migration: The Mexico-U.S. Stream from 1970 to 2000.
Filiz Garip. 2010. Under review.

Migrants to the United States are a diverse population. This diversity, captured in various migration theories, is overlooked in empirical applications that describe a typical narrative for an average migrant. Using the Mexican Migration Project data from about 17,000 first-time migrants between 1970 and 2000, this study employs cluster analysis to identify four types of migrants with distinct configurations of characteristics. Each migrant type corresponds to a specific theoretical account, and becomes prevalent in a specific period, depending on the economic, social and political conditions. Strikingly, each migrant type also becomes prevalent around the period in which its corresponding theory is developed.

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03/28/2012

Curriculum Vitae

Courses Offered This Academic Year

A Sampling of Courses Offered in Other Years

Papers available in Portable Document Format (PDF)

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