Miserable Migrants? Natural Experiment Evidence on International Migration and Objective and Subjective Well-Being

By S. Stillman, John Gibson, David J. McKenzie, Halahingano Rohorua. Social Science Research Network, 2012

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over 200 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth and typically experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where incomes are higher. But effects of migration on subjective well-being are less clear, with some studies suggesting that migrants are miserable in their new locations. Observational studies are potentially biased by the self-selection of migrants so a natural experiment is used to compare successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery in order to experimentally estimate the impact of migration on objective and subjective well-being. The results show that international migration brings large improvements in objective well-being, in terms of incomes and expenditures. Impacts on subjective well-being are complex, with mental health improving but happiness declining, self-rated welfare rising if viewed retrospectively but static if viewed experimentally, self-rated social respect rising retrospectively but falling experimentally and subjective income adequacy rising. We further show that these changes would not be predicted from cross-sectional regressions on the correlates of subjective well-being in either Tonga or New Zealand. More broadly, our results highlight the difficulties of measuring changes in subjective well-being when reference frames change, as likely occurs with migration.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7351f831c4412b7b288bc98ccee05b5f543c1f96

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In General Health Professions

In Health

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The French Unhappiness Puzzle: The Cultural Dimension of Happiness (2014, background): “…a small literature on migration and happiness, showing unanimously (and unsurprisingly) that immigrants are less happy than natives, controlling for a series of observable characteristics and circumstances (see Stillman et al. 2012, Bartram 2011, Safi 2010, Baltatescu 2007, or De Jong et al. 2002).”
Bringing Happiness Into the Study of Migration and Its Consequences: What, Why, and How? (2018, background): “Migrants may experience a dip in happiness in the years before migrating followed by a temporary peak shortly after migration (Stillman et al., 2015).”