Subsequent Migration of Immigrants Within Australia, 1981–2016

Australia is a major immigration country and immigrants currently represent around 28% of the total population. The aim of this research is to understand the long-term consequences of this immigration and, particularly, how migrants respond to opportunities within the country after arriving through the process of subsequent (internal) migration. The focus is on major immigrant groups in Australia, including persons born in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, China and India, and how their patterns differ from persons born in Australia. To conduct this analysis, we have gathered data for a 35-year period based on quinquennial census data. We also obtained birthplace-specific mortality data for constructing multiregional life tables for the immigrant populations. Subsequent migration is important for understanding population redistribution, and the relative attractiveness of destinations within host countries. Our results highlight the importance of subsequent migration and the diversity of migration behaviours amongst different immigrant groups in the context of overall declines in internal migration since 1981.     

The Sources and Diversity of Immigrant Population Change in Australia, 1981–2011

Australia has one of the largest percentages of immigrant populations in the developed world with a highly regulated system of immigration control and regular censuses to track their changes over time. However, the ability to explain the population change through the demographic components of immigration, emigration, and death by age and sex is complicated because of differences in measurement and sources of information. In this article, we explore three methods for reconciling the demographic accounts from 1981 to 2011 for the Australia-born and 18 foreign-born population groups. We then describe how the immigrant populations have changed and what has contributed most to that change. We find that the sources of immigrant population change have varied considerably by age, sex, country of birth, and period of immigration. Immigrants from Europe are currently the oldest and slowest-growing populations, whereas those from elsewhere are growing rapidly and exhibit relatively young population age structures. Studying these patterns over time helps us to understand the nature of international migration and its long-term contributions to population change and composition.     

Ethnic disparities in social and economic well-being of the immigrant aged in Australia

The paper examines ethnic differences in the social and economic well-being of the immigrant aged in Australia and the factors affecting older immigrants’ well-being as measured by a number of indicators. The data analysis is guided by the concept of the ‘Third Age’ as the basis for a more positive approach to the discussion of ageing and as a life-cycle stage of independent living in old age, focusing on the pursuit of an active retirement and the absence of core activity restrictions. Data from the 2006 population census on living arrangements, need for assistance with daily activities, income, participation in paid work and volunteering, and provision of care to other family members are used to examine the social and economic well-being of the immigrant population aged 65 and over identified by their country or region of origin and in comparison with the Australian-born aged. Policy implications of the research findings are discussed.     

Immigration,below-replacement fertility,and long-term national population trends

The long-term demographic effects of immigration on a population experiencing below-replacement fertility are studied by assuming that the size and age composition of the immigrant population do not change over time. The size of the first-generation immigrant population becomes stationary within a time period not greater than the human life span. Thereafter, the number dying equals the number entering over any given time interval. The stationarity of the native population, among which deaths exceed births, is maintained by the compensating number of births to the immigrant population. The limiting age distribution of the country's population, although stationary, may not decline monotonically with age and may look like a camel's back, with one or two humps.     

The demography of disability and the effects of immigrant history: Older Asians in the United States

Using data from the 2000 U.S. census, we compare the older Asian population with U.S.-born, non-Hispanic whites with respect to three indicators of disability. Insofar as any Asian "advantage" in health vis-a-vis whites exists among the population aged 65 and over, our evidence suggests that it occurs primarily among the U.S.-born segments of this population. We also investigate how differences in disability levels among Asian immigrant groups are influenced by country of birth and by the combined effects of duration of residence in the United States and life cycle stage at entry. These results highlight the diversity of the older Asian population with respect to the ways in which immigration and origin history are linked to disability outcomes. We conclude that in later life, immigrant status confers few disability advantages among the Asian population in the United States.     

Factors Shaping Workplace Segregation Between Natives and Immigrants

Research on segregation of immigrant groups is increasingly turning its attention from residential areas toward other important places, such as the workplace, where immigrants can meet and interact with members of the native population. This article examines workplace segregation of immigrants. We use longitudinal, georeferenced Swedish population register data, which enables us to observe all immigrants in Sweden for the period 1990–2005 on an annual basis. We compare estimates from ordinary least squares with fixed-effects regressions to quantify the extent of immigrants’ self-selection into specific workplaces, neighborhoods, and partnerships, which may bias more naïve ordinary least squares results. In line with previous research, we find lower levels of workplace segregation than residential segregation. The main finding is that low levels of residential segregation reduce workplace segregation, even after we take into account intermarriage with natives as well as unobserved characteristics of immigrants’ such as willingness and ability to integrate into the host society. Being intermarried with a native reduces workplace segregation for immigrant men but not for immigrant women.     

‘Bringing the unclothed immigrant into the World’: Population policies and gender in twentieth-century Australia

This paper considers several policy responses to declining birth rates in Australia over the twentieth century, revealing key continuities in the ‘administration of population’. Early in the century pronatalist policies to enhance fertility predominated. In spite of evidence in the 1890s, 1920s and 1940s that economics shaped family sizes and that women’s lives included paid work, little acknowledgment of this occurred outside wartime. In the second half of the twentieth century, immigration largely replaced pronatalism as a desired means of building population numbers. Century’s end brought new concerns about fertility decline, an ageing population, immigration and increased asylum seeking. These concerns revitalized the call for a population policy and raised unresolved questions for women. This expression comes from Mr Ozanne, speaker in the Commonwealth House of Representatives debate on the Maternity Allowance Bill, 1912, Australia, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3412. He spoke of ‘women doing their duty to Australia by bringing the unclothed immigrant into the world’.     

An Australian map of British and Irish literacy in 1841

This contribution to the study of the literacy transition in Britain, Ireland, and Australia also touches on the relationship between literacy and international migration. Some 20,000 emigrants arrived in Australia in 1841 and their literacy is here established at the individual level, and then related to regional origins, occupations, religion, sex, and family status in the British Isles. The new Australian data offer unusual evidence to juxtapose with the prevailing account of British and Irish literacy. The paper makes systematic comparisons of the immigrant evidence with existing literacy findings for the populations of England and Wales, of Ireland, and the colonial population of Australia in the year 1841. The results also show extraordinary similarity of rank orderings between the Australian data and the conventional sources. The results show that the immigrants were consistently more literate than the home and the receiving populations and indicate a substantial link between migration and literacy.     

Institutional impediments to population policy in Australia

Despite being near the top of the OECD league in rate of population growth, Australia does not have any explicit population policy. The potential constituent parts of one, particularly on immigration, family and environment, are firmly enmeshed in separate political domains and responsive to separate clusters of interests. Vague, demographically ill-informed, and mutually inconsistent views of a desired population size or trajectory for Australia co-exist, with no arena for systematic engagement and considered debate among them. Australia is not alone in this respect: instructive parallels can be drawn from Canada and the United States. Indeed, population policy may well be one of the issues that modern liberal democracies find peculiarly difficult to deal with. However, there are also specific historical circumstances that led to this outcome, and that perpetuate it. Revised version of a paper presented at the Seventh National Conference of the Australian Population Association, held in Canberra in September 1994.     

Host-feeding and oviposition by parasitoids in relation to host stage: Consequences for parasitoid-host population dynamics

Summary Among parasitoids which host-feed destructively, there is a tendency for females to partition their feeding and oviposition behaviour in relation to different host stages, feeding preferentially or exclusively on earlier host stages and ovipositing preferentially or exclusively in (or on) later ones. We explored the dynamic implications of this behaviour for parasitoid-host population dynamics, using modifications of the age-structured simulation models of Kidd and Jervis (1989, 1991). Using the new versions of the models, we compared the situation where parasitoids practice host stage discrimination with respect to feeding and oviposition, with the situation where they do not. Additionally, we examined the effects of host stage discrimination on populations by (a) having generations either discrete or overlapping, (b) varying initial age structure, (c) having varying degrees of density dependence acting on host adult mortality, and (d) varying parasitoid develoment times in relation to the length of host development. With either discrete or overlapping generations of the host population, a reduction in the parasitoid development time had a destabilizing influence on the parasitoid-host population interaction. With discrete generations stage discrimination had no effect on the risk of extinction, irrespective of either the degree of density dependence acting on the host population, or the initial age structure of the host population. When parasitoid search was uncoupled from the insect's adult energy requirements, the interaction was always unstable. With continuous generations, stage discrimination affected stability at certain parasitoid development times, but not at others. The relative lengths of parasitoid and host development times also influenced the tendency of the host population to show discrete or overlapping generations.     

Empirical characteristics of legal and illegal immigrants in the USA

We combine the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contains information on US legal immigrants, with the American Community Survey (ACS), which contains information on legal and illegal immigrants to the USA. Using an econometric methodology proposed by Lancaster and Imbens (J Econ 71:145–160, 1996) we compute the probability for each observation in the ACS data to refer to an illegal immigrant, conditional on observed characteristics. These results are novel, since no other work has quantified the characteristics of illegal immigrants from a random sample representative of the population. Using these conditional probability weights on the ACS data, we are able to uncover some interesting facts on illegal immigrants. We find that, while illegal immigrants suffer a large wage penalty compared to legal immigrants at all education levels, the penalty decreases with education. We also find that the total fertility rate among illegal immigrant women is significantly higher than that among legal ones, in particular for middle and higher educated women. Looking at the sector of activity, we document that the sectors attracting most illegal immigrants are constructions and agriculture. We also generate empirical distributions for state of residence, country of origin, age, sex, and number of legal and illegal immigrants. Our forecasts for the aggregate distribution of legal and illegal characteristics match imputations by the Department of Homeland Security.     

Immigrants’ economic performance across Europe – does immigration policy matter?

Drawing on panel data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we compare the economic performance of immigrants to Great Britain, West Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Austria to that of the respective indigenous population. The unit of analysis is the individual in the household context. This allows us to define immigrants state of integration into the host society at the family level taking into account issues such as immigrant/native intermarriage. Economic performance is measured in terms of the country-specific pre-government income position and change in the relative income position due to redistribution processes within the respective tax and social security systems. Our work is based on the premise that countries may be categorized – similarly to existing categorizations based on the type of welfare regime – according to the nature of their immigration policy. From an economic point of view, a successful and integrative immigration policy should result – at least when controlling for background characteristics such as education – in a non-significant differential between the economic performance of immigrants and that of the indigenous population. At first glance, our results indicate that this ideal is not attained in all of the countries analysed, particularly not in Germany and Denmark, where the economic performance of immigrants is much lower than that of the indigenous population. However, results from GLS random-effects models show that immigrants to these countries improve their economic situation rapidly with increasing duration of stay in the host country. This implies that these countries also do fairly well in fostering in the economic integration of immigrants. Our empirical results further reveal that the substantial cross-country differences in the immigrant/native-born performance differential persist even when controlling in detail for socioeconomic characteristics of the household and for indicators of the state of the immigrants integration, such as years since migration and immigrant/native intermarriage. This suggests that not only the conditions of entry to a country impact on immigrants economic performance, but also country-specific institutional aspects such as restrictions on access to the labour market and parts of the social security system that are related to citizenship or immigrant status. There still is a great deal of heterogeneity across EU member states in this respect. This should be taken into account when working towards the harmonization of national EU immigration policies.This paper benefited substantially from discussions at the EEA 2003 Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and the EPUNet 2003 Conference in Colchester, UK. We also acknowledge very helpful comments resulting from the reviewing process     

Aging population scenarios: an Australian experience

During the past decade, there has been wide public discussion about the effects of population and immigration policies. There is some consensus that an older population imposes economic costs but uncontrolled population growth imposes congestion and environmental burdens. While many realize that policies which restrict population tend to exacerbate aging, the inevitable trade-off is not widely acknowledged. Fewer still appreciate that there is a sustainable age distribution that is largely imposed on us by nature that cannot be defeated in the long term. In this paper, we look at the ‘aging issue’ for Australia by looking at the total population and age distribution as a joint outcome. For ease of interpretation, the age distribution is converted into a required retirement age (RRA) to maintain dependency ratios at 2010 levels. We examine the effects of alternative policy scenarios on total population and RRAs, benchmarked against a hypothetical population in zero population growth equilibrium. We account for differing demographic groups of immigrants and emigrants as well as trends in mortality. Policy scenarios can be well summarized by plotting the trajectory of the two outcomes, total population and RRA, with the equilibrium values as axes.     

Gastarbeiter in West Germany and Switzerland: an assessment of host society-immigrant relations

West Germany and Switzerland have in general pursued similar immigration policies with respect to alien labor. In spite of a convergence in official policy and a change from temporary migration to settlement in both countries, immigrant groups in West Germany and Switzerland have displayed different attitudes and rates of integration within the host societies. Even when narrowing our discussion to one national group, the Italians, we find substantial differences persist. These cannot be attributed to the percentage of unskilled workers from Italy, intention to stay, the general social climate of the host societies, or even to political institutions such as trade unions. Rather, the higher integration and assimilation of Italians in Switzerland than in Germany appears to be related to structural and demographic factors. Unless policy-makers are aware of the importance of these factors, it is unlikely that they can adequately respond to the complexity and diversity of the problems generated by foreign workers.     

Change, continuity or cycles: The population turnaround in New South Wales

This study examines population flows from Sydney and other regions to perimetropolitan and coastal areas of New South Wales, the two main foci of the population turnaround since 1971. It uses census internal migration statistics for the five intercensal periods between 1971 and 1996, and estimated resident population statistics between 1997 and 2000. Fluctuating trends are described with respect to variations in age structures of migration flows and net migration gains by SLAs in coastal areas over time. Evidence of fluctuating trends is evaluated in relation to population structure change and local socio-economic multipliers in turnaround areas. The turnaround is far mor than a net migration gain from large metropolitan areas; it is also associated with interregional migration which avoids metropolitan areas, and which is at least in part environment- and amenity-related. The experience of some other countries, such as the USA where net migration reversals in population turn-around regions have occurred, has not been replicated in Australia. While elements of explanation for the complex cumulative causation process of the population turnaround in Australia are discussed, including the issues of fluctuating or cyclical trends, much more understanding of the economic and social factors involved is required.     

A decomposition of immigrant divorce rates in Australia

Crude divorce rates of overseas-born Australians by birthplace are not comparable because different birthplace groups have different age structures and marriage patterns that affect the rates. This paper decomposes the crude rates into components due to the effects of age structrue, marriage patterns and the divorce rate of married men and women. This allows for a better comparison of the level of divorce by birthplace. The range in the standardized divorce rates by birthplace is smaller than that indicated by the crude rates. Nonetheless, there remains considerable variation in immigrant divorce rates in Australia.     

Intermarriage patterns and social cohesion among first, second and later generation Australians

Studies of ethnic intermarriage in Australia have found that group size, residential segregation, and religious homogeneity, as well as social distance from the dominant (Anglo) cultural group, are important factors determining the likelihood of ethnic intermarriage. However, studies to date have predominantly focused on the first generation, and have less to say about interethnic marriages among members of the second and later generations. This paper analyses marriage patterns across immigrant generations, focusing on specific European ancestries: German, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Polish and Hungarian, contrasted with members of the dominant group. The results reveal strong effects of ancestry, immigrant generation, cross-generational preferences, and intergroup exchanges, as well as a few disjunctions reflecting discontinuities in the history of settlement among different immigrant groups. The results also show that social distance is important in determining the likelihood of intermarriage, as well as the cohesiveness of ethnic groups across generations.     

Consumption and population age structure

In this paper, the effects on aggregate consumption of changes in the age distribution of the population are analysed empirically. Economic theories predict that age influences individuals’ saving and consumption behaviour. Despite this, age structure effects are rarely controlled for in empirical consumption functions. Our findings suggest that they should. By analysing Norwegian quarterly time series data, we find that changes in the age distribution of the population have significant and life-cycle-consistent effects on aggregate consumption. Furthermore, controlling for age structure effects stabilises the other parameters of the consumption function and reveals significant real interest rate effects.      

Intergenerational transfers in US county-level CO2 emissions, 2007

Research has shown that increases in carbon emissions and resulting climate change are not driven by population size alone, but also associated with industrialization, urbanization, and economic development. Further, industrialization and development may, in part, be driven by changing demographic structure, and in particular the process of population aging. Fluctuations in age composition shape aggregate production and consumption. Viewed through this lens, the carbon dioxide emissions of an analytical unit (county, province, state, nation) can be considered a product of its age composition. This analysis tests several demographic theories of age-specific production and consumption on US county-level carbon dioxide emissions. Using a modified STIRPAT framework, econometric estimates identify a positive correlation between county-level labor force participation and total carbon dioxide emissions. These effects are a result of general economic activity as opposed to growth only in energy intensive industrial sectors, a relationship that is widely hypothesized but under-developed in carbon emission estimates. In addition, results show larger households are associated with lower aggregate emissions, confirming the hypothesis that areas of declining household size will experience higher future emissions. In general, this research demonstrates the importance of adding nuance to emission estimates by integrating demographic dimensions beyond population size and growth.     

Immigrant mothers’ preferences for children’s sexes: A register-based study of fertility behaviour in Norway

Parental sex preferences have been documented in many native populations, but much less evidence is available on immigrants’ preferences for the sexes of their children. Using high-quality longitudinal register data from Norway, a country with a recent immigration history, we estimate hazards regression models of third birth risks by the sex composition of the first two children. A central question in the extant literature is whether the sex preferences of immigrant mothers match those observed in their country of origin, or if cultural adaption to local conditions is more important. Our analyses indicate that the sex preferences of immigrants generally match those previously documented for their native population, especially in the case of son preferences. The pattern of sex preferences is unmodified by the mother’s exposure to the host society. In sum, our evidence generally supports theories emphasizing cultural persistence in preferences, rather than theories of adaption or immigrant selectivity.