PAA Preview

April 5, 2013


Heather Randell’s PAA paper examines drivers of urban out-migration among young adults in the cities of Altamira and Santarém in the Brazilian Amazon, using an event history model to investigate how social capital, human capital, and socioeconomic deprivation contribute to this process. Randell and co-author Leah VanWey find that in Altamira, migration tends to be an individual-level opportunistic strategy fostered by family networks, while in Santarém migration tends to be a household-level strategy driven by socioeconomic deprivation, suggesting that urban out-migration is a diverse process distinguished both by geographic and historic socioeconomic differences.

In her paper “The Redistribution and Socioeconomic Mobility of Immigrants in America’s Interior,” Erica Mullen uses panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to address gaps in the literature that fail to account for secondary migration of immigrants to the US who moved between metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mullen examines whether, in their moves from so-called “traditional” destinations to new cities in the US,  these migrants are better or worse off in terms of income compared to (1) before they migrated, (2) non-migrant immigrants, and (3) native migrants.
