The psychic costs of migration: evidence from Irish return migrants

Within the economics literature, the 'psychic costs' of migration have been incorporated into theoretical models since Sjaastad (J Polit Econ 70:80 93, 1962). However, the existence of such costs has rarely been investigated in empirical papers. In this paper, we look at the psychic costs of migration by using alcohol problems as an indicator. Rather than comparing immigrants and natives, we look at the native-born in a single country and compare those who have lived away for a period of their lives and those who have not. We use data from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing which is a large, nationally representative sample of older Irish adults. We find that men who lived away are more likely to have suffered from alcohol problems than men who stayed. For women, we again see a higher incidence of alcohol problems for short-term migrants. However, long-term female migrants are less likely to have suffered from alcohol problems. For these women, it seems that migration provided psychic benefits, and this is consistent with findings fro

Early-life Causes and Later-life Consequences of Migration: Evidence from Older Irish Adults

Between 2009 and 2011, fieldwork was undertaken for the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Extensive information was collected on about 8,500 individuals aged 50 and over and living in Ireland, covering topics such as economic circumstances and health. One of the features of Ireland’s older population is the remarkably high proportion of returned migrants, that is, former emigrants who have returned to live in Ireland. This is reflected in the TILDA sample with over 20 % being returned migrants. Given the large number of returned migrants in the TILDA sample and the fact that the respondents are older, it has been possible to use the data to provide insights into different dimensions of migration at different points in the life-cycle. This paper provides a review of this work to date. Three issues are addressed. First, what circumstances contributed to the decision to emigrate? Second, was there evidence that living away produced psychological stress? Third, do return migrants suffer from social isolation on their return? The data suggest that the return migrants were more likely to have suffered abuse as children, to have been more prone to alcohol problems and to be more socially isolated currently