Variation in Educational Compositions of Immigration Flows by Development

Ziyue Huang, Shanghai University
Xu Shuqiang, Asian Demographic Research Institute, Shanghai University
Guy J. Abel, University Of Hong Kong

Empirical evidence on the structure of immigration flows by education level is fundamental to monitoring the impact of human capital mobility. Most prior research on human capital and immigration uses migrant stock measures that fail to capture the timing of migration events and simplify education into a binary variable (college-educated or not, often summarized as high-skilled or low-skilled), as flow data by education level are not typically available. We explore detailed education-specific immigration flow estimates derived from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International (IPUMSI) repository. In total, we identify 1,945,762 individual international migrant records in 80 countries and 220 censuses that we aggregate to estimate country-level education proportions of immigration flows. Multinomial multilevel regression analyses are used to summarize the relationship of the educational shares of immigration flows with the HDI (Human Development Index) and components of HDI (including standard of living, health and education) in the receiving countries. We find that as development increases, a higher proportion of immigrants have completed secondary or university educations and lower proportions of immigrants with less than primary education. The rise in the share of educated migrants, as development levels in the receiving countries increase, occurs faster for female than male flows.

Keywords: International Migration, Human Capital, Education, and Work

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