Emigration
The Best and Brighest?

With the prospect of greater internal migration within an enlarged European Community, labour migration promises to become a topical policy issue once again. In Discussion Paper No. 52, Research Fellow Cormac O Grada uses Irish survey data to examine issues which arise in discussions of migration.

Those who believe in the economic benefits of immigration often stress the drive and industry of the migrants. Such benefits, they argue, may be important enough to outweigh any short-run pressures that immigration might have on the labour market. Opponents of emigration make the same argument in reverse. The argument that the millions who left Ireland over the last two centuries were in some sense "different' or "better' than those who stayed is almost as old as the migration itself. The initiative of the emigrants and their frustration with prospects in Ireland might easily be taken as an indication of their ambition, willingness to take risks, or even their intelligence - qualities allegedly in poor supply among the labour force at home. "Better' can hardly have meant skills and wealth, however; Irish emigrants have almost always been predominantly poor and unskilled.

An examination of the determinants of emigration and of the characteristics of emigrants could shed light on the extent to which qualities such as ambition are lost because of emigration. Yet this analysis is not straightforward, as O Grada notes. The principle of comparative advantage might suggest that those with talent and ambition should emigrate. Yet this assumes that the decision to migrate is purely an individual matter. Parental choice or family obligation may enter into the decision, and parents may attempt to keep their more talented children at home. Parents may wish to equalize the incomes of their children and may fear that the more able children who have emigrated may not assist the less able who remain. If instead risk avoidance is the family's main concern, the propensity of the more able children to emigrate would depend on the relative earning power of the able and less able children and its variance at home and abroad.

Previous studies of the determinants of Irish emigration have focussed on aggregate flows, wage differentials, and the availability of information to emigrants. Microdata have received less attention, even in official studies. O Grada analyzes a survey of 271 young people, living in a "typical rural community' in County Cavan in 1965, when most of the respondents were still at school. The survey provides detailed information on family background, economic status, and attitudinal detail. In addition, a follow-up survey records those who emigrated between 1965 and 1968. O Grada's analysis suggests that while those who emigrated were relatively better educated than their neighbours, kinship variables such as parental attitudes and emigrant sponsors are also important.

Discussions of emigration also focus on the age distribution of the emigrants. The notion that Ireland lost by exporting "instant adults' to foreign labour markets is an old one. O Grada examines post-war Irish emigration in order to assess the extent of these losses. He notes that these "life-cycle losses' from migration must be weighed against receipts from emigrant tourism and remittances. His estimates suggest that these items appreciably reduce the "life cycle losses' from emigration.


On Two Aspects of Post-War Irish Emigration
Cormac O'Grada

Discussion Paper No. 52, February 1985 (HR)