Academic interest in migration and its effects has been increasing over recent decades. Throughout the twentieth century, European powers came face to face with cultures often only known through colonial interrelations between countries. The increase in migration in the twentieth century resulted in many studies focusing on multiple effects within the country that served as the country of destination for those migrating. Migrants were motived by several factors, including political and economic. In the case of the latter, what happens in the country that migrants leave behind? Eroğlu's Poverty and International Migration examines poverty as both a reason for and outcome of international migration. She does this by comparing three generations of “settler” migrants, all with Turkish ethnicity. In this comparison, migrants spanning multiple destinations were connected with their returnee and stayer counterparts living in the country of origin (Turkey). This approach is unlike that taken by most studies in the literature on migration, which focus on migrants and settlers in the country of residence (European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden).
Poverty and International Migration is the first study to investigate the extent of group and generational differences. In doing so, it draws on sources of monetary poverty and is based on an adaptation of the resource-based model. The resource-based model is adapted by means of three major innovations. First, by taking a multi-site approach, this study allows the settler and the return migrants to be compared with their stayer counterparts in the country of origin. This approach provides rare insights into the economic benefits and disbenefits of international migration. Secondly, using a nested survey design, the author was able to follow family members of migrants and stayers until the fourth generation. This led to an unparalleled intergenerational perspective that allowed the author to explore generational trends in migrant poverty, as well as its direct transmission from parents to their own children, across three generations. And finally, unlike most quantitative studies on migration, Eroğlu's book takes a theory-driven approach to understand the root causes of poverty among migrants. It does so by using theory-driven frameworks developed in her earlier work,Footnote 1 while aiming to deepen our understanding of international migration contexts and to inform the statistical models that one might use in similar research. Eroğlu utilizes the definition on poverty from the Eurostat (2010) threshold, which is set at sixty per cent of the equivalent median income of the country of residence.
Eroğlu's book comprises six chapters and constitutes a unique contribution to both the academic and public debate and to the literature on international migration. The first chapter serves to introduce the book. The second chapter provides an overview of previous findings concerning the incidence, persistence, and sources of migrant poverty. Eroğlu positions her research within the wider historiography on the relationship between poverty and international migration. Chapter Three explains the methodological approach to and the definition and measurement of migrant poverty. Chapter Four outlines the key features of the research population and the sample used, and the research design and methods used by the 2000 Families Survey. Chapter Five presents the results from descriptive and probit analyses of the survey data and provides a narrative to these. Finally, Chapter Six concludes with a discussion of their implications for theory, research, and policy, and offers some remarks on the research limitations and the scope for further research.
As Chapter Four shows, this study is centred on four questions. First, do the settlers and returnees differ significantly from the stayers in the extent to which they experience monetary poverty? Second, are subsequent generations more or less likely than their male ancestors to be monetarily impoverished, and were there significant generational differences between the three groups? Third, are adult children with poor parents significantly more likely to experience monetary poverty than those with non-poor parents, and to what extent do adult children from the three groups differ in the extent to which they escape parental monetary poverty? And fourth, what do any of the observed differences between groups and across generations tell us about the poverty consequences of international migration?
These research questions and the inclusion of important theoretical approaches resulted in four hypotheses. First, the risk of exposure to poverty is expected to be highest for settlers and the lowest for returnees. Second, the settlers residing in countries with more generous welfare states are unlikely to fare better than their counterparts living under less generous welfare regimes. Third, the settlers from subsequent generations are unlikely to fare any better than the first-generation stayer and returnee counterparts. Fourth, intergenerational transmission of poverty is likely to remain strong among all groups, except for the returnees.
As mentioned above, this study draws on the 2000 Families Survey and a two-stage screening in 2010 and 2011. Several techniques were used to generate the database, such as face-to-face interviews and phone interviews.
The 2000 Families Survey charted Turkish family genealogies of male ancestors who moved during guest-worker years and their counterparts who remained in the country of origin, up to the fourth generation. This means there were two samples: a Turkish one and a European one. Five regions in Turkey were used for this study: Acipayam; Akçaabat; Emirdağ; Kulu; and Şarkışla. These were the regions that, according to the Survey, were among the areas that witnessed the highest level of outmigration. Eight EU countries were included as countries of residence, including Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden. This study provides a complete genealogy of the male ancestor lineages of 1,992 families. It is important to note that the family tree model used did not include female ancestor lineages. The result generates basic demographic information for 49,000 families, among whom a survey was conducted using a well-informed family member.
The overall response rate for the Turkish sample was sixty-one per cent, with a total of 5,980 personal interviews with members of three generations nested in 1,770 families across the five regions mentioned above. The non-response rate for the Turkish sample was six to eight per cent. The European sample had a non-response rate of eighteen per cent, resulting in a total of 515 interviews.
Data from these samples and interviews resulted in multi-layered evidence from the multi-site approach on the basis of which hypotheses one and two were confirmed, and hypotheses three and four were partially supported. Overall, this study shows little improvement in the poverty status of settlers across generations. This is due to the retirement of the first generation taking place under highly unfavourable conditions. Comparing the poverty levels of second- and third-generation settlers with those of their counterparts in Turkey, this study shows that poverty among settlers in Europe remained well above that of their non-migrant counterparts. Second- and third-generation settlers in Europe continued to suffer from a certain mismatch between their educational, occupational, and income status. The return migrants seemed to be the only group to succeed in breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. From the second generation onwards, the economic capital of settler migrants delivered greater returns, resulting in significant cash-generating capacity. And the institutional elements that settlers acquired by becoming a citizen of the country of residence appear to have offered some protection against the risk of monetary poverty.
Eroğlu's work deepens existing studies on poverty. Through her application of the resource-based model, Eroğlu provides a comprehensive perspective on the important causal paths between the processes of migration and that of migrant poverty. Using this model, she outlines a wide range of micro- and macro-level factors that future studies can take along in research on what might affect the poverty outcomes of international migrants and their descendants.
Besides being of interest to those scholars active in migration studies, these insights might be valuable for social and labour historians. Eroğlu's work demonstrates how international migration can both have an effect on contemporary social phenomena and lead to an in-depth understanding of historical events through a societal understanding of current issues. Her work and the multi-layered effects of international migration it points to could therefore also be valuable to international policymakers.
