Migration and marital unions: a two-way relationship

Reading the theoretical literature on international migration, an individual considering moving to a foreign destination was standing on a rock-solid basis, formed by his or her family. The family was involved in the decision and also in the financing of the lumpy investment into migration (e.g., Stark and Bloom, 1985). This, in turn, implied that an individual migration was matched by an implicit agreement between the migrant and the non-migrant family members that the income gains from this investment would have been shared through remittances (e.g., Poirine, 1997). The empirical literature has, then explored the implications of migration and remittances on the family members left behind (e.g., Gibson, McKenzie and Stillman, 2011; Clemens and Tiongson, 2017; Mobarak, Sharif and Shresta, 2023).

The research that we conducted was motivated by a simple question: to what extent international migration fits with this image? And, in case it does not, as migrants change their marital status after having moved abroad, which are the implications for our understanding of the determinants of migration and of its effects on the left behind?

What the data tell us

We analyze data from the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2017 to 2021, to analyze how often migrants originating from developing countries change their marital status after moving to the United States. 
The data reveal that nearly half of the migrants that were unmarried upon arrival in the United States get married in the following years. The (male) migrants that were already married mostly arrived to the United States while leaving their spouse behind (as documented also by McKenzie and Rapoport, 2010 for Mexican migrants). They then experience changes in their marital status or living arrangements in the few years after migration: either their spouse joins them, or they divorce. 

Once we focus on Mexico, drawing on the data from the 2020 population census, we are able to compare the spouses’ characteristics for migrants and stayers. The data reveal that Mexican men who migrate are married to women whose characteristics are both different from those of the spouses of the stayers, and also have a greater variability. This potentially suggests that potential migrants might have a hard time figuring out who they might end up marrying in the United States. 

Does migration change marriage plans?

In order to understand whether this is the case, we conducted an online survey experiment on a sample of around one thousand unmarried individuals aged 18 to 25 residing in Mexico. 

In the survey experiment, we asked respondents to describe the characteristics of their future spouses into two different scenarios: one in which they stayed in Mexico, and one in which they moved to the United States while being still unmarried. The respondents were significantly less confident in their ability to describe the characteristics (such as age, education, place of birth) of their future spouses in the migration rather than in the no-migration scenario. 

Furthermore, we also elicited their intentions concerning their own migration to the United States, varying (in a random way) the order in which we asked the questions on their future spouses, and on migration intentions. The respondents that we had primed to think about marriage were significantly less likely to declare that they intended to migrate to the United States in the future. Thus, the (greater) uncertainty about who you might end up marrying at destination discourages migration and can give rise to a status quo bias. 

Lessons from other migration studies

Our analysis, which draws on the data included in the replication package of Mobarak, Sharif and Shresta (2023), also reveals that studying the impact of male migration on the spouses left behind can be exposed to challenges related to marital unions intervening after migration. This arises because a substantial portion of the migrants in their sample actually gets married after their first temporary migration experience with a woman who stays behind. 

Our paper provides an example of the additional insights that emerge when we closely intertwine the literature on the economics of migration with the economics of the family. 

Article reference

Simone Bertoli, David McKenzie and Elie Murard, “Migration, spouses, and counterfactual spouses”, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2025. Replication files. 

Bibliographical references

• Clemens, Michael A., and Erwin R. Tiongson. "Split decisions: Household finance when a policy discontinuity allocates overseas work." Review of Economics and Statistics 99.3 (2017): 531-543.
• Gibson, John, David McKenzie, and Steven Stillman. "The impacts of international migration on remaining household members: omnibus results from a migration lottery program." Review of Economics and Statistics 93.4 (2011): 1297-1318.
• McKenzie, David, and Hillel Rapoport. "Self-selection patterns in Mexico-US migration: the role of migration networks." the Review of Economics and Statistics 92.4 (2010): 811-821.
• Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq, Iffath Sharif, and Maheshwor Shrestha. "Returns to international migration: Evidence from a Bangladesh-Malaysia visa lottery." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15.4 (2023): 353-388.
• Poirine, Bernard. "A theory of remittances as an implicit family loan arrangement." World Development 25.4 (1997): 589-611.
• Stark, Oded, and David E. Bloom. "The new economics of labor migration." The American Economic Review 75.2 (1985): 173-178.