During World War II, France conscripted tens of thousands of young men from Senegal and other West African colonies, deploying many to Europe. Using novel survey data from Senegal and a complementary survey among West Africans in Germany, supplemented by Afrobarometer data, I study whether exposure to ancestral military service abroad continues to affect migration intentions, plans, and behaviour today. Singling out involuntarily enlisted conscripts and exploiting exogenous variation in local recruitment intensity based on the geocoded birthplaces of Senegalese soldiers who died in World War II, I show that descendants of conscripted soldiers exhibit signicantly higher emigration aspirations, plans, and behaviour. Intergenerational transfer entails grandfathers returning to their communities and grandchildren being old enough to have interacted with them. Moreover, recruitment does not appear to affect aspirations through (human) capital advantages, but through networks and civic engagement. The results highlight that colonial military recruitment|an early, large-scale episode of enforced transcontinental migration|left a durable imprint on contemporary migration patterns.
