Abstract
As with most significant decisions people make, migration is generally an attempt to improve one’s quality of life. In conventional terms, one might expect that such an attempt would normally succeed, particularly when migrants are moving to countries where quality of life is generally higher (in part because those countries are wealthier). But it is not obvious that migration has a generally positive effect on migrants’ happiness. In general, gaining a higher income does not lead to greater happiness, and so migration motivated by hope for economic gain might prove disappointing. When migrants move to wealthier countries they sometimes experience deterioration in comparative economic status, perhaps with unfortunate implications for their happiness. This chapter reviews the research assessing this proposition and briefly considers studies investigating happiness for people migrating in other (i.e., non-economic) modes. A consideration of policy implications argues that research on happiness and migration does not reinforce the case for a more restrictive approach to immigrant admissions policies.
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Notes
- 1.
Some people might wish to extend the point to include the well-being of other species.
- 2.
There is a ‘Facebook Gross National Happiness’ indicator; some might be reassured by the fact that it does not correlate with more conventional measures of happiness (Wang et al. 2014).
- 3.
Another way of posing questions about migration and happiness studies focuses on the effect of migration on average happiness in destination countries; Polgreen and Simpson (2011) find that net migration raises happiness for relatively unhappy countries but lowers it for relatively happy countries.
- 4.
See Kenny (2005) for a discussion of how to think about what that threshold might be.
- 5.
This finding comes in contrast to the results of research approaching the question in a different way. An analysis of survey data on Latin America shows that people expressing an intention to migrate are less happy than those lacking such an intention: their situations are objectively favourable but they are nonetheless dissatisfied (Graham and Markowitz 2011, who call them ‘frustrated achievers’).
- 6.
One can also find ‘lifestyle migration’, particularly of citizens of affluent countries seeking what they consider a better way of life; an example is British expatriates living in France and Spain (Benson and O’Reilly 2009).
- 7.
One might at least insist on transcending the ‘negative freedom’ embraced by libertarians and address also the ‘positive freedom’ that requires capabilities and institutional solutions sometimes facilitated by the state.
- 8.
Many countries both send and receive migrants; the point is to situate the research in the origin, prior to migration.
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Bartram, D. (2015). Migration and Quality of Life in the Global Context. In: Glatzer, W., Camfield, L., Møller, V., Rojas, M. (eds) Global Handbook of Quality of Life. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9178-6_21
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