Research Paper Proposal

International migration implicitly means people leaving behind family members. Depending on the context and legal framework, while some temporary workers need to migrate alone and are forced to return to their home country where relatives have remained, permanent immigrants may move along with others. Countries have different policies for those that want to reunite with family members that have migrated previously, as well as regulations for dependents to enter the labor market or have access to certain rights and services. It has been shown that family structure and household living arrangements are important factors for immigrant integration and for their children’s future.
For most of the twentieth century, most migrants to the United States from Mexico were temporary, moving for seasonal work and returning to the communities where the rest of the family had remained. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Mexican migration to the United States has taken on an increasingly permanent character as migrants obtained year-round jobs and were joined by other family members. A flow that was before mainly composed of males migrating alone has been changed to include an increasing number of women and children. In terms of living arrangements and family structures, it has been shown that recent Mexican immigrants in the US are more likely to live in extended family or non-kin households than nonimmigrant households in the US and Mexico.
In this paper I am interested in analyzing family structures and living arrangements of Mexicans in Canada, a recent destination, and comparing these to the patterns in the United States, the traditional destination. I would expect differences that can be attributed to Canadian immigration policy, the maturity of the flow and selection of immigrants. My main objective will be to describe first the phenomena and give possible explanation of how to disentangle the interaction of the sources of these differences. The specific research questions of this paper are: how do household and family structures of immigrants differ in the United States and Canada? How does immigration policy differ in terms of family reunification and migration of dependents? How are Mexicans living in Canada in terms of their family and household structures and how do these differences relate to age, gender, socio-economic status, human capital and time since arrival? The first two questions will be informed by a literature review while the third question will be answered using a statistical analysis of the complete confidential set of individual records of the Canadian 2001 and 2006 censuses. Due to time limitations, I will use secondary data and published results for the United States in order to focus on the analysis on Canada.