Boujija Y., Bignami S., Delaunay Valérie, Sandberg J. (2022). Who matters most ? Migrant networks, tie strength, and first rural-urban migration to Dakar. Demography, 59 (5), 1683-1711. ISSN 0070-3370.
Titre du document
Who matters most ? Migrant networks, tie strength, and first rural-urban migration to Dakar
Social networks' influence on migration has long been explored largely through the lenses of cumulative cau sation and social cap ital the ory. This arti cle aims to reconceptualize ele ments of these the o ries for the case of rural-urban migration and test their util ity in explaining first-migration timing. We use a uniquely exten sive social network survey linked to pro spectively col lected migration data in rural Senegal. We decompose migrant networks into return migrants, current migrants, and non mi grant res i dents of the des tination to capture hetero gene ity in migration-rel evant social cap ital. As expected, the number of non mi grant alters living in the cap i tal, Dakar, has an out-sized asso ci ation with the migration haz ard, the number of current migrants from the vil lage liv ing in Dakar has a smaller asso ci ation, and the number of return migrants has little asso ci ation. Drawing on social cap ital the ory, we test the influ ence of (1) subjec-tively assessed tie strength between the ego and their network alters and (2) struc turally weak ties mea sured through sec ond-order ("friend of a friend") connections. Weak and strong subjective ties to current migrants and non mi grant Dakar res i dents are pos itively asso ci ated with the first-migration haz ard. Structurally weak ties to current migrants are too, but only for individu als with no direct ties to current migrants.
