Adult Children's Homeleaving in Mexico in the Context of Siblings' International Migration

Paula Fomby, Johns Hopkins University

Using nonmigrant children in Mexico as the unit of analysis, the objective of this paper is to determine whether U.S. migration by one's siblings mediates one's own characteristics, like marital status and employment status to predict departure from the parental household. We hypothesize that these traditional predictors of home-leaving will be weakened where one has migrant kin if nonmigrant children are expected to remain in the parental household to compensate for the absence of siblings. We test this hypothesis using household roster data and retrospective data on migration from the Mexican Migration Project. The research adds to the literature on homeleaving by attempting to establish causality between siblings' migration and some forms of homeleaving, and by introducing measures of other individuals' behavior to explain individual decisions.