Onward Migration Analysis

Onward migration analysis studies what happens after a migrant's first move: rather than settling permanently or returning home, many migrants move again to a third country or region, a secondary or 'onward' move that conventional origin-to-destination analysis misses entirely. The analytical core is event-history modeling with competing risks. From the moment a migrant arrives at a first destination, several mutually exclusive futures compete — moving onward, returning to the origin, or remaining — and the method models the hazard of each as a function of time since arrival and of the migrant's characteristics and conditions. This framing draws on the step-wise migration tradition that David Conway clarified in 1980, in which migration unfolds as a sequence of moves rather than a single transition, and on the synthesis of migration theories by Massey and colleagues in 1993, which supplies the human-capital, network, and structural mechanisms that drive secondary movement. A central question is selectivity: onward movers are typically not a random subset of arrivals but are differentially selected on skills, legal status, and ties, so comparing the determinants of onward moves against those of return and staying reveals who keeps moving and why.