Return migration by time spent in Sweden

Christian Skarman, Statistics Sweden

The purpose of the study is to determine if taking time since immigration into account would help making better projections of the emigration. The study includes all persons that immigrated to Sweden 1997 2009. For this population event history analyzes has been used in models containing the fixed variables sex, age at immigration, country of birth and reason for residence permit and the time varying variables citizenship, employment status and parenthood. The results show that the relationship between re-emigration and time in Sweden is strong among persons born in countries with a high development level and is nearly non-existent for persons born in countries with a low level of development. The results also show that the propensity to re-emigrate is much higher among work migrants than among refugees and it is more common to re-emigrate if one is male, younger, childless, unemployed and if that person does not have Swedish citizenship.