Move alone or together: The roles of household structure and characteristics in migration in Indonesia

The role of family in migration decision-making is presumed to be more pronounced in developing countries. By perceiving migration of one or more household members as a result of family strategy, some under-explored issues on migration in Indonesia are assessed in this study, namely: to what extent household structure and characteristics explain the likelihood of household members to migrate alone or together. Using the five waves of Indonesian Family Life Surveys, the results of multinomial regressions confirm that to some extent, households that send one member to migrate are different from households that send more than one member to migrate. Male-headed households are more likely to send more than one member to migrate than female-headed households. While marital status of the household heads, the presence of under-five children and school-aged children, counts for migrating alone, these variables do not significantly affect migration of more than one member. I speculate that some family-structure variables that may affect migrating alone may become less instrumental for migrating together because when some household members decide to move together, their household structure may become less relevant than for a person moving alone. Regarding the effect of household assets, house ownership negatively affects migrating alone or together. Land ownership, however, positively influence the likelihood of sending one member, but statistically insignificant for moving together. The land owned may be used for productive activity in the origin while one member is sent away to diversify sources of income. Lastly, because the forty percent poorest quintiles have higher chance to send their members to migrate alone than the rest of the households, while there is no difference across quintiles in the likelihood of migrating together, this finding may indicate that one-person migration can be considered as one of the risk-reduction strategy for family migration for poorer households