Are LGB Migrants Better off than LGB Stayers?

Fernanda Fortes de Lena , Centre d'Estudis Demografics (CED)
Diederik Boertien, Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED)

This paper investigates whether LGB people receive higher returns from migration than heterosexual people in terms of educational attainment, income, and mental health. LGB individuals are more likely to migrate, but few quantitative studies have estimated whether migration provides higher returns to LGB people. Some studies have shown that the choice of university for gay men is not only motivated by educational reasons. Other studies have shown that migrating to a different city can be a way to distance themselves from non-accepting family and friends for many LGB individuals. This suggests that socioeconomic motivations, central to much research on migration, might not be sufficient to explain migration behavior among LGB people. We use Next Steps data from the UK with information on migration between ages 15 and 25, as well as information on sexual identity (N = 6701, out which 324 LGB people). We find that LGB migrants are higher educated and have more income than LGB non-migrants. However, these returns are also observed, or even appear larger, for heterosexual people. We observe that the mental health of LGB migrants is substantially higher than the mental health of LGB non-migrants, whereas there is no difference in mental health at all between heterosexual migrants and non-migrants. These results underline the importance of non-socioeconomic factors for understanding the migration experiences of LGB people.

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 Presented in Session P3. Migration, Economics, Policies, History