International Migration Institute

Tom Kleinepier presents his paper 'Life paths of migrants', co-authored by Helga de Valk and Ruben van Gaalen in Parallel session I(C) of the conference Examining Migration Dynamics: Networks and Beyond, 24-26 Sept 2013 Polish migration to the Netherlands has increased substantially over the past decade and is one of the main origins of migrants settling in the country nowadays. Nevertheless, still little is known on how migration affects the lives of these migrants in the family domain and what decisions are made by these migrants. In this study, we use register data from Statistics Netherlands to examine to what extent migration affects the timing (“when”) and sequencing (“in what order”) of family-life transitions. The majority of studies on family-life transitions of migrants exclusively focus on one transition only, which is unfortunate as different events in the life course are not separate experiences but are linked to one another. Therefore, we apply a more holistic approach by using sequence analysis