Adult Child Migration and the Health of Elderly Parents Left Behind in Mexico.

Research on international migration often focuses on the outcomes for emigrants at their destination, thereby overlooking the consequences for the family members of migrants remaining in the home country. In source countries with rapidly aging populations such as Mexico, a critical public policy concern is how the elderly dependents of US migrants fare while their children are away. This paper begins an examination of that topic by investigating the relationship between children’s migration status and parental health outcomes. Conventional wisdom suggests that family members of migrants should benefit from international migration due to the large flows of remittances from the United States to Mexico. Nonetheless, little is known about the fraction of these remittances going to elderly parents, particularly when migrants are old enough to have established separate households. In addition, elderly parents may require physical support in the form of hours of care from their children which may be disrupted when one child migrates and for which there may be no close substitutes. Finally, elderly parents may suffer emotionally when their children are absent, particularly when children lack the documents to legally cross the US-Mexico border. The relationship between children’s migration and the health of elderly dependents left behind is thus theoretically uncertain and has been a growing area of research. John Giles and Ren Mu (2004) examine the question of how elderly health affects children’s migration choices in China. Randall S. Kuhn, Bethany Everett, and Adult Child Migration and the Health of Elderly Parents Left Behind in Mexico