A THREE-DIMENSIONAL LIFE TABLE APPROACH TO IMMIGRANTS' SOJOURNS ABROAD

摘要

: This article develops a three-dimensional life table as a spatio-demographic tool to estimate the cumulative years spent abroad for an age-heterogeneous immigrant cohort as well as conditional life-abroad expectancies. The three-dimensional life table accounts simultaneously for the two attrition processes terminating immigrants' life-abroad, namely the spatial process of return migration and the demographic process of mortality, using age-dependent mortality and duration-age dependent return migration probabilities for age-heterogeneous immigrant cohorts. The three-dimensional life table forms the basis for a series of simulations to derive the cumulative years spent abroad for an age-heterogeneous immigrant cohort as well as conditional life-abroad expectancies under a variety of scenarios, ranging from no return migration to strong return migration characteristic of the early phase of an immigration system.