This book is a systematic study (the first of its kind) of the impact of migration on Kerala s community and society. It looks at the number of emigrants and return emigrants and their impact on unemployment and self-employment; impact of remittances on household income and poverty, and the impact of migration on the elderly and women.

This IOM/UNFPA project on Emigration Dynamics in Developing Countries was initiated during the early 1990's.

Using INDEPTH's multi-site network to provide new demographic insights into population variables, this book provides a new perspective on migration, health and livelihood's interaction over time. The book starts with providing a conceptual and methodological framework to inform the epidemiological studies that are clustered into two themes, showing the dynamics of migration with either household livelihoods or individual health outcomes. The findings demonstrate the important cross-national regularities in human migration. The contributed chapters also exemplify the fact that the impacts of migration can be either positive or negative for sending and/or receiving communities, depending on the issues at hand and the type of migration under consideration.

As society changes, so do individual life courses. This book reports the influence of changes in the economic domain , the socio-cultural domain and government policy in the life courses of people living in the Netherlands. The data are derived from the statistics on internal migration for the period 1973-1989 and the Housing Demand Surveys conducted in 1981, 1985, and 1989. The study comprises analyses of short versus long distance migration, moves and their motives, moves to and from the larger cities, moves into home-ownership, and moves connected with leaving the parental home, cohabitation and marriage. These analyses make an important contribution to our understanding of migration dynamics. The superiority of an approach featuring individual life course experience in addition to period and age over traditional Age-Period-Cohort approaches is also demonstrated.

Contributed articles presented at the Indo-French Workshop on Indian Emigration held in Paris during 14-15 November 2006 moderated by the Research Unit on International Migration, Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, India.

1980-93, by John Foot

In recent years, the term ‘diaspora’ has been more frequently used to characterise peoples existing away from their homelands. Khachig To¨- lo¨lyan, editor of the journal Diaspora, asserts that ‘the term that once described Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile community, overseas community, [and] ethnic community’. Generally speaking, then, this mosaic of Indian identities abroad is presented as the mirror of India itself. India is diverse, and so too are its migrants. It is acknowledged that Indian migrants abroad tend to reproduce their own religions, family patterns, and cultures as much as possible. One is the prefix ‘Indian’. And the other is the term ‘dia-spora’. The implication of the first is that there is a single India with its people, who are somehow united under one flag. This is far from obvious. India has been described as a ‘nation and its fragments’ or an ‘invented nation.

Using INDEPTH's multi-site network to provide new demographic insights into population variables, this book provides a new perspective on migration, health and livelihood's interaction over time. The book starts with providing a conceptual and methodological framework to inform the epidemiological studies that are clustered into two themes, showing the dynamics of migration with either household livelihoods or individual health outcomes. The findings demonstrate the important cross-national regularities in human migration. The contributed chapters also exemplify the fact that the impacts of migration can be either positive or negative for sending and/or receiving communities, depending on the issues at hand and the type of migration under consideration.