Surinam, a former Dutch colony, obtained political independence in 1975. The announcement of this major political reform and the resulting restriction on migration to the Netherlands created uncertainty about the future and fears about ethnic dominance which induced a mass migration. Many Surinamese families rushed to leave the country before losing their rights to Dutch citizenship, the so-called ‘beat-the-ban rush’
In this study we investigate the long-term economic integration of these migrants and their children and grandchildren. Moreover, we compare the outcomes of the migrants from the mass migration with the outcome of migrants from earlier years. We use administrative micro records over multiple generations.
We find that ‘beat-the-ban’ migrants, those arriving just before the ban, are negatively selected compared to economic migrants arriving before the announcement of the ban. Upon arrival beat-the-ban migrants had lesss schooling, were older, had larger families and more often came from rural areas. This difference in selection is reflected in the outcomes of the first generation; we find large outcome gaps between natives and beat-the-ban migrants even forty years after the mass migration, and smaller outcomes gaps for economic migrants. Remarkably, for the next generations we find a different pattern.
The outcomes of beat-the-ban migrants converge towards the outcomes of natives whereas the outcomes of economic migrants hardly converge towards natives. Unobserved factors of the first generation of beat-the-ban migrants might explain this pattern; their schooling upon arrival and their income probably does not reflect their full earnings potential. Migration policies based on characteristics upon arrival might miss the full potential of migrants.
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