Does Information Improve the Experience of Pursuing Labor Migration? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Pakistan

A large literature on international labor migration explores how to improve low-skilled migrants’ experience of pursuing and obtaining overseas employment. Much of this scholarship focuses on describing and mitigating difficult, and sometimes exploitative, conditions in the host country. Scholars have paid less attention to factors in home countries that may affect aspiring migrants’ experience of looking for overseas work. We help address this gap by conducting a field experiment in the high out-migration country of Pakistan to examine whether receiving new information about employment brokers and overseas opportunities improves aspiring migrants’ subjective and objective experience of the job-seeking process. After analyzing the effects of information on those who lack alternative sources of information, we report mixed findings. These highlight the need to think carefully about ways to improve aspiring migrants’ job-seeking experiences, especially with regard to the common assumption that if low-skilled migrants simply “knew more” — that is, had more relevant and accurate information — they would not allow themselves to have negative migration experiences; our findings suggest this is not necessarily always the case.