Try another municipality or leave the country? A disaggregated approach to determinants of internal migration and emigration for immigrants and natives in Norway

Abstract International and internal migrations are increasingly analysed together. We expand existing knowledge by comparing the mobility of natives, immigrants and native-born children of immigrants living in Norwegian municipalities of varying centrality. We propose a theoretical framework from which we derive predictions about international and internal moving behaviour of urban versus rural immigrants, natives, and native-born children of immigrants (‘second generation’). Further, we test these predictions using a trinomial logit model with random effects and a high-quality register panel dataset covering the full population in Norway for the period 2014–2020. In line with our predictions, we find that emigration propensities do not differ significantly between rural and urban immigrants, nor between rural and urban ‘second generation’. Natives, on the other hand, have considerably higher emigration propensities if they live in central municipalities. For internal migration, the patterns are different: immigrants and second-generation individuals who live in rural areas have clearly higher probabilities of moving to another municipality than their peers in more urban areas. Among natives, no such clear patterns are found. All three groups are generally less likely to move abroad than to another Norwegian municipality, but exceptions exist, for instance, for single immigrants in the Oslo area without a job.