This dissertation covers three important topics in international migration:why people migrate, why some people return home after initially migrating, and what happens in the labor market to those who stay.I utilize new, unique microdata on roughly 250,000 Indian indentured servants sent around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under forward contracts for the first two chapters.In the third chapter, I rely on administrative data from West Germany/Germany from the 1970s to early 2000s.Uncertainty about economic conditions, not merely average wage differentials between markets, affects migration. Ex ante forward, guaranteed migration contracts—used by millions of workers—can reduce uncertainty for migrants.In the first chapter, I combine aspects of the two and ask, how does origin-market uncertainty affect out-migration under forward contracts?.Indian indentureship offers a clean identification strategy to isolate the importance of sending-market uncertainty.The migration decision is consistent with migrating to escape price volatility, my main measure of uncertainty. I find compositional differences by social network:different castes respond differently to economic conditions.The effects of prices and wages on landowning castes are the reverse of those on non-landowning castes. Finally, volatility exerts a persistent negative effect by lowering return migration.The second chapter further develops the research on return migration. I ask, how much are upper-caste individuals willing to pay for upper-caste status?Traditional discrimination models view discrimination from the vantage point of a group that receives worse treatment due to its non-economic characteristics vis-a-vis a reference group.Discriminated groups pay a cost in the labor market for these characteristics.However, the corollary may be true:a privileged group may pay a fee in order to receive better, rather than equal, treatment.In the case of caste, I hypothesize that high-caste Indians abroad are willing to pay more to return to India and reap the labor and non-labor benefits of high-caste status.To test this, I use return migration of Indian indentured servants in Fiji.This context removes confounding labor-market factors and cleanly identifies the gross value of upper castes.I show that the lower bound of the value of the highest castes in north India roughly 2.5 years;; gross wages. The effects are entirely driven by men, as women;;s caste status appears delinked from return migration.My results show some of the first evidence quantifying a caste;;s value and speak to caste;;s persistence today.In the third chapter I switch to contemporary West Germany/German to study labor market differences after migration for natives and immigrants.Using a representative panel data set of workers, I find that differentials do exist between German workers and foreign workers.Human capital accounts for many of the differences, with both differential levels and returns for each group.First, natives are more skilled than foreigners.Second, at low levels of education and skill, foreigners earn roughly 4% more than natives; however, this reverses to foreigners earning 3% less at high levels of education and skill.German and foreign workers also exhibit different wage-growth trends over their work cycles, with foreign workers earning on a flatter trajectory.Return migration exacerbates these trends.Using an alternative administrative data set and comparing, I conclude that return migration increases the wage differential over time due to positive selection of return migrants.
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