Migration to Sweden and union dissolution

Kirk A. Scott, Lund University

Migration is a stressful life event that is likely to be negatively related to subsequent marital stability. This holds for international migration in particular, and crude divorce statistics often reveal elevated levels of union disruption for immigrants in developed countries. However, while the relationship between migration and other vital events like fertility and mortality have been studied in great depth, there is still a lack of accurate longitudinal analyses of the divorce dynamics of international migrants. The present study improves this situation by investigating the divorce risks of migrants to Sweden subsequent to immigration. The study involves those that were married at migration and those that married subsequent to arrival. We test various hypotheses of disruption, adaptation and selection to explain the elevated divorce risks. Our study is based on population register data on the resident population of Sweden and we cover the most common immigrant groups in Sweden.