Goodbye Norway: Top-Earners Selection Into Return and Onward Migration

Abstract We use high-quality panel data on the entire population of Norway to study first-generation immigrants who arrived for labor and out-migrate during our observation period (2000‒2020). We utilize rarely available official information about status-at-arrival and destination-upon-exit to disaggregate immigrants into returnees, onward migrants, and stayers, which enables us to investigate underlying selection mechanisms and offer a better understanding of the sorting of immigrants into different countries and new awareness of the self-selection of stayers. Our findings demonstrate significant selection for all characteristics, which are differentially associated with return and onward migration. Interestingly, women are more migratory than men, while the employed are less likely to out-migrate. Although both the low and high educated are more likely to return and migrate onward, the highest educated exhibit the greatest odds of out-migration. Immigrants with no and higher-than-average earnings are more likely to return and move onward, resulting in a U-shaped effect. It is remarkable that the top earners’ emigration is toward either destination, revealing notable differences across egalitarian income distributions. Nordic immigrants are the most likely to return, and other non-Europeans are the most likely to move onward. Our findings remain robust to several tests, however, they do not systematically conform to the predictions of labor migration theories.