ABSTRACT
Emigration is a choice. Personal characteristics such as age, gender, family status, occupation, and education affect that choice. Across these characteristics, emigrants are seldom a random draw out of the populations from which they came, nor are they representative of the populations into which they enter. Emigration is not only a transfer of raw labor, but a transfer of wealth—human-capital investments in occupational skills and education—from one country to another. Knowing the characteristics of the emigrants is important to assessing the impact this transfer had on the economies of the sending and the receiving countries. 1
