A large literature on international labor migration explores how to improve low-skilled migrants’ experience of pursuing and obtaining overseas employment. Much of this scholarship focuses on describing and mitigating difficult, and sometimes exploitative, conditions in the host country. Scholars have paid less attention to factors in home countries that may affect aspiring migrants’ experience of looking for overseas work. We help address this gap by conducting a field experiment in the high out-migration country of Pakistan to examine whether receiving new information about employment brokers and overseas opportunities improves aspiring migrants’ subjective and objective experience of the job-seeking process. After analyzing the effects of information on those who lack alternative sources of information, we report mixed findings. These highlight the need to think carefully about ways to improve aspiring migrants’ job-seeking experiences, especially with regard to the common assumption that if low-skilled migrants simply “knew more” — that is, had more relevant and accurate information — they would not allow themselves to have negative migration experiences; our findings suggest this is not necessarily always the case.

中文翻译：

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信息是否改善了劳务移民的体验？来自巴基斯坦实地实验的证据


有关国际劳工移民的大量文献探讨了如何改善低技能移民寻求和获得海外就业的经验。这些奖学金的大部分重点是描述和减轻东道国困难的、有时甚至是剥削性的条件。学者们较少关注母国可能影响有抱负的移民寻找海外工作经历的因素。我们通过在移民高发国家巴基斯坦进行实地实验来帮助解决这一差距，以检验接收有关就业经纪人和海外机会的新信息是否可以改善有抱负的移民在求职过程中的主观和客观体验。在分析了信息对缺乏其他信息来源的人的影响后，我们报告了不同的结果。这些突出表明，有必要仔细思考如何改善有抱负的移民的求职经历，特别是考虑到一个普遍的假设，即如果低技能移民只是“了解更多”，即拥有更多相关和准确的信息，他们就会不允许自己有负面的移民经历；我们的研究结果表明情况并非总是如此。