Between Origin and Destination: German Migrants and the Individual Consequences of Their Global Lives

During the twentieth century, international migration was mainly understood as immigration into economically highly developed welfare states. This has changed over the course of recent decades because these countries are meanwhile also understood as important sources of international mobility. Whereas international mobility experiences have potentially far-reaching consequences for social inequalities and life chances, migration studies have only little experience in analysing international migration from those economically highly developed welfare states. This introduction frames the chapters in this volume that contribute to fill this gap by examining the individual consequences of global lives not only as a question of migrants’ integration into receiving societies (destination). Rather, the consequences of international mobility are also studied by comparing migrants with the non-mobile population of the country of origin (origin) and as results of specific trajectories (migration) in individual life courses during the migration process (Destination-Origin-Migration Approach). The introduction also provides an overview of how this approach is utilised by the different chapters of the book, all based on the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS), which provides a comprehensive empirical basis for studying the consequences of international migration along four dimensions of the life course: employment and social mobility, partner and family, wellbeing and health, as well as friends and social integration.