Jan Saarela’s research while affiliated with Åbo Akademi University and other places

Background Children of immigrants often have excess mortality rates, in contrast to the low mortality typically exhibited by their parents’ generation. However, prior research has studied children of immigrants who were selected into migration, thereby rendering it difficult to isolate the intergenerational impact of migration on adult mortality. Methods We use semi-parametric survival analysis to carry out a total population cohort study estimating all-cause and cause-specific mortality among all adult men and women from age 17 among all men and women born in 1953-1972 and resident in Finland in 1970-2020. We compare children of forced migrants from ceded Karelia—an area of Finland that was ceded to Russia during the Second World War—with the children of parents born in present-day Finland. Results Children with two parents who were forced migrants have higher mortality than children with two parents born in Northern, Southern and Western Finland, but similar or lower mortality than the subpopulation of children whose parents were born in the more comparable areas of Eastern Finland. For women and men, a mortality advantage is largest for external causes and persists after controlling for socio-economic factors. Conclusions Our findings suggest that forced migration can have a beneficial impact on the mortality of later generations, at least in the case where forced migrants are able to move to contextually similar locations that offer opportunities for rapid integration and social mobility. The findings also highlight the importance of making appropriate comparisons when evaluating the impact of forced migration.

It is well known that migrant fertility is associated with age at migration, but little is known about this relationship for forced migrants. We study an example of displacement in which the entire population of Finnish Karelia was forced to move elsewhere in Finland in the 1940s. This displacement was unique because of its size and scale, because we have data on almost the whole population of both men and women who moved, and because of the similarity between origin and destination. These aspects enable us to investigate the disruptive impact of forced migration, net of other factors such as adaptation and selection. For all ages at migration from one to 20, female forced migrants had lower levels of completed fertility than similar women born in present-day Finland, which suggests a permanent impact of migration. However, women born in the same year as the initial forced migration showed no difference, which may indicate the presence of a counterbalancing fertility-increasing effect, as observed elsewhere for people born during a humanitarian crisis. There is less evidence of an impact for men, which suggests a gendered impact of forced migration-and its timing-on fertility. Results are similar after controlling for social and spatial mobility, indicating that there may be no major trade-off between reproduction and these forms of mobility.