Parental mobility, temporality and migration aspirations among currently non-migrant youth in Indonesia and the Philippines

This paper draws on both quantitative and qualitative data to investigate whether young adults in Indonesia and the Philippines are more likely to aspire to migrate if their parents have been migrants during their childhood (N = 413 from Indonesia; N = 357 from the Philippines). We capture parents’ longitudinal mobility trajectories using sequence analysis and explore the inter-relationships of childhood temporalities, gender, intergenerational reciprocity, and migration aspirations through the narratives of five young adults (two from Indonesia and three from the Philippines). We find a strong association between fathers’ long-term migration and young adults’ migration aspirations, but gender differences only in Indonesia. The influence of lifetime experiences of parental migration on young adults’ current migration aspirations depends both on which parent migrates and the cumulative experiences of their migration. The young adults’ narratives shed further light on the gendered nature of migration aspirations and highlight both their fluidity and their embeddedness within wider mobility infrastructures. They also reveal the non-linearity of time as reflected in the interweaving of past/present/future within a nexus of experiences, emotions, dreams and circumstances that will shape the young people’s future life trajectories.