Mass involuntary migration and educational attainment

Forcible displacement of children disrupts their social capital, and education is of primary importance regarding their integration into the host communities. Millions of individuals found themselves on the “wrong side” of the border when British India was Partitioned purely along religious lines in 1947, leading to mass-scale violence and migration. These migrants received very little state support because the host states were severely resource-constrained, but they were treated as citizens of the newly formed states. In this paper, I combine survey data with digitized archives of historical census data to study the effect of this large-scale permanent displacement event on the human capital attainment of forcibly displaced children. I use a cohort-age based differences-in-differences approach to show that individuals of school-going age, who were born in India and migrated to Pakistan, have a higher likelihood of completing primary and secondary education than natives in the same birth cohorts. I show that migrants’ initial choices regarding location and occupation are two important potential mechanisms that point towards the existence of the “uprootedness hypothesis”. My findings provide important insights for the integration of migrants into the host communities and underscore the need to better understand the comparative efficacy of different methods used for supporting forcibly displaced communities.