A three-dimensional life table approach to immigrants' sojourns abroad

This article develops a three-dimensional life table as a spatio-demographi c tool to estimate the cumulative years spent abroad for an age-heterogeneo us immigrant cohort as well as conditional life-abroad expectancies. The th ree-dimensional life table accounts simultaneously for the two attrition pr ocesses terminating immigrants' life-abroad, namely the spatial process of return migration and the demographic process of mortality, using age-depend ent mortality and duration-age dependent return migration probabilities for age-heterogeneous immigrant cohorts. The three-dimensional life table form s the basis for a series of simulations to derive the cumulative years spen t abroad for an age-heterogeneous immigrant cohort as well as conditional l ife-abroad expectancies under a variety of scenarios, ranging from no retur n migration to strong return migration characteristic of the early phase of an immigration system.