This is just another way of managing the informal-formal sector issue. One marker of economic development is the improvement in financial infrastructures. If one can move money across international borders, then the ease with which one can be a new migrant and remain a connected member of the origin community and household rises. While there have been efforts to account for the value of international flows of remittances, there is little understanding of whether improvements in financial infrastructure help generate and support migration in the first place. Data coming from various field sites suggest that the conventional demographic profile of the rural-urban migrant may be shifting as well.
Migrants are still young.
While many are male and single, there seems to be an increasing fraction of migrants who are female and a larger pool of family migrants. The work on Mexican migration to the United States finds substantial fractions of females in the migratory flow, fractions that increase with time. Our own work in Ghana challenges the notion that migrants are detached from families in the destination. What we need to know more about is the timing of the movements of family members. It is probably the case that frontier or first-wave migration is predominantly young single males, but how exactly the stream is altered after that is not well known.