Expanding Opportunity Structures: Parental Investments in Education, Migration, and Extrinsic Risk Reduction among Indo-Fijians

Parental investment strategies are contingent on parental capacities and ecology. Parental embodied capital may be important in aspiration construction and investments in children’s human capital, which is especially important in urban environments where skills are directly tied to wage income. For Indo-Fijians, rural ecology strongly limits opportunities. Here this limitation is conceptualized as extrinsic risk and immune to reduction through enhanced parental investment. Urban migration is interpreted as a risk reduction strategy, given an expanded urban opportunity structure (lower extrinsic risk). Qualitative and quantitative data from 678 Indo-Fijian children suggest that, contingent on parental capacities, parents migrate in response to their perceptions of decreased opportunities that manifest as high levels of extrinsic risk in rural environments. Parental investment in quality and quantity corresponds to parental perceptions of extrinsic risk, which in turn correspond to migration status, indicating that parental strategies do respond to perceived limits on investment payoffs. Because resources invested in one aspect of growth, development, or reproduction cannot also be invested in another, trade-offs occur over the life course. Life history (LH) theory provides a framework for examining between-species and withinspecies patterns of resource allocation trade-offs (Ellis et al. 2009). Fundamental LH trade-offs are growth versus maintenance, current versus future reproduction, and offspring quality versus quantity (Borgerhoff Mulder 1992; Chisholm 1999; Stearns 1992). Of particular interest to the present analysis is the quality-quantity trade-off, which describes the allocation of resources across a number of offspring. A quality­ based strategy occurs when resource allocation is intensified across a few relatively “high-quality” offspring. A quantity-based strategy results from spreading resources more thinly across a relatively high quantity of offspring (Stearns 1992). Variation in LH strategies occurs because of environmental variation and individual condition. Thus, parental investment strategies (e.g., quality versus quantity) are contingent on the LH of parents themselves, including their lifetime accumulation of skill, experience, and somatic resources, as well as current and past ecological conditions (Becker 1981; Kaplan et al. 2002; Low et al. 2008). Owing to phenotypic plasticity, individual LH strategies are expected to respond to ecologically specific opportunities and risks (Ellis et al. 2009), given individual condition (Kaplan et al. 2002). All else being equal, environments that are marked by high levels of extrinsic risk, which is risk of mortality or morbidity that is immune to reduction from increased parental effort, favor a quantity-based LH strategy, whereas lower levels of extrinsic risk tend to favor a quality-based LH strategy (Ellis et al. 2009; Quinlan 2006, 2007; Pennington and Harpending 1988). Opportunities and Urbanization Urbanization is proceeding rapidly in many developing countries as part of a larger process of development and involves the shift of rural residents to urban cities. In 2008, for the first time in human history, the urban proportion of the world’s population exceeded the rural. This urban increase is fueled mainly by rural to urban internal migration and is ongoing. Rural population growth will become negative by 2025, and the world urban population will double by 2050 (increasing from 3.3 billion in 2007 to 6.4 billion in 2050), with most urban increase occurring in less developed regions (United Nations 2008). Internal migrations in developing countries occur because of limits on rural land resources (VanWey 2005) and because cities seem to offer better options for employment, education, health care, public services, and entertainment (Moore et al. 2003). Rural to urban migration in developing countries is part of larger process of development and “intimately linked” to reduced land access (VanWey 2005:142). The transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy involves movement of labor out of the agricultural sector, which generally involves movement of individuals to urban areas in pursuit of wage-earning employment. Individual migrations may be motivated by potential for urban employment or by the loss or threat of loss of rural land resources. Rural land resource availability may be impacted by population growth outpacing available arable land, the fragmentation of familial landholdings, environmental degradation, or eviction (VanWey 2005). In Fiji, however, loss of rural agricultural land generally occurs when an Indo-Fijian farming family is evicted from leased farmland (Reddy and Naidu 2001). Increasing rates of eviction and land tenure uncertainty continue to fuel internal migration among Indo-Fijians. Migration is selective, and not all rural inhabitants migrate (Curran 2002; Kanbur and Rapoport 2005; Liang and Chen 2007; Lukic and Nikitovic 2004; VanWey 2005). Potential migrants are a heterogeneous group who respond differentially to migration incentives, and their responses may be contingent on migrant capacities since the shift from a rural to an urban ecology entails changes in patterns of employment, education, and child productivity (Neill 2007). Migration selectivity has been conceptualized as contingent on a set of environmental considerations at places of both origin and destination that serve as “push-pull factors” potentially impacted by human capital and a migrant’s ability to succeed in the urban destination (Curran 2002:94). Though urban migrants lack human capital relative to the destination community, they tend to have much higher levels of human capital than members of the origin community who remain behind (Kanbur and Rapoport 2005). Thus, the decision to migrate is determined by the costs and benefits involved in relocation (Pekkala 2003), which itself may be mediated by parental embodied capital. Research has shown that education is positively associated with urban migration (Pekkala 2003) and that “human capital generates higher returns in urban than rural areas” (Huang et al. 2002:626). Urban returns to human capital are recognized through greater work opportunities for the college educated (Costa and Kahn 2000). In turn, the urban environment further enhances some people’s human capital by providing opportunities for workers to acquire even more skills (Becker 1962; Glaeser and Mare 2001). Alternatively, because human-capital-based firms are attracted to the growing body of human capital in urban areas, rural localities generally experience difficulty in maintaining educated workers (Sander 2006). Although the urban area is associated with greater educational attainment and an expanded range of opportunities, the rate of human capital acquisition is not uniform. In addition to high rates of educational attainment, urban areas also show high rates of school dropout (Sander 2006). It is estimated that between one-quarter and one-half of urban residents in the developing world now live in poverty (Redman and Jones 2005). One reason for this might be the marginalization of under-skilled urban residents and migrants.