Community Well-being and Mexican Interstate Migration in the United States

Abstract

In this chapter we model the interstate migration flows of Mexicans in the United States in the period of 2011–2015. Our theoretical rationale and modeling are mainly grounded in sociological human ecology. Our research fills two important voids in the demographic literature analyzing migration streams. First, virtually all prior analyses of U.S. interstate migration streams have focused on the migration flows of all persons, that is, without regard to their race or ethnicity or other characteristics. Our research here analyzes the migration flows of Mexicans. According to data from the annual American Community Surveys of 2011 through 2015, there were an estimated nearly 440,000 Mexicans living in one of the 49 contiguous U.S. states and the District of Columbia who had migrated to that state from another U.S. state or the District 1 year earlier. In our chapter we describe the interstate migration flows of these Mexicans, and we model the variation in their flows with a basic gravity model and with a human ecological model.