Abstract
Mexico and the United States both face rapid population aging as well as older populations with high poverty rates. Among the most vulnerable populations of retirement age in either nation are Mexican immigrants to the United States. This work uses data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study and the Mexican Health and Aging Study to assess retirement decisions among persons born in Mexico and working in either nation as well as such decisions by non-Hispanic Whites in the United States. Social security system incentives matter for the retirement of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. but not for return-migrants in Mexico.
Highlights
Mexico and the United States both face rapid population aging as well as older populations with high poverty rates
We found that the social security systems were an important determinant for retirement for Mexican-born immigrants in the United States, but that they mattered little for return-migrants in Mexico
The findings of Sevak and Schmidt (2014), who used the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to document differences in social security benefits between foreign-born and native-born, match ours. They found that the foreign-born who had been in the United States for longer periods of time had similar or higher monthly benefits than the native born, while foreign-born persons who arrived in the United States closer to retirement age had fewer quarters of social security covered earnings and lower monthly benefits
Summary
Mexico and the United States both face rapid population aging as well as older populations with high poverty rates. This work uses data from the U.S Health and Retirement Study and the Mexican Health and Aging Study to assess retirement decisions among persons born in Mexico and working in either nation as well as such decisions by non-Hispanic Whites in the United States. Among older adults in the United States, poverty rates are especially high for racial minorities – for instance, 17.7% for Hispanics compared to 6.6% for non-Hispanic whites (Flores and Radford, 2017). Since 1970, the Hispanic median income has lagged behind that of non-Hispanic whites at low, middle, and high-income levels (Kochhar and Cilluffo, 2018) This growing gap may be due to a larger proportion of Hispanics working in low-paid jobs with fewer benefits, often because of their lower levels of educational attainment (Tali et al, 2018).
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