Occupational and Geographic Choices of Working Mexican-American Immigrants

Abstract

The economic and social significance of Mexico-US labor migration is difficult to overstate, and its truly unique circumstances – the physical contiguity of the world’s largest economy and the massive and mobile labor force of a substantially less developed country chief among them – provide compelling motivation for analysis of the issue. The implications of millions of foreign-born workers entering the US economy are both enormous and nebulous. This paper examines the geographic and occupational destinations of Mexican immigrants using a multinomial logit model of migrant choice. Our analysis of EMIF Norte Border Survey data empirically confirms several key anecdotal observations: that this particular immigrant population is highly reliant on informal social networks to mitigate occupational downgrading upon entry to the US market, that those networks also largely determine the geographic choices of immigrants, and that both sectoral and spatial dispersion over time have added to the list of traditional immigrant “gateway” locations. These results are of particular relevance to the sustainability of rapid urban development in metropolitan fueled in part by migrant labor supply shocks. Efficient and sustainable outcomes for immigrant workers and the communities that receive them will depend on the responsiveness and foresight of local socioeconomic policy.