Social Capital and International Migration from Latin America

Douglas S. Massey,María Aysa-Lastra

doi:10.1155/2011/834145

Abstract

We combine data from the Latin American Migration Project and the Mexican Migration Project to estimate models predicting the likelihood of taking of first and later trips to the United States from five nations: Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Peru. The models test specific hypotheses about the effects of social capital on international migration and how these effects vary with respect to contextual factors. Our findings confirm the ubiquity of migrant networks and the universality of social capital effects throughout Latin America. They also reveal how the sizes of these effects are not uniform across settings. Social capital operates more powerfully on first as opposed to later trips and interacts with the cost of migration. In addition, effects are somewhat different when considering individual social capital (measuring strong ties) and community social capital (measuring weak ties). On first trips, the effect of strong ties in promoting migration increases with distance whereas the effect of weak ties decreases with distance. On later trips, the direction of effects for both individual and community social capital is negative for long distances but positive for short distances.

Highlights

Research over the past two decades has established the centrality of social networks to the process of international migration
Studies based on data from the Mexican Migration Project have established a variety of findings: that having a social tie to a current or former U.S migrant dramatically increases the odds of emigration [6,7,8], that the size of this effect varies with the strength of the tie and the closeness of the relationship [9], that network effects differ by gender [10,11,12,13], that the power of network ties to promote migration is a real causal effect and not spurious or attributable to unmeasured heterogeneity [14, 15] and that networks and the social capital they produce are fundamental to the cumulative causation of migration [16, 17]
We combined data from the Latin American Migration Project and the Mexican Migration Project to study the effects of different forms of capital on processes of international migration to the United States from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Peru

Summary

Introduction

Research over the past two decades has established the centrality of social networks to the process of international migration. Studies based on data from the Mexican Migration Project have established a variety of findings: that having a social tie to a current or former U.S migrant dramatically increases the odds of emigration [6,7,8], that the size of this effect varies with the strength of the tie and the closeness of the relationship [9], that network effects differ by gender [10,11,12,13], that the power of network ties to promote migration is a real causal effect and not spurious or attributable to unmeasured heterogeneity [14, 15] and that networks and the social capital they produce are fundamental to the cumulative causation of migration [16, 17]. We seek to understand intercountry differences in the relative importance of various measures of human and social capital in predicting international migration and to assess how effects differ with respect to the costs of migration

Social Capital and Migration

Other Forms of Capital

Source of Data

Access to Forms of Capital Across Latin America

Key Control Variables

Other Control Variables

Social Capital and First Migration

10. Interactive Models of Social Capital and First Migration

11. The Process of Repeat Migration

Findings

12. Conclusions