Mexican Emigration Research Articles

The Effect of Mexican Emigration to the US on Trade and Inward FDI in Mexico*

Using a panel data set of the 32 Mexican states and the 10 years from 2008 and 2017, this paper estimates the potential contribution of migration to international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). In the context of Mexico and the United States, we estimate models with a generalized propensity scores (GPS) methodology in order to account for the endogeneity of the migration decision, in addition to baseline gravity models. We find a generally positive and significant relationship between Mexico-US migration and Mexico-US imports, exports, and inward FDI from the US to Mexico. While mixed evidence is found across the various gravity estimations regarding the relationship between Mexico-US migration and inward FDI from the US to Mexico, the GPS results signal consistency across various estimations. Even when controlling for size of the state population, size of the state economy, distance from the capital city of each state to the Mexico-US border, and the fact that a state is on the Mexico-US border, basic results remain consistent. We conclude that in this context migration complements trade and inward FDI, and point to transnationalism as a central factor that leads to migration’s positive contribution.

Sports, public spaces, and immigrant communities. Basketball tournaments among Mexican immigrants in California

This paper examines the role of sports practice in the re-articulation process of immigrant communities in their places of destination. I will use the case of basketball tournaments held by immigrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, in the context of the Los Angeles metropolitan region. This Mexican emigration has settled mainly in southern California, in the United States. While the eventual creation of their immigrant communities is explained by the insertion of immigrants in specific labor niches through their social networks, mainly based on sharing the same hometowns of origin, the role of socio-cultural elements such as sports practice and the formation of immigrant public spaces are also significant factors that make possible this process. The examination of these sports practices reveals its centrality in the conformation of these public spaces and with it the development of identification processes that enables the consolidation of immigrant communities.

El voto desde el norte

Using original survey data, we analyze the factors contributing to participation and preferences in the 2018 Mexican election among the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Our empirical analysis of public-opinion data reveals that exposure to Mexican mass media is a significant predictor of voting from abroad among immigrants and US-born Mexicans. Diaspora voters’ feelings of efficacy, their assessments of Mexican democracy, and structural factors yield mixed effects on the vote from abroad and candidate preferences. The study’s design also allows for comparison of the transnational electoral preferences of Mexican emigrants and US-born dual nationals.

Climate Migration at the Height and End of the Great Mexican Emigration Era.

Previous research has linked increasing climate-change-related variability to Mexico-US migration, but only under particular climatic/social conditions and periods of high irregular migration. Using the 2000 and 2010 Mexican censuses, we examine this environment-migration nexus across a broader set of socioecological contexts and during periods of both increasing (1995-1999) and declining (2005-2009) migration. Consistent with the notion that climate can "trap" populations in place, we find that frequent/severe bouts of hot or dry conditions are associated with lower US-bound migration from most of rural Mexico. However, we do find higher climate outmigration during episodes hot and dry climate, or out of places with lower vulnerability. Our comparisons across periods suggest that climate migration is affected by conditions in the U.S. in a similar or slightly weaker manner as other forms of migration are. Altogether, our findings suggest that rural Mexico is unlikely to push large numbers of international "climate refugees" and that climate migration is indeed sensitive to conditions in sending and destination areas.

Neither Here nor There, I Do Not Vote and I Do Not Care: The External Electoral Participation of Mexican Migrants in New Zealand

In 2006, an estimated 4.2 million Mexican emigrants were entitled to vote in presidential elections in Mexico, making this country the highest potential recipient of external votes around the world. Despite this fact, during the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections, less than 1 % of that estimated population actually casted their external votes raising questions about how previous patterns of political behavior can transcend borders and accompany migrants to their new countries. In this work, I argue that Mexican migrants’ interaction with an established democracy such as New Zealand is not a fundamental reason to encourage political participation through external voting. Through a qualitative lens, the paper attempts to analyze sentiments, attitudes, and behaviors of Mexican migrants toward the political arena and their effect in preventing or encouraging formal participation in Mexican elections. I conclude that cultural patterns of electoral behavior that originated in Mexico play a decisive role in the way Mexicans relate to their native country, regardless of the intensity of political integration to New Zealand democracy.

The Education-Occupation Mismatch of International and Internal Migrants in Mexico, 2005-2012.

Recent studies have found international migrants from developing countries such as Mexico to be negatively selected by education; that is, they are less educated than those who stay behind. Moving beyond the question of whether migrants are negatively selected by education overall, I examine how migrants are selected compared with others in similar jobs. Using data from a nationally representative panel survey of Mexican households, I find that men who migrate abroad have significantly higher levels of education than nonmigrants in the same occupation. Because men who are overeducated for their occupation tend to receive lower wages than those employed in occupations commensurate with their education, and are also more dissatisfied with their jobs, overeducation may encourage men to emigrate. Results from the regression models, which account for differential selectivity into employment, indicate that internal migrants within Mexico also have higher educational levels than nonmigrants in the same occupation prior to migrating but comparable levels of education afterward. Migrating internally, therefore, appears to allow men to improve their occupational placement. Finally, I examine changes in migrants' education over time and find evidence that the education-occupation mismatch has increased among Mexican emigrants in the years following the 2008 U.S. recession.

The politics of cross-border engagement: Mexican emigrants and the Mexican state

Reacting to migrants’ many, ongoing involvements with their home communities, sending states have increasingly adopted policies designed to resolve the problems of citizens living abroad and to respond to expatriates’ search for engagement, doing so in ways that best meet home state leaders’ goals. This article seeks to understand the factors shaping this interaction between sending states and emigrants abroad by studying two contrasting aspects of the Mexican experience—expatriate voting, a relatively new development, and provision of the matrícula consular, a long-standing component of traditional consular services, though one that has recently been transformed. Focusing on the complex set of interactions linking migrants, sending states, and receiving states, the article identifies the key differences and similarities between these two policies. Both policies suffered from a capacity deficit inherent in sending state efforts to connect with nationals living in a territory that the home country cannot control; both also generated conflict over membership and rights. Nonetheless, Mexico’s efforts to resolve the immigrants’ identification problems in the receiving society proved useful to millions; by contrast, a tiny proportion of emigrants took advantage of the first opportunity to vote from abroad. These diverging experiences demonstrate that sending states can exercise influence when intervening on the receiving society side, where the embeddedness of the immigrant population provides a source of leverage. By contrast, the search to re-engage the emigrants back home encounters greater difficulties and yields poorer results, as the emigrants’ extra-territorial status impedes the effort to sustain the connection to the people and places left behind. In the end, the article shows that extension to the territory of another state yields far more constraints than those found on home soil as well as unpredictable reactions from receiving states and their peoples, not to speak of nationals who no longer perceive the migrants as full members of the society they left.

The Bounded Polity: The Limits to Mexican Emigrant Political Participation

International migration yields pervasive cross-border social engagements, yet homeland political involvements are modest to minimal. This contrast reflects the ways in which the distinctive characteristics of expatriate political life impede participation in the polity that emigrants have left behind. As polities are bounded, moving to the territory of a different state yields political detachment: diminishing awareness of home country political matters and weakened ties to the home state's electoral institutions. To assess this argument, we use a representative survey of the Mexican-born population in the United States to analyze two critical conditions for participation in expatriate elections: emigrants' ability to demonstrate eligibility to vote and their knowledge about voting procedures. We find clear signs of detachment. Most Mexican emigrants are not in a position to participate in homeland politics. Social ties, while pervasive, are associated with more knowledge only for the very small segment of the most engaged.

Understanding different migrant selection patterns in rural and urban Mexico

The productive characteristics of migrating individuals, emigrant selection, affect welfare. The empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data. This paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues: the ENET (Mexican Labor Survey), which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non-migrants. This dataset presents a relevant dichotomy: it shows negative selection for urban Mexican emigrants to the United States for the period 2000–2004 together with positive selection in Mexican emigration out of rural Mexico to the United States in the same period. Three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested. Whereas higher skill prices in Mexico than in the US are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban Mexico, its combination with network effects and wealth constraints fully accounts for positive selection in rural Mexico.

Cristero Diaspora: Mexican Immigrants, The U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico's Cristero War, 1926-29

The author examines the connections between Mexico's Cristero War, a bloody church-state conflict that raged across west-central Mexico from 1926 to 1929, and the great wave of Mexican emigration to the United States that occurred during the same period. Although historians have generally treated the Cristero War and Mexican emigration as two distinct and unrelated subjects, a rich array of archival evidence from both sides of the border demonstrates that thousands of Mexican immigrants during the late 1920s supported the Cristero cause from the United States. By elucidating the geographical and political interconnections between the Cristero War and Mexican emigration and exploring the instrumental role played by the U.S. Catholic Church in placing religious exiles from Mexico within immigrant communities, the author demonstrates the development of a diaspora of Mexican Cristero supporters across cities and regions in the United States.

Mexican labour market performance and emigration

During the last three decades, the Mexican economy has not generated enough jobs for the expanding labour force. Unemployment rate in Mexico is low, but almost one third of the labour force works in the informal sector. Migration flows from Mexico to the US have been significant in the last decade. Even though the number of Mexicans in the US has remained stable, Mexican immigration to the US dropped from 2006 to 2009. Emigration is a key employment channel for the enlarged working-age Mexican population. A reduced migratory flow may pose a major challenge for the Mexican labour market.

Development and the Urban and Rural Geography of Mexican Emigration to the United States

Past research on international migration from Mexico to the United States uses geographically-limited data and analyzes emigrant-sending communities in isolation. Theories supported by this research may not explain urban emigration, and this research does not consider connections between rural and urban Mexico. In this study we use national data from Mexico to investigate rural and urban emigration. We find that a central motivation for emigration – self-insurance through labor market diversification – is most relevant to less rural, non-metropolitan places. Paradoxically, while Mexican cities have the lowest rates of emigration, the rural places that are spatially proximate to cities have the highest rates. These findings suggest that while urban development retains emigrants within city borders, it may generate emigration out of neighboring rural places.

New Evidence on Emigrant Selection

This paper examines the extent to which Mexican emigrants to the United States are negatively selected. Previous studies have been limited by the lack of nationally representative longitudinal data. This one uses a newly available household survey, that identifies emigrants before they leave. On average, U.S.-bound Mexican emigrants from 2000 to 2004 earn lower wages and have less (more for females) schooling than nonmigrant Mexicans, evidence of negative selection. This argues against Chiquiar and Hanson's (2005) findings. The discrepancy is primarily due to an undercount of unskilled migrants in U.S. sources and secondarily to the omission of unobservables in their methodology.

Migra!: a history of the U.S. Border Patrol

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Map of the U.S.-Mexico Border Region Introduction Part One: Formation 1. Early Years of the U.S. Border Patrol 2. A Sanctuary of Violence: U.S. Border Patrol in the Greater Texas-Mexico Borderlands 3. California-Arizona Borderlands 4. Mexico's Labor Emigrants, America's Illegal Immigrants: Rise of Mexican Emigration Control Part Two: Transformation 5. A New Beginning: World War II and the U.S. Border Patrol 6. Corridors of Migration Control 7. Uprising: A Farmers' Rebellion Part Three: Operation Wetback and Beyond 8. Triumphs of {apos}54 9. The Day of the Wetback Is Over: Migration Control and Crime Control in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Index

A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration

The field of migration studies is dominated by examinations into how immigrant-receiving countries grapple with social problems ranging from border control to immigrant incorporation. David Fitzgerald challenges this tendency and offers what is, to date, one of the most comprehensive looks into the politics and administration of emigration.A Nation of Emigrants is about the consequences and opportunities that mass labor emigration poses to emigrant-sending nations and how such nations attempt to limit the negative consequences and leverage the opportunities of emigration. Focusing on Arandas, a small rural county in Jalisco, Mexico, the book tells the story of how state, civic, and religious institutions within Arandas and greater Mexico attempted to maintain ties with migrants from Arandas living in the United States. Fitzgerald uses this locale to examine the evolution of local experiences with absent community members, the national tensions between administering a territory and managing citizens, and the international dimensions of labor migration. The three primary content chapters are organized according to systems of emigration control and management. Chapter 2 examines federal efforts to manage mass labor migration to the United States. Chapter 3 focuses on how the Catholic Church adjusted to the rise of mass migration to a Protestant nation. Chapter 4 discusses how hometown associations emerged to encourage and coordinate emigrant investment in municipal projects within Mexico. Each of the chapters follows a similar historical arc by examining how institutions opposed to mass labor emigration during the early twentieth century had, by the early 1990s, actively embraced Mexican nationals living in the United States. Municipal governments, parish churches, and the federal government all balanced courting emigrant workers’ earnings with anxieties regarding the reincorporation of emigrant citizens. Each of these chapters serves as evidence for Fitzgerald’s primary intellectual objective, which is to critique theories regarding the erosion of nation-states and the rise of transnational subjects. “The Westphalian system of sovereign states is not in decline,” argues Fitzgerald. “In fact, it is so robust even when confronted by mass international migration that it has shaped a new social contract between emigrants and their home country that I call citizenship a la carte” (p. 154).Fitzgerald’s concept of “citizenship a la carte” suggests that Mexico — a nation of emigrants — has adjusted to the rise of mass emigration by extending to citizens abroad opportunities for ongoing economic, cultural, social, and even political engagement with Mexico. Citizens abroad, in other words, may leave Mexican territory but remain Mexican subjects. Yet, argues Fitzgerald, citizenship a la carte limits how governments can exercise authority over citizens outside the national territory and the ways in which emigrant citizens can pick and choose benefits of citizenship without obligations. In particular, explains Fitzgerald, states lose the option of coercive force when citizens exit the national territory, and emigrants participate from afar in Mexican politics, culture, and society but are exempt from living according to conditions that they help to create. A Nation of Emigrants raises important questions regarding the reach of national authority, the substance of citizenship, and the everyday physical realities of life in an era of mass migration.The book sharply outlines its theoretical framework and will prove useful in graduate courses on state power, transnationalism, and citizenship. Fitzgerald’s historical approach promises a provocative analysis of changes that have taken place in Arandas since economist Paul Schuster Taylor conducted interviews there for his 1933 book A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community: Arandas in Jalisco, Mexico, but it provides merely a general tour that lacks empirical and analytical substance. For example, archival resources are not always contextualized, and Fitzgerald tends to deploy single primary sources without considering contradictions and contingencies. Further, he misses opportunities for deeper analysis. For example, Fitzgerald provides new information on the Catholic Church and its role in managing Mexican emigration, but he discusses religion, families, and migration without attention to the gendered dimensions of work, mobility, and authority, and without any significant analysis of how the rising number of female migrants might have impacted the Mexican state’s assumption of a more protectionist stance toward its citizens abroad during the 1990s. Still, with these quibbles aside, A Nation of Emigrants raises critical new questions that will lead migration scholars to more thoughtfully consider the emigration story that unfolds alongside immigration history.

The Great Mexican Emigration

Abstract In this paper, we examine net emigration from Mexico over the period 1960 to 2000. The data are consistent with labor supply shocks having made a substantial contribution to Mexican emigration, accounting for two-fifths of Mexican labor flows to the United States over the last two decades of the twentieth century. Net emigration rates by Mexican state birth year cohort display a strong positive correlation with the initial size of the Mexican cohort relative to the corresponding U.S. cohort. In states with long histories of emigration, the effects of cohort size on emigration are relatively strong, consistent with the existence of preexisting networks.

Detour through the Sonora-Arizona Desert: New routes of Mexican emigration to the United States

During the 1980s the Tijuana-San Diego border region was the most common place for unauthorized border crossings into the United Status. Since 1993, when the US government increased its control and surveillance of its border with Mexico, the migration flow of unauthorized workers has been progressively and increasingly diverted to the Sonora-Arizona desert. The purpose of this paper is to document the new routes of Mexican emigration to the United States, and emphasize the consequences for emigrants, specifically in terms of their increased vulnerability.

Inside the Sending State: The Politics of Mexican Emigration Control

The social science of international migration has generally ignored labor emigration control policies. In the critical case of Mexico, however, the central government consistently tried to control the volume, duration, skills, and geographic origin of emigrants from 1900 to the early 1970s. A neopluralist approach to policy development and implementation shows that the failure of emigration control and the current abandonment of serious emigration restrictions are explained by a combination of external constraints, imposed by a highly asymmetrical interdependence with the United States, and internal constraints, imposed by actors within the balkanized Mexican state who recurrently undermined federal emigration policy through contradictory local practices.

Emigration and Wages in Source Countries: Evidence from Mexico

This paper empirically examines the effect on wages in Mexico of Mexican emigration to the United States, using data from the Mexican and United States censuses from 1970-2000. The main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on Mexican wages. There is also evidence for increasing wage inequality in Mexico due to emigration. Simple welfare calculations based on a labor demand-supply framework suggest that the aggregate welfare loss to Mexico due to emigration is small. However, there is a significant distributional impact between labor and other factors.

Emigration and Wages in Source Countries: Evidence From Mexico

This paper empirically examines the effect on wages in Mexico of Mexican emigration to the United States, using data from the Mexican and United States censuses from 1970-2000. The main result in the paper is that emigration has a strong and positive effect on Mexican wages. There is also evidence for increasing wage inequality in Mexico due to emigration. Simple welfare calculations based on a labor demand-supply framework suggest that the aggregate welfare loss to Mexico due to emigration is small. However, there is a significant distributional impact between labor and other factors.