Self-Selection Patterns in Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Role of Migration Networks

By David J. McKenzie, Hillel Rapoport. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2010

661 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. A simple theoretical framework shows the impact of networks on migration incentives at different education levels and how this affects the composition of migrant skills. Empirically, we find positive or education-neutral selection in communities with weak migrant networks but negative self-selection in communities with stronger networks. This is consistent with high migration costs driving positive or intermediate self-selection, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection being driven by lower returns to education in the United States than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987).

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f590f21ddb8305ab7706eb53228c134dcb4e17af

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Refugee Crises on Host Labor Markets: The Case of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Turkey (2015, background): “…are fleeing to a more developed country with a different culture and language, where they are generally lacking the host country related skills (e.g. language) and are not selected or self-selected into migration which is commonly the case in international migration McKenzie and Rapoport (2010).”
Do Immigrants Cause Crime (2012, background): “The predictive power of the instrument exploits the fact that new immigrants of a given nationality tend to settle into the same areas as previous immigrants from the same country (see e.g. Munshi, 2003; Jaeger, 2006; McKenzie and Rapoport, 2007).”
Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration (2015, positive): “Skilled migrants have been found to be less sensitive to networks than unskilled migrants (Beine et al., 2011, McKenzie and Rapoport, 2010).”
Does Development Reduce Migration? (2014, background): “McKenzie and Rapoport (2010) find a positive association between human capital stocks and emigration in Mexican households, but only in areas of low migration prevalence—where credit and information barriers are plausibly highest.”
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Migration, Entrepreneurship and Social Capital (2012, background): “There are three equations: (17) for e, (17) for e, and (24), and three unknowns: e, e, and .”
Income Maximization and the Selection and Sorting of International Migrants (2011, positive): “McKenzie and Rapoport (2010) and Belot and Hatton (2008) consider this possibility explicitly.”