An analysis of the economic determinants of legal and illegal Mexican migration to the United States.

Abstract

The pattern of recent legal and illegal Mexican gross migration to the U.S. is surveyed and its principal economic determinants are analyzed empirically. Concern is with the economics of the migratory flow per se rather than with the estimation of short-run effects and/or long-run consequences of Mexican migration to the U.S. on either the Mexican or the American economies. The major findings of the econometric analysis can be summarized as follows: 1) it appears that the economic determinants of legal illegal and total Mexican migration to the U.S. are essentially the same although the magnitude of the consequence of a percentage change in a given economic determinant is considerably different depending on which migratory flow is being examined; 2) the main variable affecting the number of legal illegal and total immigrants is the differential in the rate of unemployment between Mexico and the U.S. especially the rate of unemployment in Mexico; 3) the elasticity of migration with respect to intercountry unemployment differentials is much higher for illegal than for legal immigrants; the same is true of the elasticity of migration with respect to the rate of unemployment in Mexico; 4) differentials in real wages do not appear to influence the number of legal illegal or total immigrants; and 5) the attempt to quantify the probability of a migrant both finding a job and earning an American salary as well as of him/her both finding a job and obtaining the existing wage differential was unsuccessful in that migratory flows continued to be determined primarily by unemployment considerations. The key to diminishing the flow of Mexican migrants - were that to become a long-run U.S. policy objective - lies in reducing the existing gap between economic opportunities in Mexico and in the U.S.