UC San Diego

The Mexican migration to the U.S. is a phenomenon that has been studied extensively in the literature. Lately, it has acquired particular attention in the media and has now become a permanent component of the political dialogue in the U.S. To understand this phenomenon, many authors have analyzed the magnitude and selectivity of migrants from Mexico to the U.S., and many others have investigated the determinants of the migration decision. However, there is still no clear agreement on the determinants, patterns and the magnitude of the Mexican migration to the U.S. phenomenon. In this dissertation, I work to further the understanding on the topics of selectivity of migrants and the determinants of migration and to shed light on the causes for the lack of consensus in the literature. The first chapter follows the typical social capital approach to analyze the migration decision, but it also considers the impact of family remittances, a component that has been typically ignored when analyzing the migration decision. The main results show that both family remittances and migration networks promote migration abroad from poor rural communities in Mexico. The second chapter investigates why there are so many discrepancies on estimates of the magnitude and the selectivity of migrants from Mexico. This paper shows that such discrepancies result simply from the decision of what data source to use. As an alternative, this paper proposes the use of the Net Migration methodology to obtain estimates of the number of migrants, gender composition, age distribution and educational attainment. The main estimates obtained tend to fall between estimates that use U.S. data and estimates that use Mexican data. Finally, the third chapter analyzes several globalization measures taken by the Mexican government in the 1990s and their potential impact on the migration incidence. Contrary to the existing literature, this paper does not focus solely on the contribution of FDI, imports and maquiladora exports to GDP to asses the impact of globalization on migration. It considers also the impact of other globalization measures that severely affected agricultural communities and find that these measures had a strong positive impact on migration