Political Polarization and US-Mexico Migration (with Giuseppe Ippedico and Giovanni Peri), American Economic Association: Papers and Proceedings, May 2025
Abstract: We study how the US presidential election of 2016 affected the subsequent inflow of Mexican-born immigrants. We use the "Matricula Consular de Alta Seguridad" data to construct proxies for annual inflows and internal movements of Mexican-born individuals, including undocumented immigrants, across US commuting zones. We find that a 10-percentage point increase in the Republican vote share in a commuting zone reduced inflows by 1.8 percent after the 2016 Trump election. The internal relocation of established Mexican immigrants primarily explains this reduction, though inflows of new immigrants decreased as well.
NBER working paper
Abstract: Using newly validated data on geographic migration networks, we study how labor demand shocks in the United States propagate across the border with Mexico. We show that the large exogenous decline in US employment brought about by the Great Recession affected demographic and economic outcomes in Mexican communities that were highly connected to the most affected markets in the US. In the Mexican locations with strong initial ties to the hardest hit US migrant destinations, return migration increased, emigration decreased, and remittance receipt declined. These changes significantly increased local employment and hours worked, but wages were unaffected. Investment in durable goods and children’s education also slowed in these communities. These findings document the effects in Mexico when potential migrants lose access to a strong US labor market, providing insight regarding the potential impacts of stricter US migration restrictions.
Social Learning along International Migrant Networks (with Yuan Tian and Brian K. Kovak), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2022, 195: 103-121
NBER working paper
Abstract: We document the transmission of social distancing practices from the United States to Mexico along migrant networks during the early 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Using data on pre-existing migrant connections between Mexican and U.S. locations and mobile-phone tracking data revealing social distancing behavior, we find larger declines in mobility in Mexican regions whose emigrants live in U.S. locations with stronger social distancing practices. We rule out confounding pre-trends and use a variety of controls and an instrumental variables strategy based on U.S. stay-at-home orders to rule out the potential influence of disease transmission and migrant sorting between similar locations. Given this evidence, we conclude that our findings represent the effect of information transmission between Mexican migrants living in the U.S. and residents of their home locations in Mexico. Our results demonstrate the importance of personal connections when policymakers seek to change fundamental social behaviors.
Measuring Geographic Migration Patterns Using Matrículas Consulares (with Brian C. Cadena and Brian K. Kovak), Demography, May 2018, 55(3), pp. 1119-1145
Press Coverage: US News
Abstract: In this article, we show how to use administrative data from the Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) identification card program to measure the joint distribution of sending and receiving locations for migrants from Mexico to the United States. Whereas other data sources cover only a small fraction of source or destination locations or include only very coarse geographic information, the MCAS data provide complete geographic coverage of both countries, detailed information on migrants’ sources and destinations, and a very large sample size. We first confirm the quality and representativeness of the MCAS data by comparing them with well-known household surveys in Mexico and the United States, finding strong agreement on the migrant location distributions available across data sets. We then document substantial differences in the mix of destinations for migrants from different places within the same source state, demonstrating the importance of detailed substate geographical information. We conclude with an example of how these detailed data can be used to study the effects of destination-specific conditions on migration patterns. We find that an Arizona law reducing employment opportunities for unauthorized migrants decreased emigration from and increased return migration to Mexican source regions with strong initial ties to Arizona.
The Effects of Immigration Enforcement on Educational Investments in Migrants’ Source Regions
Abstract: This paper examines how changes in U.S. interior enforcement policies affect schooling investment decisions for children in Mexican source regions. I combine newly validated data on geographic migration networks and the staggered rollout of the Secure Communities immigration enforcement policy (SCP) to identify Mexican communities that were highly connected to U.S. destinations implementing SCP. Using administrative data and a panel difference-in-differences strategy, I show that in these Mexican communities, girls in 8th grade and boys in 7th grade are more likely to drop out of school. The main mechanism driving these effects is a decrease in remittances as opposed to an increase in the expected wage premium for education. These findings provide evidence of the unintended consequences that destination-county immigration policies can have on source countries’ human capital.
The Role of Political Polarization and Migrant Networks on Migrant Selection (with Giuseppe Ippedico and Giovanni Peri)
The Effect of Mexican Migrants on U.S. Labor Markets: A New Approach Using Weather Shocks and Migrant Networks (with Brian C. Cadena, Marieke Kleemans, and Brian K. Kovak)