List at least three important details about mexican immigrants journey to the united states

Int Migr Rev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2013 Nov 3.

Published in final edited form as:

PMCID: PMC3816114

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Abstract

The geography Mexican migration to the U.S. has experienced deep transformations in both its origin composition and the destinations chosen by migrants. To date, however, we know little about how shifting migrant origins and destinations may be linked to one another geographically and, ultimately, structurally as relatively similar brands of economic restructuring have been posited to drive the shifts in origins and destinations. In this paper, we describe how old and new migrant networks have combined to fuel the well-documented geographic expansion of Mexican migration. We use data from the 2006 Mexican National Survey of Population Dynamics, a nationally representative survey that for the first time collected information on U.S. state of destination for all household members who had been to the United States during the five years prior to the survey. We find that the growth in immigration to southern and eastern states is disproportionately fueled by undocumented migration from non-traditional origin regions located in Central and Southeastern Mexico and from rural areas in particular. We argue that economic restructuring in the U.S. and Mexico had profound consequences not only for the magnitude but also for the geography of Mexican migration, opening up new region-to-region flows.

Keywords: Migration, immigration, Mexico, United States, origins, destinations, gateways, economic restructuring, industrial restructuring

1 Introduction

The geography of Mexico-US migration has experienced deep transformations in recent decades as migrant origins and destinations have diversified away from their traditional Mexican sources and US gateways. The heartland for emigration to the United States has historically been Mexico’s West-Central region, principally localities in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas. Since early in the twentieth century, these states have accounted for a majority of all emigrants to the United States (Durand et al., 2001). Over the past three decades, however, new sending regions have slowly emerged (Durand and Massey, 2003), particularly in areas south and east of Mexico city (e.g. Cohen, 2004; Rosas, 2008; Smith, 2006), reducing the importance of the Central-West to less than half of the flow for the first time (Durand and Massey, 2003).

Within the United States, the spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants has also diversified, but more recently and at a quicker pace. Before the 1990s, around 85% of all Mexican migrants went to just three states: Texas, Illinois, and California, with the latter receiving upwards of 60% all by itself(Massey and Capoferro, 2008). By the late 1990s, however, the share of new arrivals settling in California dropped from two thirds to only one third, with the bulk of the difference being absorbed by emerging and re-emerging states of destination in four regions: in the Southeast, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; in the Midwest, Iowa and Nebraska; in the West, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada; and the Northeast, the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania(Durand et al., 2005; Massey and Capoferro, 2008). These shifts initially occurred as large numbers of immigrants living in traditional gateway states migrated internally to these destinations (Donato et al., 2007; Durand et al., 2005; Lichter and Johnson, 2006, 2009; Malone et al., 2003). Thereafter, however, they appear to have been fueled by even more substantial direct immigration from Mexico, as we show and discuss below.

Scholars argue that the changing spatial distribution of migrant origins has come in response to liberalization-driven economic restructuring (Delgado-Wise and Covarrubias, 2007; Fernández-Kelly and Massey, 2007; Massey et al., 2008; Nevins, 2007) associated with various shocks to the Mexican political economy (e.g. Hanson, 2003; Lustig, 1990; Polaski, 2004; Zepeda et al., 2009). Likewise, the shift in the spatial distribution of destinations has been attributed to the restructuring of various industries and their relocation to non-metropolitan places in the Southeast and Midwest(Griffith, 2005; Hernández-León and Zúñiga, 2001; Kandel and Parrado, 2005).

To date, however, we know little about how shifting migrant origins and destinations may be linked to one another geographically and, ultimately, structurally (for an exception we discuss below, see Massey et al., 2010). In particular, we do not know the extent to which economic restructuring south of the border may have either caused or accentuated the shift in destinations north of the border. In this paper, we describe how old and new migrant networks have combined to fuel the well-documented geographic expansion of Mexican migration. We use data from the 2006 Mexican National Survey of Population Dynamics, a nationally representative survey that for the first time collected information on U.S. state of destination for all household members who had been to the United States during the five years prior to the survey. We find that the growth in immigration to southern and eastern states is disproportionately fueled by undocumented migration from non-traditional origin regions located in Central and Southeastern Mexico and from rural areas in particular. We argue that economic restructuring in the U.S. and Mexico had profound consequences not only for the magnitude but also for the geography of Mexican migration, opening up new region-to-region flows.

2 Previous Studies

New Destinations, Industrial Restructuring, and Declining Gateways

The spatial distribution of the population of the United States has changed significantly over the past two decades, as confirmed by the 2010 census and the accompanying shifts in congressional reapportionment.1 Although Hispanics, in particular, and immigrants, in general, have been an integral part of this geographic diversification (Goodwin-White, 2007; Lichter and Johnson, 2009; Massey, 2008; Singer, 2004), shifts have been particularly marked in the case of Mexican immigrants. In just a few years, Mexican migration–previously directed almost entirely to the Southwest and the Chicago Metropolitan Area–has become a national phenomenon(Donato et al., 2007; Durand et al., 2005; Malone et al., 2003). In contrast, spatial dispersion away from traditional gateways has been more limited for other immigrant groups.

The shift in the spatial distribution of migrant destinations has been attributed to the restructuring of various industries, mainly food-processing (Griffith, 2005; Hernández-León and Zúñiga, 2001; Kandel and Parrado, 2005). While some (e.g. poultry packing, farming) were already firmly established in the new areas, others (e.g. beef packing) increasingly moved into them during the 1980s and 1990s (Kandel and Parrado, 2005). Both sets of companies hired a large number of immigrants, mostly of Hispanic descent, recruiting workers both from elsewhere in the U.S. and directly from the country of origin (Johnson–Webb, 2002; Krissman et al., 2000).

In addition to the aforementioned geographic shifts in labor demand, two other phenomena seemed to have motivated migrants to move away from traditional gateways. First, industrial restructuring took place in the wake of a massive regularization of undocumented migrants under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Legal status acquired in the early 1990s provided former undocumented migrants with a new freedom to move and pursue job opportunities elsewhere. With newly acquired papers, migrants were no longer tied to labor markets where they knew they could work without documents (Durand et al., 2005; Durand et al., 1999; Neuman and Tienda, 1994). Second, living conditions deteriorated in many traditional gateways, prompting immigrants to look elsewhere to escape expensive rents, crowded housing, failing schools, violent neighborhoods, and rising anti-immigrant sentiment (e.g. Fennelly, 2005; Hernandez-Leon and Zuniga, 2000; Hernández-León and Zúñiga, 2001). Light (2006) argues that local policies in cities like Los Angeles also created harsher living conditions for low-income immigrants.

Internal Redistribution vs. Direct Immigration

Although internal migration was initially responsible for the changing spatial distribution of Mexican migrants in the U.S. (see also Donato et al., 2007; Durand et al., 2005; Lichter and Johnson, 2006, 2009; Malone et al., 2003), it has more recently been fueled by direct immigration from Mexico. Using data from the Integrated Public Use Micro Samples from the 1990 and 2000 census (IPUMS-USA, publicly available through the University of Minnesota, Ruggles et al., 2010), Table 1 shows the place of previous residence for Mexican immigrants ages 15+ who reported moving in the five years prior to the census date.

Table 1

Characteristics of migrants to the US and non-migrants ages 15+ surveyed in Mexico

In this table we define traditional, re-emerging, and new destinations following Singer’s (2004) depiction of metro-area immigrant gateways,2 basing our classification on historical trends in census data reported by Durand et al. (2005) and Massey and Capoferro (2008). Although not shown in this table, in subsequent tables we subdivide these three categories regionally following the scheme used by Durand and Massey (2003). Thus Traditional Gateways include those states with a long history of Mexican migration and the largest inflows of migrants on a continuing basis and are composed of two geographic sub-regions: the Borderlands (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas) and the Great Lakes Region, which incorporates states in the greater Chicago area (Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin), along with Michigan and Ohio.

In contrast, Re-emerging Destinations include places in the Northwest and Great Plains that received non-trivial numbers of immigrants during the earlier Enganche Era (1900–1929) or the Bracero Period (1942–1964), but which declined as destinations during the Undocumented Era (1965–1985). In this category we also include regions that experienced significant migration during the first years of the Undocumented Era but stagnated for a time before reviving in the late 1980s and 1990s. The Northwest Region includes the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah. Although Durand and Massey (2003) distinguished the Upper Plains (Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Minnesota) from the Lower Plains (Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Iowa), here we collapse these two groups of states into a single category, the Great Plains Region, for reasons of statistical power. Examples of states that received immigrants during earlier eras but declined during the undocumented era only to resurge in the 1990s are Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Oregon (see Durand et al., 2005), whereas the Yakima Valley in Washington received significant immigration early in the undocumented era that faltered only to revive again in the 1990s (see Darian, 2006).

We characterize states in the rest of the continental United States as New Destinations, which we divide into three regions located east of the Mississippi in which Mexican migration was by and in large non-existent or very small before the 1980s (with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York). The Southeast Region is composed of Maryland, the District of Columbia, the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. The South includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky; and finally, the Northeast spans Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

Table 1 shows the changing distribution of stocks and recent streams of Mexican immigrants among traditional, re-emerging, and new destinations, as well as the origins of the streams within or outside the United States. The percentage of Mexican-born individuals living in traditional gateways diminished between 1990 and 2000, going from 93.4% to 84.3%. This change occurred because of a dramatic increase in rates of in-migration to re-emerging and new destination states and not because of a substantial decrease in the rate of in-migration to traditional gateways. Whereas the in-migration rate (i.e. the annualized ratio of Mexican-born individuals moving into the region in the five years prior to the census divided by the number estimated to live there at the beginning of the period) decreased only slightly in traditional gateways (going from 3.8% to 3.6%), it more than quadrupled in re-emerging gateways (going from 2.0% to 8.9%) and almost tripled in new destinations, reaching very high levels (rising from 3.8% to 10.5%).

A non-trivial number of migrants who arrived in re-emerging and –to a lesser extent–new destinations during the late 1980s and late 1990s came from locations within the United States, mostly from traditional gateways. In re-emerging destinations, 39.8% and 36.6% of recent arrivals came from within the U.S. during 1985–90 and 1995–2000, respectively. In contrast, 92.9% and 89.9% of arrivals to gateway states in the same periods came from aboard. In new destinations, meanwhile, the percentage of new arrivals coming from within the U.S. was 37.8% in 1985–90 and 22.7% in 1995–2000. The decline in this percentage does not mean that internal migration to new areas diminished in absolute terms; rather, direct immigration from Mexico grew at a faster rate and thus fueled most of the growth of Mexican-born communities east of the Mississippi.

The importance of direct immigration from Mexico is not surprising in light of its rapid growth during the late 1990s and most of the first decade of the 21st Century (Bean et al., 2001; Passel and Cohn, 2008). Given the rising tide of immigration to new destinations from abroad, we argue that it is necessary to understand the changing distribution of geographic origins in Mexico before speculating about the degree to which the shift to new destinations might stem from IRCA’s legalization, deteriorating conditions in gateways, or U.S. industrial restructuring versus changing conditions in Mexico. Linking specific regional origins to specific regional destinations will enable us to evaluate the relative contributions of transformations north and south of the border in producing the new geography of Mexican immigration.

New Origins, Mexican Restructuring, and Migrant Networks

As mentioned at the outset, the spatial distribution of Mexican migrant sending regions has also shifted in recent times away from its traditional heartland in the Central-West region, which Durand and Massey (2003) call the Historical Region. This region, which encompasses the states of Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Nayarit, Colima, and Michoacán from the 1920s until recently has comprised at least 50% of the total outflow to the United States. The share peaked between 60% and 70% during the 1970s, however, and since then has declined steadily to reach levels just below 50% early in the new century (Durand and Massey, 2003) and –more recently– to levels just below 40% (see Table 2).

Table 2

Migrant destinations and urban origins by region of origin in Mexico

Until the mid-1990s, the second most important sending region was the Border Region, which includes the states of Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas. According to Durand and Massey (2003), between 20 and 28% of migrants historically came from these eight states, but after the mid-1990s this share fell below 20% and then dipped to 11% by 2000 as the region came to house the most rapidly growing sector of the Mexican economy (Hanson, 2003). Rather than shedding migrants, the border region now attracts a large number of internal migrants (Lozano-Ascencio et al., 1999) and, despite a long history of cross-border movement, residents of border communities are now less likely to migrate to the United States than interior residents, especially once step-migration is taken into account (Fussell, 2004; Fussell and Massey, 2004; Lozano-Ascencio et al., 1999).

As the Border and Historical Regions saw their share of migrants decline in recent decades, two new sending regions have come on line: the Central Region, which includes the states of Querétaro, México, Distrito Federal, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Puebla, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, and the Southeastern Region, which includes Veracruz, Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán. The Central Region was relatively unimportant until 1980, accounting for no more than 10% of migrants to the U.S., but rose steadily thereafter to reach just over 30% by century’s end (Durand and Massey, 2003). Mexico’s Southeastern Region remained insignificant as a migration source until recently, contributing fewer than 2% of migrants through the early 1990s (Durand and Massey, 2003). By the end of the millennium, migrants from this region composed 7% of the total (Durand and Massey, 2003). More recently, this figure has gone up to 13% (see Table 2).

Scholars have argued that these transformations were triggered by economic restructuring and shocks to the Mexican political economy beginning in the 1980s (Fernández-Kelly and Massey, 2007; Massey et al., 2008; Nevins, 2007). These transformations disproportionately affected the countryside, especially rural areas in the southern part of the country (Hanson, 2003; Polaski, 2004; Zepeda et al., 2009). Mexico’s political economy steadily liberalized following its entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1985, its adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, and its accession to the World Trade Organization in 1995. Economic liberalization increased job opportunities in export manufacturing plants located overwhelmingly north of Mexico City, especially in the border region; but it also brought about a concomitant loss of primary sector jobs, mostly in the south (Hanson, 2003; Polaski, 2004; Zepeda et al., 2009), where open commodity markets caused prices for corn and coffee to decline (Nevins, 2007; Zepeda et al., 2009), rendering many small-scale producers incapable of competing and exacerbating their dependence on subsistence agriculture.

These transformations, along with a series of economic crises that afflicted the country in 1982, 1988, 1994, and 2009, kept the purchasing power of Mexicans at or below 1980 levels (cfr.Lustig, 1990), broadened the income gap between northern and southern regions of the country (Borraz and Lopez-Cordova, 2007; Chiquiar, 2008; Hanson, 2003; Jensen and Rosas, 2007), and stimulated a series of adaptation strategies by the working poor (De la Rocha, 1994), including international migration (Nevins, 2007). If the shift away from immigrant gateways toward new destinations was fueled by U.S. industrial restructuring, the unleashing of internal mobility through IRCA’s legalization, and deteriorating living conditions in traditional destinations, one would expect that migrants from Central-Western Mexico would continue to dominate the stream into new destinations, given their historical dominance of migration from Mexico and their well-established social networks (Curran and Rivero-Fuentes, 2003; Flores, 2005; Flores et al., 2004; Lindstrom and López-Ramírez, 2010; Massey and Espinosa, 1997; Massey et al., 1994; Massey and Riosmena, 2010; Palloni et al., 2001) (but see Fussell and Massey, 2004; Menjívar, 2000). If, however, economic restructuring in Mexico was more relevant role in explaining the shift in destinations, then we might expect migrants from non-traditional sending areas to be over-represented in the composition of streams to new destinations.

Thus far, the geographic diversification of immigrant origins and the changing spatial distribution of migrant destinations have been separately studied using census and survey data from U.S. and Mexican sources, respectively. In Mexico, the Decennial Census and the Encuesta Nacional de la Dinámica Demográfica (ENADID) traditionally asked which household members had been to the United States during the preceding five years. Tabulating the number of people so identified by state offers a snapshot of the geographic origins of Mexican immigration, and classifying them by individual, family, and household characteristics yields a socioeconomic profile of migrants to the United States (see Durand et al., 2001; Marcelli and Cornelius, 2001; Massey and Zenteno, 2000). In the United States, the Decennial Census and Current Population Survey historically have asked place of birth, enabling social scientists to examine the distribution of Mexican-born persons by state and region in the United States and to study their socioeconomic characteristics (see Durand et al., 2005; Massey and Capoferro, 2008).

Until recently, however, there was no way to link information on places of origin with information on places of destination, at least using nationally representative surveys. From the U.S. census and CPS, for example, we knew where Mexican migrants lived in the United States but not where they came from in Mexico. Likewise, the Mexican census and ENADID told us where people with U.S. experience lived in Mexico, but not where they came from in the United States. It was thus impossible to identify specific place-to-place streams —not even their size, much less the characteristics of the immigrants involved and how they might differ from place to place.

This situation has changed with the appearance of two new data sources.3 The first, Mexico’s Matrícula Consular Program, provides a registration document to nationals who register with Mexican Consulates abroad. Issued since 1871, the document was originally a paper certificate that recorded the foreign address of the bearer, but in response to the rising number of undocumented migrants living north of the border and the growing repression directed against them, beginning in March 2002 the ID card underwent major changes and was replaced with a high security, wallet-sized card that uses the same security standards as the Mexican passport, thereby enabling its use for identification purposes in the United States (Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior 2004).

By the end of 2006, some 5.7 million consular ID’s had been issued (Dalton and Gordon 2005) and the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior prepared a sample of nearly one million registrants and published the data on the internet (http://www.ime.gob.mx/estados.htm). These data enable one to cross-classify state and region of origin in Mexico with state and city of destination in the United States to identify specific place-to-place networks, which Massey, Rugh, and Pren (2010) have analyzed. They found that by 2006, migration to the United States had moved well beyond its historical origins in West-Central Mexico and had come to embrace sending communities in the Central, Southeast, and Border regions. Although Massey et al. found traditional gateways continued to dominate destinations in the United States, a variety of newer gateways had emerged in the south and Midwest by 2006, and California had lost its overwhelming dominance as a favored destination.

The Matrícula data, however, have coverage and depth limitations. Although the data are available for a very large number of people, they only cover undocumented residents of the United States and are not necessarily even representative of that population since the database only includes those who voluntarily came forward to register for the consular ID, which presumably includes people who are better established as US residents. In addition, the Matrícula data only offer aggregate tabulations for a limited set of characteristics, making it impossible to study characteristics and behaviors at the individual level.

3 Data

We use a second recent source of data, Mexico’s 2006 round of the ENADID, the National Survey of Population Dynamics. The 2006 ENADID for the first time asked household members with U.S. experience where they had gone in the United States, which also enables the identification of specific streams. We build on the earlier work of Massey et al. (2010) and use data from ENADID to characterize the size and composition of specific migratory streams. Although the ENADID data offer a much smaller number of cases than the Matrícula Consular data, the survey is based on a probability sample that yields a nationwide snapshot of all households with a member who had migrated to the United States during the five years preceding the survey. The survey captures both legal and undocumented migrants and includes them even if they were still in the United States–as long as someone in the household remained behind to report on them. Moreover, the data are available at the individual level, so that multivariate models of migrant decision-making can be estimated, though explanatory variables are limited to the standard socio-demographic indicators included on the ENADID and exclude many factors specifically relevant to migration decisions, such as access to social capital through migrant network connections (the data do not include information the locality or municipality where the interview was conducted though the rural-urban classification of the locality of residence was included in the database).

The ENADID is based on a stratified, multi-stage probability sample of 41,926 dwellings. The sample was designed to obtain information representative of the nation, states, metropolitan areas, mid-sized urban areas, and rural areas (INSP, 2008). The ENADID is a semi-continuous survey of repeated cross-sections, the first of which was done in 1992 by the Mexican Statistical Office (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, or INEGI). Its purpose was to obtain information on a variety of demographic processes, including mortality, fertility, and reproductive health, as well as internal and international migration. Subsequent cross-sections of the survey were implemented in 1997 and again in 2006 (for other migration studies using previous cross-sections of these data, see Canales, 1999; Durand and Massey, 2003; Durand et al., 2001; Massey and Zenteno, 2000; Zenteno and Douglas, 1999).

Within each household surveyed by the ENADID in 2006, fieldworkers enumerated all persons who normally resided there,4 even if temporarily absent, and obtained basic socio-demographic information for these individuals. In the section on international migration, the survey asked if any household member moved to the US between January 2001 and the date of the interview.5 Although this definition does include people not living in the sampled households at the time of the survey (63% of recent migrants were still in the US at the time, see Table 2 below), this definition clearly does not include members of entire households that left for the United States without returning during the reference period, a population that may be better captured with U.S. data sources.

To minimize potential biases in under-reporting, we focus our analyses on household members old enough to engage in independent migration, given that the emigration of children tends to occur in tandem with that of other household members, making them most likely to be under-estimated by the design of the ENADID. We set a lower bound for inclusion at age 15, thus yielding a sample of 100,963 individuals, 2,477 of whom had US migratory experience in the five years prior. These 2,477 migrants belong to 2,071 households yielding an average of 1.2 migrants per household.6

In addition to identifying recent international migrants, the ENADID also collected information about their last US trip, such as the documentation used by the migrant and their state of destination in the US. This last question was not asked in previous versions of the ENADID or in the 2000 Census Migration Supplement, making it possible for the first time to identify specific interregional streams from a nationally-representative data source. However, given the wording of the state of destination question (to which US state did the migrant go to during his/her last trip?7) survey respondents could have interpreted this as their main but not first destination thus exaggerating the extent of direct immigration from Mexico towards new destinations. However, we believe our main findings are not overly affected by this potential interpretation for two reasons. First, our estimates in Table 1 above indicate that most migrants into new destinations moved directly from Mexico. As such, even if present, the extent of this bias should not be dominating our results. Second, if there was a sizable amount of masked step migration to traditional gateways and on to new destinations measured by the survey as movement towards new destinations alone, we would expect that people from the Historical region would represent migrant streams toward new destinations: on the contrary, we find that streams towards new destinations have a distinct origin-composition (e.g. see Map 1 below), which suggests the stream towards new destinations is not dominated by the better-established networks of the Historical region (see also Massey et al., 2010: Table 4).

Distribution of 2001–2005 Migrants by Region of Destination in the U.S. and Composition of Region of Origin in Mexico by Region of Destination in the U.S.

Table 4

Migrant regional and urban origins by region of destination in the US

Some 83% of migrants (2,061 individuals) provided valid information on state of destination. Given that this is a relatively small number, we focus on region-to-region rather than place-to-place or state-to-state streams. Although this approach has the obvious drawback of ignoring intra-regional shifts in migrant origins and destinations, the analyses stemming from our regional classification provide—albeit in broad strokes—a clear picture of the changing geography of Mexican migration at a relevant scale of analysis.

4 Origins, destinations, and characteristics of migrants

Table 2 presents general socio-demographic characteristics for Mexican migrants aged 15+ who left for the United States between 2001 and 2005 (N=2,477) and compares them to non-migrants aged 15+ (N=98,486). Although the age structure of migrants tends to be quite young, those in the sample are older, on average, than the general Mexican population (mean age of 44.5 vs. 38.4), because the latter still has a young structure and the former includes those making return trips to the US as well as those going for the first time. While women are still under-represented in the flow (40% vs. 52% in the general population) they represent a larger share than studies have found in the past (cfr. Durand et al., 2001: Table 2). Some female moves are independent of male migration (Kana'iaupuni, 2000), whereas others are tied to family reunification (Cerrutti and Massey, 2001; Donato, 1993) oftentimes by way of legal migration (Riosmena, 2010). Migrants and non-migrants differ in educational attainment, partly because migrants in the sample are older. Relative to non-migrants, migrants have higher proportions of persons with no schooling (12% vs. 8%), incomplete primary education (30% vs. 16%), and completed elementary education (21% vs. 17%), and lower proportions with some lower secondary (23% vs. 29%) and some upper secondary (15% vs. 29%).

Given differences in age structures, it is not surprising that migrants are considerably less likely to be single than non-migrants (8% vs. 31%) and more likely to be either currently or previously married (78 vs. 59% and 14 vs. 10% respectively). Age, gender, and marital status differences are reflected in the household position of migrants. Household heads are over-represented in the migrant flow by a large margin (81% vs. 36%).

As Durand et al. (2001) point out, the growing representation of urban origins among migrants partly stems from the urbanization Mexico has undergone since the 1950s (Garza, 2003), as villages have become towns and towns have become cities. Although the majority of migrants no longer come from rural areas, these are still over-represented in the flow: while only 22% of the Mexican population lives in rural localities, 40% of migrants come from rural places. As shown in the table, small urban areas (2,500–15,000 inhabitants) are also slightly over-represented in the migrant flow (16%, vs. 13% for non-migrants) whereas medium-sized urban areas (15,000–100,000 inhabitants) yield around 14% for both migrants and non-migrants. The proportion of people coming from medium-sized cities has in fact remained strikingly stable since the 1970s, fluctuating between 11 and 15% (Durand et al., 2001). Although the share of migrants coming from metropolitan areas has been on the rise (Durand et al., 2001; Hernández-León, 2008), these areas are still under-represented in the flow. Whereas more than half of all Mexicans live in metropolitan areas, only 30% of U.S. migrants come from such places, results that are consistent with the hypothesis that mechanisms associated with the cumulative causation of migration (Massey, 1990) do not operate as efficiently in large urban settings because of their higher economic dynamism and diversity, and greater anonymity and impersonality (Fussell and Massey, 2004).

The regional composition of migration reveals continuities in the Historical Region and changes elsewhere. Although the Historical Region’s proportion of the outflow has now dropped below 50% and stood at just 38% in 2001–2005 (cfr. Durand and Massey, 2003; Durand et al., 2001), it is still the largest source region for migration to the United States and the only one over-represented relative to its share of the population (only 22% of Mexicans aged 15 and over live in this region). In contrast, 15% of recent migrants come from the Border Region, which is slightly under-represented relative to its share of the total population (21%). The same is true for the Central and Southeastern Regions, which compose 33% and 13% of the migrant flow, respectively, compared with 40% and 16% of the Mexican population. These figures are generally consistent with those derived from previous studies (cfr. Durand et al., 2001) though they also suggest that migrants from less traditional sending regions are joining the flow at very high rates: the share originating in the Southeast, for example, increased from 7% during 1995–2000 (Durand and Massey, 2003: Table 13) to the estimated 13% during 2001–2005.

Map 1 and the first line on Table 3 show the distribution of migrants according to region of destination. Although traditional gateways still dominate direct streams from Mexico (streams toward the Borderland and Great Lakes region compose two thirds of the total flow), the shift toward new destinations is indeed quite notable: 15.5%, 3.9%, and 7.3% of migrants go to the Southeast, South, and Northeast respectively, making up more than a quarter of the flow, a figure already higher than the late 1990s estimates reported by Durand et al. (2005) and Massey and Capoferro (2008).

Table 3

Characteristics of migrants to the US by region of origin in Mexico

Table 3 also shows the distribution of the region and level of urbanization of the place of origin of migrants according to their region of destination in the U.S. The changing regional composition of Mexican origins is contributing more than its share to the eastward expansion of immigrant destinations documented in the second section of the paper. Although the re-emergence of destinations in the West and Midwest indeed seems to be driven largely by networks emanating from the Historical Region, the eastern expansion of Mexican migrants in the United States is not. First, the Historical Region is always over-represented in streams to traditional destinations: its residents compose 38% of the total flow but 43% and 48% of migrants going into the Borderland and Great Lakes Regions. In contrast, migrants from the Historical Region represent only 30%, 27%, and 13% of migrants going to the Southeast, South, and Northeast of the United States. The striking under-representation of the Historical Region in flows to the Northeast and –to a lesser extent, South and Southeast–suggest that old networks from Central-Western Mexico do not operate in the same way to guide migrants to new destinations as they do to channel migrants to communities in traditional and re-emerging gateways.

The concentration of people from Mexican Border states in the US Borderland Region is also evident from Table 3. Migrants from the Mexican Border region are over-represented in flows to U.S. states just across the border (21% vs. 15% overall) as well in as the smaller flows going to the Great Plains (26% vs. 15% overall). Flows from the Border Region to the American South are non-trivial at 15%, basically mirroring the share of migrants leaving the Border region overall. In contrast, the share of migrants from the Border Region is much lower in flows going to traditional Great Lakes gateways (9%), and new destination areas in the Southeast (3%) and Northeast (5%).

The pattern of emigration from Mexico’s Central Region most likely reflects its combination of immigrants from both older and newer immigrant origins (e.g., areas around Mexico City and Guerrero vs. Puebla and Querétaro--see De Genova, 2005: p.p. 3–4). For instance, the Central Region is well represented in traditional gateways in the Great Lakes Region (34% vs. 33% overall) and the Northwest (37%), as well as new immigrant destinations in the Southeast (42%) and the Northeast, where nearly three fourths of recent migrants arriving directly from Mexico come from the Central region. New destinations in the South (26%) and Southeast (35%) disproportionately receive migrants from Southeastern Mexico, again suggesting that newer sending areas are contributing more than their fair share to the growth of new immigrant destinations (see also Map 1).

The rural-urban origin of migrants seems to relate in systematic ways to the profile of sending regions described above. Migrants going to the South and Southeast (who tend to work in primary sector industries, see Dunn et al., 2005; Griffith, 2005; Haverluk and Trautman, 2008; Kandel and Parrado, 2004; Kandel and Parrado, 2005; Kandel and Parrado, 2006; Parrado and Kandel, 2008) are least likely to come from a Mexican metropolitan area and disproportionately likely to come from rural areas. In the South and Southeast, 50% and 55% of migrants, respectively, come from rural areas while only 11% and 20% are of metropolitan origin. In contrast, the proportion of migrants coming from metropolitan areas is highest in the more established flows going to the US Borderland Region (p<0.10 relative to the national average), whereas the proportion coming from rural areas is lowest in this region. The relative number of migrants with rural origins is also quite low in the re-emerging areas of the Northwest, a fact that might reflect the historical transformation of migration in traditional gateways away from seasonal agricultural labor toward work in urban services (e.g. Cornelius, 1992; Durand et al., 1999; Riosmena, 2004). Interestingly, although migrants going to the Great Lakes region have traditionally worked in the industrial and urban sectors (De Genova, 2005), they do not come from places that are particularly urbanized relative to the general migrant flow, except for a slight over-representation of migrants from urban areas with 15,000–100,000 inhabitants, at 21% (vs. 14%).

Table 4 shows individual-level characteristics of 2001–2005 migrants according to their region of destination in the U.S., including documentation and return behavior as well as socio-demographic traits (the rightmost panel shows the total for all migrants regardless of region of destination). The proportion undocumented is somewhat higher among migrants going to new destinations in the South and Northeast (80% and above) compared with the Borderland and Great Plains, where the proportions are 60 and 67%, respectively. The low Borderlands figure reflects higher proportions using tourist visas (20%), perhaps because of the over-representation of migrants from the Mexican Border Region, who have greater access to crossing cards and other visas. The low figure in the Great Plains is attributable to higher proportions of migrants with work/residence permits (20%), perhaps owing to better-established flows of contract labor. Although return rates also vary across destination regions, it is only in the extremes (and the two largest flows) that these patterns are significantly different from the average for all migrants. The likelihood of return is lowest among migrants going to the Southeast (30%) and highest among migrants going to the Borderland Region (42%), where trip durations are nonetheless slightly longer than average (6.9 months vs. 5.8 months for all returnees).

The demographic profile of migrants by destination does not vary greatly, certainly not enough to be distinguished from the overall mean in most instances (and this variation is also much lower than that across region of origin, results not shown). Only for migrants going to the South is the mean age of migrants slightly lower than average, at 41 years vs. 44.5 (p<0.10). Although the proportion of women is generally lower in traditional destinations (35%–39%) than in new destinations in the South (43%–44%), these differences are not statistically significant. Not surprisingly, the educational attainment of migrants reflects their urban-rural origins. The percentage of people with at least some lower secondary education (the sum of the two highest schooling categories shown in Table 4, which can be interpreted as being around or above the educational average for the Mexican adult population), is higher in the Northeast (31.6 + 13.0 = 44.6%), the Borderland Region (41%), and the Great Lakes (37%) compared with figures of 28% and 30% in the Southeast and South, respectively. In all other regions, schooling levels were not significantly different from the average. Finally, the distribution of marital status is similar across all destinations except the South, where the percentage of migrants who are currently married is higher than in all other regions (87% vs. an average of 78%).

5 How do the determinants of migration to traditional and new origins differ?

Table 5 shows odds ratios from multinomial logistic regression models estimated to predict migration to traditional and re-emerging destinations combined versus newer destinations in the Southeast, South, and Northeast, in both cases relative to non-migrants. Significant differences between coefficients predicting emigration to traditional and re-emerging versus new destinations are denoted in bold (p<0.05) and italics (0.05<p<0.10). The socio-demographic determinants of migrating to a new destination are not significantly different from the determinants of going to traditional or re-emerging destinations, with one exception. Although children of a household head are considerably less likely to migrate to any US destination (results of global model not shown), when they do they are 1.64 times more likely (1.64 = 0.14/0.08, p<0.1) to move to new than to a more traditional destination.

Table 5

Characteristics of migrants by region of destination in the United States.

Unlike the socio-demographic characteristics, rural and regional origins are significant in predicting migration towards traditional vs. new destinations and generally confirm the results of the descriptive statistics presented above. The rural-urban gradient is sharper in flows directed towards new destinations than in those going to traditional and re-emerging gateways, even after we control for region of origin in Mexico. Relative to rural areas, the odds of migration to traditional or re-emerging gateway are 15%, 36%, and 54% lower in smaller urban, larger urban, and metropolitan areas. These gaps are even greater for new destinations, where the odds of emigration are 35%, 54%, and 78% lower in smaller urban, larger urban, and metropolitan areas relative to rural areas. Again, this is not surprising given that the demand for migrant labor in the American South and Southeast is heavily concentrated in primary sector industries such as food processing. As a result, the expansion of Mexican migration eastward (at least for flows stemming directly from Mexico) retains the relatively rural character Mexican migration has had historically.

However, again, it does not retain the region-of-origin character of previous epochs. The regional pecking order in emigration rates varies conspicuously by region of destination. Residents of the Historical Region are most likely to migrate to traditional and re-emerging destinations, followed by those from the Border, Central, and Southeast Regions, who are 60%, 61%, and 80% less likely to migrate to traditional or re-emerging destinations than residents of the Historical Region, once we control for other relevant characteristics including the rural-urban classification of the locality of origin. In contrast, people from the Central Region are most likely to migrate to new destinations. Indeed, they are 1.26 times more likely to do so than residents of the Historical Region. In contrast people living in the Border and Southeaster Regions are 78% and 39% less likely to migrate to new destinations than people living in the Historical heartland of Mexican migration to the United States.

Although residents of the Historical and Border Regions are more likely to go to traditional or re-emerging gateways than to new destinations in the East, Southeast, and South, the opposite is true for residents of the Central and Southeast Regions. Residents of the Border Region, for example, have 44% (0.22/0.40, p<0.01) lower odds of migrating to new destinations than to regions with traditional/re-emerging gateways. In contrast, people from Central and Southeast Mexico have 3.1 (i.e., 1.26/0.41 and 0.61/0.20) times higher odds of migrating to new destinations than to traditional or re-emerging gateways. It is thus clear that the eastward expansion of Mexican settlement previously documented in the literature has a different origin composition net of other confounders, at least among migrants who come directly from Mexico.

6 Discussion and Conclusion

Our results reveal the divergent regional origins of Mexican migrants to new destinations in the American South, Southeast, and especially the Northeast. A majority of migrants going to new destinations in the East come not from the Historical Region but from Central and Southeastern Mexico. Migrants from the Central Region dominate flows into the Northeast (72% with an additional 10% coming from the Southeast) and the Southeast (42%, plus 26% from the Central region), whereas migrants from the Southeast dominate migration to the South (35%, in addition to 23% from Central Mexico, see Table 4). Although migrants from the Historical Region remain a non-trivial portion of the flow going to the Southeast (29%) and South (27%, see Table 3), they are strikingly absent from flows into the Northeast (in our data, mostly comprised of the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), in which they represent a meager 13%.

It is possible, of course, that the origin composition of current population stocks in the new destinations could be less dominated by Central and Southeastern Mexico because of past migration flows and internal redistribution of migrants away from traditional gateways, though that possibility remains something of an empirical puzzle given the lack of relevant data. Nonetheless, this seems unlikely given how migrant networks typically operate (Fussell and Massey, 2004; Lindstrom and López-Ramírez, 2010; Massey et al., 1994) and the rapid growth in emigration from Mexico’s Central and Southeast Regions (cfr. Table 2, Durand and Massey, 2003; Durand et al., 2001), especially given the rapid rise of migration to the U.S. South, Southeast, and Northeast (cfr. Table 4, Durand and Massey, 2003; Durand et al., 2005; Leach and Bean, 2008; Massey and Capoferro, 2008).

More than half of all migrants to the US South and Southeast, in particular, originate in Mexican rural areas whereas only a few (11%–20%) come from metropolitan areas. This pattern not only is consistent with the distribution of migrant origins favoring flows from the Central and Southeastern regions (40% and 67% rural, see table 2), but remains so even after we control for the regional composition of flows into new destinations (Table 5). In any event, the rural-urban composition of flows into new destinations in the US South and Southeast is not surprising given the demand for immigrant labor created by meat processing and other agro-industries in non-metro areas in the US South and Midwest (Dunn et al., 2005; Griffith, 2005; Haverluk and Trautman, 2008; Kandel and Parrado, 2004; Kandel and Parrado, 2005; Kandel and Parrado, 2006; Parrado and Kandel, 2008). As a result, the more rural character of Mexican migration remains a common feature of flows to these regions, though not to the Northeast, where migrants enter diverse occupations in the urban sector in cities such as New York (e.g. Smith, 2006) more often than they enter rural occupations in small towns in the tri-state area (e.g. Shutika, 2005).

Note that these trends do not imply that Central and Southeastern Mexicans go exclusively to new destinations; as with other migrant streams, the largest flows from the Central and Southeastern regions go to the US Borderlands Region (47% and 41%, respectively), though these shares are indeed smaller than among those leaving from the Historical (64%) and Border (78%) regions.8 The Border Region in fact stands out in various ways from other origin regions. First, it is the only region in which a majority of migrants come from metropolitan areas (see Table 2). Though this predominance almost defies the notion that cumulative causation does not operate in large cities (Fussell and Massey, 2004), not even in the Border Region do metropolitan areas contribute their fair share to the migrant flow (see Table 6).

Table 6

Odds ratios from logistic regressions predicting the probability of migrating to the US by region of origin in Mexico (standard errors not shown)

Migrants from the Border region also have flat education-migration gradients and above-average return rates, and they concentrate heavily in the adjacent Borderland Region. The profile of Border migrants may stem more from the unique history of cross-border movement than from the structural conditions that promote emigration from elsewhere in Mexico, particularly the South. Indeed, large disparities in job creation partially fueled by NAFTA have transformed the Border region into the most rapidly growing portion of the Mexican in both economic (Hanson, 2003) and demographic (Lozano-Ascencio et al., 1999) terms. In contrast, the liberalization of the Mexican economy and the gradual opening of agricultural markets under NAFTA have generated large-scale displacement from the countryside, especially in Southern Mexico (Delgado-Wise and Covarrubias, 2007; Fernández-Kelly and Massey, 2007; Massey et al., 2008; Nevins, 2007). Thus the recent growth of Mexican migration and its geographic diversification on both sides of the border reflects a confluence of supply-side and demand-side factors operating in the same direction with a common thread: economic restructuring.

​

Table 7

Odds ratios from multinomial logistic regression predicting the probability of migrating to Traditional/renewed and newer gateways (vs. not emigrating).

Acknowledgements

We thank Luis Felipe Ramos Martínez and Jorge Valencia for guidance with the use of the ENADID data and Nancy D. Mann for her careful editing and suggestions. We acknowledge administrative and computing support from the NICHD-funded University of Colorado Population Center (grant R21 HD51146).

Footnotes

1See http://2010.census.gov/2010census/data/embedmap.php. Last accessed December 28, 2010.

2Singer classified metro gateways into various types according to the evolution of their share of foreign-born in every decennial census in the 20th Century. Re-emerging gateways are those places with an above-average share of foreign-born individuals in 1900–1930, lagging below the national average until 1980, after which it increased rapidly (Singer, 2004: p. 5). Given that we are dealing with much larger regions, our classification is less strict and more informal, but follows the same spirit. Re-emerging regions are those in which Mexican migration had been sizable before the 1980s (mostly during the Enganche or Bracero Eras of 1900–1929 and 1942–1964), later to diminish in relevance relative to immigration intro traditional gateways, and which resurged during the 1980s and 1990 (Durand et al., 2005).

3There is of course a plethora of community studies, many of them in Zúñiga and Hernández-León (2005) and Smith and Furuseth (2006) in which oftentimes the place or state of origin (as a proxy for the age of the migrant network) in Mexico is explored. Among others, scholars have studied destinations in New York (mostly with Pueblans, see Smith, 2005; Smith, 2006), Pennsylvania (Kenneth Square, see Shutika, 2005), North Carolina (Griffith, 2005; Parrado and Flippen, 2005), Northern Georgia (e.g. Dalton, see Hernandez-Leon and Zúñiga, 2005; Hernández-León and Zúñiga, 2001), Iowa (Grey and Woodrick, 2005), Nebraska (Gouveia et al., 2005), Maryland (Dunn et al., 2005), Kentucky (Rich and Miranda, 2005), and Louisiana (Donato et al., 2005). However, the main goal of these studies has by and large been to understand the perils and mechanisms of community formation and inter-ethnic relations in these places while emphasizing the context of reception migrants face and the role of restructuring in bringing certain jobs to these areas (also see Murphy et al., 2001; Smith and Furuseth, 2006).

4According to the interviewer’s manual, a person normally residing in the household is that who generally sleeps, prepares his/her meals, and obtains shelter in the interviewed dwelling p. 8 and 49, available at http://www.conapo.gob.mx/encuesta/Enadid2006/docs/ENADID%202006.%20Manual%20de%20la%20entrevistadora.pdf last accessed July 9, 2010). Both the household roster and the international migration section include a filter question to verify the alleged household member (and in the case of the latter, the recent US migrant) lived in the household prior to emigrating (see questions 3.3 and 4.5 on pages 9 and 19, available at http://www.sinais.salud.gob.mx/demograficos/enadid/cuestionarios.html, last accessed July 9, 2010).

5The exact wording in the questionnaire was: “¿De enero de 2001 a la fecha, alguna persona de este hogar se fue a vivir a los Estados Unidos de América, aunque haya regresado?” (see question 4.2 on page 19, available at http://www.sinais.salud.gob.mx/demograficos/enadid/cuestionarios.html, last accessed July 9, 2010). See also interviewer’s manual (p. 8 and 49, available at http://www.conapo.gob.mx/encuesta/Enadid2006/docs/ENADID%202006.%20Manual%20de%20la%20entrevistadora.pdf last accessed July 9, 2010). This wording suggests that temporary visitors were not included in the migrant count.

6Note that the percentage of migrants in the sample (a design-adjusted 2.34% over slightly more than 5 years) is low compared to estimates derived from other data sources (cfr. Hill and Wong, 2005; Rubalcava et al., 2008), including the recently-released 2009 ENADID, which included similar information to the 2006 ENADID for migrants leaving the interviewed household since 2004 and from which we tabulated origin-destination distributions. While indeed the percentage of migrants in the sample is higher in the 2009 ENADID (5.7%, partly due to the continued growth of documented and undocumented migration from Mexico during most of the decade, see Passel and Cohn, 2008), the regional distributions of origins and destinations were quite consistent with the figures presented here. For instance, the percentage of migrants coming from the Historical (39.5%), Border (16.4%), Central (29.1), and Southeastern (14.8) regions are very close to (and not statistically different from) the estimates we present on Table 2. Likewise, the distribution of migrants going towards the Borderlands (54.1%), Great Lakes (7.25%), Northwest (3.3%), Great Plains (2.6%), Southeast (20.7%), South (3.1%), and Northeast (7.1%) are overall consistent with the estimates presented in the first Panel on Table 3, though they also suggest a smooth continuation of the shift towards new destinations. The 2006 results thus provide an earlier snapshot of the shift towards new destinations and how they are related to the shift in migrant origins as well.

7See question 4.11 on p. 21 “¿A qué estado de los Estados Unidos se fue la última vez?”.

8However, after controls are introduced, migrants from the Central and Southeast regions do in fact have a larger propensity to emigrate to new than to traditional and re-emerging destinations (see Table 5).

Contributor Information

Fernando Riosmena, Population Program and Department of Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder.

Douglas S. Massey, Office of Population Research and Department of Sociology, Princeton University.

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