Explaining the Decline in Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Effect of the Great Recession

“…In fact, in the years before the recession, nonagricultural emigrants were no more educated than nonmigrants in the same occupation, and return migrants were actually negatively selected within their occupations. The increasing educational selectivity of international migrants within occupation is consistent with results I presented elsewhere (Villarreal 2014), showing an overall increase in educational selectivity since the onset of the 2008 U.S. recession. The fact that the increase in educational selectivity occurs not only with respect to the entire population but also within occupations indicates that the overall increase in selectivity is not simply due to a change in the occupational profile of migrants.…”

“…1 shows the difference in years of education between Mexican men who did not migrate and those who migrated before and after the onset of the U.S. recession. The gap in education between nonmigrants and migrants becomes smaller over time, which is consistent with a decrease in the negative educational selectivity (Villarreal 2014). The change in selectivity is particularly pronounced for international emigrants from urban areas.…”

“…This growth was part of a much longer trend (not seen in my results) in which the unauthorized immigrant population grew nearly continuously during the period of economic growth from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s ( J. S. Passel and Krogstad 2023 ). Consistent with research on Mexican unauthorized immigrants ( Villarreal 2014 ), this growth spell was abruptly disrupted by the Great Recession in 2007 when large numbers of unauthorized immigrants left the country, new entries dropped, and the total population fell by over 1.5 million. As shown in Figure 3 and Appendix 2 of the Supporting Information , unauthorized migrant populations from nearly all regions and countries declined due to a sudden increase in exits and declines in entries in 2007 and 2008.…”

“…How do accumulated migration experiences or migrant social capital further influence year effects, and do these migrant social capital measures moderate the year effects? As with other research that has examined the impact of economic recessions on migration (both international and internal) (Cadena and Kovak 2013; Castles 2011; Green and Winters 2010; Villarreal 2014), we find that the Asian Financial Crisis significantly reduced migration after 1997–98. Potential migrants are generally dissuaded from migrating following an economic downturn, but that effect is slightly diminished after accounting for migrant selectivity.…”