Did Mexico’s Fertility Transition Contribute to Abating Emigration to the United States?

• In Event: Sociology of Population Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5. Migration and Migrants

Abstract

Emigration from Mexico to the United States once represented the largest international emigration flow worldwide. By 2010, however, it had decreased in size dramatically, and has ceased to be the largest in the world. Furthermore, increases in migration flowing in the opposite direction resulted, for most of the previous decade, in zero net migration between the two countries. The scholarly literature on migration has attributed this decline to changes in the economy of United States, and to demographic processes that follow from Mexico’s fertility transition, particularly population aging. Drawing on emigration estimates from Mexican census data spanning 30 years, this study decomposes differences in emigration from Mexico between different time periods to quantify the contribution to emigration decline of changes in the age structure of Mexico’s population. Preliminary findings attribute at most 3.3% of the decline in Mexican emigration to population aging in Mexico, while highlighting that if it weren’t for unexplained declines in age-specific migration rates, Mexican emigration would have increased, driven by population growth. These findings suggest that the causes of emigration decline are social and economic, and not the direct result of purely demographic processes.

Author

• Jorge Mancilla, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill