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ABSTRACT
Immigration from Mexico has been a politically salient topic for decades and continues to be in the current political landscape. In this paper, we consider the push factors of the sending state that influence return migration, as opposed to much of the literature that focuses on the pull factors of the receiving state. Specifically, we hypothesize that Mexican states’ economic, political, crime, and border contexts influence a Mexican migrant’s position on whether or not to return to Mexico. To test the hypotheses, we utilize the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS) merged with Mexican sending state socioeconomic, political, crime, and border location data. The findings lend evidence that push factors impact return migration patterns for Mexican migrants, particularly political, crime, and border context.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Ideally, we would have more recent public opinion data to test our hypotheses. However, there are no other publicly available survey data sets that include the variables necessary for the analysis in the project. Specifically, other data sets lack a question regarding the location an immigrant came from other than one’s country of origin. Other data sets lack a sizeable sample of foreign-born respondents.
2 Summary statistics for all the independent variables are presented in the Appendix.
3 We use principal component factor analysis with a varimax rotation. The variables loaded on one factor, which produced an eigenvalue of 1.55. The proportion of variance accounted for on this factor is .52. We also estimated the models using an additive measure of crime context. The results are substantively and statistically consistent with those presented here and are available upon request.