Revisiting Mexican migration in the Age of Mass Migration: New evidence from individual border crossings

Abstract

I introduce and analyze the Mexican Border Crossing Records (MBCRs), an unexplored data source that records aliens crossing the Mexico-US land border at diverse locations from 1903 to 1955. The MBCRs identify immigrants and report rich demographic, geographic and socioeconomic information at the individual level. These micro data have the potential to support cliometric research, which is scarce for the Mexico-US migration, especially for the beginnings of the flow (1884-1910). My analysis of the MBCRs suggests that previous literature may have inaccurately described the origin of the first Mexican immigrants. My findings diverge from historical scholarship because the micro data capture the geographic composition of the flow at the local level and across nine entrance ports, allowing me to characterize with precision the migration patterns during the 1900s. Overall, the micro data reported in the MBCRs offer the opportunity to address topics that concern the economics of migration in the past and present.

Keywords:

• Migration
• micro data
• Mexico

JEL CLASSIFICATION NUMBERS:

• N01
• N36

Acknowledgments

This paper was developed with the financial support of: the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (2015–18) – Scholarship No. 409165; the Mexican Ministry of Education Scholarship (2015–16); the Radwan Travel and Discovery Fund (2016) – London School of Economics; the Pre-Dissertation Exploratory Grant (2017) – Economic History Association (US); the Research Fund for Graduate Students (2017) – Economic History Society (UK); and the PhD Final Year Scholarship (2018–19) – London School of Economics. All errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Borjas (2007) for additional literature on the selection and assimilation of Mexican migration to the United States.

2 Although Gamio (1930) does not develop a strictly cliometric research, he presents a study—based on quantitative evidence—of money sent back to Mexico by immigrants from 1919 to 1926.

3 Publication Title: Lists of Aliens Arriving at Brownsville, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, El Paso, Laredo, Presidio, Rio Grande City, and Roma (Texas) from May 1903 to June 1909; and at Aros Ranch, Douglas, Lochiel, Naco, and Nogales (Arizona) from July 1906 to December 1910.

4 The Immigration Act of 1903 instructed the inspection of aliens along the borders of Canada and Mexico (US Congress 1903, 1221).

5 See the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) website for a full description of the publications and forms.

6 The medical officers should have at least two years of professional experience.

7 According to Dell (2012) insurgency events related to the Mexican Revolution started in 1909.

8 This function generates random integers from a specified interval.

9 This number is commonly extrapolated to estimate a flow of 500 thousand immigrants during the 1900–10 period (Cardoso 1980, 34).

10 The newspaper does not clarify if the statistics refer to the place of last residence or place of birth.

11 The Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1907 exempted incoming Mexicans from the head tax of $2.00 and $4.00, respectively (Cardoso 1980, 34).

12 The Bajio states are: Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Nayarit, Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Colima and Michoacan. Before 1917, the state of Nayarit was called Tepic. See Figure 3 for guidance.

13 The states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Michoacan were among the most populated in the country (see Figure A.3 in Appendix A). Hence, the low share of Bajio immigrants in the sample also reflects low migration rates.