Content area
Full Text
THE CHANGING PROFILE OF MEXICAN MIGRANTS TO THE UNITED STATES: New Evidence from California and Mexico*
Abstract: Using recent data from southern California and Mexico, we challenge the notion that the demographic profile of Mexican migrants to the United States since 1970 has remained constant. We find that more recent cohorts of migrants are more likely to settle permanently in the United States, to have higher proportions of females, to be younger, to have more education, to be increasingly likely to originate in southern Mexico and the Mexico City metropolitan area, and to be increasingly likely to depart from urban areas within Mexico. Although we find no direct evidence that the legalization programs mandated by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 has led to a stronger propensity to settle permanently in the United States, logistic regression analyses demonstrate the importance of the other three main explanatory factors suggested by Wayne Cornelius in 1992: economic crisis in Mexico, the changing character of U.S. demand for labor, and social networks.
In reviewing the evidence in 1992 on the characteristics of Mexican migrants to the United States, Wayne Cornelius synthesized his data and those gathered by sixty-seven other U.S. and Mexican researchers in the 1970s and 1980s using a wide range of research methodologies and sites. Four trends were identified in the data. First, permanent settlement by Mexican migrants to the United States began to increase in the 1970s and accelerated during the 1980s. Second, the flow of Mexican migrants became more diverse geographically, originating more in nontraditional sending states and large cities, including the Mexico City metropolitan area. Third, the skill composition of the Mexican migrant flow began to improve. And fourth, the gender composition of Mexican migration shifted, becoming less maledominated as more single women and whole families began to migrate.'
Cornelius (1992) hypothesized that these changes in the profile of migrants from Mexico to the United States could be explained by four factors: the changing composition of U.S. demand for migrant labor, with nonagricultural, year-round employment opportunities increasing over shortterm agricultural jobs; the economic crisis in Mexico during the 1980s, which forced Mexicans in nontraditional source areas to enter the U.S.-bound migratory flow; changes in U.S. immigration law, especially the legalization...