Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2015 Oct;52(5):1543-70.
doi: 10.1007/s13524-015-0416-z.

U.S. Border Enforcement and Mexican Immigrant Location Choice

Sarah Bohn  1 , Todd Pugatch  2
Affiliations

U.S. Border Enforcement and Mexican Immigrant Location Choice

Sarah Bohn et al. Demography. 2015 Oct.

Erratum in

Abstract

We provide the first evidence on the causal effect of border enforcement on the full spatial distribution of Mexican immigrants to the United States. We address the endogeneity of border enforcement with an instrumental variables strategy based on administrative delays in budgetary allocations for border security. We find that 1,000 additional Border Patrol officers assigned to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering a U.S. state decreases that state's share of Mexican immigrants by 21.9 %. Our estimates imply that if border enforcement had not changed from 1994 to 2011, the shares of Mexican immigrants locating in California and Texas would each be 8 percentage points greater, with all other states' shares lower or unchanged.

Keywords: Border enforcement; Mexico; Residential location choice; Unauthorized immigration.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Demography. 2014 Dec;51(6):2255-79 - PubMed
    1. J Labor Econ. 1989 Oct;7(4):371-91 - PubMed
    1. Demography. 1994 Aug;31(3):509-24 - PubMed
    1. Demography. 2013 Oct;50(5):1873-96 - PubMed
    1. J Urban Econ. 2014 Mar 1;80:1-12 - PubMed

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources