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Who Crossed the Border? Self-Selection of Mexican Migrants in the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2014

Edward Kosack  and
Zachary Ward
Edward Kosack
Affiliation:
Ph.D. candidate, Department of Economics, 256 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0256. E-mail: edward.kosack@colorado.edu.
Zachary Ward
Affiliation:
Ph.D. candidate, Department of Economics, 256 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0256. E-mail: zachary.a.ward@colorado.edu.
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Abstract

We estimate the self-selection of Mexican migrants into and out of the United States in the 1920s. Officials recorded migrant height on border crossing manifests, which we use to proxy migrant quality and to measure self-selection into migration in 1920. Migrants were positively selected on height compared to the Mexican population. We link these migrants to the 1930 U.S. and Mexican censuses to obtain samples of permanent and return migrants and to estimate the selection into return migration. Return migrants were not differentially self-selected on height relative to permanent migrants.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 1015 - 1044
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2014 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Paul Rhode and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments that greatly improved this article. We owe special thanks to Ann Carlos for her guidance and encouragement in this project. We also thank Lee Alston, Francisca Antman, Brian Cadena, Dustin Frye, Michael Greenwood, Frank Lewis, Jason Long, Carol Shiue, and Steven Smith for helpful comments, as well as participants at the annual meetings of the Economic and Business History Society, Western Economic Association International, and the Canadian Network for Economic History. We are grateful to Chris Minns and Gill Newton for supplying the Double Metaphone algorithm for linking names. All errors are our own.

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