Nancy H. Chau is a Professor of Economics at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in Cornell University. Professor Chau’s research interests fall under three main areas: international trade, regional economics, and economic development, with particular emphasis on the economics of information and uncertainty.
Globally, there have been more than 33,400 migrant deaths since 2014, including children, women and men. In most cases, hazardous environmental conditions at border crossings were to blame, resulting in drowning, hypothermia, and dehydration, among other maladies (IOM 2019). The Mexico-U.S. border is one of the world’s busiest and deadliest migrant crossing locations. The nearly 2,000-mile border features predictable and diverse environmental conditions. Many of the migrant deaths occur in the Arizona deserts belonging to the Tucson border sector; although, migrant deaths are increasing in the Rio Grande sector in recent years as well.
What drive migrants to prefer a hazardous location over the safety of other border sectors? What is the nature, if any, of the self-selection among migrants in choosing hazardous crossing locations? Answers to these questions can contribute to a rethink of border enforcement policy designs.
State of the art border enforcement efforts are routinely reactive, as they are constantly responding to observed crossing choices. Knowledge about how individual- and community-level shocks can change the path of migration opens the possibility of making predictions about future pathways of migration and preemptively shoring up efforts to mitigate against border deaths – before it is too late.
“Arizona/Mexico border” by Allen Ormond is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
In a new paper (Chau, Garip and Ortiz-Bobea 2020), my co-authors and I leverage detailed individual migrant crossing histories available from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). We made three observations, using data from 1980 – 2005 when undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States was at its peak, and the deserts of the Tucson sector became a popular crossing location.
- Mexican-US migrants are not distance minimizers. In fact, we find that migrants often travel thousands of miles longer than the minimal distance required from a given origin location to the destination.
- This period marked the erection of border walls and the beginning of concerted border enforcement operations (e.g. Operation Gatekeeper) targeting safe and traditional migration crossing locations (e.g. San Diego sector).
- Multiple momentous events, including the dismantling of trade walls with the world (e.g. entry into General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)) and with neighbors across the border – North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – occurred between 1980 – 2005. In addition, the period also featured a major macro-economic crisis (e.g. Mexican Peso crisis), as well as variable and idiosyncratic shocks facing households such as weather fluctuations, and import competition exposure. These shocks can selectively impact migrants’ expectation about the long-term desirability of staying in an origin community (e.g. trade shocks on communities dependent on agriculture), as well as their short term ability to afford the often extremely high cost of migration (e.g. bad harvest for credit constrained households).
These observations challenge the often-deployed assumption that migrants choose distance-minimizing crossing sectors. In addition, this period of multiple concurrent economic shocks side-by-side major border enforcement operations presents a rare opportunity to simultaneously study the respective roles of border-sector, individual-level (e.g. education) and community-level (e.g. permanent trade shocks and idiosyncratic income shocks due to weather / trade exposure) characteristics in triggering hazardous border crossings.
To guide our empirical analysis, we wrote a random utility model of crossing location choices. The likelihood of crossing success (rewards; a function of border enforcement), and the likelihood of crossing accidents (risks; resulting in personal harm or death) are both border sector-specific. Our model generates expected utility maximizing multinomial choice probabilities of crossing via any one of the nine U.S. border sectors consistent with the predictions of the McFadden Choice Model. In addition, we find that the impact of individual- and community-level factors are (border sector) alternative specific such that the poor are more likely to select higher risk higher rewards locations in the absence of credit constraints. However, if migrants are credit constrained, a temporary negative income shock will have the opposite effect of deterring migrants from selecting high risk, high reward locations.
We test the negative selection prediction by feeding MMP crossing choices into alternative specific conditional logit regressions. Our findings confirm the negative selection of migrants in the Tucson sector relative to the San Diego sector – negative permanent income shifts (e.g. post-NAFTA in communities where agriculture was the mainstay; fewer years of education) compel migrants to choose the Tucson sector over San Diego. This also offers suggestive evidence that during this time period, migrants viewed the Tucson sector as a crossing location with higher risk cum reward profile relative to the historically popular San Diego because of the ease of crossing there. Interestingly, this pattern of negative selection disappears after 2008, when the Secure Fence Act reinforced border enforcement in the Tucson sector, thus potentially discounting the perceived migration reward with risk likelihood in the sector. Interestingly, negative idiosyncratic shocks (e.g. perverse rainfall shocks, import exposure shift share) have the opposite effects, consistent with migrants operating under binding credit constraints.
It is our aim that this paper stimulates interest in devoting further research efforts in the area, for open questions still abound. We understand that migration is mediated by social networks. Networks create opposing tensions by potentially raising the perceived benefits of migration, while raising awareness about the dangers of crossing. Which one dominates?
Alternatively, a well-known consequence of stricter border enforcement is that the historical circular and temporary migration patterns by individual migrants have increasingly been replaced by one-way and permanent flows often involving whole families. Now, what are the triggers that compel entire families with young children to pursue hazardous border crossings?
References
Chau, Nancy, Filiz Garip, and Ariel Oritiz-Bobea. 2021. “On the Triggers of Hazardous Border Crossing: Evidence from the Mexican-US Border.” [Wait for working paper #]
International Organization for Migration. 2019. Fatal Journeys Volume 4: Missing Migrant Children. International Organization for Migration.
