Mexican migration to the United States has been a very important issue throughout the twentiethcentury, and its relevance has reached unprecedented levels during the last two decades. Even thoughthere is a huge body of literature that analyses many different aspects of this phenomenon, theeconomic performance of migrants with respect to the Mexican labour markets has received very littleattention. This paper aims at filling this gap by presenting new evidence on the effect that migration tothe United States has on labour market outcomes of Mexican workers. It uses data from the MexicanNational Survey of Urban Labour (ENEU) for the period 1994-2002. Among other advantages, thepanel structure of the survey is ideal for minimizing the problems of self-selection bias that arecommon in most of the alternative data sources. Fixed-effects estimation indicates that Mexicanworkers that migrate temporarily to the United States obtain significantly higher earnings in the U.S.labour market than in the Mexican one during the period of migration. They also tend to work longerhours and face a generally higher likelihood of non employment during the period of return migration.Finally, the gains from temporary migration are lower for more skilled workers and for thosemigrating from the most distant regions in Mexico, relative to the United States.
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Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0804.
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