Economic arguments quantitative data and ethnographic case studies are presented to counter popular misconceptions about international labor migration and its economic consequences in Mexico. The prevailing view is that Mexico-U.S. migration discourages autonomous economic growth within Mexico at both the local and national levels and that it promotes economic dependency. However results estimated from a multiplier model suggest that the inflow of migradollars stimulates economic activity both directly and indirectly and that it leads to significantly higher levels of employment investment and income within specific communities and the nation as a whole. The annual arrival of around $2 billion migradollars generates economic activity that accounts for 10 percent of Mexicos output and 3 percent of its Gross Domestic Product. (EXCERPT)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2547388

Migradollars and development: a reconsideration of the Mexican case.

This article offers econometric evidence that income remittances sent home by family migrants stimulate household‐farm incomes indirectly by relieving credit and risk constraints on household‐farm production. A high but unequally distributed shadow value of migrant remittances appears to reinforce an equalising direct effect of remittances on the income distribution across a sample of household‐farms in rural Mexico.

The shadow value of migrant remittances, income and inequality in a household‐farm economy

Restrictive immigration policies and the militarization of external border controls by the US and the EU have failed to significantly curb immigration from Latin America and Africa. Rather, they have led to greater reliance on increasingly risky and costly irregular migration and have paradoxically encouraged permanent settlement. A commonly presented ‘smart solution’ to curb immigration is to address the perceived root causes of migration through increasing aid or liberalizing trade with origin countries. Recently, policies to stimulate remittances and to promote temporary and circular migration have also been advocated as enhancing home country development, so that these forms of migration become a medicine against illegal and permanent migration. However, besides the limited scope and credibility of such policies, empirical and theoretical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development increases people's capabilities and aspirations and therefore tends to coincide with an increase rather than a decrease in emigration, at least in the short to medium term. Under unfavourable conditions, trade, aid and remittances can be complements to, rather than substitutes for, migration also in the longer term. At the same time, demand for both skilled and unskilled migrant labour is likely to persist. Trade, aid, return migration and remittances are no short-cut ‘solutions’ to migration, and sustained immigration therefore seems likely.

Turning the tide? Why development will not stop migration.

Current, large-scale, cross-cultural migrations offer promising research targets for the study of human adaptations. The opportunities for such research, however, remain substantially unused in the mainstream of psychology. The purpose here is to provide a framework encompassing components of the migration experience to aid such research. Contextual factors in the sending and receiving societies impinge on the components of the migration experience: social networks, socioeconomic status, and culture. The components, treated as intertwining transitional experiences in migration, should be juxtaposed in research to examine their effects. Gender and age mediate the effects. The framework aims to benefit research that implicates, directly or heuristically, the experiences of persons exposed to rapid sociocultural change and the consequences of such changes in their lives.

International Migrations: A Framework for Directing Research.

Workers' remittances represent a sizeable component of international trade flows in goods and services. The paper tries to assess to what extent workers remittances are responsive to key macroeconomic variables. We first develop a simple model of altruistic transfers and show that the real exchange rate may play a crucial role in affecting the remittance behaviour of migrants. Econometric estimation of a remittance equation for a sample of five Mediterranean countries indicates that the real exchange rate is indeed a significant determinant of remittances. Further support in this respect comes from an analysis of remittance behaviour by foreign workers in Germany. We also find strong evidence to support the claim that remittances are altruistically motivated, as indicated by the systematically negative coefficient associated with recipients' income.

Workers remittances and the real exchange rate: a quantitative framework.

This paper reviews the major types of international migration and recent global and regional trends in population movements as well as conceptual issues and recent trends in the volume of remittance flows. The paper further considers the extent to which trade aid and development can be expected to stem future migration flows the role of international migration in trade in services and implications for future research. (EXCERPT)

Michael S. Teitelbaum

Papers

International migration and international trade