Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Public Use Data on Mexican and Central American Immigration - PROJECT SUMMARY This proposal requests funding for the Mesoamerican Migration Project to gather and disseminate high quality data on authorized and unauthorized migration to the U.S. from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The first two decades of the twenty-first century mark a new period in Mexico-U.S. migration. From 2007 to 2016, the estimated number of unauthorized Mexicans in the U.S. declined from 6.95 to 5.45 million. Mexico-U.S. migration has also changed from a largely circular flow of unauthorized men to a settled population of families and increasingly authorized migrants. As unauthorized migration from Mexico has declined, migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has steadily increased. From 1990 to 2015, the number of persons from these three countries resident in the U.S. grew from 975,000 to 3.0 million. The majority of this migration, like the earlier stages of Mexican migration, is unauthorized. Also similar to the case of Mexican migration, what started largely as male-led migration has increasingly involved women and children. The prospect for continued migration from Mexico and Central America remains high. The Mesoamerican Migration Project will fill an important void in the data available for studying these new migration flows. The public use data provided by this study can be used to describe, monitor and analyze current developments and long-term trends in migration, as well as inform new theory with respect to the migration of children, women and families, and the impact of adverse climatic events, crime and violence. The proposed Mesoamerican Migration Project builds on many of the core study design features of the NICHD-funded Mexican Migration Project which conducted household surveys in 174 Mexican communities from 1987 to 2019. It will provide migration data that is comparable across the four countries and backwardly comparable with four decades of survey data collected in Mexico by the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) and in Central America by the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP). Innovative features of the Mesoamerican Migration Project include: a stratified sampling plan that leverages municipal variation in levels of violence and drought; the use of referral sampling, social media, and telephone interviewing for U.S immigrant samples; parallel questionnaire content for household heads and spouses; questions on family migration and the migration of children; questions on multiple border crossings, transit through Mexico, and experiences of abuse; questions on violence and gang intimidation, crop and livestock loss, and food insecurity; compilation of weather, climate and homicide data at the municipal level; compilation of Twitter tweets on violence, weather, climatic events and migrant caravans.
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