The Dynamics of Border Enforcement and Inequality in Migrant-Sending Villages in Mexico

In a simple model that includes the prerequisite that migrants ac-quire capital for clandestine entry into the United States, the impact of the tripling of smuggling costs on low-income potential migrants is considered. This paper finds the migration rate in a given year is sig-nificantly reduced by an increase in coyote fees and the migration rate is not altered when the job-finding rate is held constant over the busi-ness cycle. Moreover, the escalation of the coyote fees resulted in an increase in inequality in sending villages. The findings of the model are tested by estimating the migration behavior in low-cost and high-cost migration periods controlling for the reduction in migration costs that results from more dense social networks in the United States. Commu-nities without dense social networks observed a reduction in migration among low-income potential migrants in the high-cost period. In con-trast, communities with dense social networks in the United States experienced similar rates of migration among different income groups in the low-cost and the high-cost periods. 1