Work, Inequality, and Gender: Migration and Mobility in Twenty-First Century Mexico

Over the last two decades migration between Mexico and the United States has undergone a profound transformation. While circular migration has long been characteristic of the U.S.-Mexico system, the great recession and increased interior and border enforcement by the U.S. Government escalated return migration to Mexico. Moreover, returnees are increasingly opting to settle in Mexico rather than return to the United States. Between 2005 and 2014, 2.4 million Mexican immigrants returned home from the United States, resulting in a 10 percent decline in the U.S. Mexican-born population. During the same period, annual Mexican migration to the United States fell by 70 percent. Escalating return migration has motivated considerable research on the labor market reintegration of migrants into their origin communities. Mexican migrants are returning to a heterogeneous set of rural and urban communities with widely varying industrial profiles and disparate labor market opportunities. The Mexican labor market is highly stratified and opportunities vary by geography. The majority of workers with fewer than twelve years of schooling consigned to work in the informal sector of the economy, a loose conglomeration of small firms that do not provide health insurance, pensions, severance pay, or written contracts, and generally employ fewer than five workers. Because of the precarious working conditions and low wages associated with the informal sector, self-employment represents the primary upward mobility pathway for individuals with low levels of formal education who face significant barriers to attaining formal employment. Business formation offers an opportunity to maximize returns to social and technical skills that workers accumulate across years of informal sector work. This dissertation consists of three independent chapters that examine mechanisms related to economic mobility across different social and geographic groups of Mexican workers: U.S. migrants and non-migrants, women and men, and more and less educated workers. The first chapter investigates how U.S. migration experience leads to self-employment among Mexican return migrants and how their self-employment affects economic mobility. To examine alternative labor market trajectories, I rely on biographical narratives, which I constructed from in-depth interviews conducted with return migrants five years apart (2010 and 2015). Using the biographical narratives, I explore the heterogeneity of self-employment among return migrants and associated variations in their reasons for traveling to the United States and economic mobility upon return to Mexico. The second chapter assesses how the relationship between U.S.-migration experience and labor market mobility upon return varies by sending community context. To examine the relationship between international migration and labor market mobility by context, I draw on the biographical narratives used in Chapter 1 and additional interviews conducted in a number of rural communities. I conceptualize migration as a social process in which migrants plans and decisions evolve over time as they gain information and acquire resources across the migratory circuit: before, during, and after migration. My contextual analysis documents the ways in which migration behavior and preparation for economic activity upon return are shaped by economic opportunities in sending communities. The third chapter explores the relationship between educational attainment and business survival among self-employed Mexican men and women. I argue that the well-documented positive relationship between educational attainment and successful self-employment reflects a gradient in access to financial resources, rather than disparate human capital skills. To assess the impact of educational attainment on successful self-employment, I estimate a series of proportional hazards models of business survival using piece-wise exponential regression. To account for workers’ access to financial resources, I adjust for possession of a designated business structure outside the home and receipt of formal or informal financial support to establish the business.Doctor of Philosoph