On the basis of recent data for Mexico, the largest source of migrants to the United States, we found generally weak support for the healthy migrant hypothesis.
The literature suggests men and women may have different preferences. This paper exploits a social experiment in which women in treatment households were given a large public cash transfer (PROGRESA). In an effort to disentangle the effect of additional income in the household from the effect of changing the distribution of income within the household, the impact of PROGRESA income on savings and investments decisions is compared with all other income sources (after taking into account participation in the program). Additional money in the hands of women is spent on small livestock (which are traditionally managed and cared for by women), improved nutrition and on child goods (particularly clothing). Among single headed households, PROGRESA income is not treated differently from other income. Direct evidence on inter-temporal preferences gathered in the Mexican Family Live Survey indicates that women are more patient than males when thinking about the future. Taken together, the results suggest that PROGRESA income results in a shift in the balance of power within households and women allocated more resources towards investments in the future.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to assess the link between migrant networks and becoming overweight or obese and 2) to explore the pathways by which migrant networks may contribute to the increasing overweight and obese population of children in Mexico. Using two waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), we find that children and adolescents (ages 3 to 15) living in households with migrant networks are at an increased risk of becoming overweight or obese over the period of observation, relative to their peers with no migrant networks. Sedentary behavior and household-level measures of economic wellbeing explain some of the association between networks and changes in weight status, but the role of extended networks remains significant. Community-level characteristics related to migration do not account for any of the observed relationship between household-level networks and becoming overweight or obese.
Although many studies have attempted to examine the consequences of Mexico-U.S. migration for Mexican immigrants’ health, few have had adequate data to generate the appropriate comparisons. In this article, we use data from two waves of the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) to compare the health of current migrants from Mexico with those of earlier migrants and nonmigrants. Because the longitudinal data permit us to examine short-term changes in health status subsequent to the baseline survey for current migrants and for Mexican residents, as well as to control for the potential health selectivity of migrants, the results provide a clearer picture of the consequences of immigration for Mexican migrant health than have previous studies. Our findings demonstrate that current migrants are more likely to experience recent changes in health status—both improvements and declines—than either earlier migrants or nonmigrants. The net effect, however, is a decline in health for current migrants: compared with never migrants, the health of current migrants is much more likely to have declined in the year or two since migration and not significantly more likely to have improved. Thus, it appears that the migration process itself and/or the experiences of the immediate post-migration period detrimentally affect Mexican immigrants’ health.
Nonmigrant family members play a central role in facilitating Mexico-U.S. migration by maintaining families, sustaining social relationships, and overseeing household economic organization in sending communities. This study investigates changes to the emotional wellbeing of nonmigrant mothers when their partners reside in the United States. We hypothesize that partner migration affects mothers’ wellbeing through three pathways: directly via the toll of spousal separation, and indirectly via changes to the economic profile of the sending household and through changes to mothers’ household responsibilities. We test these relationships using data on 2,813 mothers aged 18-44 in 2002 and measured in three waves (2002, 2005, 2009) of the Mexican Family Life Survey. We employ a fixed-effect estimation strategy that improves causal attribution of women’s wellbeing to spousal residential location. We find evidence of increases in some forms of distress—sadness, crying, difficulty sleeping—when spouses are in the United States but no meaningful increase in depressive symptomology. Though partner emigration shifts several aspects of women’s lives in sending households, changes to household resources or time allocation do not account for the moderate shifts in emotional duress associated with spousal absence. Importantly, additional tests reveal that we would observe large and significant associations between spousal migration and mothers’ emotional wellbeing using a less rigorous estimation strategy, raising caution about the interpretation of cross-sectional studies evaluating wellbeing in sending homes.
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