Abstract
Recent studies have found international migrants from developing countries such as Mexico to be negatively selected by education; that is, they are less educated than those who stay behind. Moving beyond the question of whether migrants are negatively selected by education overall, I examine how migrants are selected compared with others in similar jobs. Using data from a nationally representative panel survey of Mexican households, I find that men who migrate abroad have significantly higher levels of education than nonmigrants in the same occupation. Because men who are overeducated for their occupation tend to receive lower wages than those employed in occupations commensurate with their education, and are also more dissatisfied with their jobs, overeducation may encourage men to emigrate. Results from the regression models, which account for differential selectivity into employment, indicate that internal migrants within Mexico also have higher educational levels than nonmigrants in the same occupation prior to migrating but comparable levels of education afterward. Migrating internally, therefore, appears to allow men to improve their occupational placement. Finally, I examine changes in migrants’ education over time and find evidence that the education-occupation mismatch has increased among Mexican emigrants in the years following the 2008 U.S. recession.
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Notes
The level of required education for a particular occupation is frequently operationalized as the average education for all workers in that occupation. Quintini (2011) referred to this as the “statistical approach,” and Hartog (2000) referred to it as one based on “realized matches.” Some studies have attempted to define the required education based on an a priori classification by experts or by the workers themselves (McGoldrick and Robst 1996). Although using the mean educational level has several limitations, it is difficult to find expert or self-assessed measurements that are sufficiently reliable and consistent over time (Hartog 2000).
As discussed later, however, an actual reduction in the overeducation of Mexican men after migrating internationally is not strictly necessary for overeducation to increase the odds of emigration. The lower wages and frustration of being underplaced for their education may make workers less attached to their current jobs and therefore more mobile. Various factors could explain why underplaced migrants would choose to emigrate even if migration does not result in better occupational placement abroad. Migrants may have incorrect information about their prospects in the U.S. labor market. Alternatively, other factors, including the expectation of higher wages and greater occupational mobility in the United States, may compensate for the low occupational placement abroad.
This measurement timing is particularly important for in-migrants because it may take individuals who recently migrated to a community some time to be incorporated into the labor market. On the other hand, international emigrants and internal out-migrants might change jobs in anticipation of moving. Results from alternative models using information from the first available wave instead of the last were consistent with those reported here.
Mexican women are less likely to emigrate independently but more likely to emigrate for family reunification (Cerrutti and Massey 2001; Donato 1993; Donato and Patterson 2004). Job dissatisfaction as a result of a mismatch between their level of education and their occupation will therefore have a smaller effect on women’s decisions to migrate abroad. Also, despite their increasing participation in the labor market, Mexican women continue to be employed at lower rates than men, potentially leading to an additional selection bias (see the upcoming discussion on selection into employment).
The categories of internal in-migrants and out-migrants are not mutually exclusive because it is possible for the same individual to move into the household in one quarter and migrate out in a later quarter during the same year of observation. These repeated migrants account for 5.3 % of all out-migrants and 10.8 % of all in-migrants. The same is true among international migrants. Repeated international migrants account for 5.8 % of all emigrants and 10.8 % of all return migrants.
Fixed-effects models were also tested using all 32 Mexican states, leading to similar results.
As shown by Stolzenberg and Relles (1997), under some conditions, Heckman sample selection models may lead to inaccurate estimates of regression coefficients. The main problem arises when the selection hazard is nearly indistinguishable from the predictors in the model. Under those conditions, problems associated with multicollinearity may arise. Fortunately, the extremely large sample size in the models tested as well as the use of a strong instrument help mitigate the potential for estimation problems.
See Table 4 in the appendix for the complete results, including those for the first-stage equation.
Any inference regarding the combined effect of return migrant selectivity and work experience abroad based on a comparison of the educational attainment of return migrants and current emigrants assumes that changes in emigrant selectivity over time are either small, or that such changes are largely captured by other predictors in the model—specifically, men’s age. If emigrants became more positively selected by education over time, then current emigrants will be more educated than the stock of immigrants living in the United States. The difference in the coefficients of emigrants and return migrants in Table 2 would then provide a negatively biased estimate of the combined effect of return migrant selectivity and work experience abroad.
In a separate ancillary analysis not presented here, I used propensity score matching in an attempt to adjust for the selectivity of return migration, thereby isolating the effect of migrants’ work experience abroad. The results of the treatment effects models, in which return migrants were matched as close as possible with emigrants on a standard set of covariates of migration, indicated that the experience of migrating abroad resulted in an increase of 0.2 years of education relative to other men in the same occupation. Although not definitive, this ancillary analysis suggests that the migration experience results in a slight underplacement of men based on their education net of selectivity.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the author (R03-HD080774), as well as a grant to the Maryland Population Research Center (R24-HD041041).
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Villarreal, A. The Education-Occupation Mismatch of International and Internal Migrants in Mexico, 2005–2012. Demography 53, 865–883 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0470-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0470-1