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Objective and Subjective Variables Behind the Working Conditions of Tertiary-Educated Mexican Migrants in the USA

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Abstract

This paper contributes to the field of study of skilled migration by employing a different database from the one commonly used to study labor-market placement; our database was collected through an online questionnaire answered by Mexican migrants with tertiary education living in the USA. Through analysis of a set of both objective and subjective variables (not available in any other official database), we developed a statistical profile of their working and income conditions (high, medium, and low), and we corroborate much of what is in the literature, that is, that the concept of human capital is insufficient for analyzing the job outcomes of tertiary-educated migrants. We find the variables that increase the probability of tertiary-educated migrants’ income falling within the high-income stratum for both men and women are having a command of English and having a job offer prior to arrival in the USA. Other variables matter for men but not for women (and vice versa); for example, confidence in studies undertaken in Mexico mattered only for men. While being a professional or an entrepreneur/manager increases the probability of high income for both men and women, men excel in the market with STEM and econ-business degrees while women excel only in econ-business. For both men and women’s income, feeling discriminated against because of having a non-native accent decreases the likelihood of being in the high-income bracket. The perception of ethnic discrimination, however, affects only women’s income in a similar way.

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Notes

  1. The term “tertiary-educated” migrants is used throughout this paper. To date, most of the literature has referred to this category of migrants as “skilled migrants”; however, the literature has also questioned the term and discussed its definition. Here we prefer using “tertiary-educated” migrants because our definition is based on migrants having university studies.

  2. The criterion of “arrived 25 years or older” is an approximation to filter out those who arrived as children/adolescents and did their tertiary studies in the USA.

  3. Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia.

  4. The survey was conducted using Qualtrics software, a specialized online survey package. As a reference, see Vázquez Maggio & Domínguez Villalobos (2017), an online preliminary report with the results of the survey (available at: http://ru.economia.unam.mx/id/eprint/55).

  5. The general characteristics of this sample are shown in Table 6 in the Appendix.

  6. The income brackets are defined as “low-income” if the migrant´s annual income is less than US$36,000, as “middle-income” if it is between US$36,000 and US$99,000, and as “high-income” if it is equal or higher than US$100,000.

  7. We remind our audience that one aspect of the participant selection criteria was that individuals must have completed their bachelor’s degree in Mexico.

  8. We are not posing any suggestion of causality rather, at this point, we are only examining the nature of the relationship between income and feelings of discrimination.

  9. Of course, there are other related factors such as skin color and phenotype, clothing, consumption patterns, among others, that we did not explore because they are beyond the scope of this study.

  10. The results of the model are satisfactory. According to the LR test, all the coefficients are statistically significant in both models. The pseudo R squared indicates that the level of improvement of this model is 27.25% with respect to a model with only the intercept. Furthermore, according to the R count, the model correctly explains 75.73% of the values of the dependent variable for the male model. In the regression of female model, the pseudo R squared is 17% and the R count 14% tertiary-educated migrants and 65% in the regression of male tertiary-educated migrants.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the generous resources provided by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México UNAM through the PAPIIT project IN305218. Also, the authors thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Economía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, Ciudad de México, Mexico

    Lilia Domínguez Villalobos & Mónica Laura Vázquez Maggio

  2. Facultad de Contaduría y Administración, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Santiago de Querétaro, Qro, Mexico

    Flor Brown Grossman

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  1. Lilia Domínguez Villalobos
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Correspondence to Mónica Laura Vázquez Maggio.

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Table 6

Table 6 Ordered logistic regression. Standard errors
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Domínguez Villalobos, L., Vázquez Maggio, M.L. & Brown Grossman, F. Objective and Subjective Variables Behind the Working Conditions of Tertiary-Educated Mexican Migrants in the USA. Int. Migration & Integration 23, 1063–1090 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-021-00871-9

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