All aboard! Railroad access and Mexico-US mass migration

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2018 New Researcher Poster Prize, Economic History Society
2018 Poster Prize, International Economic History Association

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Media coverage: The Long Run

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About 100 thousand Mexican laborers crossed the border every year during the 1900s. This figure remains at similar levels today, making the Mexico-US migration the most intense and persistent of the twentieth century. While there is extensive literature addressing the Mexico-US migration in recent times, our knowledge about the factors that initially induced it is limited to few historical studies. This chapter examines the impact of railroad access on Mexican mass migration to the United States in the early twentieth century.  To overcome the endogeneity of railroad access, I implemented an identification strategy based on least cost paths. My main result—based on newly-digitized individual crossings (Oct 1906 - Sep 1910) and data from the 1910 Population Census of Mexico—shows that districts closer to a rail line had higher migration rates (2.5 more migrants per thousand inhabitants) than those farther away. My finding implies that railroad access could explain up to 60 percent of all border crossings.