Mexican-Born Persons’ Earnings and Settlement in New Destinations: A Decomposition Analysis

Mark A. Leach, University of California, Irvine
Frank D. Bean, University of California, Irvine

In the 1990s, the proportion of Mexican-born persons residing outside the five traditional destination states of Mexican migration (AZ, CA, IL, NM and TX) increased from 10 percent to almost 25 percent. Does increased dispersion to new destinations facilitate socioeconomic incorporation for the Mexican-born population? What are the implications of settlement in new destinations on individual incorporation? Preliminary results show that at the national level, group dispersion contributed to slower earnings growth among Mexican-born persons and that their relative earnings declined at a faster rate than what might have occurred had they not dispersed, ceteris paribus. At the regional level, earnings among Mexican-born persons in new destinations, although lower in absolute terms, appear to be higher relative to earnings among non-Latino white persons. These results add a new dimension to previous findings that attribute slow wage growth to structural and compositional factors without considering geographic distribution.