The Effect of Rainfall on Migration from Mexico to the United States

Abstract

There has been very little work on the impact of rainfall on migration from Mexico or even elsewhere. We use satellite data from NASA to examine the effect of the lagged level of rainfall relative to an area's historical average, on migration from small Mexican communities to the United States. Controlling for the level of education, proportion married, and historic migration levels, we find higher levels of rainfall significantly reduce Mexican migration to the United States and a 20 percentage point higher-than-normal level of rainfall leads to a predicted 10.3 percent decrease in migration.