Public Insecurity and International Emigration in Mexico

Liliana Meza, Consejo Nacional de Población
Michael Feil, Independent Researcher

Based on municipal data, obtained from the 2010 Census, this paper shows a positive correlation between public insecurity in Mexico and international migration from the most violent areas of the country. This suggests that insecurity is promoting emigration to the US, while total flows are decreasing. Public insecurity is here measured by local homicide rates. Theoretically we argue that Environments of Insecurity (EOI) are behind flows of people moving to safer places. These movements differ from those that take place for economic reasons in the sense that the groups that are able to make them are the most affected by turmoil, despite their socio-economic status. Given that northern and highly developed regions have been most hardly hit by organized crime, our work suggests that a new kind of migrants is arriving from Mexico to the US, creating socio-demographic pressure in certain receiving regions.