TY - JOUR AU - Ibarraran, Pablo AU - Lubotsky, Darren TI - Mexican Immigration and Self-Selection: New Evidence from the 2000 Mexican Census JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11456 PY - 2005 Y2 - July 2005 DO - 10.3386/w11456 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11456 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11456.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Pablo Ibarrarán Inter-American Development Bank 1300 New York Avenue Stop B0700 Washington, DC 20577 Tel: 202-623-1561 Fax: 202-623-3694 E-Mail: pibarraran@iadb.org Darren Lubotsky Department of Economics University of Illinois at Chicago University Hall Room 728 601 South Morgan Street Chicago, IL 60607 Tel: 312/996-6240 E-Mail: lubotsky@uic.edu M1 - published as Pablo Ibarraran, Darren Lubotsky. "Mexican Immigration and Self-Selection: New Evidence from the 2000 Mexican Census ," in George J. Borjas, editor, "Mexican Immigration to the United States" University of Chicago Press (2007) AB - We use data from the 2000 Mexican Census to examine how the education and socioeconomic status of Mexican immigrants to the United States compares to that of non-migrants in Mexico. Our primary conclusion is that migrants tend to be less educated than non-migrants. This finding is consistent with the idea that the return to education is higher in Mexico than in the United States, and thus the wage gain to migrating is proportionately smaller for high-educated Mexicans than it is for lower-educated Mexicans. We also find that the degree of negative selection of migrants is stronger in Mexican counties that have a higher return to education. ER -