TY - JOUR AU - Card, David AU - Lewis, Ethan G TI - The Diffusion of Mexican Immigrants During the 1990s: Explanations and Impacts JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11552 PY - 2005 Y2 - August 2005 DO - 10.3386/w11552 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11552 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11552.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Card Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall, #3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510/642-5222 Fax: 510/643-7042 E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu Ethan G. Lewis Department of Economics Dartmouth College 6106 Rockefeller Hall Hanover, NH 03755 Tel: 603/646-2943 Fax: 603/646-2122 E-Mail: ethan.g.lewis@dartmouth.edu M1 - published as David Card, Ethan G. Lewis. "The Diffusion of Mexican Immigrants During the 1990s: Explanations and Impacts ," in George J. Borjas, editor, "Mexican Immigration to the United States" University of Chicago Press (2007) AB - Mexican immigrants were historically clustered in a few cities, mainly in California and Texas. During the past 15 years, however, arrivals from Mexico established sizeable immigrant communities in many "new" cities. We explore the causes and consequences of the widening geographic diffusion of Mexican immigrants. A combination of demand-pull and supply push factors explains most of the inter-city variation in inflows of Mexican immigrants over the 1990s, and also illuminates the most important trend in the destination choices of new Mexican immigrants %u2013 the move away from Los Angeles. Mexican inflows raise the relative supply of low-education labor in a city, leading to the question of how cities adapt to these shifts. One mechanism, suggested by the Hecksher Olin model, is shifting industry composition. We find limited evidence of this mechanism: most of the increases in the relative supply of low-education labor are absorbed by changes in skill intensity within narrowly defined industries. Such adjustments could be readily explained if Mexican immigrant inflows had large effects on the relative wage structures of different cities. As has been found in previous studies of the local impacts of immigration, however, our analysis suggests that relative wage adjustments are small. ER -