Search

As the preferred theory for understanding international migration, social capital theory (SCT) structures current debate about Mexican population growth in new US metropolitan destinations. We review this literature to show that SCT does not cover the secondary migration of hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants from traditional to new US metropolitan destinations. As a complement to previous SCT applications, we develop two hypotheses about this internal migration: one that identifies the increasing growth in secondary migration relative to other Mexican migration streams to new destinations, and one that specifies ethnic economic conditions as one of the factors leading Mexicans to migrate out of traditional destinations. Data are from 140 US metropolitan areas (metros) with 2,000 or more economically active adult Mexican migrants in 1990 and 2000. Two statistical models form the analysis: a contingency table and a multi-level model applied to a specially constructed data file merging metropolitan-level data from the 1990 Census with individual-level migration behaviour in 1995–2000 from 2000 Census data. The results are consistent with existing SCT explanations of Mexican population growth in new US metropolitan destinations since the 1990s and further show that the internal migration of Mexican migrants is a powerful contributor thereto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]