Research

Transit Migration through Mexico: Evidence from The Beast (Job Market Paper)

This paper estimates the effect of transit migration on local crime victimization in Mexico. While existing research focuses on migration's consequences in destination countries, transit countries (those through which migrants pass en route to their final destination) bear social costs that remain poorly understood. Mexico is an especially important case given its role as the primary corridor for Central American migrants heading to the United States. 

I exploit spatial variation in Mexico's freight rail network, known as The Beast, to proxy for predicted migrant flows across 2,462 municipalities from 2011 to 2019. Using a two-way fixed effects design, I combine this measure with individual-level data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (ENVIPE), where victimization is measured as an indicator for whether at least one household member was victimized. I find that an increase of 10,000 predicted transit migrants raises overall crime victimization by 0.24 percentage points, a 3 percent increase relative to the mean. Effects are concentrated in property crime, particularly vehicle parts theft, with additional increases in violent crime, specifically kidnapping and rape.  

These results show that transit countries bear measurable social costs from international migration flows, a dimension that has received insufficient attention in both policy debates and academic research.