Security issues and immigration flows: Drug-violence refugees, the ...

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ified. Model 1 present results without controlling for not-drug-related homicides while the rest of the specifications (Model 2 and 3) control for them. Controlling for not-drugrelated homicides does not change the results but increases the goodness of fit of the models. Drug-related violence is strongly linked to migration flows, independent of the general homicide rate in a county. Furthermore, in every specification the coefficients of drug-related homicides are larger than those of general homicides which confirms my hypothesis that Mexicans are taking migration decisions based in organized crime activities rather than in general security concerns. The reason why drug-related homicides are better predictors of migration flows than general homicides may be that drug-related homicides are a newer phenomena, not an important cause of homicides before 2004 (Rios and Shirk 2011), and leave a longer lasting impression in the communities because of their particularly violent features. Unlike general homicides, the victims of drug-related homicides are tortured and beheaded, and their bodies are dumped at the streets, hanged from pedestrian bridges, or displayed publicly next to messages directed to rivalry trafficking organizations. Model 3 adds fixed effects per states to capture changes happening at the state level that may have influenced migration dynamics —for example, we should expect citizens living in states with well publicly regarded justice systems to be less affected by drug-related violence even if the number of homicides are the same than in states where citizens are less confident of their governments.The goal of the paper is to show that outflows are correlated with organized crime activities, which is why Model 3 is considered the preferred specification. [Table 4 about here] Indeed, in all specifications, drug-related homicides are an important factor in Mexican migration outflows. In my preferred specification (model 3), drug-related homi- 12
cides increased the number of Mexicans unexpectedly migrating out of their residency counties by 220,291. Every one point increase in the rate drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants is correlated with 6.34 Mexicans fleeing their county of residency. As an example, consider the case of Tijuana; in the period from 2007 to 2008, its drug-related homicides rate changed by 31.04 points (going from 176 to 614 drug-related homicides in just one year). If the results of the model hold, an average of 5,367 Mexicans left Tijuana just during 2008 fleeing from drug-related homicides. Drug-related homicides are less robust predictors of unexpected immigration inflows actually, when fixed effects per state are added, the variable becomes insignificant. That is to say, even if drug-related homicides are correlated with people leaving their counties, this does not mean that, when deciding on where to relocate, people will feel more attracted to counties with less drug-related homicides. Counties with higher drugrelated homicides expel people but counties with lower drug-related homicides do not attract people. Other organized crime activities, particularly extortion also have had important effects in migration flows. Extortion is correlated with unexpected migration outflows —and less robustly with unexpected migration inflows. In the preferred specification, every additional case of extortion per 100,000 inhabitants increases unexpected migration outflows in 13.03 per 100,000 inhabitants. That accounts for a total of 44,401 Mexicans relocating running out of extortion. Tijuana has lost about 926 citizens because of extortion; other border cities like Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Juarez had lost 286, 334 and 221, respectively. Kidnappings were not significantly correlated with migration outflows or inflows. This result is quite robust among all models and is consistent with what we would expect given the particularities of the victims of this crime. Kidnapper pick their victims according to their wealth not by location. Because kidnapping victims are hunted, migration does not change their attractiveness as targets. Traditional, economic explanations of migration flows take the expected signs and 13
Page 1 and 2: Security issues and immigration flo
Page 3 and 4: ecently changed their residency to
Page 5 and 6: most profitable part of drug traffi
Page 7 and 8: —Reynosa citizen 2 Over the last
Page 9 and 10: curity concerns rather than by trad
Page 11: the number of college graduates is
Page 15 and 16: unexpected migration flows and refu
Page 17 and 18: Actually, the influx of immigrants
Page 19 and 20: emergency. The exodus of at least 1
Page 21 and 22: increase safety within Mexican citi
Page 23 and 24: [18] Ibarraran, Pablo and Darren Lu
Page 25 and 26: [35] Parametria. Mexico y sus Despl
Page 27 and 28: Figures Figure 1: Geographic distri
Page 29 and 30: Tables Table 1: Unexpected migratio
Page 31: Table 4: Empirical results: Drug-re

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