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International Journal of Population Studies

RESEARCH PAPER

Undocumented migration in response to

climate change

2
2
1*
Raphael J. Nawrotzki , Fernando Riosmena , Lori M. Hunter , and Daniel M.
3
Runfola
th
1 Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, 225 19 Avenue South, 50 Willey
Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
2 Institute of Behavioral Science, CU Population Center, University of Colorado Boulder, 1440
th
15 St. Boulder, CO 80309, USA
3 The College of William and Mary, 200 Stadium Drive, Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA

Abstract: In the face of climate change-induced economic uncertainties, households may em-
ploy migration as an adaptation strategy to diversify their livelihood portfolio through remit-
tances. However, it is unclear whether such climate-related migration will be documented or
undocumented. In this study we combined detailed migration histories with daily temperature
and precipitation information from 214 weather stations to investigate whether climate change
more strongly impacted undocumented or documented migrations from 68 rural Mexican mu-
nicipalities to the U.S. from 1986−1999. We employed two measures of climate change, the
warm spell duration index (WSDI) and precipitation during extremely wet days (R99PTOT).
Results from multi-level event-history models demonstrated that climate-related international
migration from rural Mexico was predominantly undocumented. We conclude that programs to
facilitate climate change adaptations in rural Mexico may be more effective in reducing undo-
cumented border crossings than increasing border fortification.
Keywords: climate change, environment, climate change adaptation, international migration,
undocumented migration, documentation status, rural Mexico

*Correspondence to: Raphael J. Nawrotzki, Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, 225 19 th
Avenue South, 50 Willey Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; Email: r.nawrotzki@gmail.com

Received: July 15, 2015; Accepted: August 26, 2015; Published Online: September 5, 2015
Citation: Nawrotzi R J, Riosmena F, Hunter L M, et al. (2015). Undocumented migration in response to
climate change. International Journal of Population Studies, vol.1(1): 60–74.
http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJPS.2015.01.004.

1. Introduction

Copyright: © 2015 Raphael J. Na- Climate change has the potential to strongly influence economic conditions through the
wrotzki, et al. This is an Open Access agricultural sector (Boyd and Ibarraran, 2009). For instance, in Mexico, about 80% of
article distributed under the terms of the economic losses between 1980 and 2000 have been attributed to climatic shocks
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom-
mercial 4.0 International License (http: (Saldana-Zorrilla and Sandberg, 2009). In rural areas of Mexico, households heavily de-
//creative-commons.org/licenses/by-nc/ pend on agricultural production for income and sustenance (de Janvry and Sadoulet, 2001;
4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, Winters, Davis and Corral, 2002). Similar to many households in various developing
distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is countries, rural Mexican households often lack the technological infrastructure to guard
properly cited. against adverse climate impacts (Gutmann and Field, 2010) as only about 23% of arable

International Journal of Population Studies | 2015, Volume 1, Issue 1 60