Yusuf Bomba, Class of 2026

This summer I worked with Professor Sarah Pearlman and looked at the changing rates and demographics of migration from Mexico to the United States, and how they impacted the labor market. During the first half of the project, I focused mainly on the changing demographics of the people migrating. I began by collecting census data and ACS data from IPUMS and by cleaning data from the Mexican Migration Project. The Mexican Migration Project collected retrospective data from different regions in Mexico about peoples first and last trips to the United States, and began collecting data in 1986. Once I had collected data, I utilized Stata to create line graphs, bar graphs, and scatter plots to outline how the demographics of people migrating have changed since the early 1900s and found that, on average, migrants in recent decades were older and more educated. Through this process I also found just how impactful the Bracero program was in influencing the flow of migration and the impact on the labor force between 1942 and 1964. The Bracero program was a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico that provided temporary agricultural visas to Mexican workers and allowed them to come to the United States and return to Mexico multiple times over the course of two decades.

We also took a trip to Ellis Island to visit the immigration museum. At this museum, I was able to learn more about the general migration patterns in the US and much of my own research was confirmed by information present at the museum.

I then moved over to mapping migration by US state to outline the areas in the US that were most impacted by the flows of migrants. This then evolved into mapping the flows of migrants by state and by industry as I sorted the data into groups of those working in agriculture, construction, and manufacturing. I concluded by beginning to look at wage regressions for Mexican born workers in the United States.