New Migration Destinations and Agglomeration Economies in the United States

Marcos Valdivia-López, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Luis Quintana-Romero, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Francisco Pérez-Torres, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Latino immigrants, regardless of their abilities, have been historically settled in the so called traditional migration destinations such as the State of California and others. Nevertheless, migration destinations exhibited an important geographical turn in the nineties since they started to feature regional dispersion, situation known in the literature as the emergence of "new immigration destinations." This paper contributes to the understanding of this discussion by analyzing the role of agglomeration economies, as suggested by the theoretical framework of the New Economic Geography, to explain the formation of new Latino migration destinations in the USA during the period 1980-2007. Our results show that the new migration destinations can be in part explained by agglomeration and congestion economies that have impacted firms and migrant worker mobility decisions.