The Impact of a Possible Trump Reelection on Mexican Immigration Pressures in Alternative Countries
We address the question of the impact of a possible Trump reelection on the location
choices of potential Mexican migrants. We use migration aspiration data from the
Gallup World Poll Surveys which provide the preferred location choices of Mexican
respondents before, during and after President Trump first office period. We show
that Trump presidency led to an increase in disapproval rates about the US leadership
among Mexican respondents, which in turn led to a decrease in the level of the perceived
attractiveness of the US location. Using a Cross-Nested Logit model that allows to
account for the heterogeneity in the substitution patterns between alternative locations
to the US, we simulate the impact of a possible reelection of Donald Trump based
on different scenarios about these disapproval rates. Compared to models such as the
multinomial logit, we find that such a reelection would lead (i) to a lower increase in
the number of potential migrants staying in Mexico and (ii) heterogenous increases
across countries in the number of Mexican willing to move to a specific destination. In
particular, countries such as Canada, the UK, Germany, Spain and France would face
significant higher increases in Mexican immigration pressures.