Just as English skills might allow migrants to interact more freely in U.S. labor mar- kets, one’s legal status while a migrant might also shape the opportunities that one has
to accumulate skills while abroad. We fi nd evidence of a greater return to documented migration experience, and a greater propensity for documented migrants to acquire
job- relevant work experience appears to drive this result.
II. Literature on Return Migration and Skill Upgrading
There is a large literature on the determinants and effects of migration, and Mexican migration in particular. Hanson 2006 offers a comprehensive survey
of the work on Mexico. Much of this literature addresses the selection of migrants observed in the United States. While our empirical work does not directly engage this
issue, later we will place our results in the context of that literature see the appendix. Rather, here we restrict our attention to the theoretical and empirical work on return
migration and skill upgrading.
A number of studies, including Borjas and Bratsberg 1996, Dustmann and Weiss 2007, and Dustmann, Fadlon, and Weiss 2011, develop theoretical models of tem-
porary migration in which migrants acquire additional skills while working abroad that are rewarded in the home country. If the return to such skill is suffi ciently high, then
this mechanism provides an incentive for individuals to return home. As Domingues Dos Santos and Postel- Vinay 2003 argue, this effect of temporary migration may
help to expand a source country’s human capital stock and increase its rate of eco- nomic growth. Mayr and Peri 2009 further link this mechanism to the literature
on the “brain gain” by developing a model of return migration, skill upgrading, and endogenous schooling to analyze the conditions under which temporary migration
opportunities can raise the education level of a sending country.
While there is an existing empirical literature on temporary migration and skill up- grading, it tends to focus on the European experience. De Coulon and Piracha 2005
analyze data from Albanian workers and fi nd that the return migrants in their sample are negatively selected on the basis of premigration earnings, but experience a wage
premium as a result of temporary migration. Using Hungarian data, Co, Gang, and Yun 2000 conclude that time spent abroad improves the labor market performance
of female migrants, but not the performance of male migrants. Barrett and O’Connell 2001 and Barrett and Goggin 2010 also fi nd a premium for return migrants in
Ireland.
While the high volume of recent intra- European migration certainly justifi es the attention paid to temporary migration and skill upgrading in Europe, relatively little
research assesses the skill- upgrading hypothesis in the context of Mexican migration to the United States. Beginning with the Bracero guest worker program 1942–64,
Mexico- U.S. migration has been distinguished by a high propensity for return migra- tion Massey, Durand, and Malone 2003. Although much has been written on the
development impact of migrants’ remittances in Mexico
3
, the possibility of skill up- grading on the part of return migrants has not received much attention. The MMP
3. For examples, see Woodruff and Zenteno 2007 and Durand, Parrado, and Massey. 1996.
data contain very rich information about migration experience over the life cycle, which is valuable in exploring the return to migration experience. Zahniser and Green-
wood 1998 use an early version of the MMP with fewer observations dominated by high- migration communities and fi nd a large positive return to migration experience.
Alternately, using data from the 2000 Mexican census, Lacuesta 2010 fi nds that migrants tend to earn about 7–10 percent higher wages than nonmigrants upon return-
ing. However, Lacuesta does not fi nd that wages grow with experience, and interprets this as evidence that the return migrant premium refl ects self- selection rather than skill
upgrading. While the Census data has the advantage of being nationally representative, it only provides data on the duration of the last trip to the United States taken within
the last fi ve years. We fi nd that these data limitations have substantial consequences for the estimation of returns to migration experience when we censor the MMP data
in a similar way.
III. A Simple Model of Temporary Migration
