Ecuadorian Migration: An Ethnographic Approach to Analyzing Socio-Cultural Influences on Migration

This research project is about national and transnational migration, as experienced by one Andean Ecuadorian family, currently living in the New York Metropolitan area in the United States. Through the collection of their life histories and an analysis of literature on this particular migrant group, I explore the different cultural trends that played a role in their migration from; rural Andean towns to large urban centers, from rural communities and urban centers into the Amazon jungle and their later migration to the United States of America. Using Social Network Theory as an analytical framework, I am focusing on these individuals’ social networks, as a factor in their internal migration in Ecuador and to the United States, finding that often times, people that are not a part of their closest networks, such as acquaintances, neighbors and distant relatives can play a very influential role in creating the opportunity to migrate, through funding, loans, as well as becoming hosts to the migrants. The use of these social networks in my informants’ migration history is extracted from hours of interviews and my personal observations. Their stories are injected into the text and in their own voice, allowing the reader to hear from the migrants themselves and draw further conclusions. The findings are consistent with those of other studies on migration, asserting that social and cultural factors play an important role in the decision to migrate and migrants’ settlement patterns

Community structure detection in the evolution of the United States airport network

This is the post-print version of the Article. Copyright © 2013 World Scientific PublishingThis paper investigates community structure in the US Airport Network as it evolved from 1990 to 2010 by looking at six bi-monthly intervals in 1990, 2000 and 2010, using data obtained from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the US Department of Transport. The data contained monthly records of origin-destination pairs of domestic airports and the number of passengers carried. The topological properties and the volume of people traveling are both studied in detail, revealing high heterogeneity in space and time. A recently developed community structure detection method, accounting for the spatial nature of these networks, is applied and reveals a picture of the communities within. The patterns of communities plotted for each bi-monthly interval reveal some interesting seasonal variations of passenger flows and airport clusters that do not occupy a single US region. The long-term evolution of the network between those years is explored and found to have consistently improved its stability. The more recent structure of the network (2010) is compared with migration patterns among the four US macro-regions (West, Midwest, Northeast and South) in order to identify possible relationships and the results highlight a clear overlap between US domestic air travel and migration

Self-selection patterns in Mexico-U.S. migration: the role of migration networks

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. We first present a simple theoretical framework showing how such networks impact on migration incentives at different education levels and, consequently, how they are likely to affect the expected skill composition of migration. Using survey data from Mexico, we then show that the probability of migration is increasing with education in communities with low migrant networks, but decreasing with education in communities with high migrant networks. This is consistent with positive self-selection of migrants being driven by high migration costs, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection of migrants being driven by lower returns to education in the U.S. than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987)