Beyond Chapala and Cancún: Grappling with the Impact of American Migration to Mexico

Abstract

Over the past two decades, a twist in the migratory relationship between Mexico and the United States has begun to attract the attention of policy makers and scholars: a growing stream of people moving permanently or semi-permanently from the United States to Mexico. The general understanding of this phenomenon until recently has been that these migrants are wealthy retirees moving to isolated resort-type complexes in beach cities. However, the present paper demonstrates that the migration is actually heterogeneous in terms of its people, places and impacts. Thus, we argue that study of the phenomenon must be expanded to include not only a better understanding of the migrants themselves, but also the impacts on the receiving localities. To this end, we propose a framework for a research agenda, creating a typology of receiving places and the settlements within these places