Migration opportunities and human capital investments

We examine how shocks to migration opportunities affect schooling outcomes in origin communities. We focus on the migration between Mexico and the United States, and exploit the expansion of the Secure Communities program in the US—a federal data-sharing program that substantially increased the risk of deportation for illegal migrants—as an exogenous shock to the attractiveness of illegal migration. Our results suggest that the Secure Communities program increased attendance, enrollment, and educational attainment in municipalities that had stronger migration-network links with counties in the US that adopted the program early-on relative to municipalities that had ties with US counties that introduced the policy somewhat later. These results are consistent with the interpretation that the Secure Communities program raised the returns to education for prospective migrants by making low-skill migration to the US less attractive.