Migrating Alone or With Family? Mental Health Among Internal and US Return Migrants in Mexico

Between 2010 and 2015, more than one million Mexican migrants returned to Mexico from the United States. US return migrants are disadvantaged in terms of health compared to stayers in the destination country and compared to nonmigrants. However, research has rarely considered whether this also holds for internal return migrants. In addition, we know little about heterogeneity in the health of return migrants, particularly whether health differs depending on whether individuals migrated with family members or not. Using representative panel data for the Mexican population from the Mexican Family Life Survey, this article makes several contributions. First, a mental health penalty is found for both US return migrants and internal return migrants compared to nonmigrants in Mexico. Second, I find health disadvantages for return migrants who migrated alone or alone with a child. Conversely, migration with a partner is not significantly related to mental health. A strength of the analytical approach is that longitudinal data, and more specifically individual fixed-effects models and coarsened exact matching, are used to account for important parts of selection into migration. Overall, this article shows that who individuals migrate with is strongly related to mental health after migrants return home.