Estimating internal migration in contemporary Mexico and its relevance in gridded population distributions

Abstract

Given downward trends in fertility and mortality, population dynamics –and thus the estimation of spatially-explicit population dynamics and gridded population and derivative products– are increasingly sensitive to mobility processes and their changes in spatiality. In this paper, we present a procedure to produce origin-destination intermunicipal/intercounty and interstate migration matrices, briefly discussing their use and application in gridded population products. To illustrate our approach, we produce total and sex-specific matrices with information from the 2000 and 2010 Mexican Census long-form 10% surveys. We share the code required to reproduce the extraction of these and for potentially at least another 122 country-periods based on harmonized publicly-available data from IPUMS International, which allow for the addition of ancillary social and economic data and individual and household levels, or IPUMS Terra, which further allow for GIS-based mapping, visualization, and manipulation and for the merging of important contextual, e.g., environmental, data. Besides discussing the likely limitations of these measures, using official projections from the Mexican government, we illustrate how migration/mobility data improve the estimation of spatial/gridded population dynamics. We wrap up with a call for the collection of more adequate, spatially-explicit data on residential mobility and migration globally.