Cuban Migration to the United States and the Educational Self-Selection Problem

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)IntroductionUntil the early twentieth century, Cuba was considered a country of immigrants. Cuban people have been shaped by three major migration flows: European (mainly Spanish), African and Chinese, the most important being the Spanish power, involving around one and a half million people (Perez de la Riva 2000). In the second half of the nineteenth century, one-third of the Cuban population was born outside the island.From 1850 to 1899, 900,000 immigrants entered Cuba, primarily Spanish immigrants, representing 90 per cent of European immigration: mainly men working in the sugar and tobacco industry (Perez de la Riva 2000). In 1899, 10.97 per cent of the Cuban population was born abroad, 81 per cent of which were male (Demographic Yearbook of Cuba 1961 [1965]). From 1902 to 1932, 1.25 million immigrants entered Cuba, of which 800,000 were Spanish.After 1926, immigration declined until becoming insignificant in 1930. The global crisis of 1929 and the subsequent collapse of the sugar industry in the early years of the 1930s resulted in the loss of the immigration country status that characterised Cuba up until then (Aja Diaz 2002). In 1953, the proportion of people born abroad dropped to 3.95 per cent (Demographic Yearbook of Cuba 2010).Cuba's external migration rate, defined as the ratio of the difference in the number of immigrants and emigrants with respect to average population, per 1,000 population has been negative for several decades. In the last 30 years, it reached its lowest level in 1980 and 1994. In 1980, the figure reached 14.6 per 1,000 and in 1994 4.4 per 1,000 (Demographic Yearbook of Cuba 2010), coinciding with two major waves of migration from Cuba to the US, the first known as the Puente Maritimo del Mariel and the second as the Crisis de los Balseros.US has been for Cuba, and for other Latin American countries, the main destination of migration. The US Census for 2010 revealed that 50.5 million people (16.36% of the entire population) in the US are Hispanics, and this number rose from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010 (US Census Bureau 2010). Of these Hispanics, 1.12 million were born in Cuba, representing 3 per cent of foreigners living in the US (Motel and Patten 2012).Based on this data, the aim of this article is to analyse the characteristics, mainly educational, of Cubans who have emigrated to the US and compare them with those of Cubans who have remained in Cuba. In this way, we intend to address the self-selection problem among Cuban emigrants to the US in terms of educational levels and analyse the importance of educational levels on the probability of Cuban migration.The self-selection problem means that rational agents optimise their decision to participate in different markets, work, education, migration, etc. (Hotz 2011), and therefore, the migrants choose markets that offer more attractive expectations. Roy's (1951) model was the first to address this problem, analysing how individuals optimise their decision to belong to one group or another in a given market, depending on their skills.Self-selection not only depends on the unobservable characteristics of an individual such as ability, motivation, relatives or friends in the US (Borjas 1987) or access to financial resources (Chiquiar and Hanson 2005) but mainly depends on observable characteristics such as education.If there is a positive relationship between migration and education, that is, more educated persons migrate, we could be talking about the existence of human capital flight. If the migration of highly skilled labour is permanent, this process results in an increase in the growth potential of the receiving country of migrants and may represent a loss to the country of origin (Albo and Ordaz Diaz 2011).The self-selection problem of Cuban migrants has not been addressed since Borjas (1991) in the context of migration to the US from different countries, including Cuba. …