Fernando Riosmena

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Colorado Boulder

Scholarship in Migration Studies and Forced Migration and Refugee Studies recognizes that migration and immobility can be the result of various, mixed motivations. Empirical work and conceptualizations of forced and “lifestyle” migration consider some of this complexity. Scholarship on immobility has also examined various, mixed motives. Finally, m...

For this special issue of the International Migration Review, we develop and provide a comprehensive organizing framework, the Migration Intersections Grid (MIG), to inform and guide migration research in and through the remainder of the twenty-first century. We motivate our work by conducting a high-level scoping review of summaries and syntheses...

Migration theorizing has coalesced around sets encompassing several frameworks. Despite many contributions of these collections, contemporary migration theorizing exhibits three important shortcomings, which this paper aims to address. First, sets of theories have traditionally not explicitly and jointly addressed fundamental questions in migration...

Growing numbers of countries are including ethnoracial questions on their national censuses, spawning new scholarship on the politics of state classification and ethnoracial stratification. However, these literatures have generally not focused on how alignment or misalignment between state and popular conceptualizations of ethnoracial categories af...

Place of origin and place of current residence may shape migrants' health-related behaviors. Using the nationally-representative US New Immigrant Survey (n = 7930), we examined associations between country of origin, state of residence, and dietary changes among foreign-born adults. 65% of migrants reported dietary change since immigration (mean sc...

Despite increased incidence and severity of climate shocks associated with climate change, observed levels of adaptation remain low. To assess if individuals adapt to the heat-induced crop losses of neighboring households in rural, agriculturally reliant communities, we integrate panel socioeconomic and demographic data from rural Mexico with high...

A 2011 Foresight report by the UK Government Office for Science introduced and raised questions and concerns about trapped populations. Conceptualized as consisting of actors who are highly vulnerable to climate and environmental stressors given limited resources (economic, social), trapped populations lack the capacity to adapt to these stressors...

This study examines the association of changes in weight status from teen to young adult ages with the number of ideal cardiovascular health (CVH) and clinical CVH metrics by adulthood. We hypothesized that increases in weight status from teen to young adult ages are associated with less ideal CVH metrics in adulthood. Data from a subset of partici...

In recent decades, an increasing number of Latin American countries have included ethnoracial questions on their censuses, giving rise to unprecedented data on monoracial and multiracial forms of classification. In Mexico, the government launched a count of its black population for the first time in the nation’s history in 2015, in addition to its...

Objectives On average, U.S. immigrants experience increases in body mass during their time in the country. These changes are related to important shifts in diet post immigration but could also continue to be influenced by sending-area environments. We assess the level of variance in dietary change that is attributable to country of origin and U.S....

Climate change and attendant weather events are global phenomena with wide-ranging implications for migration and health. We argue that while these issues are inherently interrelated, little empirical or policy attention has been given to the three-way nexus between climate vulnerability, migration, and health. In this Review, we develop a conceptu...

Body mass index (BMI) is generally used to classify adiposity. Despite the fact that the consequences of adiposity for chronic health accumulate and manifest over time, most population health research exploring the implications of high BMI measures only its recent intensity. Some studies have used retrospective measures involving maximum weight, an...

This project examines the relationship between migration, population, and economic processes, and forest cover change in Mexico from 2001 to 2010. Using multiple regression analyses with remotely-sensed, significant (p < 0.10) change in woody vegetation from 2001 to 2010 as our dependent variable, we explore how environmental, migration, demographi...

The migration literature shows that individuals whose siblings have migrated abroad are more likely to migrate, yet we know little about sibling migrant networks. We use MMP and MAFE-Senegal survey data to compare migration patterns in two very disparate contexts (Mexico and Senegal) in an attempt to assess the scope, manner, and generalizability o...

Objectives: Pre- and post-migration environments have differing demographic, social and economic characteristics which can affect health (Figure 1). What level of variance in bodyweight is attributable to individual-, country of origin-, and state of resettlement-level factors? Methods: We test what portion of the variance (as captured through i...

Given downward trends in fertility and mortality, population dynamics –and thus theestimation of spatially-explicit population dynamics and gridded population and derivativeproducts– are increasingly sensitive to mobility processes and their changes in spatiality. In thispaper, we present a procedure to produce origin-destination intermunicipal/int...

Previous research has linked increasing climate-change-related variability to Mexico-US migration, but only under particular climatic/social conditions and periods of high irregular migration. Using the 2000 and 2010 Mexican censuses, we examine this environment-migration nexus across a broader set of socioecological contexts and during periods of...

This paper examines the gendered roles of sibling position and network‐derived social capital in Mexican and Senegalese international migration. We investigate how men's and women's migration decisions are associated with their position within the nuclear family before and after accounting for nuclear family migrant networks. Crucially, we also est...

Compared to the overwhelming emphasis on the causes of international migration, less attention has been paid to immigrant destination choice. Studies which have addressed destination outcomes are generally quantitative in nature and have focused on macro-level explanations. In this article, we adopt a qualitative approach to examine undocumented Me...

Hispanics in the United States (and foreign-born Hispanics in particular) have relatively favorable health given their lower socioeconomic status compared to, for example, non-Hispanic whites. This phenomenon is often called the Hispanic health paradox (HHP). This study examines whether the previously documented HHP in hypertension prevalence exten...

Migration provides a strategy for rural Mexican households to cope with, or adapt to, weather events and climatic variability. Yet prior studies on environmental migration in this context have not examined the differences between choices of internal (domestic) or international movement. In addition, much of the prior work relied on very coarse spat...

Despite being newcomers, immigrants often exhibit better health relative to native-born populations in industrialized societies. We extend prior efforts to identify whether self-selection and/or protection explain this advantage. We examine migrant height and smoking levels just prior to immigration to test for self-selection; and we analyze smokin...

Evidence is increasing that climate change and variability may influence human migration patterns. However, there is less agreement regarding the type of migration streams most strongly impacted. This study tests whether climate change more strongly impacted international compared to domestic migration from rural Mexico during 1986–99. We employ ei...

Population: In this article, we seek to replicate this finding and test conjectures that could explain this new observed phenomenon using objective indicators of adult health by educational attainment in several groups: (1) Mexican-born individuals living in Mexico and in the United States, (2) U.S.-born Mexican Americans, and (3) non-Hispanic Ame...

Background: Longitudinal micro-level data about international migration behavior are notoriously difficult to collect, but data collection efforts have become more frequent in recent years. Comparative research of the patterns and processes of international migration, however, remains quite rare, especially that which compares across regions. Obj...

This article discusses major methodological challenges in the comparative study of the drivers of international mobility (between different times and places) when using household surveys. Noting the difference between the study of coterminous and stage-specific drivers of migration, I highlight the problems of obtaining data with adequate represent...

In the face of climate change-induced economic uncertainties, households may employ migration as an adaptation strategy to diversify their livelihood portfolio through remittances. However, it is unclear whether such climate-related migration will be documented or undocumented. In this study we combined detailed migration histories with daily tempe...

Increasing rates of climate migration may be of economic and national concern to sending and destination countries. It has been argued that social networks—the ties connecting an origin and destination—may operate as “migration corridors” with the potential to strongly facilitate climate change-related migration. This study investigates whether soc...

Studies investigating migration as a response to climate variability have largely focused on rural locations to the exclusion of urban areas. This lack of urban focus is unfortunate given the sheer numbers of urban residents and continuing high levels of urbanization. To begin filling this empirical gap, this study investigates climate change impac...

In spite of a major economic slowdown in 2007-2009 and an increasing escalation of immigration and border enforcement in both the United States and Mexico over the last decade, unauthorized migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA, i.e., El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) has persisted. These trends are puzzling and stand in...

Purpose To distinguish the origins of higher weight status and determine when and why intra- and interracial/ethnic disparities emerge. Design The study used a longitudinal analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Setting The study was conducted in the United States. Subjects Participants were children of non-His...

To estimate changes in self-report and treatment of diabetes and hypertension between 2001 and 2012 among Mexican aged 50-80, assessing the contribution of education and health insurance coverage. The Mexican Health and Aging Study was used to estimate associations of education and insurance on prevalence and treatment of diabetes and hypertension...

Foreign- and U.S.-born Hispanic health deteriorate with increasing exposure and acculturation to mainstream U.S. society. Because these associations are robust to (static) socioeconomic controls, negative acculturation has become their primary explanation. This overemphasis, however, has neglected important alternative structural explanations. Exam...

Virtually all accounts of the state of the US immigration system point to its patently broken condition, with the presence of almost 12 million people without legal status paramount to this characterization. Because of several recent developments including continued and renewed interest in regularizing the status of most unauthorized migrants in ex...

In many rural regions of developing countries, natural resource dependency means changes in climate patterns hold tremendous potential to impact livelihoods. When environmentally-based livelihood options are constrained, migration can become an important adaptive strategy. Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we model U.S. emigration from...

Virtually all accounts of the state of the US immigration system point to its patently broken condition, with the presence of almost 12 million people without legal status paramount to this characterization. Because of several recent developments including continued and renewed interest in regularizing the status of most unauthorized migrants in ex...

Although the informal economy has grown rapidly in several developing nations, and migration and informality may be related to similar types of credit constraints and market failures, previous research has not systematically attempted to identify if migrant households are more likely to start informal and formal businesses alike and if this associa...

This study examines the ways in which the adaptive capacity of households to climatic events varies within communities and is mediated by institutional and landscape changes. We present qualitative and quantitative data from two Maasai communities differentially exposed to the devastating drought of 2009 in Northern Tanzania. We show how rangeland...

We investigate how the matrilineal vs. patrilineal origin of Mexican couples' migrant networks are associated with the aspirations to migrate and the subsequent migration behavior of each spouse. Using longitudinal data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (2002-2005) on 3,923 married couples across 139 municipalities; we estimate multi-level logist...

Environmental and climatic changes have shaped human mobility for thousands of years and research on the migration-environment connection has proliferated in the past several years. Even so, little work has focused on Latin America or on international movement. Given rural Mexico's dependency on primary sector activities involving various natural r...

Latin American immigrants to the United States come from a variety of places and, thus, disease environments. As such, their health profiles differ considerably from those of individuals born in the United States (including those of people of Hispanic descent), though not necessarily in the way one might expect. Although foreign-born Latinos come f...

This paper explores alternative future trajectories of international migration by applying a multiregional flow model to a new set of estimates of global bilateral migration flows developed by the second author. The innovations in population projections presented here are threefold: first, the projections are based on new flow estimates that are co...

In this article, we test for four potential explanations of the Hispanic Health Paradox (HHP): the "salmon bias," emigration selection, and sociocultural protection originating in either destination or sending country. To reduce biases related to attrition by return migration typical of most U.S.-based surveys, we combine data from the Mexican Heal...

Migrant flows are generally accompanied by extensive social, economic, and cultural links between origins and destinations, transforming the former's community life, livelihoods, and local practices. Previous studies have found a positive association between these translocal ties and better child health and nutrition. We contend that focusing on ch...

Previous studies find U.S. immigrants have weaker socioeconomic gradients in health relative to non-Hispanic whites and their U.S.-born co-ethnics. Several explanations have been advanced but few have been tested empirically. We use data from the Mexican Family Life Survey and the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, including longitudinal data i...

In this paper, we assess the role of policies aimed at regulating the number and age structure of elections on the size and age structure of five European Academies of Sciences. We show the recent pace of ageing and the degree of variation in policies across them and discuss the implications of different policies on the size and age structure of ac...

The geography Mexican migration to the U.S. has experienced deep transformations in both its origin composition and the destinations chosen by migrants. To date, however, we know little about how shifting migrant origins and destinations may be linked to each another geographically and, ultimately, structurally as relatively similar brands of econo...

Although Latino immigrants come from countries with high levels of inequality, their socioeconomic gradients in health are generally weaker than those among their US-born co-ethnics and much weaker than those of US-born non-Hispanic (NH) whites. We review this literature among Latin American immigrants looking at the role of: factors related to con...

In this paper, we offer a general outlook of the health of Latin Americans (with a special emphasis on Mexicans) during the different stages of the migration process to the U.S. given the usefulness of the social vulnerability concept and given that said vulnerability varies conspicuously across the different stages of the migration process. Severe...

With increasing life expectancy in the U.S., it is important to know whether a longer life expectancy means a longer healthy life span or a prolonged period of later-life morbidity. This study examines changes in lifetime without diabetes, a leading cause of morbidity in later life. Using demographic methods and nationally representative data, we e...

Available data have consistently pointed up the failure of U.S. policies to reduce undocumented migration from Latin America. To shed light on the reasons for this failure, we estimated a series of dynamic models of undocumented entry into and exit from the United States. Our estimates suggest that undocumented migration is grounded more in mechani...

In this paper, I compare the transition into legal permanent residence (LPR) of Mexicans, Dominicans, and Nicaraguans. Dominicans had the highest likelihood of obtaining residence, mostly sponsored by parents and spouses. Mexicans had the lowest LPR transition rates and presented sharp gender differentials in modes: women mostly legalized through h...

In this paper, I analyze how the association between Mexico-U.S. migration and marriage varies across socioeconomic settings in origins. Using Mexican Migration Project data and employing bilevel survival analysis with controls for socioeconomic, migrant network, and marriage market characteristics and family size, I find that single people are mos...

In 2007, IIASA and the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (VID) released a database reconstructing detailed information on levels of educational attainment by age (in five-year age groups from 15 to 65+ years), sex, and for every five years between 1970 and 2000 for 120 countries (see Lutz et al. 2007). This database...

In a hierarchical organisation of stable size the annual intake is strictly determined by the number of deaths and a statutory retirement age (if there is one). In this paper we reconstruct the population of the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1847 to 2005. For the Austrian Academy of Sciences we observe a shift of its age distribution towards ol...

En este artículo analizamos pautas de emigración y retorno de las comunidades mexicanas localizadas en regiones tradicionalmente emisoras y en nuevas comunidades de emigración. Las regiones tradicionales de origen se ubican en los Estados más occidentales de México, mientras que las nuevas están localizadas en el sur de Ciudad de México o cerca de...

En este artículo analizamos pautas de emigración y retorno de las comunidades mexicanas localizadas en regiones tradicionalmente emisoras y en nuevas comunidades de emigración. Las regiones tradicionales de origen se ubican en los Estados más occidentales de México, mientras que las nuevas están localizadas en el sur de Ciudad de México o cerca de...

This dissertation deals with three aspects of Latin America - US migration dynamics using data from the Mexican and Latin American Migration Projects (MMP/LAMP). First, I look at period changes in first, return, and repeated migration probabilities while looking at differences between traditional and non-traditional origins in Mexico using a parity...

In this paper, we investigate how the gendered origin of migrant networks (i.e. matrilineal vs. patrilineal) is associated with aspirations to migrate and subsequent migration behavior. Using longitudinal data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS), we follow 3,923 married couples across 139 municipalities over the 2002-2005 period. We find th...