U.S. Return Migration and Gendered Partnership Trajectories in Mexico

Since 2007, more people have left the United States for Mexico than vice versa, reversing a historical process that had lasted for over 50 years. Yet, return migrants remain understudied. Given the importance of family in understanding migration and return, partnership trajectories are central to return migrants' reintegration. In this paper, we use data from the 2017 and 2025 Survey of Retrospective Demographic Events (EDER) to examine the sequences of partnership formation from ages 15 to 34 among 28,690 individuals in Mexico of whom 1,064 are U.S. return migrants who emigrated for the first time between ages 15 and 23. We adopt a gendered perspective, given that the motivations, resources, and outcomes that define female and male migration are profoundly different. Our findings provide limited evidence that male return migrants are more likely to marry than non-migrants. However, migration does not substantially interfere with union formation. Although migrant men tend not to form unions while in the U.S., they postpone entering a union after return. For some men, migration may be a disruptive event: male return migrants are more than twice as likely to experience a life course marked by separation compared to non-migrants. This does not apply to women. Female return migrants are less likely to remain single and more likely to enter into early cohabitation, a pattern consistent with family-based migration. Our results shed light on the challenges of return migrants’ reintegration, in a context of increasingly restrictive U.S. immigration policies.