My goal in this blog post is to use the migration crisis in Latin America to demonstrate that Tiebout might be thinking of the pattern of human movement in a backwards way. An article published today in the Financial Times reveals that the migration crisis in Latin America is intensifying, as worsening political and economic conditions drive tens of thousands up towards the US-Mexico border. I will attempt to explain how such a phenomenon does not align with Tiebout’s model in “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.”
Tiebout’s model frames human movement as people voting for certain communities, but the situation in Latin America shows that people vote against certain communities. It is not the particular expenditures of local US governments that are driving human movement. “Inequality and exclusion and very low confidence on the part of the population that conditions are going to improve” are the factors driving migration. When people are pushed away from their communities rather than drawn in, it does not make sense to use your zip code as preference revelation because families will move to communities that do not optimally meet their preferences in order to survive. In times of crisis, perhaps it makes sense to use geographic location to reveal what an individual's preferences are not.
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