The Mexican migration phenomenon is one of the largest and most studied in the literature. Despite the fact that
intrinsic motivations of migrants as well as the effect of the US migration policies have been thoroughly revised,
there seems to be little evidence regarding the effect of the Mexican government's role. Motivated by a simple
game theoretic model, this paper's objective is to stress the importance of the Mexican authorities in determining
the migration decision by exploiting the heterogeneity in local development outcomes to estimate the probability of
migrating. To control for unobservable characteristics of migrants, a willingness to migrate variable is used. The
results suggest that the domestic government should not be disregarded when studying migration patterns.