The uncertain connection: free trade and rural Mexican migration to the United States

"Will a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) decrease Mexican migration to the United States, as the U.S. and Mexican governments assert, or increase migration beyond the movement that would otherwise occur, as NAFTA critics allege? This article argues that it is easy to overestimate the additional emigration from rural Mexico owing to NAFTA-related economic restructuring in Mexico. The available evidence suggests four major reasons why Mexican emigration may not increase massively, despite extensive restructuring and displacement from traditional agriculture....NAFTA-related economic displacement in Mexico may yield an initial wave of migration to test the U.S. labor market, but this migration should soon diminish if the jobs that these migrants seek shift to Mexico."     

The Mexico of "the other side": Mexican immigrants in the United States

"The purpose of this work is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of... Mexican immigrant workers for the economy and the political and cultural status quo of the United States. The Mexican immigrant workers pose a dilemma for the United States. On the one hand, the United States needs them for a better functioning of its economy. On the other, the Mexican immigrant workers represent a racial, cultural and political challenge to the American 'establishment'.... Given the magnitude of the problem which the Mexican immigrants represent and the intense debate surrounding it, the cheap labour they represent for the economy of the United States and the unsolved conflicts this provokes, are fertile ground for the analysis of the economic, political and cultural interests competing for the degree of flexibility or the amount of policing the Mexican border should have." (SUMMARY IN ENG AND FRE)     

Cultural competence in the assessment of poor Mexican families in the rural southeastern United States

Increasing numbers of poor Mexican immigrant families are settling in the rural southeastern United States. Most of these families are from isolated agrarian communities in Mexico and are headed by unskilled laborers or displaced farm workers with little education. Child welfare workers and other service providers in rural communities may be poorly prepared to address the needs of this population. This article provides an overview of the cultural, social, and family dynamics of first generation, working class Mexicans to promote cultural competency among helping professionals. An ecological perspective is used to examine the strengths that poor Mexicans bring from their culture of origin, stresses of the migratory experience and ongoing adaptation, shifts that may occur in family structure and functioning, disruptions in the family life cycle, the role of social supports in family adaptation, and effect of institutional discrimination on family well-being. Suggestions also are made for essential components of adequate in-service education.     

The political and socioeconomic context of legal and illegal Mexican migration to the United States (1942-1984)

The US manpower shortage in industry and agriculture during World War II, combined with Mexico's burden of an excess number of unemployed laborers, provided the basis for serious labor negotiations between the US and Mexico. The result was the Bracero Agreement of 1942, a bilateral agreement involving annual quotas for the temporary hiring of Mexican braceros. On the surface the program worked well. However, there were points of contention between the 2 countries: 1) in opposition to Mexico's policy of placing recruitment centers in the interior of the country, US policy called for placing the centers near the border, to reduce transportation costs; 2) Texas, which received no braceros because of racial discrimination, relied upon illegal aliens for manual labor; 3) Texas flagrantly violated a 1948 agreement when the Border Patrol welcomed aliens across the river despite Mexican officials' threats to close the border; 4) legal braceros were confronted with competition from illegals who were willing to work for a lower wage; 5) in 1954, the Border patrol physically helped aliens across the border, while Mexican policy were physically restraining them; 6) with the conclusion of a new Bracero agreement in March 1954, illegal aliens were no longer needed, so more than 1 million were apprehended and deported to Mexico's interior. The termination of the Bracero Program in 1964 gave new impetus to illegal trafficking and the number of illegals apprehended began to increase steadily in 1965. The migration flow after 1964 was influenced by the following socioeconomic conditions in Mexico: 1) unemployment, 2) very large disparities in income distribution, 3) a discrimination of the rural sector in favor of the urban in the allocation of government funds, and 4) a dependency on foreign capital and technology. Also, it was cheap labor for the US. Neither the US nor Mexico has adopted policies related to either economic development or immigration that would systematically curtail or regulate the flow of Mexican migrants to the US. However, conflicting pressures limit the policy-making process. President Carter was limited in his policy options by the needs of large-scale commercial agriculture. President Reagan's idea of a guest-worker program did not develop into legislation. Mexico's Lopez Portillo administration counted on migration to the US as a substitute for redistributive land reform in its handling of rural political pressures; the migratory flow functioned as an "escape valve" helping to dilute the effects of rapid demographic increase and preserving the status quo.     

The Effect of Rainfall on Migration from Mexico to the United States

There has been very little work on the impact of rainfall on migration from Mexico or even elsewhere. We use satellite data from NASA to examine the effect of the lagged level of rainfall relative to an area's historical average, on migration from small Mexican communities to the United States. Controlling for the level of education, proportion married, and historic migration levels, we find higher levels of rainfall significantly reduce Mexican migration to the United States and a 20 percentage point higher‐than‐normal level of rainfall leads to a predicted 10.3 percent decrease in migration.     

Undocumented Migration to the United States and the Wages of Mexican Immigrants

Prior work has documented the remarkable decline in the real wages of Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. over the past several decades. Although some of this trend might be attributable to the changing characteristics of the migrants themselves, we argue that a more important change was the circumstances under within Mexican immigrants competed for jobs in the U.S. After 1986 a growing share of Mexican immigrants was undocumented, discrimination against them was mandated by federal law, and enforcement efforts rose in intensity. We combined data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) with independent estimates of the percentage undocumented among Mexicans living in the U.S. to estimate a series of regression models to test this hypothesis. Controlling for individual characteristics helps to explain the decline in the wages of immigrants, but does not eliminate the trend, which is only explained fully when the percentage undocumented is added to the model. A key date is 1986, confirmed by a Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analysis, when undocumented hiring was criminalized and undocumented migration revived after IRCA's legalization programs ended. As the percentage undocumented rose to new heights in the face of employer sanctions, immigrant wages fell below what we would have observed under the former policy regime. Using newly available data from Warren and Warren (2013), we examined how variation in the percentage undocumented by state and year from 1990 through 2009 affected immigrant wages and confirmed a strong negative effect, but the addition of an interaction term to the model indicated that the negative effect was confined largely to undocumented migrants, whose wage penalty rose from 8 to 18 percent as the percentage undocumented rose from its observed minimum to maximum.     

Economic integration and labor flows: stage migration in farm labor markets in Mexico and the United States

"This article examines the probable effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on migration from Mexico to the United States, disputing the view that expansion of jobs in Mexico could rapidly reduce undocumented migration. To the extent that NAFTA causes Mexican export agriculture to expand, migration to the United States will increase rather than decrease in the short run. Data collected in both California and the Mexican State of Baja California show that indigenous migrants from southern Mexico typically first undertake internal migration, which lowers the costs and risks of U.S. migration. Two features of employment in export agriculture were found to be specially significant in lowering the costs of U.S. migration: first, working in export agriculture exposes migrants to more diverse social networks and information about U.S. migration; second, agro-export employment in northern Mexico provides stable employment, albeit low-wage employment, for some members of the family close to the border (especially women and children) while allowing other members of the family to assume the risks of U.S. migration."     

Determinants of English proficiency among Mexican migrants to the United States

"We replicate prior research into the determinants of English language proficiency among immigrants using a dataset that controls for potential biases stemming from selective emigration, omitted variables, and the mismeasurement of key constructs. In general, we reproduce the results of earlier work, leading us to conclude that despite inherent methodological problems, research based on cross-sectional censuses and surveys yields fundamentally accurate conclusions. In particular, we find unambiguous evidence that English proficiency rises with exposure to U.S. society, and we reaffirm earlier work showing a clear pattern of language assimilation among Mexican migrants to the United States."     

Real earnings and human migration in the United States

"The present article offers an alternative [to Rabianski's] empirical analysis of the migration impact of living cost differentials and deals with net (as opposed to gross) [U.S.] migration to some 25 (as opposed to just 11) SMSAs over the 1960-70 rather than the 1955-60 time period. The results...indicate that...living cost differentials do significantly affect geographic mobility, i.e., improve the regression results."     

Rural gentrification and linked migration in the United States

Although gentrification is a process commonly associated with urban landscapes, rural areas in advanced economies have also experienced gentrification over the past two decades. Largely based on case study approaches, the Rural Studies literature describes transformations in the housing market, changed cultural attitudes toward the environment, political conflicts surrounding land-use planning, and heightened class polarization as outcomes of rural gentrification. The analysis in this paper extends our understandings of rural gentrification in two fundamental ways. First, drawing on US census data from 1990 and 2000, the paper systematically examines gentrification in nonmetropolitan counties across the United States and develops a methodology for identifying areas with similarly strong evidence of gentrification. The second section of the analysis compares the geographic distribution and socioeconomic change in gentrifying counties with the rest of nonmetropolitan America emphasizing the changes in the baby boomer and Latino populations. In so doing, the analysis opens up new possibilities for comparative analysis of gentrification both between and within countries, connects our understandings of rural gentrification to other processes of globalization playing out within rural space, and argues for work on rural gentrification to more explicitly integrate questions surrounding race and ethnicity alongside questions of class.     

The Marital Status of Recent Mexican Immigrants in the United States in 1980 and 19901

Using Public Use Microdata Samples, we analyze the temporal marriage patterns of recent Mexican immigrants in the United States, and relate these patterns to socioeconomic and political events, such as U.S. immigration reform, increasing returns to skill, and rising incentives for unattached Mexicans to migrate during the 1980s. Our findings indicate that recent Mexican immigrants (particularly men) were less likely to be married within five years of migrating in 1990 than their counterparts had been in 1980. An empirical extension further suggests that the relative endogamy odds among Mexican immigrants who migrated to the United States by 1980 increased during the next decade. Such demographic changes may affect policies involving issues such as education, welfare and retirement.     

The Effect of Immigration from Mexico on Social Capital in the United States

Has mass migration from Mexico since the 1980s contributed to a well‐documented decline in US social capital? Theories linking ethnic diversity to lower social cohesion and participation (e.g., Putnam 2007, 30, 137) would strongly predict this effect. Yet the impact of immigration in particular, rather than ethno‐racial diversity generally, on US social capital has not been examined. Assessing the impact of immigration is important because some have speculated that associations between measures of diversity and social capital found in the United States are a byproduct of the country's distinctively fraught history of black–white relations. This scope condition would greatly limit the applicability of Putnam's thesis. To assess the impact of Mexican immigration, this study leverages a dynamic measure of social capital and an instrumental variables design. The results address an important recent methodological critique of the broader literature and strongly corroborate the hypothesis that immigration erodes social capital.     

Capacity building for rural development in the United States

Rural development in the United States places considerable weight upon the contribution of leadership in small communities to bring about local regeneration. This effort draws upon the theory and practice of capacity building processes. The application of this approach is examined through the experience of the Colorado Rural Revitalisation Project which was initiated in 1988 as a collaborative venture between two universities and a state agency. It concluded in 1992 having worked with 47 rural communities. The outcomes of the partnership programme related to learning and action are discussed and the results of an evaluation exercise are presented. A suite of local, institutional and national issues arising from the Project is identified. It is concluded that there is merit in greater interest being taken in initiatives like the Colorado Rural Revitalisation Project by policy makers, educationalists and rural communities in Europe.     

Family reunification and Philippine migration to the United States: the immigrants' perspective

This article focuses on the impact of the family reunification provisions in the US immigration policy for legal immigration from the Philippines. Immigration and Naturalization Service data on the changing pattern of Philippine immigration to the US between 1971 and 1984 show an increase of nearly 2 1/2 times in the number of immediate family members exempt from numerical limitations, a doubling in the number of immigrants entering under family preference categories, but a marked decline in the number of occupational preference immigrants. Immigration-related plans, behavior, and characteristics from the immigrants' perspective are also analyzed. A family unification policy-based typology has been constructed to categorize intended and actual immigrants to the US. Using this typology, systematic differences are reported for out-migration plans, family contacts, the immigration process, and the characteristics of intended and actual immigrants. While political and economic system competition and inequality are contextual factors for international migration, from the immigrants' perspective, joining family members by means of the family reunification provisions of the US immigration policy is the dominant explanation for legal immigration to the US in a sample of 1340 adults in Philippine households in 1982.     

Incorporation of Migrant Students Returning From the United States to High Schools in Mexico

The purpose of this research was to identify the difficulties faced by the Mexican migrant students when incorporated into the Mexican education system after having studied in the United States of America. Thirty migrant middle school students, two principals, two social workers and one teacher participated in the study. The study (conducted in two phases) collected information regarding: school admission, adjustment to the school organization, adaptation to learning situations and the perception of school belonging. The main problems found during the admission and enrolment procedures in Mexican schools are: language use, diagnostic assessment, didactic processes that take place in the classroom, complementary support activities, grade repetition, very little family involvement and the separation of the students from their migrant parents.