Debacles on the Border: Five Decades of Fact-Free Immigration Policy

2019 ◽  
Vol 684 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Undocumented Mexican Migration ◽  
Trump Administration

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has compiled extensive data on the characteristics and behavior of documented and undocumented migrants to the United States, and made them publicly available to users to test theories of international migration and evaluate U.S. immigration and border policies. Findings based on these data have been plentiful, but have also routinely been ignored by political leaders, who instead continue to pursue policies with widely documented, counterproductive effects. In this article, we review prior studies based on MMP data to document these effects. We also use official statistics to document circumstances on the border today, and draw on articles in this volume to underscore the huge gap between U.S. policies and the realities of immigration. Despite that net positive undocumented Mexican migration to the United States ended more than a decade ago, the Trump administration continues to demand the construction of a border wall and persists in treating Central American arrivals as criminals rather than asylum seekers, thus transforming what is essentially a humanitarian problem into an immigration crisis.

Manufacturing Crisis and Fomenting Fear at the Dawn of the Age of Mass Expulsion

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Adam Goodman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Migrant Labor ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Social And Cultural Factors ◽  
Everyday Reality ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Undocumented Mexican Migration

This chapter explains how the United States' ongoing demand for cheap migrant labor normalized the deportation machine at the border and in the interior. It talks about the Immigration and Naturalization Service's increasing dependence on voluntary departures and immigration raids between 1965 and 1985 that made the possibility of deportation an everyday reality for undocumented immigrants. It also describes the pattern of circular, undocumented Mexican migration that emerged as a relatively open and benign labor process with few negative consequences. The chapter reveals how bureaucratic practices, changes in law, and combination of political, economic, social, and cultural factors demonized ethnic Mexicans and solidified the stereotype of them as prototypical “illegal aliens”. It also highlights the changes in the policy and political economies of the United States and Mexico from 1965 to 1985 that resulted in significant transformations to the deportation machine.

scholarly journals Barricading the Border: COVID-19 and the Exclusion of Asylum Seekers at the U.S. Southern Border

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Gilman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
Refugee Protection ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Southern Border ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Health Guidance ◽  
Trump Administration

What years of deterrence efforts and restrictions on asylum did not achieve to block the U.S. southern border to asylum seekers, the Trump Administration has now accomplished using the COVID-19 pandemic as justification. New measures exclude asylum seekers from U.S. territory, thereby effectively obliterating the U.S. asylum program, which had promised refugee protection in the form of asylum to eligible migrants who reach the United States. In some cases, the policies adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic harden impediments to asylum already in place or implement restrictions that had been proposed but could only now be adopted. In others, the policies could never have been imagined before the pandemic. Overall, the force of these measures in dismantling the asylum system cannot be overemphasized. Once adopted, using an emergency rationale based on the pandemic, these policies are likely to become extremely difficult to reverse. This is particularly true where the restrictions exclude asylum seekers from the physical space of the United States. This article will thus explore two modes of physical exclusion taking place at the U.S. southern border during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) indefinitely trapping in Mexico those asylum seekers who are subject to the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols; and (2) immediate expulsions of asylum seekers arriving at the southern border pursuant to purported public health guidance issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Tradeoff of Temporariness: Economic and Social Impacts of H-2A Status on Mexican Migrant Men

2022 ◽  
pp. 019791832110660
Author(s):  
Shelby O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Formal Economy ◽  
Discernible Effect ◽  
Mexican Migrant ◽  
Economic And Social Impacts

As the H-2A visa program expands to become a core component of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States, questions emerge about the tradeoffs migrants face between temporary and undocumented statuses. This article employs propensity score matching of participants in the Mexican Migration Project—an extensive binational survey of Mexican migrants and their families—to compare economic and social outcomes of H-2A visa recipients vis-à-vis undocumented migrants. Findings indicate that although H-2A visas offer benefits like a lower cost of living while abroad, they do not produce a discernible effect on wages relative to wages earned by undocumented migrants. While H-2A migrants are more likely to work in the formal economy, they are also less likely to build social capital or language proficiency in the United States than undocumented migrants, indicating a degree of social isolation that can be exploited by employers. This comparison contributes to a growing literature on the proliferation of temporary migratory statuses and the marginality experienced by migrants within these statuses.

Spiritual Citizenship: Immigrant Religious Participation and the Management of Deportability1

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Guzman Garcia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Religious Participation ◽  
Undocumented Migrants

This article advances the concept of spiritual citizenship to examine how some religiously active migrants employ religion to see themselves as, and to try to become, less deportable. Drawing from ethnographic observations and interviews with Central American and Mexican immigrants in the United States, I find that undocumented migrants use religion to redefine their own sense of self and to position themselves as spiritual citizens of “good moral character.” This research examines how the priorities of religious organizations can operate in relation to and through a neoliberal context. While religion supports migrants as they endure criminalization, my discussion of spiritual citizenship shows how the benefits of religious participation can also depend on migrants’ willingness to become deserving neoliberal citizens.

Evolution of the Mexico-U.S. Migration System: Insights from the Mexican Migration Project

2019 ◽  
Vol 684 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Large Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Undocumented Migration ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Migration System ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Migratory Experience

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has collected and disseminated representative survey data on documented and undocumented migration to the United States. The MMP currently includes surveys of 161 communities, which together contain data on 27,113 households and 169,945 individuals, 26,446 of whom have U.S. migratory experience. These data are used here to trace the evolution of the Mexico-U.S. migration system from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, revealing how shifts in U.S. immigration and border policies have been critical to the formation of different eras of migration characterized by distinctive patterns of migration, settlement, and return in different legal statuses. The current era is characterized by the repression of the large population of undocumented migrants and their U.S. citizen children by an ongoing regime of mass detention and deportation and the simultaneous recruitment of Mexican workers for exploitation on short-term temporary visas. As the dynamics of Mexican migration to the United States continue to change, they will be monitored and analyzed in subsequent waves of data collection by the MMP.

Refugees in the United States and the Politics of Crisis

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Author(s):  
Stephanie J. Nawyn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Border Enforcement ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Nature

Labeling a refugee migration as a “crisis” is not an inevitable action to large-scale forced migration. It is a choice that is steeped in racial, gender, and colonialist politics. The choice to label a situation a crisis might have underlying it good intentions for highlighting migrants’ dire situations, but it can also have negative discursive (and potentially material) consequences. Discursively, labeling a crisis could justify a more defensive stance than a humanitarian approach, leading to greater border enforcement and less willingness to provide protection and assistance to refugees. This chapter outlines some of the negative responses that are typical in US discourse on refugees, and how those responses tend to misinterpret the real nature of refugee crises, using the situation of Central American asylum seekers entering the United States in the mid-2010s as an exemplar.

scholarly journals Undocumented and Unwell: Legal Status and Health among Mexican Migrants

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 571-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda R. Cheong ◽  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Return Migration ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The United States ◽  
Undocumented Migrants ◽  
Undocumented Migration ◽  
Mexican Migration ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Mexican Adults ◽  
Using Data

Using data from the Mexican Migration Project, we evaluate the effects of documented and undocumented migration on the health of Mexican adults. Results suggest that documented and undocumented migrants are positively selected with respect to health in migrating to the United States and health status does not strongly predict selection into return migration back to Mexico. Among returned migrants, health deteriorates as the number of trips to the United States increases, with undocumented migrants experiencing an extra health penalty. While there is no continued decline on return to Mexico for undocumented migrants, they fare worse than returned documented migrants.

scholarly journals Political Leaders’ Discourses and Securitization of Migration: A Comparison of Turkey and the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Selin Kabacaoğlu ◽  
Fulya Memişoğlu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Political Discourses

With the growing importance of human mobility in the global agenda since the early 1990s, international migration has increasingly evolved into a securitized phenomenon. This has also made international migrantsa prominent target group of security speech acts. The main objective of this study is to explore migration-security nexus in the context of political discourses. The paper brings a comparative perspective to the role of political leader discourses in the securitization of migration by examining the cases of the United States (USA), hosting the largest number of international migrants, and Turkey, the world’s top refugee hosting country. Through the analytical lens of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and securitization theory, the study unpacks the rhetoric used by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and American President Donald John Trump towards migrants/ asylum seekers. As the key findings demonstrate, the way the two leaders reflect the migration-security relationship to their speech acts significantly varies. President Trump associates migrants with security issues in multiple ways including social, political and economic spheres, while President Erdoğan’s discourse links migrants with security issues inthe economic realm, but his general discourse reflects a desecuritization approach. In both countries, it is observed that the discourses of political leaders concerning migrants and asylum seekers exert influence on public opinion.

scholarly journals Latino and Central American Asylum Seekers in the United States of America During the Trump Administration

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 406-420
Author(s):  
Sina Mohammadi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
United States Government ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Us ◽  
States Government ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
The Right

The purpose of the article was to examine the Trump administration's asylum policy applied to Central American and Latino applicants. The United States has grappled with refugee problems in recent decades, and in 2018 Trump signed an executive order to detain families seeking to immigrate to the United States without separating from one another. With this decree, a new approach was formed in the policy of the United States government, which emphasizes the severe restrictions on the entry of asylum seekers and immigrants. In the methodological, it is a documentary research close to hermeneutics. It is concluded that, although the United States government has cited security concerns as an excuse to restrict the entry of asylum seekers, especially Latinos from Central American countries, this political approach is in conflict with the national legislation of the United States that stipulates that any citizen Foreigner arriving at any point along the US border, or at official exit points, has the right to apply for asylum. Furthermore, the implementation of such a policy is contrary to the end of the 1951 Convention, which focuses on the protection of refugees without distinction.

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