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

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.

2022 ◽  
pp. 019791832110660
Author(s):  
Shelby O'Neill

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.


Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 684 (1) ◽  
pp. 212-226
Author(s):  
Emilio A. Parrado ◽  
Angie N. Ocampo

This article examines continuities and changes in the prevalence and determinants of first migration and return between Mexico and the United States. The results show a dramatic decline over time in the likelihood of migrants’ making a first trip. The empirical design distinguishes processes affecting migrating cohorts from those emanating from period conditions, paying particular attention to changes in educational selectivity and the legal status of the flows. The definition of cohort and period corresponds roughly to changes in U.S. migration policy and the American economy. We find that the likelihood of return migration also declined in conjunction with period conditions that are related to border enforcement. The drop in the likelihood of return was particularly sharp for undocumented migrants, and, over time, return flows increasingly consist of documented migrants. The implications of these findings for immigration policy in the United States and for the incorporation of returnees in Mexico are discussed.


2017 ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Nadejda Kudeyarova

The debate over the Mexican migrants issue has been intensi ed by Donald Trump’s election. His harsh statements have provoked a discussion on the US policy for Mexico, as well as on the migration regulation in the United States. However, the mass migration of the last quarter of XX - beginning of XXI centuries may be also readily associated with the social and demographic processes developed in Mexico throughout the 20th century. The dynamics of migratory activity followed the demographic changes. The internal causes of the Mexican migration analysis will allow more clarity in understanding contemporary migration interaction between the two neighboring countries.


Author(s):  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Douglas S. Massey

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rana Basam Khan ◽  
◽  
Muhammad Nawaz Bhatti ◽  
Ghulam Mustafa ◽  
◽  
...  

It has been decades since legislative issues have thought about social, defense, and compassionate issues of migration which has become a touchstone in U.S strategy discussion. Mexican migration to the U.S started in 1848. It has proceeded to the present with no critical interference, something that makes this work movement very particular as a basic segment of the American work advertise. Generally started with enormous development, driven by starvation, political problems, open doors in the U.S; that point eased back, tightened, or unexpectedly finished, from 1850 to 1882, similar to the case of the Chinese. The details show that Mexico is a key source of settlers in U.S and has long been a major source of enemy contact with refugees, but so many have been focusing on Mexico and not the other countries which have also become major sources of illegal immigrants. The United States and Mexico are bordered with California, San Diego, and Baja California, Tijuana, and the Pacific Ocean. The boundary stretches eastward to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Texas, on the Rio Grande. From that point the border continues south-east along the Rio Grande River until the end of it in the Gulf of Mexico. Border stretching of over 1945 miles is insufficiently regulated. Only old solid markers, rusty safety clasp and spoiled dry fence posts can be found in many parts of the place, and the river Grande that over the centuries has continuously changed its course separating both nations. U.S endeavors to control passages and exit adequately have been focused principally along the most profoundly dealt transit courses driving to north. U.S. powerlessness to control all the Mexican boundary has proven that any Mexican involved in operating in the U.S seldom discovers that the frontier is an unlikely trap Through the span of the most recent 170 years, Mexican migrants have to a great extent worked in horticulture, farming, mining, and railroad development.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-190
Author(s):  
Benjamin W. Barrett ◽  
T. Elizabeth Durden

Data from 154 different Mexican communities, housed within the Mexican Migration Project (mmp), is used to explore the influence of U.S. assimilation on a Mexican migrant’s propensity to remit money back to Mexico. A migrant opening a U.S. bank account is employed as a proxy for assimilation. Sociodemographic, U.S. migration, and Mexican community control variables are included. It is found that a migrant opening a bank account during the last U.S. migration is associated with a reduced probability of remitting money back to Mexico, suggesting a shift in social and economic activity from Mexico to the U.S. for migrants abroad. Los datos de 154 comunidades mexicanas, agrupados en el Mexican Migration Project (mmp), se utilizan para explorar la influencia de la asimilación a Estados Unidos sobre los migrantes mexicanos, tomando en cuenta su propensión a enviar remesas de vuelta a México. La apertura de una cuenta bancaria en Estados Unidos por parte de un migrante se emplea como una forma subsidiaria de asimilación. Se incluyen variables sociodemográficas, de migración a Estados Unidos y de control de las comunidades mexicanas. Los hallazgos dicen que la apertura de una cuenta bancaria por parte de un migrante durante la última ola de migración a Estados Unidos se asocia a una menor probabilidad de enviar remesas de vuelta a México, lo cual sugiere un cambio en la actividad social y económica de México hacia Estados Unidos por parte de los migrantes en el extranjero.


Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
Jorge Durand ◽  
Karen A. Pren

A majority of Mexican and Central Americans living in the United States today are undocumented or living in a marginal, temporary legal status. This article is a comparative analysis of how Mexican and non-Mexican Latino immigrants fare in the U.S. labor market. We show that despite higher levels of human capital and a higher class background among non-Mexican migrants, neither they nor Mexican migrants have fared very well in the United States. Over the past four decades, the real value of their wages has fallen across the board, and both Mexican and non-Mexican migrant workers experience wage penalties because they are in liminal legal categories. With Latinos now composing 17 percent of the U.S. population and 25 percent of births, the precariousness of their labor market position should be a great concern among those attending to the nation’s future.


2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
Jacob S. Rugh ◽  
Karen A. Pren

Using data from Mexico's Matríícula Consular program, we analyze the geographic organization of undocumented Mexican migration to the United States. We show that emigration has moved beyond its historical origins in west-central Mexico into the central region and, to a lesser extent, the southeast and border regions. In the United States, traditional gateways continue to dominate, but a variety of new destinations have emerged. California, in particular, has lost its overwhelming dominance. Although the geographic structure of Mexico-U.S. migration is relatively stable, it has nonetheless continued to evolve and change over time.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Vasquez

Literature on international migration, assimilation, and transnationalism continues to be concerned with questions about ties that migrants and their descendents have with their homelands, coethnics, and the native-born population. Tomás R. Jiménez's Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity and Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children provide important perspectives on different aspects of the larger phenomenon of international migration from Mexico to the United States that is a consequence of labor demand in the United States, economic need and job scarcity in Mexico, and a global economy. Both books deal with social life that takes place across ethnic boundaries, within ethnic groups, and across national borders. Taking qualitative approaches and dealing with the perennial tension between inclusion and exclusion, these books analyze the experiences and perspectives of Mexican migrants, Mexican children, and Mexican Americans.


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