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

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.

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

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.

The Geography of Undocumented Mexican Migration

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.

China's “Tidal Wave” of Migrant Labor: What Can we Learn from Mexican Undocumented Migration to the United States?

The purpose of this article is to place Chinese labor migration from agriculture within the context of the literature on labor mobility in developing countries by comparing it to undocumented Mexican migration to the United States. The similarities fall within three general areas: the migration process, the economic and social position of migrants at their destination, and the agrarian structure and process of agricultural development that has perpetuated circular migration. The last section of the article draws upon these similarities, as well as differences between the two countries, to generate predictions concerning the development of labor migration in China. A fifteen-car train arrived in Shanghai from the city of Fuyang in Anhui Province on February 14. On board were 2,850 laborers from outside the municipality, signaling the beginning of the spring labor influx. Of this group, most were between 20 and 30 years of age, and more than half had never left their home villages before. Most will stay in Shanghai, while others will head to Hangzhou, Wenzhou, Ningbo, and Changshou to seek work. The Shanghai Public Security Department already has prepared a number of vehicles to transport laborers to other places outside the city, and the Shanghai police have strengthened their forces to keep public order. (FBIS, 1994d)