scholarly journals New Estimates of Undocumented Mexican Migration and the Probability of Apprehension

Demography ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey ◽  
Audrey Singer
Author(s):  
Adam Goodman

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.


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.


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.


1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth D. Roberts

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)


1930 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Taylor
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
David P. Lindstrom

This analysis draws on binational data from an ethnosurvey conducted in Guatemala and in the United States in Providence, Rhode Island, to develop a refinement of the weighting scheme that the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) uses. The alternative weighting procedure distinguishes between temporary and settled migrants by using a question on household location in the Guatemala questionnaire that is not used in the MMP. Demographic characteristics and integration experiences of the most recent U.S. trip are used to assess the composition and representativeness of the U.S. sample. Using a composite index of migrant integration to compare the impact of alternative U.S. sample weights on point estimates, I find that although the U.S. sample is broadly representative across a range of background characteristics, the MMP sample weighting procedure biases estimates of migrant integration downward.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Roger Rouse

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document