The Mexican government confronted the economic crisis of the 1980s with policies of economic liberalization and export-driven industrialization. The government combined these policies with a drive to alter the contours of the labor market by loosening the rules governing hiring and firing, salaries and industrial relations.1 All this created what one observer called the “radical exclusion” of workers and peasants from access to the means of earning or producing a dignified existence.2 International migration became a common response in both rural and urban Mexico.3
By the 1990s, Mexicans were migrating in large numbers even from outside the historic “sending area” of West Central Mexico (primarily the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco and Zacatecas, from which migration can be traced back to the last decades of the nineteenth century). With the traumatic peso devaluation of 1994, this historic trickle began to “massify” and extend to the southern states of Puebla, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Veracruz and even Chiapas.4
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) argued that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would resolve the problem by producing jobs instead of migrants. But on New Year’s Day 1994, the day the treaty went into effect, the Zapatista rebellion exploded, exacerbating the country’s brewing political and economic crisis. Before the end of the year a massive flight of dollars seriously undermined Salinas’ optimism. By mid-1995, agricultural production had plummeted, real wages had suffered a steep decline and unemployment had risen significantly. Between 1993 and 1998 the economy generated only 120,000 jobs annually, a fraction of the estimated 1.3 million jobs required just to employ new entrants into the labor force.5 Those unable to enter the formal sector either found low-paying and insecure informal-sector employment at home, or migrated north.6
The number of people of Mexican birth residing in the United States increased from 6.7 million to 9.6 million between 1995 and 2002. By March 2004, the Mexican-born U.S. population had increased to 11.2 million. According to a recent Pew Hispanic Center study, net migration flows from Mexico grew from 220,000 annually between 1980-84, to 370,000 annually between 1990-94 and to 575,000 annually between 2000-04. In 1986, more than two million Mexicans secured legal status through the Reagan Administration’s Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), but U.S. xenophobia—stoked to higher levels after 9/11—has taken the possibility of another amnesty off the political agenda. A small number of Mexicans have achieved legal status through family reunification, but the overwhelming majority, between 80 and 85% of those arriving during the last decade, are undocumented. This undocumented Mexican population now accounts for 53% of all people of Mexican birth residing in the United States.7
Just as the sending areas in Mexico have diversified, so have the destinations in the United States. This is due in part to the IRCA legalization, which was supposed to resolve the “migrant problem” by establishing employer sanctions and beefed-up border patrol. The goals of IRCA were to legalize those who were in the United States, prevent others from entering and punish employers who knowingly employed undocumented migrants. Subsequent government efforts in the mid-1990s stiffened the punitive features of U.S. immigration policy with major “seal-the-border” operations in San Diego, El Paso and other urban areas. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and reforms in the same year to federal welfare law then denied immigrants, documented or not, access to entitlement programs such as unemployment insurance, food stamps and certain welfare benefits. According to anthropologist Tamar Diana Wilson, the aim of this (and other) legislation is
to deny any governmental subsidy for reproduction or maintenance of the foreign-born workforce, even if their reproduction and maintenance now is occurring in the United States. The point is to discourage these processes [of family unification], and separate productive and re-productive activities. Those who wish to bring relatives to the U.S. are deemed responsible for their welfare, thus transferring responsibility for well-being from state and federal governments to individuals.
She adds that it “is not that Mexican undocumented immigrants are to be totally excluded from U.S. soil. Their labor is needed. Rather, their presence will be tolerated only as long as they are almost costless, as compared to the native born.”8
In the context of the Mexican economic crisis, the net effect of these policies has been precisely the opposite of their publicly stated intents. The legalizations under IRCA established platforms for new migrants in the United States and helped spread migration outside the historic receiving areas of California, Texas and Illinois. The tightened border strengthened and enriched immigrant smugglers and raised the cost of migration both in monetary and human terms, as migrants bypassed heavily patrolled urban areas for treacherous desert and mountain terrain. The policy also converted a previously circular migration into a more permanent one, as many of those who had succeeded in entering the United States prolonged their stays in order to avoid the hazards of another crossing following a visit home.
Mexicans—especially undocumented Mexicans—would not be migrating in increasing numbers were they able to find decent work in Mexico as easily as in the United States. The vast majority has obviously not been able to do so, and immigrants are further drawn to a U.S. economy undergoing formative transformations marked by a proliferation of demand for unskilled labor. Mexican researcher Alejandro Canales explains recent trends in the U.S. labor market by contrasting the ways that Mexico and the United States have implemented neoliberal economic policies. Mexico, argues Canales, took an orthodox approach, in which across-the-board labor flexibilization played a key role. U.S. capital, on the other hand, pursued a heterodox strategy that combined features of internal and external flexibilization, within and across economic sectors and often within a single enterprise. Internal flexibilization affected the domestic U.S. workforce; external flexibilization occurred when firms shipped unskilled, low-wage jobs “offshore”—to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean basin and elsewhere—while keeping higher paid management as well as research and development positions in the United States.
The U.S. experience with internal flexibilization involved the application of advances in new information technology and contributed to the further polarization of the workforce between a small number of highly productive workers “with access to well-paid, stable and full-time employment,” and a mass of workers who remained “marginalized in poorly paid, unskilled and unstable jobs,” writes Canales.9 In concrete terms this meant more Wall Street bankers and computer technicians along with an even greater number of janitors, grocery stockers, hospital workers, domestics and restaurant dishwashers. Many of the latter jobs, poorly paid and generally dead-end, have come to be filled by Mexicans and other Latino migrants located at the bottom rungs of the U.S. class structure.10
Historically, “Mexican” has signified “agricultural worker” to most non-Latino U.S. citizens. Mexicans—and especially undocumented Mexican migrants—now compose the majority of the U.S. labor force dedicated both to suburban lawn care and to rural agriculture; they tend to occupy the bottom rungs in both areas. Continuing mechanization of U.S. agriculture and the urban drift of Mexican migrants, however, have reshaped the migrant occupational structure. A study by Jean Papail and Fermina Robles found that 70% of Mexicans who migrated before 1975 from the “historic” sending area of center-west Mexico worked in agriculture, compared to 29.2% of those who arrived in the period 1980-89 and only 18.2% of those who migrated between 1990-99. Once the predominant employer of Mexican migrant labor, agriculture has now been displaced by construction, industrial manufacturing and services, all primarily urban pursuits.11
Detailed examination of U.S. employment and income data shows that Hispanics—two-thirds of whom are Mexican migrants or U.S. citizens of Mexican descent—tend to be concentrated in the least-skilled and lowest-paid subcategories of each of the above-mentioned categories. Elaine Levine of Mexico’s National Autonomous University notes, “It is not by chance that only 15 of the 143 [occupational] headings with some degree of concentration of Hispanic workers have a weekly salary that exceeds the general median of $610 in 2002. Of the 42 categories or subcategories with a high or very high concentration of Hispanic workers, not one provides a weekly median salary equal to or greater than the general median.”12
The only area in which Mexicans have a relative advantage compared to other ethnic groups is as “skilled workers,” especially in construction. But construction salaries, especially for undocumented migrants, are highly variable; the work is characterized by frequent periods of unemployment, and workplace accidents are common occurrences. Small, unscrupulous contractors and subcontractors in New York City, for example, frequently exploit undocumented Mexican construction workers, sending them to dangerous jobs, such as rehabilitating substandard structures, at salaries only slightly above the U.S. minimum wage. Injuries are commonplace and deaths are not infrequent.13
Another common characteristic of Mexican migrant labor is its concentration in, and growing domination of, a limited number of job categories. Certain sectors of light manufacturing, gardening, office maintenance, food preparation, specialized masonry and grocery stocking have become associated with Mexican migrant workers in many U.S. cities. Mexican migrants predominate in restaurant kitchens in Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere, carpet factories in Dalton, Georgia, Pennsylvania mushroom farms, coastal North Carolina crab processing plants, and slaughterhouses and chicken processing plants throughout the United States. Male Mexican migrants occupy a wide variety of poorly paid agricultural, service sector and industrial jobs. Their female counterparts—who, since IRCA, have accounted for a growing proportion of the Mexican migrant population—on the other hand, are concentrated in light manufacturing (especially assembly plants in Los Angeles) and personal services, such as housecleaning and child care.
Many researchers have shown that employer recruitment of many of these “ethnically slotted” Mexican migrants takes place “transnationally” through migrant networks rather than through a competitive local or regional U.S. labor market. Migrants themselves fill vacancies in their places of employment by referring brothers, cousins and friends residing in the United States or those just a phone call away in Mexico. Researcher Wayne Cornelius has noted the advantages that network recruitment accords employers in San Diego County.
No costly advertising is required; no employment agency fees need be paid. Job vacancies can be filled almost immediately; in most cases immigrants already working in the firm know that a vacancy is about to occur even before the employer does. High-quality workers are virtually guaranteed, even without the screening of job applicants, since the immigrant’s social network vouches for his or her reliability, productivity and good character.14
Cornelius concludes that in Southern California, Mexican immigrant labor has become “structurally embedded” in the economy and relatively immune to changes in immigration policy, an observation that holds for New York and many other receiving communities. Nearly half the 112 San Diego employers interviewed by Cornelius’ team reported that “U.S.-born persons never apply for the same types of jobs held in their firm by immigrants, or apply only rarely for these jobs.”15 Writing in the mid-1990s following the passage of NAFTA, Cornelius found that neither California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187—eventually rescinded by the courts—nor tightened security at the border, e.g. Operation Gatekeeper, were likely to reduce Mexican migration to the United States.
Both in the United States and Canada, Mexicans have entered temporary worker programs that also recruit from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and other areas of the English-speaking Caribbean. In 1987, West Indian workers represented more than 80% of the participants in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), but by 2001, Mexicans had become the majority. An even more abrupt shift occurred in the U.S. H2A Program, which provides temporary visas for agricultural workers from Mexico and the Caribbean to work mainly for tobacco, cucumber and onion farmers in the U.S. South and along the Eastern Seaboard.16 There, Mexican migrant workers increased their share of the seasonal labor force from 20% in 1987 to 80% in 1998, a period during which the H2A Program grew from 17,500 to 27,000 workers.17
No single factor explains these ethnically delineated shifts. At different times and places employers’ stereotypes about the endurance and abilities of particular ethnic or racial groups, their perceptions of Mexicans’ docility and exploitability, and the changing fortunes of ethnically linked crop regimes have all played roles. In 2003, one Canadian nursery owner who employed both Mexicans and West Indians explained that he assigns people to tasks that draw on their strengths: “Jamaicans like more physical work.… In their society work is culturally either male or female: digging or lugging pots for men, weeding for women. Mexicans don’t discriminate between these types of work, but they don’t like to dig evergreens. On the other hand, give Mexicans a hoe and they will outwork Jamaicans every time.”18
Ethnic slotting, then, occurs in rural agricultural as well as urban industrial, commercial and service sector employment. Mexican temporary migrants to Ontario, Canada have achieved overwhelming numerical dominance in the flower and nursery industries and in the cultivation of hothouse tomatoes and cucumbers, key sectors of the region’s agriculture that have expanded rapidly under NAFTA. Jamaicans and Barbadians predominate in apples and tobacco, where height and physical strength are highly valued by employers. It can be argued that farmers in southern Ontario and Quebec have used the SAWP to subsidize their success amid intensified competition under NAFTA. Between 1994 and 2001, average wages of seasonal workers increased less than 1% annually, from $6.70 to $7.10 Canadian dollars an hour. The program expanded during this period, leading to accusations that Ontario farmers were deliberately replacing Canadian agricultural laborers with offshore ones to reduce costs.
Tanya Basok of the department of sociology and anthropology of the University of Windsor thinks that Mexican seasonal workers “have become structurally necessary for Canadian horticulture.” In her view, “It is not the vulnerability of farming that makes growers dependent on offshore labour, but the need to secure labour that is not only unfree to change jobs but that is available for work on demand. Since such unfree labour does not exist in Canada, it is vital for Canadian agriculture to have access to unfree foreign workers.”19 Gary Cooper, president of the Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services, a private sector non-profit organization that oversees many of the day-to-day operations of the SAWP on behalf of participating farmers, agrees that without Mexican labor, “most of the fruits and vegetables in Ontario would not be grown.” According to Cooper, “Canadians will still eat those fruits and vegetables, so why don’t we enjoy the economic benefits of producing them? We can take Mexican tomatoes and ship them up here, you can send a Mexican to California to produce tomatoes there and ship them up here, or you can send a Mexican up here and you grow the tomato here in Ontario.”20
Much as they do in Canada, low-paid migrant workers in the United States shore up declining sectors of the economy, occupy the lower rungs of growth areas, subsidize the reproduction of middle-class life styles and service the rich. In these ways—to paraphrase anthropologist John Gledhill—Mexico makes some of its most important contributions to the restructuring of U.S. capitalism. Gledhill points out that the “statistical complementarity” of the Mexican and U.S. labor markets (Mexico’s surplus labor supply and the high U.S. demand for unskilled workers) is neither necessary nor inevitable, but results from the particular strategies pursued by dominant sectors of capital and the governments that generally serve their interests.21 Organized workers both in Mexico and the United States opposed economic restructuring, which was fully implemented only after major working-class defeats, such as the Reagan Administration’s intervention in the air-traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and President Salinas’ repression of independent Mexican union movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Perhaps the growing “Mexicanization” of many low-wage, low-status jobs would matter less if the second and third generations were able to move up in the occupational hierarchy. Then we would have the fabled immigrant success story of parents sacrificing their health and welfare for the sake of educating their children; the children’s acquisition of cultural capital would then open up a greater range of opportunities than had been available to their parents. Many researchers, however, believe that economic, political and social processes may be conspiring to “freeze” Mexicans and other new migrant groups in place. Recent Mexican migrants—many of whom come from urban areas—have more schooling than the Mexican national average, but they remain well below other U.S. Latinos. Furthermore, they tend to reap lower economic returns from high school graduation onwards.
Educational achievement combines with labor market trends and discriminatory practices to generate significant obstacles to the economic improvement of Mexican migrants. Sociologist Robert Smith maintains that “it is not the decreasing quality of the immigrants, but of the economy, that accounts for the dimmer prospects of today’s Latinos.”22 Between 1991 and 2000, the U.S. economy created more than 20 million jobs, the majority of which required no more than a high school diploma and paid low wages. In the current decade (2000-10), we are likely to see more of the same: an increase in the number of jobs requiring higher education, but a proportionately larger growth of positions in which educational achievement is secondary to work experience or on-the-job training.23 Elaine Levine paints a pessimistic employment picture:
Several decades ago, almost any progress in terms of educational attainment could be expected to bring some improvement in terms of income. Immigrants and others who graduated from high school could at least aspire to well-paying jobs in manufacturing. Given the labor market conditions prevailing in the U.S. today, this option is no longer open to most of those among today’s youth who for one reason or another can’t expect to earn a college degree. In today’s more stratified and segmented economy, with greater income differences and skills than ever before, it cannot be taken for granted that the problem of lower educational attainment and lower socioeconomic status experienced by specific groups will rapidly disappear for subsequent generations.24
Prospects are even dimmer for the growing number of undocumented Mexican migrants in the U.S. labor force, whose human rights and access to basic services are under assault. Smith, for example, discusses the consequences of the decision by the Chancellor of the City University of New York—based on the 1996 IIRIRA—to deny in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants with established local residency. This change in policy raised the cost of tuition from $1,800 to $3,400 per semester, making it “extremely difficult for most undocumented students to continue their college education.”25
Most of the developments discussed here began long before NAFTA, but the treaty has intensified the negative effects. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the U.S. economy has been characterized by greater polarization and ethnic segregation than at any time in the recent past, with a proliferation of low-skill, low-wage jobs largely filled by migrant, especially Mexican, labor. On the Mexican side, the economic circumstances of most Mexicans continue to worsen: real wages are declining, stable employment is harder to find, income and wealth inequality are on the rise and the informal sector absorbs ever greater proportions of the workforce. As NAFTA’s critics have pointed out, the creation of a North American free-trade zone composed of economies of such different sizes and levels of technological advancement virtually ensured the exacerbation of existing inequalities between and within the participating countries.
Recent evidence suggests that the maintenance of the neoliberal model in Mexico depends on the continued northward expulsion of unemployable (or subemployable) sectors of the labor force. In the short term, migration relieves domestic political and economic pressures and generates a growing amount of remittances—estimated at $16.6 billion for 2004. This money, which gets channeled into local, regional and national economies, plays a key role in sustaining marginalized households and communities. Remittances also provide relief to a precarious balance-of-payment situation exacerbated by the flood of NAFTA-induced U.S. imports.26
The key role of Mexican migrant labor, both documented and undocumented, should lead us to contemplate just what the United States would look like in its absence. This was the topic of the recently released film called A Day Without a Mexican, directed by Sergio Arau. The events sardonically narrated by the film take place mainly in Los Angeles—which has the fourth-largest concentration of Mexicans in the world—but it embraces the entire state of California. With heavy doses of irony, the filmmakers narrate a vision of what might occur if a thick fog, rolling off the ocean and blanketing the state, led to the disappearance of all people of Mexican heritage.
Chaos ensues in markets because there is no one to sort and display the produce, dishes pile up in restaurants, upper-class Anglo homemakers are frustrated and perplexed as they attempt to cook, clean and carry out other tasks without their Mexican domestics and tons of fruit go unpicked in the fields. Even U.S. Border Patrol agents, lacking anyone to pursue, become bored and listless, and some lament their poor treatment of undocumented migrants in the past. When Mexicans do finally reappear at the end of the film, Border Patrol agents hoist them on their shoulders in an impromptu parade of thanks. The message is unmistakable: Mexicans may have to “disappear” before U.S. citizens seriously examine their racist and xenophobic beliefs and behaviors and gain an understanding of how much their daily routines depend on the poorly paid and “invisible” labor of millions of Mexican migrants.
About the Author
Leigh Binford conducts research on international migration and teaches in the postgraduate sociology program at the Social Science and Humanities Research Institute at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Most recently, he is the author of Rumbo a Canadá: la migración canadiense de trabajadores agrícolas tlaxcaltecas (SIZA/UAT, 2004).
Notes
1. Thanks to Elaine Levine for research material and to Nancy Churchill for editorial assistance.
2. Mercedes González de la Rocha, “From the Resources of Poverty to the Poverty of Resources? The Erosion of a Survival Model,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 28, No. 4, 2001, pp. 72-100.
3. Alejandro I. Canales, “Migración internacional y flexibilidad laboral en el contexto del TLCAN,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2001, p. 14. Canales refers to this policy as “a Fordist strategy in relation to production, but a flexible one in relation to labor.”
4. Leigh Binford, ed., La Economía Política de la Migración Internacional en Puebla y Veracruz: Siete Estudios de Caso (Puebla: CONACYT/ICSyH/BUAP, 2004); Luis Hernández Navarro, “To Die a Little: Migration and Coffee in Mexico and Central America,” special report for the Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, December 15, 2004; Jeffrey Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004).
5. Germán A. Zárate-Hoyos and Deborah Spencer, “El movimiento migratorio de México a Estados Unidos en la era del TLCAN,” Comercio Exterior, Vol. 53, No. 12, 2003, pp. 1122-30.
6. Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change During the Neoliberal Era,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2003, pp. 41-82.
7. Jeffrey S. Passel, “Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Undocumented Population,” Pew Hispanic Center Report, March 21, 2005, p. 2.
8. Tamar Diana Wilson, “Anti-immigrant Sentiment and the Problem of Reproduction/Maintenance in Mexican Immigration to the United States,” Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2000, pp. 191-213.
9. Alejandro I. Canales, “Migración internacional y flexibilidad laboral en el contexto del TLCAN,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología, p. 19.
10. Alejandro I. Canales, “La inserción laboral de los migrantes mexicanos en Estados Unidos,” paper presented at the XXII LASA Congress, Miami, Florida, March 15-19, 2000.
11. Jean Papail and Fermina Robles Sotelo, “Inserción laboral de los migrantes urbanos de la región centro occidental de México en la economía estadunidense,” in Elaine Levine, ed., Inserción Laboral y Estatus Social de los Migrantes Mexicanos y Latinos en Estados Unidos (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte, 2004), pp. 33-48.
12. Elaine Levine, “La otra cara de la migración: inserción laboral y estatus social de los migrantes mexicanos y latinos en Estados Unidos,” in Elaine Levine, ed., Inserción laboral y estatus social de los migrantes mexicanos y latinos en Estados Unidos, p. 94.
13. Jimmy Breslin, The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002).
14. Wayne A. Cornelius, “The Structural Embeddedness of Demand for Mexican Immigrant Labor: New Evidence from California,” in Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, ed., Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspective (Boston: The David Rockefeller Center Series on Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 1998), p.126.
15. Wayne A. Cornelius, “The Structural Embeddedness of Demand for Mexican Immigrant Labor: New Evidence from California,” in Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, ed., Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspective, p. 126.
16. Leigh Binford, Guillermo Carrasco, Socorro Arana and Soledad Santillana de Rojas, Rumbo a Canadá: La Migración Canadiense de Trabajadores Agrícolas Tlaxcaltecas (Mexico: SIZA/UAT, 2004).
17. David Runsden, Raul Hinojosa, Kathleen Lee and Richard Mines, The Extent, Pattern, and Contributions of Migrant Labor in the NAFTA Countries (Los Angeles: NAID Center, UCLA, 2000).
18. Interview with J.G., St. Catherines, Ontario, September 10, 2003.
19. Tanya Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), p. 144.
20. Cited in Lisa Grace Marr, “They do the work that Canadians Scorn,” The Hamilton Spectator News, June 3, 2002, p. A11.
21. John Gledhill, “The Mexican Contribution to the Restructuring of U.S. Capitalism: NAFTA as an Instrument of Flexible Accumulation,” Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1998, pp. 279-96.
22. Robert Smith, “Commentary,” in Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, ed., Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspective, p. 152.
23. Elaine Levine, “La otra cara de la migración: Inserción laboral y estatus social de los migrantes mexicanos y latinos en Estados Unidos,” in Elaine Levine, ed., Inserción Laboral y Estatus Social de los Migrantes Mexicanos y Latinos en Estados Unidos.
24. Elaine Levine, “Ten Years into NAFTA Mexico is Specializing in Exporting Cheap Labor,” Paper for the NAFTA Symposium, “Trading Justice: NAFTA’s New Links and Conflicts,” Center for Research on Women, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, University of Memphis, March 24-26, 2005, p. 20.
25. Robert Smith, “Imagining Mexican Educational Futures in New York,” in Regina Cortina and Mónica Gendreau, Immigrants and Schooling: Mexicans in New York (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 2003), p. 110.
26. The $16.6 billion figure probably overestimates the true amount of remittances. See Fernando Lozano Ascencio, “Tendencias recientes de las remesas de los migrantes mexicanos en Estados Unidos,” talk delivered at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2004.
