Abstract
This is a timely book. With an unprecedented economic crisis that began in 2007, the likes of which we have not seen since the Depression, and an administration that is implementing heightened enforcement policies throughout the country, the researchers are filling a vacuum in the literature on how economic downturns affect migration. It is also timely by challenging the media’s primary perspective that the economic crisis has caused undocumented immigrants to return to their places of origin. This study, based on fieldwork carried out by the Mexican Migration Field Research and Training Program in the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, involved a team of thirty-eight undergraduate and graduate students from U.S. and Mexican institutions. In collaboration, they conducted a total of 1,031 “in-home” interviews and 500 hours of unstructured interviews among persons aged 15 to 65 on both sides of the border. A most compelling aspect is that the researchers focused on Tunkas, an indigenous community in rural Yucatan and various migration sites in Southern California that they had already studied in 2006. While the researchers made no claim that the survey sample was statistically representative of “larger universes” of Mexican migrants, the researchers used both quantitative surveys and qualitative ethnographic studies to maintain that Tunkas is “broadly representative of indigenous communities of emigration in Southern Mexico.”
In their study, the researchers found that Tunkaseños have migrated both for purposes of employment or reunification, with men migrating primarily for employment opportunities and women migrating “to be reunited with family members already living there.” Since the local economy of Tunkas has depended primarily on outside resources to survive, the researchers found that the economic crisis had the effect of reducing internal migration employment opportunities in the nearby tourist areas as well as a decrease in the amount of remittances being sent by Tunkaseños in the United States. Hence, Tunkaseños on both sides of the border face economic insecurities and have to make difficult choices of whether to stay in Tunkas, migrate to another internal site (such as Merida), or pay costly fees to a coyote with no assurance of employment. The findings by the researchers contradict classical theories of migration and the mainstream media that have promoted the idea that the economic crisis is resulting in large numbers of migrants returning to their hometowns. They further contradict the U.S. federal government’s contention that the lower numbers of migrants crossing the border have been primarily due to its enforcement policies. The researchers instead focus on how increased enforcement is resulting in Tunkaseños who are already in the United States to stay, and forcing those in Tunkas to either stay or to migrate internally. They provide evidence that between 2006 and 2009, there was a decline in new migration from Tunkas to the United States and that return migration had also decreased.
The other result of these conditions which the book documents is the survival strategies that Tunkaseño families use on both sides of the border including: reducing the amount of remittances sent back, reducing household expenditures, sharing meals, consolidating households, relying on social networks, and identifying alternative income sources such as the informal economy and the informal credit system. These strategies, which are fully documented with impeccable data, include how health, education, and community participation play roles in navigating the crisis. In contradistinction to the claims of U.S. government officials that their enforcement policies will ultimately prove to be effective, the researcher’s qualitative data show that the migration plans of Tunkaseños, like other migrants, are not permanent and are only being postponed temporarily until the economy improves.
This book bolsters the argument that immigration patterns will not significantly change with domestic immigration policies. Instead, workers will remain in or return to their country of origin when the economy in these countries improves. A real change would take the equivalent of a Marshall Plan, where the U.S. government would work with Mexico and other Latin American countries to strengthen their economies.
The chapter on “Tunkaseños in the Transnational Labor Market” refers to some of the “globalized market” factors that have resulted in the demise of agriculture and the rise of the industrial and service sector. While the chapter does mention that the state government of Yucatan invested in the maquiladora industry resulting in 126 plants and the “vulnerability” of the agricultural economy (resulting in Tunkaseños turning to the informal economy), there could have been more research and analysis on the role that U.S. trade policies have played in these transformations. With the use of subsidies to U.S. farmers who have exported corn and beans across the border, thousands of Mexican farmers have been displaced and turned into internal and global migrants. The “free trade agreement” as it is called, has removed existing trade barriers, eliminated tariffs left on American imports, allowed U.S. corporations full ownership of companies in Mexico, and granted U.S. financial services greater access to Mexican markets. Any talk of benefits to the Mexican people becomes questionable when one looks at the dismal results of the “maquiladora” industry all along the Mexican side of the border. These corporations, which have run away from the United States in search of cheap labor and less regulation, have not only been caught polluting the air and water but they have also had a profound effect on the cohesion of the Mexican family, displacement of the small farmer, and influence on the decisions of individuals to migrate or to stay.