Abstract
Political rhetoric on Mexican immigration in the United States belies the reality. The rhetoric: Mexican immigrants are flooding American cities and towns. The reality: their number has been shrinking for almost two decades. The rhetoric: The Mexican undocumented population has been rising. The reality: the number of undocumented Mexicans has fallen by a third since the Great Recession. The rhetoric: we live in an era of mass Mexican emigration; the reality: that era ended almost two decades ago, and a new period of return migration has begun.
In this complex milieu of rhetoric overriding reality, The Returned: Former U.S. Migrants’ Lives in Mexico City by Masferrer, Hamilton, and Denier, provides a much-needed and insightful investigation into the lives of return migrants, a population that is invisible in their new communities and forgotten in the ones they left behind.
The study is based on in-depth interviews of 34 return migrants in Mexico City, of whom almost half were deported, and many among the other half lacked proper immigration documents or faced other precarious visa situations. The narratives are nuanced, multifaceted, and at times, contradictory — resonating with the complexities of migrant lives in the United States and lived experience upon return.
The book has eight chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the scale and size of the return migration, and Chapter 2 describes the challenges that return migrants experience in Mexico City, their new abode. Chapter 3, “The Policy Trap,” highlights how increasingly restrictive US immigration policies limit migrants’ mobility, deepen undocumented precarity, and shape the conditions of return. The next three chapters describe migrants settling back into urban life and focus on family and work. The final two chapters, synthesize migrants’ coping strategies and propose policies such as mental health support, improved labor-market matching, entrepreneurship programs, and reforms that facilitate family reunification and reintegration.
The narrative highlights a mix of some positives and many negatives. On the positive side, the return migrants have a sense of relief from the constant fear of deportation or harassment from US enforcement agencies. There is joy of reunification with family members left behind when they emigrated to the United States, but for many, separation from family members now left behind in the United States inflicts a heavy emotional toll as well. The US-born children who accompanied their parents confront language barriers, cultural adjustments, and separation from friends back in the United States.
The narratives of the Returned reflect a profound sense of loss: economic, social, and psychological. Norteado is the term that one return migrant used to describe the state of his fellow return migrants. A take on “el norte,” a colloquial expression that many in Mexico use for the United States, norteado also means disoriented. Return migrants experience disorientation at many levels: from living in Mexico City, which they describe as “dynamic, unequal, and massive”; from being trapped by the US immigration regime that prevents safe or legal remigration and mobility across the border.
There are multiple negatives associated with the very act of return. As the larger literature on return migration globally documents, in many origin communities, return migration is taken as a sign of failure. Political rhetoric and social media, in the United States, often associate undocumented immigrants with drugs and crime, and justify their deportation to control drug trafficking and crime. Partly on account of these prejudices that are inflamed in the media, return migrants feel discriminated against and stigmatized. Reception contexts matter for reintegration. Mexico City, where the subjects of The Returned live, with its vast urban landscape, provides little institutional support tailored to the needs of returnees.
The qualitative research methodology, applied in the book, allows for a nuanced understanding of individual experiences, capturing the complexities of return migration that quantitative data alone might overlook. The authors delve into the personal narratives of returnees, exploring themes of identity, belonging, and adaptation. The authors are careful to note that their sample is not representative of all return migrants and that their narrative may not be recounting the full story. Still, the in-depth interviews provide valuable insights and lay the groundwork for future research. Key themes, disorientation, discrimination, and aspirations to return to the United States can be starting points for deeper studies. Do Mexican return migrants view that their migration experience has left them better off or worse off? Do return migrants experience more discrimination in Mexico than they did in the United States? Or is it that while they expected discrimination in the United States, they did not think that they would be discriminated against in their own country, and therefore the shock is more severe?
What is striking in these narratives is the absence of the determination and grit often associated with migrants. The narratives challenge the widely held assumption that return migrants will seamlessly reintegrate into their homelands. For many interviewed, reintegration has proved difficult, as skills and experiences gained in the United States rarely translate into recognition in the Mexican labor market.
At several points in the book, the authors ask the question: Why do migrants return? To their credit, they acknowledge that the question is beyond their study, which is based on a sample not representative of the return migrant population, yet it remains crucial to comprehend the future trajectories of their subjects. The question has a simple answer for those who are deported: they had no choice. Then, there are the de facto deported who returned because their family members were deported, and they were presented with a single choice: return with the family and keep it intact, or stay but with a family disintegrated and trapped across two nations, with little or limited choice of mobility. And then there is a third group who voluntarily returned, of their own choice. The Returned is substantially about the first two groups. Whether voluntary return migrants in Mexico face the same challenges as forced returnees or whether migration to the United States has brought some economic return is an issue for future research.
The book is an important compendium for policy makers, researchers, and students of immigration. It brings into focus the struggles of return migrants who become invisible to both their home and host country after they return.
