Write essay on citizenship and immigration policy

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Sociology: Comparative Immigration

Respond to questions 1 and 2 in typed essays, each of which is roughly 650 words long. Respond to question 3 in a typed essay roughly 1250 words long. Use 12 point font and make sure that your essays are all double-spaced.

Reminder regarding plagiarism: Plagiarism will not be tolerated. Taking exact wordings from lecture slides and advancing them as your own thoughts constitutes a form of plagiarism. You may, of course, rephrase information taken from lecture slides; you may also cite or quote from lecture slides, all the while appropriately referencing the lecture and/or date that the lecture was presented. Exact quotations should be limited in number; you must express ideas in your own words.

1. Drawing on Aptekar, Bloemraad, and Fassin and Mazouz, as well as lectures, contrast Canada, France, and the USA to explain how the “meaning of citizenship” varies among these three countries, with particular attention to the degree to which citizenship is understood as encompassing or excluding continuing homeland attachments.

2. How did cognitive and affective (emotional) factors influence the citizenship decisions of the Castillo family? What objectives did they seek to advance in obtaining citizenship and how did those goals vary by gender and cohort?

3. Explanations of changes in immigration policy contrast the influence of factors related to domestic politics as opposed to pressures or incentives arising from the international arena. Drawing on readings (Tichenor; FitzGerald and Cook-Martin; Reimers; Lee) and lectures, use key concepts such as that of path dependency, strange bedfellow coalitions, the rights/admissions dimensions of immigration policy, the politics of national humiliation, vertical v horizontal dimensions to explain the ways in which both domestic and international politics influence immigration policy; focus your explanation on one episode from each of the following groups:

Group 1: The Chinese exclusion act; the National Origins Act of 1924; the exclusion of Mexicans from the National Origins Act of 1924 (the quota act);

Group 2: The Hart-Celler Act of 1964; the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986; or the current-day stalemate over Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Provide details and examples from readings and lectures.

Please note that you must analyze two policy episodes, taking one from group 1 and one from group 2. There is no expectation that domestic and international factors will be equally important in each case that you analyze (though that may be true); most important is that you demonstrate your ability to identify influences of each type.

Rules:

  • Double spaced
  • 12 point font (Times New Roman)
  • 650 + 650 + 1,250 = total 2,550 words
  • MLA format
  • Include work cited page
  • Cite all sources
  • At least 5 sources (pick from readings and lectures listed below only)

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The Normative Terrain of the Global Refugee Regime ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org /2015/the-normative-terrain-of-the-global-refugee-regime/ Alexander Betts 10/7/2015 Syrian refugees in Turkey. (Courtesy: European Commission DG ECHO/Creative Commons) The global refugee regime encompasses the rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures that govern states’ responses to refugees. It comprises a set of norms, primarily those entrenched in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines who is a refugee and the rights to which such people are entitled. It also comprises an international organization, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has supervisory responsibility for ensuring that states meet their obligations toward refugees.1 The underlying ethos of the refugee regime is a reciprocal commitment to the principle of nonrefoulement, that is, the obligation not to return a person to a country where she faces a well-founded fear of persecution. As the preamble to the 1951 Convention makes clear, the premise of the refugee regime is international cooperation; specifically, that states reciprocally commit to provide protection to refugees. The regime comprises two sets of obligations: asylum and burden-sharing. Asylum can be defined as the obligation that states have toward refugees who reach their territory; burden-sharing represents the obligation that states have toward refugees in the territory of other states, whether to financially support them or to resettle some of them on their own territory. The existing regime has a strongly institutionalized norm of asylum that is widely accepted; however, the norms related to burden-sharing are weak and largely discretionary.2 Political theorists have long debated the obligations that states have in relation to international migration. Broadly speaking, most political theorists recognize a special right to refugee protection, although the extent of this right is understood differently among communitarians and liberal theorists. Despite this apparent consensus, however, the existing refugee regime is at a crossroads. In the context of the Syria crisis, and with more people displaced today 1/41 than at any time since the Second World War, the existing refugee regime is being challenged by the record number of people seeking protection. As a result, an increasing number of governments are closing their borders. Jordan, Hungary, Croatia, Kenya, Thailand, and Australia have all recently shut their borders to refugees, at least temporarily, suggesting that states’ commitment to asylum may be increasingly conditional. Furthermore, there are now new drivers of cross-border displacement, including climate change, food and water insecurity, and state fragility. Within this context, a set of normative questions arises—questions that have not drawn sufficient attention until now. The purpose of this essay, then, is to guide reflection on the obligations that states have today, both individually and collectively, toward refugees. Its intention is not to provide definitive answers, but rather to pose questions to further the normative debate. WHY PROTECT? Where does normative obligation come from? On what basis can we ground a claim to asylum? This has rarely been explored with respect to refugees. Yet today, when publics and electorates in Europe, Australia, and many other locations around the globe are asking why they should assist asylum seekers, it is important to identify the ethical grounds for that commitment. It is also important, however, to recognize that there can be a diverse set of reasons to normatively commit to refugee protection, including obligation, interests, and values. Obligation Most moral philosophers recognize that we have ethical commitments to others. The humanitarian principle implies that we have particular obligations toward those in need. There are a range of perspectives that can be advanced to support this thesis. At one end of the spectrum, communitarians suggest that our primary obligations are toward those within our own society. Yet even those like Michael Walzer, who assert that the state is analogous to a club, a neighborhood, or a family, recognize that refugees possess a set of moral claims on our political communities.3 This is because they flee such desperate situations, and are in such dire need, that we should admit them to our territory insofar as the cost to our own societies is low. This Refugee processing center, Kos, Greece. (Courtesy: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies/Creative Commons) obligation, therefore, is conditional. Fleshing this out, for instance, Garrett Hardin uses the metaphor of “lifeboat ethics,” highlighting that the carrying capacity of the state depends upon its ability to help refugees without causing great detriment to those already in the metaphorical boat. 4 Alternatively, a range of liberal theorists argue that the threshold of “low cost” can be set much higher. Some liberals, drawing on Rawls, suggest that, behind the “veil of ignorance,” we are all potentially refugees, and that refugees are ordinary people in exceptional situations.5 Hence our common humanity should be the basis of recognizing our moral obligation. For other liberal theorists, such as Joseph Carens, the rights of migrants, including refugees, can be grounded in basic democratic values of freedom and equality. He argues that this should entail “reasonable accommodation” of people’s differences.6 At the extreme end of the spectrum, radical utilitarians such as Singer argue that ultimately it is morally untenable not to reallocate opportunities to poor people up to the point at which marginal utilities are equalized across all people. In other words, we should be admitting people right up until their quality of life is no worse than our own. Attempting to reconcile this spectrum of positions, Matthew Gibney has argued that people have obligations that are 2/41 both “special” (that is, toward their families and communities) and “general” (in other words, toward humanity). Drawing upon the work of Thomas Nagel and Samuel Scheffler, Gibney argues that we need to understand that in practice people value their special obligations more than their general ones. The “humanitarian principle” supported by Gibney requires that we should prioritize the welfare of the most vulnerable arriving at our territory insofar as the cost is comparatively low. 7 Are the few hundred thousand asylum seekers that Europe has taken in this year, who in theory could be divided among twenty-eight European Union member states, too many? What criteria would one need to use to determine what a “fair share” of refugees means for a given state? The current situation—in which many countries argue that they are “overwhelmed” and that the cost to their citizens of hosting refugees is relatively high—leaves open the question of the extent of this obligation. Are the 1.2 million refugees in Lebanon, a small country with a population of just over 4 million, too many? Are the few hundred thousand asylum seekers that Europe has taken in this year, who in theory could be divided among twenty-eight European Union member states, too many? What criteria would one need to use to determine what a “fair share” of refugees means for a given state? Other theorists extend the argument beyond the humanitarian principle, arguing that the source of moral obligation toward distant strangers comes from the reality of our interconnected world. Seyla Benhabib, for instance, has argued that we are no longer simply part of isolated national communities, and that our moral obligations extend by virtue of our transnational interactions. The existence of a global society means that when other people suffer in the world, we are complicit in that suffering.8 Conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, for instance, have been affected in various ways by the foreign policy decisions of the United States and many European powers. Thomas Pogge, for one, highlights some of those interconnections as a basis on which we can think about claims to global justice. 9 Interests Refugee protection is not important just for humanitarian reasons. It is also crucial for global stability. As Emma Haddad has recognized, one of the inevitable consequences of the international state system is that sometimes it malfunctions. When states fail in their duty to protect the fundamental rights of their own citizens, people are forced to leave those countries, whether temporarily or permanently.10 When they do so, it is in the interests of international security that they have somewhere safe to go. States collectively benefit from the availability of refugee protection, which can be considered, to some extent, to be a global public good.11 When provided, it offers nonexcludable and nonrivalrous benefits to all states, irrespective of who contributes. Those benefits are, first, the security of reintegrating people into the state system and, second, human rights—the guarantee that people have their basic needs met somewhere. 3/41 Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons. (Courtesy: European Commission) The challenge, though, is that typically the taking in of refugees is perceived by states as imposing economic, social, and political costs. Thus, acting in isolation, states often seek to free ride on the provision of refugee protection by other governments, and have strong incentives to engage in burden-shifting. That is one of the reasons international refugee law exists: to create a set of norms that obligates governments to a reciprocal commitment to support refugees. In that sense, when a state provides protection it is helping maintain the global refugee regime—the architecture of reciprocal support that confers a set of global public goods. The danger, of course, is that when countries fail to reciprocally commit to asylum or burden-sharing, this in turn threatens the edifice of the global refugee regime.12 A lot of the normative analysis proceeds on the assumption that refugees impose a cost. But this is actually an empirical question, and the assumption can be challenged. In the limited research that exists on the economic contributions of refugees, there is evidence to suggest that with the right policies, refugees can make a contribution to national development and serve as a benefit to host governments and populations. Uganda, for example, has adopted the relatively enlightened “Self-Reliance Strategy,” which allows refugees the right to work and freedom of movement. In our research on the Ugandan case, we have been able to show the positive effects of this policy on the country’s economy and society. In Kampala, 21 percent of refugees employ others in their businesses, and of these, 40 percent of the employees are Ugandan nationals. In other words, refugees can create jobs for host countries.13 If the cost or benefit of refugees is the result of our polices rather than the innate capacity of refugees themselves, then this has implications for our normative analysis. Values Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard has highlighted that one of the most fundamental sources of normativity is identity. In her work on “self-constitution,” she argues that one of the key foundations of normativity is the way in which identities are constituted over time.14 If we behave in a morally good way, this in turn shapes who we become as people. Following Korsgaard, we can understand much state behavior in relation to refugees as identitydriven. In the current refugee crisis in Europe, for example, Germany has expressed significant pro-refugee values, 4/41 reflective of its self-understanding as a responsible and progressive state. In opinion polls, most Germans are strongly in favor of taking in refugees, and in August 2015 Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that the country could take up to 800,000 Syrian refugees in one year, adding that “Germany is a strong country and it will cope.” Refugees in Budapest, Hungary. (Courtesy: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies /Creative Commons) Identity and values sometimes privilege taking refugees from particular countries in particular contexts, and they can also underpin exclusionary policies. During the cold war, granting refugee status in the West was seen as a way of implicitly condemning the values of Eastern Bloc countries and supporting Western capitalism. With the current influx of refugees in Europe, the Visigrád states—Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Poland—have expressed a strong preference for taking Christian refugees. In other parts of the world, an important source of the commitment to take refugees is the Islamic value of protecting “guests.” Even though many countries in the Middle East are not signatories to international refugee conventions, they nevertheless support refugee protection based on a set of religious and historical values. WHO TO PROTECT? The definition of a “refugee” was created at a particular juncture of history, and in a particular geographical context: post–Second World War Europe. The definition of “people fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution” was a product of that era. Today there are new drivers of cross-border displacement, including environmental change, state fragility, and food insecurity. Many of these fall outside the framework of the Refugee Convention. This poses a question of who today has a just claim to asylum. Many authors suggest that persecution is a special case and justifies the privileged status of “refugee.” For others, the existing conception of “refugee” creates an ethically arbitrary barrier, excluding others with equally valid moral claims to protection. How do we sort out these distinctions? We can approach this issue in terms of whether persecution is a special case; whether a broader category of what might be called “survival migrants” also has a case for asylum; and whether in the contemporary world it still makes sense to even distinguish “migrant” categories. Matthew Price offers one of the strongest defenses of persecution as a special case that creates a particular justification for asylum. While he suggests there may be grounds for granting temporary protection to people fleeing 5/41 other forms of humanitarian crisis, he regards asylum to be, by definition, a pathway to permanent citizenship elsewhere.15 The concept of asylum, however, can be understood not necessarily as a path to citizenship but rather simply as a right to access territory, whether on a temporary or permanent basis. Seen that way, it is hard to deny that other people fleeing serious human rights violations and deprivations would also have a similar moral claim to cross an international border. Jean-François Durieux has supported this position, suggesting that there are different asylum “paradigms,” including “admission” for people fleeing persecution and “rescue” for those fleeing disaster.16 For Durieux, persecution is distinctive for two reasons: it leaves no alternative route for protection and it often enables states to admit people based on affinity with their plight, given the individualized nature of persecution. Like Price, Durieux suggests that war or natural disaster should trigger alternative forms of support, such as humanitarian aid or temporary refuge. James Hathaway has also argued that refugees represent a distinct case: among forced migrants, they are the most deserving of the deserving.17 Fleeing their own government, they are the least likely to be in a situation in which they can seek effective redress within their own state. In addition, he argues that broadening the category to include other categories of forced migration risks undermining the availability of protection for (“true”) refugees. Others, like Gibney, find the idea that there is a clear line between refugees fleeing persecution and other forced migrants unpersuasive. According to Gibney, “these attempts fail to establish a clear, crisp, and credible dividing line between these groups. This does not mean that there are no differences at all, it is simply these differences are relatively minor, Internally displaced people, North Darfur, Sudan. (Courtesy: United Nations Photo/Creative Commons) not intrinsic, and not of great moral significance.”18 I have argued that a broader category of people is deserving of the right to seek asylum, a group that I call “survival migrants.”19 I define survival migrants as people who are outside their country of origin as a result of their country’s inability to ensure their most fundamental human rights. The group includes the institutional category of refugees, but is much broader. It encompasses those fleeing not only civil and political rights violations but also very serious socioeconomic rights deprivations. The moral basis of this argument builds upon Henry Shue’s notion of “basic rights”—rights without which it is impossible to enjoy any other right. For Shue, there are three basic rights: basic liberty, basic security, and basic subsistence.20 While the existing refugee definition ensures protection for people fleeing many deprivations of basic liberty and basic security, it does nothing to protect people fleeing the absence of basic subsistence. From a basic rights perspective, this is an arbitrary distinction.21 Take the case of Zimbabwe. Between 2003 and 2009, up to 2 million Zimbabweans fled to neighboring South Africa, driven out by deep socioeconomic rights deprivations resulting from hyperinflation, poor planning, drought, and the collapse of the national economy under President Robert Mugabe. These people were not fleeing the political situation so much as the economic consequences of the underlying political situation. As a result, most were not recognized by South Africa as refugees. Indeed, at the peak of the crisis South Africa had a refugee recognition rate of less than 10 percent. According to the government’s own statistics, in 2007 and 2008 it deported around 300,000 Zimbabweans each year. The outcome was clearly unjust, but it reflected the government’s use of the 1951 Convention definition of a refugee, which excluded most Zimbabweans. The question of who to protect has implications for how to think about the important distinction between “refugee” 6/41 and “migrant.” At the outset of the crisis in Europe, most commentators described it as a “migrant crisis.” This in turn led to a backlash as others suggested that it was actually a “refugee crisis.” Some media outlets such as Al Jazeera even announced that they would stop using the word “migrant.” The implicit argument was that because refugees had a particular moral claim, we should more appropriately describe the group as “refugees.” Indeed, while the majority crossing were from refugee-producing countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Eritrea, it was not clear that all of them would fit the definition of refugee under the 1951 Convention. In response, a number of commentators such as Jørgen Carling have argued that abandoning the word “migrant” would also entail risks, including the stigmatizing of UNHCR refugee camp, Za’atari, Jordan. (Courtesy: DFID – UK Department for International Development/Creative Commons) other migrants. In fact, as he has pointed out, it is important that we recognize that all migrants have human rights.22 Finally, it should be mentioned that the distinctions among immigration categories, and the privileging of some over others, are premised upon a Westphalian state model, which relies upon an underlying assumption that people belong in particular states. Yet with growing transnationalism, what political community means and what it can become is an open question. Political theory in general has only just begun to consider how we might reconceive political community or understand it more broadly than in simple Westphalian terms. For many people today, one’s primary source of entitlements and opportunities comes from inclusion within, or exclusion from, the global economy —not from the behavior or protections afforded by a particular state. HOW TO PROTECT? The final question relates to the content of protection. What should be provided to refugees, where, and by whom? The traditional assumption is that most of the responsibility should be borne by neighboring countries. However, this “accident of geography” places the overwhelming burden on countries that often have the least capacity to absorb refugees. Indeed, 86 percent of the world’s refugees are in developing regions.23 Over a third of these refugees are hosted in camps, some are in open settlements, and over half are in urban areas, with long-term humanitarian assistance provided by state and other donor funding, such as through various UN agencies. As protection space diminishes for refugees around the world and the political climate becomes less auspicious, there is a greater need for creative thinking about how we protect threatened populations. Who Should Host? Where, then, should refugees be offered protection? As noted above, the existing institutional framework implicitly confers greater responsibility to those who are near than those that are far; the principle of asylum is strongly institutionalized, while burden-sharing is largely discretionary. From a deontological perspective, proximity can be justified based on an “acts versus omissions” distinction. To use force to repel those who arrive at our borders may render us morally complicit in those people’s fate. But from a consequentialist perspective the acts versus omissions distinction dissolves. To fail to assist those in need, no matter how far away, may be just as morally problematic as expelling those at our borders. Many countries actively seek to portray refugees who are distant and remain in their regions of origin as “worthy,” and those who move spontaneously across borders as less so. We can see how this proximity versus distance debate plays out in contemporary refugee politics. Many countries 7/41 actively seek to portray refugees who are distant and remain in their regions of origin as “worthy,” and those who move spontaneously across borders as less so. This has been the official stance of Australia, which has sought to limit arrival by boat while supporting the resettlement of asylum-seekers through UNHCR. Many other countries are seeking to emulate this model; the United Kingdom, for example, is seeking to “break the connection between spontaneous arrival in Europe and access to protection in the U.K.”24 The logic offered for this type of policy is that it makes little difference where refugees are protected. If protection “in the region of origin” can be provided, that removes the need for onward movement to other parts of the world. Holding everything else constant, there may be normative validity to this argument. However, it is an empirical question whether or not “protection in the region of origin” can actually function as a substitute for spontaneous arrival asylum in other, more distant states. Empirically, there is some evidence to suggest that when industrialized states close their borders and instead seek to support refugees in their first country of asylum in the developing world, those developing countries become increasingly unwilling to continue to host refugees. Take the case of the United Kingdom, which faced a spike in asylum seekers in the early 2000s. As a potential solution, Home Secretary Jack Straw proposed that Tanzania take a number of the Somali asylum seekers who were then arriving in Britain in exchange for which the United Kingdom would provide Tanzania with financial support. The response was stark. Not only did Tanzania decline the offer but it used it as justification to increase restrictions in its own policies toward Burundian refugees.25 The implications were clear: while having an external dimension to European refugee policies is important, it cannot be understood to be a substitute for protection in Europe (or other rich democracies around the world). Refugee processing center, Preševo, Serbia. (Courtesy: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies/Creative Commons) Industrialized states have resorted to other methods in order to keep potential refugees outside their borders. Take the idea of transit processing centers—places where asylum seekers have their asylum claims processed extraterritorially. Australia, for example, uses Papua New Guinea and the island of Nauru to assess the claims of asylum seekers. Genuine refugees are transported to Australia, but those whose applications are declined face deportation. This idea has proved deeply problematic because of the human rights abuses perpetrated in Nauru’s detention centers and the way the policy leaves many lives in limbo. Other creative ideas are being mooted for how to rethink the political geography of asylum, including Special Economic Zones26 and the concept of a “Refugee 8/41 Nation” on territory specifically purchased or annexed to host refugees.27 What Rights Should Be Granted Refugees? Existing humanitarian responses are, broadly speaking, well conceived for the emergency phase. Many states provide food, clothing, and shelter when refugees arrive. However, too often that emergency response continues year after year, leaving refugees in “protracted refugee situations.” At the same time, as many countries around the world struggle to meet the needs of their own citizens, the level of rights and entitlements that refugees should receive is not a simple matter to resolve, particularly if there is competition for resources with citizens of the host state. One potential solution would be for richer countries to provide development assistance that would support host-state nationals and refugees at an equal level of opportunity and autonomy. Instead of being an inevitable “burden,” the presence of refugees might thereby bring benefits to the host state. In developed countries, too, there is a debate about the rights and protections refugees should receive. For example, the resettling of refugees in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark is very costly because refugees there are entitled to generous social security benefits. In Norway, for instance, a debate emerged in 2015 about whether to allocate funds to resettle a finite number of refugees from camps to Norway, or whether to allocate that money to support the majority of refugees in their region of origin. Eventually, the country decided to provide resettlement to 8,500 Syrian refugees, but the total cost was well in excess of the country’s total annual humanitarian aid budget. A related issue is the duration of refugee protection. In certain contexts, the idea of temporary protection has been used. During the Kosovo crisis, the EU countries participated in a wider humanitarian evacuation program for Macedonia, giving Kosovar Albanians the right to settle temporarily in EU countries until the situation in Kosovo abated. Similarly, in 1995 the United States used temporary protection visas to allow people who were fleeing a volcanic eruption in Montserrat the ability to remain in the United States until they were able to return home. On one hand, this is a way of potentially making refugee protection sustainable in the long run. Some argue, however, that refugees acquire rights over time, which necessitates some kind of pathway to naturalization and ultimately citizenship.28 Who Is Responsible? States have the primary responsibility for the human rights of their own citizens. When that social contract fails, other states and the international community are expected to stand in and provide surrogate protection. Protection, thus, is a duty of states. Likewise, the three main durable solutions—resettlement, repatriation, and local integration —are all about reintegrating refugees into a state. Increasingly, however, the private sector, including business, is playing a role. Recently, the IKEA Foundation gave the largest private sector grant in the history of the United Nations to UNHCR, donating €110 million, including to support the development of a “Refugee Housing Unit” to ensure sustainable shelter for refugees. Other multinational corporations, from Hewlett-Packard to UPS, are increasingly engaging with the work of UNHCR. However, while business is an increasingly important humanitarian actor, its role comes with risks. Many businesses are well-meaning, but their motives and modes of engagement with refugees vary considerably. Motives for engagement include philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, innovation, access to labor, and interventions in the supply chain; meanwhile, some companies engage on the basis of the profit motive, and others for social enterprise. It would only take one case of serious exploitation to discredit the potential role of business and undermine its potential contribution to refugee protection. Today, though, there are no established ethical or normative principles to guide private sector engagement with the refugee regime. There is an urgent need for such standards. THE FUTURE OF THE REFUGEE REGIME As I stated at the beginning of this essay, the refugee regime is at a crossroads. Created in the aftermath of the Second World War, the regime was a product of its time. Since then, international society has evolved. The distribution of power in the international system has changed, as has the nature of displacement. As asylum and 9/41 immigration have become more politicized, so too has the protection space available to refugees diminished. The issues of who, why, and how to protect refugees pose a series of normative challenges that can only be addressed by recognizing the dynamic nature of refugee protection today. Old assumptions no longer apply. Refugees are not an inevitable cost on host states; they can also be a socioeconomic benefit. States are no longer the only protection actors; markets also matter for the outcomes for refugees. The numbers and drivers of displacement are multiplying. These dynamics lead to a series of choices, and our choices are not exogenous to the dynamics that shape the normative questions. Our answers have implications for institutional design. The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, Germany. (Courtesy: Leif Hinrichsen/Creative Commons) Refugee Convention remains an important guiding source of norms. To renegotiate it today would be almost politically impossible; indeed, it would likely result in a worse agreement than was arrived at in 1951. Furthermore, UNHCR’s role has changed dramatically since its creation. Today it protects not only refugees but also internally displaced persons, victims of natural disaster, and stateless persons. It provides emergency relief in crisis situations, directs care and assistance to refugees, and supports them with legal advice. There is very little question that these structures should remain in place. The real questions are: How we can adapt and, where necessary, build upon this institutional order? How can we better persuade states and their societies to meet the needs of refugees? How can they adapt to be more inclusive of the people they protect? What should be provided to refugees and where should it be provided? And, finally, who has the responsibility to do so? The answers to these crucial questions will shape the future of the global refugee regime. 1. Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Alexander Betts, Gil Loescher, and James Milner, UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee 10/41 Protection (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2012). 2. Alexander Betts, Protection by Persuasion: International Cooperation in the Refugee Regime (Ithaca: Cornell 11/41 University Press, 2009). 12/41 3. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 13/41 4. Gerrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today 8, no. 4 (1974). 14/41 15/41 5. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (New York: Belknap, 1974). 16/41 6. Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 64. 7. Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees 17/41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 18/41 8. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19/41 9. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002). 20/41 10. Emma Haddad, The Refugee in International Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 11. Astri Suhrke, “Burden-Sharing during Refugee Emergencies: The Logic of Collective versus National Action,” 21/41 Journal of Refugee Studies 11, no. 4 (1998), pp. 396–415. 22/41 12. Betts, Protection by Persuasion. 13. Alexander Betts, Louise Bloom, Josiah Kaplan, and Naohiko Omata, Refugee Economies: Rethinking 23/41 Popular Assumptions (Oxford: Humanitarian Innovation Project, 2014). 14. Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (New York: Oxford University Press, 24/41 2009). 15. Matthew Price, Rethinking Asylum: History, Purpose, and Limits (New York: Cambridge University Press, 25/41 2009). 26/41 16. Jean-François Durieux, “Three Asylum Paradigms,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 20, 27/41 no. 2 (2013), pp. 147–77. 17. James Hathaway, “Is Refugee Status Really Elitist? An Answer to the Ethical Challenge,” in Jean-Yves Carlier and Dirk Vanheule, eds., Europe and Refugees: A Challenge? (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997); and James Hathaway, “Forced Migration Studies: Could We Agree Just to ‘Date’?” Journal of Refugee 28/41 Studies 20, no. 3 (2007), pp. 349–69. 18. Matthew Gibney, “Should We Privilege Refugees?” Paper Presented at Refugee Studies Centre’s 30th 29/41 Anniversary Conference on Global Refugee Policy, Oxford University, December 6, 2013. 19. Alexander Betts, Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement (Ithaca: Cornell 30/41 University Press, 2013). 20. Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 31/41 University Press, 1980). 32/41 21. Andrew Shacknove, “Who is a Refugee?” Ethics 95, no. 2 (1985), pp. 274–84. 22. Jørgen Carling, Border Criminologies Blog, September 23, 2015, “Refugees Are also Migrants. All Migrants 33/41 Matter,” available at: www. bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/refugees-are-also-migrants/. 34/41 23. UNHCR, Global Trends Report: Forced Displacement in 2014 , June 18, 2015. 24. This is a paraphrasing of the logic outlined in David Cameron’s announcement to House of Commons that the United Kingdom would resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees, but only from camps in the region, September 7, 35/41 2015. 25. Alexander Betts and James Milner, “The Externalisation of EU Asylum Policy: The Position of African States,” 36/41 37/41 COMPAS Working Paper No. 36 (2006). COMPAS Working Paper No. 36 (2006). 26. Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, “Help Refugees to Help Themselves: Give Displaced Syrians Access to 38/41 Labor Markets,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 6, (November/December 2015). 27. Alexander Betts, “Is Creating a New Nation for the World’s Refugees a Good Idea?” Guardian, Development Professionals Network, August 4, 2015, www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals- 39/41 network/2015/aug/04/refugee-nation-migration-jason-buzi. 40/41 28. Carens, The Ethics of Immigration. 41/41 BEYOND SMOKE AND MIRRORS MEXICAN IMMIGRATION IN AN ERA OF ECONOMIC INTEGRATION DouGLAS S. MASSEY, JORGE DuRAND, AND NoLAN J. MALONE Russell Sage Foundation • New York 6 Beyond Smoke Clnd Mirrors observers have labeled the dream of a controlled border as an illusion of "smoke and mirrors" (Baum 1997). Politicians lack the skills of a good magician, however, and the trick has flopped. The issue is not whether North America will integrate, but how it wUl happen. Like it or not, the United States is inextricably bound to Mexico by geography, history, demography, and economics. Given a sixty-year history of continuous movement back and forth across the border, the flowering of binational trade and investment, the continent-wide expansion of transportation and communication networks, and the blending of cultures and peoples in both directions, the two nations are already substantially integrated. What remains is for Mexican and American policymakers to face up to the reality of North American integration and bring labor migration into the broader structure and organization of the North American Free Trade Agreement, helping Mexico to grow economically and ultimately to assume its rightful place as an equal partner in the global system of investment and trade that will be the foundation of prosperity and stability in the twenty-first century. Chapter 2 Principles of Operation: Theories of International Migration I M OST CITIZENS and public officials think they understand the mechanics of international migration, of course, or they would not advocate such bold proposals or act with such assured abandon. In the North American case particularly, the reasons for Mexican immigration seem obvious. The prevailing wisdom begins with the commonsense observation that the United States is a rich country and Mexico, by comparison, is not. Although Mexico's 1997 GNP per capita of $3,700 places it in the upper tier of developing nations, it pales in comparison to the U.S. figure of $29,000, and nowhere else on earth is there such a sharp contrast along a land border, much less one that is two thousand miles long. As a result of this stark income differential, the standard of living is much higher north than south of the border. In per capita terms, Mexican private consumption is only 10 percent of that enjoyed in the United States. Obviously, simply by heading northward, crossing the border, and finding a job in the United States, the average Mexican can raise, often quite dramatically, his or her standard of living. Even at the current U.S. minimum wage, a migrant working full-time for a year would earn roughly three times the Mexican average income. Under these circumstances, what rational, self-interested Mexican would not want to emigrate to the United States? Simply by crossing a line, he or she would not only earn more income but gain access to better schooling, a richer infrastructure, improved social services, superior medical care, and a fuller array of consumer alternatives. As far as most people are concerned, Mexican immigrants choose to come to the United States, making just such cost-benefit calculations. They believe that Mexicans rationally understand that the costs of / 8 Principles of Operation Beyond Smoke and Mirrors migrating to the United States are more than offset by a variety of benefits. Even discounting for the costs of moving, crossing the border, looking for work, and adapting to a foreign culture, the material well-being of most Mexicans is substantially improved by relocating to the United States and pursuing work there, and each year hundreds of thousands of Mexicans seem to make precisely this decision. As long as the wage differential between Mexico and the United States is great, most people believe, workers south of the border have a strong incentive to move northward. Although migration between Mexico and the United States goes back to the nineteenth century and has ebbed and flowed for more than a century, U.S. citizens and politicians have never been entirely comfortable with immigrants in general or Mexicans in particular (see Higham 1955; Espenshade and Calhoun 1993; Espenshade and Hempstead 1996). Public sentiment against immigrants has generally oscillated in tandem with expansionary and recessionary times and in conjunction with broader ideological currents (Meyers 1995). U.S. immigration policies have consequently swung back and forth between recruitment and restriction, acceptance and exclusion (Timmer and Williamson 1998). For a variety of reasons, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of restrictive sentiment. The most obvious way to accomplish the assumed goal of reducing Mexican immigration, based on the understanding outlined earlier, was to lower the incentives by raising the costs and reducing the benefits of entry from Mexico. Unfortunately, the principal benefit-higher income-is not easily manipulable through policy mechanisms. No politician could ever vote to lower U.S. income as a means of reducing the incentives for immigration, and while U.S. political leaders might support efforts to raise incomes in Mexico, its economy is not under their direct control. Given these constraints, U.S. policymakers focused on other, more malleable, costs and benefits. On the benefit side, the United States sought to reduce access to employment by criminalizing the hiring of undocumented workers and barring immigrants, undocumented and sometimes even documented, from receiving public services. On the cost side, the government hired more Border Patrol officers, increased their resources, and granted them new powers to detain, prosecute, and deport unauthorized aliens. By increasing the costs and lowering the benefits of undocumented migration, authorities hoped to deter Mexicans from entering and staying in the United States. That something is seriously wrong with these policies and their underlying premises is suggested by the fact that they have not worked very well. As we document later, American attempts to raise I I 1 l ) 9 the costs and lower the benefits of living and working in the United States have had little effect on the likelihood of undocumented migration, on increasing the odds of migrants returning home, on decreasing the odds of unauthorized employment, or on reducing the probability that migrants will undertake a successful border crossing. Other, more perverse consequences, however, have followed from these policies. The fundamental problem is that current policies are based on a rather narrow conceptualization of migration. The reality of contemporary immigration is considerably more complex than a simple calculus of costs and benefits. A full understanding of international migration requires facing up to four basic questions: What are the forces in sending societies that promote out-migration, and how do they operate? What are the forces in receiving societies that create a demand for immigrant workers, and how do they function? What are the motivations, goals, and aspirations of the people who respond to these forces by migrating internationally? And what are the social and economic structures that arise in the course of migration to connect sending and receiving societies? The commonsense understanding of migration as a simple costbenefit decision deals only with the third question, and it offers only one of several possible motivations for movement. In this chapter, we seek to develop a comprehensive explanation for international migration that addresses all four questions. Why People Migrate The conceptualization of Mexican immigration widely shared by legislators and the public as a cost-benefit decision corresponds to the theoretical apparatus of neoclassical economics. According to this theory and its extensions, international migration stems from geographic differences in the supply of and demand for labor (Ranis and Fei 1961). Countries with large endowments of labor relative to capital have low wages, while those with limited endowments of labor relative to capital have high wages. The resulting international differential causes workers from low-wage countries to move to high-wage countries. As a result of this movement, the supply of labor falls and wages rise in the former while they do the opposite in the latter, leading, at equilibrium, to an international wage differential reflecting the costs of international movement, pecuniary and psychic. Associated with this macro theory is an accompanying microeconomic model of decisionmaking. Rational actors choose to migrate through a cost-benefit calculation that leads thf'm to expect positive net returns, usually monetary, from international movement. Migra- 10 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors tion is analogous to investment in human capital (Sjaastad 1962), where human capital consists of personal traits and characteristics that increase a worker's productivity. Early in their lives, people invest in education to make themselves more productive and later reap benefits in the form of higher earnings. Where one lives can be viewed as an individual trait that rational actors change by investing in a move. Migrants seek to go to places where, given their skills, they can be more productive and earn more money. Before they can reap this benefit, however, they must undertake certain investments: the material costs of traveling, the costs of sustenance while moving and looking for work, the effort involved in learning a new language and cultute, the difficulty experienced in adapting to a new labor market, and the psychological burden of cutting old ties and forging new ones (Todaro and Maruszko 1987). According to neoclassical theory, migrants estimate the costs and benefits of moving to various international locations and then go to wherever the expected net returns are greatest (Borjas 1989, 1990). In stylized terms, actors estimate expected net returns by taking the earnings anticipated in the destination country and multiplying them by the probability of obtaining and holding a job there, thus deriving an estimate of "expected destination earnings." These are then subtracted mentally from those projected for the community of origin (observed earnings multiplied by the probability of getting and holding a job there), and the difference is summed year by year over the individual's expected working life (with future years being discounted because money earned now carries more utility than money earned later). From this integrated difference the estimated costs of the move are subtracted to yield the total expected net return to international migration, and migrants go to wherever they expect that total return to be greatest (Todaro and Maruszko 1987; Massey and Garcia Espana 1987). A variety of anomalous observations suggest, however, that motivations for migration go beyond such cost-benefit calculations. Under neoclassical theory, migration should not occur in the absence of a wage differential, yet such flows are frequently observed. Moreover, if there are no legal barriers to movement, migration should continue until the wage differential between two areas is eliminated, yet migration streams commonly end well before wage gaps disappear. Widely observed patterns of circular migration are also difficult to explain from a strict neoclassical viewpoint; each year thousands of undocumented migrants and even many legal immigrants decide to return to Mexico (Warren and Kraly 1985; Jasso and Rosenzweig 1982, 1990; Lindstrom 1996; Reyes 2001). If the world really worked according to ne0classical principles, why would anyone migrate abroad temporarily Principles of Operation 11 to remit money back home in anticipation of an eventual return? A rational utility-maximizing actor logically should want to stay abroad permanently to enjoy forever the higher wages and consumption available in the United States, yet each year billions of dollars are remitted back to Mexico by migrants to improve their lives at home (Massey and Parrado 1994; Lozano Ascencio 1993, 1998). These anomalies occur because the lifetime maximization of expected income is only one of several potential economic motivations for international migration, and not necessarily the most important. Neoclassical economics begins with the assumption that markets for goods and services exist, that they are complete and function well, that information and competition are perfect, and that rational individuals enter the market with exogenous tastes and preferences in order to maximize their utility (that is, they look out for number one). Given these assumptions, deductive logic is employed to discover what the world would look like if it indeed functioned according to neoclassical principles. Yet reality is considerably more complex than the enabling assumptions of neoclassical economics. Markets for goods and services may not exist, they may be imperfect, and sometimes they may fail entirely, especially during the early phases of economic development. In addition, information is usually scarce and constrained by an individual's position in the social structure, and competition is far from perfect. Finally, even if individuals are rational and self-interested, they do not enter markets as atomized individuals but as members of families, households, and sometimes larger communities, social groupings that allow for collective strategies, which at times may dovetail with those of individuals and at other times be at odds with them. If we imagine a world where families and households face the prospect of poorly functioning, missing, or failed markets, we come to a very different line of theoretical reasoning known as the new economics of labor migration (Stark and Bloom 1985). Unlike the neoclassical model, it does not assume that migration decisions are made by isolated actors, but that they are taken within larger units of interrelated people, typically families or households but sometimes entire communities. Within these units, people not only act individually to maximize expected income but also work collectively to overcome failures in capital, credit, and insurance markets (Taylor 1986, 1987; Stark 1991). In most developed countries the risks to a household's material well-being are managed through private markets and government programs. Crop insurance and futures markets give farmers a means of protecting themRelvf's e~gainst natura! disastf'rs and price fluctua- 12 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors tions, and unemployment insurance and welfare programs protect workers against the v&garies of the business cycle and the dislocations of structural change. Private and government-sponsored pension systems allow citizens to minimize the risk of poverty in old age. In relatively poor countries like Mexico, markets for futures and insurance are not well developed, and the Mexican government is in no position to fill the gap by offering substitutes. As a result, Mexicans are not only poorer than other North Americans; they are also exposed to substantially greater risk. If society were indeed made up of atomized individuals acting solely in their immediate self-interest, then Mexicans probably would just have to suffer the risks quietly. However, most Mexicans do not live as solitary individuals but within households united by powerful family ties that precede the market (Yelez-Ibafiez 1983; Lomnitz 1977; Adler-Lomnitz and Perez Lizaur 1987; Camp 1989). Unlike atomized individuals, households can manage risk by diversifying their allocation of productive resources, one of which is labor. Just as investors diversify risks by purchasing stocks across a range of firms, households diversify risks by sending out members to work in different labor markets. While some members (say, the wife and younger children) remain behind to work in the local economy, others (say, older sons and daughters) move to work elsewhere in M~xico, and still others (perhaps the household head and oldest son) migrate to work in the United States. As long as conditions in the various labor markets are negatively or weakly correlated, a household can manage risk through diversification. In the event that conditions at home deteriorate through rising unemployment, falling wages, failing crops, sagging prices, or high inflation, households can rely on migrant remittances as an alternative source of income. In developing countries such as Mexico, markets for capital and credit are also weak or absent, preventing families from borrowing to smooth consumption or undertake productive activities (Taylor et al. 1996a, 1996b). In the absence of an efficient banking system, international migration becomes a reasonable strategy that poor families :an use to accumulate cash in lieu of formal borrowing for consumption or investment. Households simply send one or more workers abroad to take advantage of higher wages to build up savings over a short time horizon. Contexts of Decisionmaking Individuals and households are almost always embedded within broader social systems that have their own organization and values, Principles of Operation 13 such as kinship networks, class hierarchies, ethnic and racial groupings, occupational sectors, and industrial or bureaucratic organizations. As social scientists have repeatedly shown, an individual's position within the social structure determines the context in which decisions are made. A person's structural position strongly influences his or her tastes, preferences, values, information, learning, resources, and, ultimately, the relative costs and benefits of any action being considered. By altering the context within which microlevel decisions are made, structural change in society can have rather pronounced effects in raising or lowering the probability of international migration. Social and economic structures are commonly transformed through powerful macrolevel forces that are exogenous to actors within any particular family or community, and social scientists have thus developed structural theories of international migration to acknowledge this fact. Building on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), a variety of theorists (Fortes and Walton 1981; Petras 1981; Castells 1989; Sassen 1988, 1991; Morawska 1990) have linked the origins of international migration not so much to the decisions of individuals or households as to the changing scope and structure of global markets, a line of reasoning that is generally known as world systems theory. In this scheme, the expansion of markets into peripheral, nonmarket or premarket societies creates mobile populations that are prone to migrate. Driven by a desire for higher profits and greater wealth, owners and managers of large firms in developed nations enter poor countries on the periphery of the world economy in search of land, raw materials, labor, and markets. Migration is a natural outgrowth of the disruptions and dislocations that occur in this process of market expansion and penetration. As land, raw materials, and labor come under the control of markets, flows of migrants are generated. For example, when farmers shift from cultivating for subsistence to cultivation for markets, competition pushes them to consolidate land holdings, mechanize production, introduce cash crops, and apply industrially produced inputs. Land consolidation destroys traditional tenure systems based on common usufruct. Mechanization decreases the need for labor and makes unskilled agrarian workers redundant to production. The substitution of cash crops for staples undermines traditional social and economic relations, and the use of modern inputs, by producing high crop yields at low unit prices, drives out peasant farmers. All of these forces contribute to the creation of a mobile labor force: agricultural workers, displaced from the land, experience a weakened attachment to the community anti bf'comP more prone to migrate internationally (Massey 1988; Hatton and Williamson 1998). 14 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors The extraction of raw materials for use in developed economies likewise requires new industrial methods reliant on paid labor. Offering wages to former peasants also serves to undermine traditional forms of social organization based on systems of reciprocity and fixed role relations, creating instead incipient labor markets based on new conceptions of individualism, private gain, change, and adaptation. Multinational firms enter poor nations to establish assembly plants and take advantage of their relatively low wages, often within special export-processing zones created by modernizing governments. The demand for factory workers strengthens local labor markets and further weakens traditional productive relations. The insertion of foreign factories into peripheral regions undermines traditiortal economies ih other ways: by producing goods that compete with those made locally; by feminizing the workforce without providing sufficient factory-based employment for men; and by socializing women for industrial work and modem consumption without providing a lifetime career capable of meeting these needs. The result once again is the creation of a population that is socially and economically uprooted and prone to migration, typically with international spillovers. The same economic processes that operate globally to create migrants in peripheral areas simultaneously make it easier for them to migrate to the developed world (Sassen 1991). To ship goods, deliver machinery, extract and export raw materials, coordinate business operations, and manage foreign assembly plants, firms in core nations build and expand transportation and communication links to the peripheral countries where they have invested. These links not only facilitate the movement of goods, commodities, information, and capital but promote an opposing flow of people by reducing the costs of movement along reverse paths. Because global investment is inevitably accompanied by the creation of transportation and communication infrastructures, the international migration of labor generally parallels the international movement of goods and capital, only in reverse. Economic globalization also creates cultural links between developed and developing nations. Sometimes the cultural links are longstanding, reflecting prior colonial relationships. Yet even in the absence of a colonial history, the cultural consequences of economic penetration can be profound. Although Mexico was colonized by Spain, Mexicans increasingly study at U.S. universities, speak English, and follow U.S. consumer styles, reflecting America's global economic hegemony. These cultural links naturally dispose them to migrate to the United States rather than other places, including Spain. Principles of Operation 15 The world economy is managed from a relatively small number of urban centers in which banking, finance, administration, professional services, and research are concentrated (Castells 1989; Sassen 1991). In the United States these global cities include New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami; in Europe they include London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Milan; and qualifying for this status on the Pacific Rim are Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney (Friedman 1986). Within these cities a wealth is concentrated to generate a strong demand for services from unskilled laborers (busboys, gardeners, waiters, hotel workers, domestic servants). At the same time the shifting of heavy industry overseas, the growth of high-tech manufacturing in electronics, computers, and telecommunications, and the expansion of services such as health and education all work to create a bifurcated labor market with strong demand for workers at both the top and the bottom of the occupational hierarchy, but with relatively weak demand in between. The Demand for Immigrants 1 l J 1' ~ \ The bifurcation of labor markets in global cities predicted by world systems theory dovetails with a larger line of theorizing known as segmented labor market theory, which grew out of institutional economics. Michael Piore (1979) has argued that international migration stems from a relatively permanent demand for unskilled labor that is built into the economic structure of developed nations. In his view, immigration is not caused by push factors in sending countries (such as low wages or high unemployment), but by pull factors in receiving societies (a chronic and unavoidable need for low-wage workers). The intrinsic demand for ineryensive labor stems from four fundamental problems faced by advanced industrial economies. The first problem is structural inflation. Wages not only reflect conditions of supply and demand but confer status and prestige, social qualities inherent to specific jobs. In general, people believe that wages should reflect social status, and they have rather rigid notions about the correlation between occupational status and pay. As a result, wages offered by employers are not free to respond to changes in the supply of workers. A variety of informal social expectations and formal institutional mechanisms (such as union contracts, civil service rules, bureaucratic regulations, and human resource classifications) ensure that wages correspond to the hierarchies of prestige and status that people perceive. If employers seek to attract workers for unskilled jobs at the bottom of an occupational hierarchy, they cannot simply raise wages for Beyond Smoke and Mirrors 16 those jobs. Doing so would upset socially defined relationships between status and remuneration. If wages are increased at the bottom, employers will encounter strong pressure to raise wage~ at .other levels of the job hierarchy. If the wages of busboys are raised m response to a labor shortage, for example, their wages may overlap with those of waitresses, thereby threatening the status of waitresses and prompting them to demand a corresponding wage increase, which threatens the position of cooks, who also pressure employers for a raise, and so on. As a result, the cost of raising wages to attract entry-level workers is typically more than the cost of those workers' wages alone. Thus, the prospect of structur~l in~ation-the ne.ed ~o raise wages proportionately throughout the JOb hierarchy to mamtam consistency with social expectations-provides employers with a strong incentive to seek easier and cheaper solutions, such as the importation of immigrants. The demand for cheap, flexible labor is also augmented by the social constraints on motivation that are inherent to job hierarchies. Most people work not only to generate income but to accumulate so~ial status. Acute motivational problems arise at the bottom of the JOb hierarchy because there is no status to be maintained and there are few avenues for upward mobility. The problem is inescapable because the bottom can never be eliminated from labor markets. Mechanization to eliminate the lowest and least desirable classes of jobs simply creates a new bottom tier composed of jobs that used to be just above the bottom rung. Since there always has to be a bottom of any hierarchy, motivational problems are inevitable. What employers need are workers who view bottom-level jobs simply as a means to the end of earning money and for whom employment is reduced solely to a matter of income, with no implications for status or prestige. Immigrants satisfy this need on a variety of counts, at least at the beginning of their migratory careers. Migrants generally begin fore~~ labor as target earners: they are seeking to make money for a speCific goal that will solve a problem or improve their status at home (such as building a new house, buying land, or acquiring consumer goods). Moreover, the disjuncture in living standards between developed and developing societies makes low wages abroad appear generous by the standards of the sending country. Finally, even though a migrant may realize that a foreign job carries low status, he does not view himself as a part of that society but as embedded within the status system of his home community, where hard-currency remittances buy considerable social status. The demand for immigrant labor nlso stPms from the duality nf labor and capital. Capital is a fixed factor of production that can be idled hu I"''"'" riTn::mrl h11t not birl nff· nwnPrs of caoital bedr the costs of - J Principles of Operation 17 its unemployment. Labor, in contrast, is a variable factor of production that can be released when demand falls, so that workers bear the costs .of. their own unemployment. Whenever possible, therefore, industnahsts seek out the stable, permanent portion of demand and reserve it for the deployment of capital, leaving the variable portion of demand to be met by the addition and subtraction of labor a dualism that creates distinctions among workers and leads to se~menta­ tion of the labor force. . Worker~ in ~e capital-intensive primary sector get stable, skilled JOb~ wor~mg "':Ith good tools and equipment. Employers are forced to mvest m their human capital through training and education. Primary-sect~r jobs are complicated. and require considerable knowledge and expenence to perform, leadmg to the accumulation of firm- and job-specific knowledge. Primary-sector workers also tend to be unionized or highly pr~fessionalized, with contracts that require employers to bear a substantial share of the costs of layoffs (in the form of severance pay and unemployment benefits). Because of these costs and c?ntinuing obligations, workers in the primary sector become expensive to let go; they become more like capital. The labor-intensive secondary sector, in contrast, is composed of ~oorly paid: unstable jobs from which workers may be laid off at any hme With httle or no cost to the employer. During down cycles an employer's first act is to shed such workers to cut the payroll. The resulting dualism thus yields a segmented labor market structure. Low wages, uns~abl~ ~onditions, and the lack of reasonable mobility prospects make 1t difftcult to attract native workers into the secondary sector. They are instead drawn into the primary, capital-intensive sector, where wages are higher, jobs are more secure, and there is a possibility of occupational advancement. To fill the shortfall in demand within the secondary sector, employers turn to immigrants. Taken together, motivation problems, structural inflation, and economic dualism create a demand for a particular kind of worker: one ~ho is.willing to labor under unpleasant conditions, at low wages, in JObs With great instability and little chance for advancement. In the past this demand was met by women, teenagers, and rural-to-urban migrants. Historically women tended to participate in the labor force up to the time of their first birth, and to a lesser extent after their children had grown. They were not primary breadwinners, and their princip~l ~ocial identity w~s that of a daughter, wife, or mother. They were ':1llmg to put up With the low wages and instability because they VI~~ed the work as transient and the earnings as supplemental; the positions they held were not threatening to their main social sta tus, which was grounded in the family. Likewise. leenal!:en., hisloricallv movPd intn "lnrl nllt nt th,., hh~~ 18 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors force with great frequency to earn extra money, gain experience, and try out different occupational roles. They did not view "dead-end" jobs as a problem because they expected to get better jobs in the future, after completing school, gaining experience, and settling down. Moreover, teenagers derive their primary social status from their parents, not their jobs. They view work instrumentally as a means of earning spending money, which they use to enhance their status among their peers by buying clothes, cars, and music; the job is just a means to an end. Finally, rural areas of developed nations for many years provided industrial cities with a steady supply of low-wage workers. Movement from social and economic backwaters to dynamic cities created a sense of upward mobility regardless of the modesty of the circumstances at the place of destination. Even menial jobs in cities provided access to housing, food, and consumer goods that represented a step up in the world for impoverished migrants from the countryside. In advanced industrial societies, however, these three sources of entry-level workers have drastically shrunk over time because of four fundamental demographic trends: the rise in female labor force participation, which has transformed women's work into a career pursued for social status as well as income; the rise in divorce rates, which has transformed women's employment into a source of primary support; the decline in birthrates and the extension of for~al education, which have produced small cohorts of teenagers entermg the labor force; and the urbanization of society, which has eliminated farms and rural communities as potential sources for new migrants to the city. The imbalance between the structural demand for entry-level workers and the limited domestic supply of such workers has generated an underlying, long-run demand for immigrants in developed countries. Why People Continue to Migrate Immigration may begin for a variety of reasons, but the forces that initiate international movement are quite different from those that perpetuate it. Although wage differentials, market failures, and structural change may motivate people to move in the first place, new conditions arise in the course of migration to make additional movement more likely, leading to the perpetuation of international migration across time and space. There has been a great deal of work on the perpetuation of international migration under the rubric of social capital theory. According to Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant (1992, 119), "social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that Principles of Operation 19 accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable neh:ork of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual ac~uamtance_ a~~ re~ognition." The key characteristic of social capital is Its converhbihty: It can be translated into other social and economic benefits (Harker, Mahar, and Wilkes 1990). People gain access to social capital through membership in interpersonal networks and social institutions and then convert it into other f~rms of capital to improve or maintain their position in society (Bourdieu 19_86; Co_leman 1990). Migrant networks are an important source of s~Cial capital for_ people contemplating a move abroad. They are sets of_ mterpersonal ties that connect migrants, former migrants, and ~onmig~ant~ at p~aces o~ origin and destination through recipro~al ties of k~sh~p, fnen~ship, and shared community origin. They mcrease the h~elihood of mternational movement because they lower the costs and nsks of movement and increase the expected net returns to migration. In keeping with the dictum that "social capital ... is created when the relations among persons change in ways that facilitate action" (Coleman 1_990, 304~, migration itself serves as the catalyst for change. Everyday hes of fnendship and kinship provide few advantages, in and of themselves, to people seeking to migrate abroad. Once someone in a person's network has migrated, however, the ties are transf~rmed into a resource that can be drawn upon to gain access to foreign employment and all that it brings. Each act of migration creates so~i~l capital among people to whom the migrant is related, thereby raismg the odds of their migration (Massey, Goldring, and Durand 1994). The first migrants who leave for a new destination have no social ~ies to draw u_ron, and for them migration is costly, particularly if it mvolves entenng another country without documents. After the first migr~nts have left, however, the potential costs of migration are substantially lowered for the friends and relatives left behind. Because of the nature of kinship and friendship structures, each new migrant expands the set of people with social ties to the destination area. Migrants are inevitably linked to nonmigrants, and the latter draw upon the obligations implicit in relationships such as kinship, friendship, and even community to gain access to employment and assistance at the point of destination. Once international migration has begun, private institutions and voluntary organizations also arise to satisfy the demand created by the growing imbalance between the large number of people who seek ent~y into capital-.ric.h countries and the limited supply of visas they typically offer. This Imbalance and the barriers that developed coun- 20 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors tries erect to keep people out create a lucrative niche for entrepreneurs dedicated to promoting international movement for profit, yielding a black market in migration services. As this underground market creates conditions conducive to exploitation and victimization, humanitarian organizations also arise to enforce the rights and improve the treatment of both legal and undocumented migrants (Hagan and Gonzalez Baker 1993; Christiansen 1996). Such organizations offer migrants another source of social capital (Goss and Lindquist 1995) by providing a range of services, such as border smuggling, clandestine transport, labor contracting, counterfeit documents, information and advice, and lodging, creqit, and shelter at the points of destination (Prothero 1990). The way in which social capital accumulates over time to perpetuate international migration represents a specific manifestation of a broader process that has been described as the cumulative causation of migration (first identified by Myrdal1957). The causation of migration becomes cumulative because each act of migration alters the social context within which subsequent migration decisions are made, thus increasing the likelihood of additional movement. Once the number of network connections in a community reaches a critical threshold, migration becomes self-perpetuating because each act of migration creates the social structure needed to sustain it (Hugo 1981; Taylor 1986; Massey 1990; Massey, Goldring, and Durand 1994; Massey and Zenteno 1999). In any bounded population, of course, processes of cumulative causation cannot continue ad infinitum. If migration continues long enough, networks eventually reach a point of saturation within any particular community. More and more community members reside in branch settlements overseas, and virtually all of those at home are connected to someone who lives abroad or has substantial foreign experience. When networks reach such a high level of elaboration, the costs of migration do not fall as sharply with each new migrant, and migration loses its dynamic momentum for growth. The prevalence of migration in the community approaches an upper limit, and migratory experience becomes so diffused that the stock of potential new migrants becomes very small and is increasingly composed of women, children, and the elderly. If migration continues long enough, labor shortages and rising wages in the home community may further dampen the pressures for emigration (Gregory 1986), causing the rate of entry into the international migrant workforce to trail off (Hatton and Williamson 1994) When observed at the national level, this trend may be difficult to detect as new communities are continuously incorporated into the mi- Principles of Operation 21 gratory stream. As the rate of out-migration decelerates in places with longer histories of migration, new areas are drawn into transnational circuits and their rates of migration begin to accelerate. As a result, the total outflow from the nation as a whole may continue to grow as migration spreads from place to place. A Schematic Diagram Because the theories discussed in this chapter posit causal mechanisl_lls operating at multiple levels of aggregation, the various explanations are not logically contradictory. It is entirely possible for individuals to engage in cost-benefit calculations; for households to seek to minimize risk and overcome barriers to capital and credit; for both individuals and households to draw upon social capital to facilitate international movement; and for the socioeconomic context within which migration decisions are made to be determined by structural forces operating at the national and international levels, often influenced by migration itself. Thus, a synthetic approach to theory construction is in order. As we see it, international migration originates in the social, economic, and political transformations that accompany the expansion of markets. The entry of markets and capital-intensive production into nonmarket or premarket societies disrupts existing social and economic arrangements and brings about a displacement of people from customary livelihoods, thus creating a mobile population of workers wh? actively s~arch for new means of sustenance. One means by whtch people dtsplaced from traditional jobs seek to ensure their economic well-being is by selling their services overseas. However, hig~er foreign wages are not the only factor motivating people to emtgrate. Households struggling to cope with the jarring transformations of economic development also use international migration as a means of overcoming frequent failures in markets for labor, insurance, capital, and credit. The absence of unemployment insurance in developing nations creates an incentive for families to self-insure by sending one or more members overseas for work. By allocating workers to different geographic regions-rural, urban, and foreign-households diversify their labor portfolios to reduce risks to income. Moreover, as households plunge into the risky and unknown world of capitalist production, the absence of crop insurance and futures markets leaves them vulnerable to economic disaster, providing yet another incentive to self-insure through international migration. Families seeking to increase agricultural production or establish new business enterprises 22 Beyond Smoke af1d Mirrors need capital, and the shift to a market economy creates new demands for expensive consumer items. The financing of both requires cash, and the inability of poorly developed banking systems to meet the demand for loans and credit gives households one final motivation for international movement. By sending a family member temporarily abroad for work, households can accumulate savings quickly to self. . finance production or consumption. While the early phases of economic development m poor nahons create migrants, later phases of economic growth in wealthy nations yield segmented labor markets that attract .them. Primary-s.ect~r jo?s provide steady work and high pay for nahve workers, while JObs m the secondary sector offer low pay, little stability, and few opportunities for advancement, repelling natives and generating a strong demand for immigrant workers. The process of labor market segmentation is most acute in global cities, where a concentration of managerial, administrative, and technical expertise leads to a conc~ntration of wealth and a strong ancillary demand for low-wage services. Unable to attract native workers, employers tum to immigrants and often initiate immigrant flows directly through formal recruitment. Although often instrumental in initiating immigration, recruitment becomes less important over time because the same market processes that create flows of immigrants also create links of transportation and communication, as well as of politics and culture, to make international movement easier and cheaper. Immigration also stems from the actions that developed nations undertake to maintain international security, protect foreign investments, and guaran~ee access to ~aw ~a­ terials overseas. Foreign entanglements create lmks and obhgahons that generate ancillary flows of refugees, asylum seekers, and military dependents. Eventually labor recruitment becomes superfluous: once begun, immigration displays a strong tendency to continue through the growth and elaboration of migrant networks. Over time the process of network expansion becomes self-perpetuating because each act of migration creates social infrastructure to promote additional movement. As receiving countries implement restrictive policies to counter rising tides of immigrants, moreover, they only create a lucrative niche into which enterprising agents move to create migrant-supporting institutions, providing even more social capital for international migration. During the initial phases of emigration from any sending country, the effects of capitalist penetration, market failure, network formation, and cumulative causation dominatP in Pxplaining the flows, but as the level of out-migration reaches high levels, the costs and risks of Principles of Operation 23 in~ernatio~al movement drop and movement is increasingly determmed by mternational wage differentials and labor demand. As de:eloping nations g~ow economically, international wage gaps diminIsh and well-funchoning markets for capital, credit, insurance, and futures come int~ existence, reducing the incentives for emigration. If these trends contmue, the country ultimately becomes integrated into the global economy as a developed, capitalist society, whereupon it un~ergoes a migration transition: net out-migration ceases, and the nahon becomes an importer of labor. Historically, this process of dev~lopment, emigration, and transition took European nations eight or mne decades, but by the late twentieth century the process seemed to have been compressed into just thirty or forty years. I I t i f System Assembly Chapter 3 System Assembly: A History of Mexico-U.S. Migration N THE history of international migration, that between Mexico and the United States is unique in several ways. First and foremost is the fact that it involves not just any pair of countries, but two with widely disparate standards of living that share a two-thousandmile land border. Although the United States also shares a long border with Canada, the latter's level of economic development is roughly comparable to the U.S. level and its average income is only fractionally lower. In addition, its population is less than one-third of Mexico's. As a result, legal Canadian immigration to the United States averages only around 21,000 persons per year-just 8 percent of the number arriving from Mexico-and it is offset by a roughly equal number of U.S. citizens moving northward, yielding a net flow that fluctuates around zero (Massey et al. 1998). Moreover, Canada's relationship to its southern neighbor has generally been cordial, and the two nations have long cooperated as allies. Canada has never been invaded by the United States, and despite a series of historical threats, it has never been forced to cede territory to its more powerful neighbor to the south. A second unique feature of Mexico-U.S. migration is its age. Its origins can be traced to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which in 1848 officially ended the Mexican-American War. In exchange for the cessation of hostilities, the end of U.S. occupation, and a payment of $18.3 million, Mexico surrendered the present-day states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, along with parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. Although the border was adjusted once more in 1853 (when for another $10 million the United States purchased the southern portions of present-day Arizona and New Mexico to secure a raii route into southern California), since that date the border has remained essentially fixed except for minor adjustments. I ~ ! II I t' I I I !' I ' I lf 25 The number of Mexicans who "entered" the United States by virtue of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was quite small, probably no more than about 50,000 (Jaffe, Cullen, and Boswell1980). Nearly all of today's 15 million Mexican Americans trace their origins to people who migrated to the United States after 1848. During the nineteenth century movement between the two countries was mostly local, involving short trips back and forth between places that had earlier been single, undivided communities. The border was relatively unpopulated and, once it left the Rio Grande River, poorly demarcated and only sporadically policed. As a result, one cannot properly speak of "international migration" between Mexico and the United States until the twentieth century. True international migration required separation and self-definition, an ideological process that assumed different forms at different locations along the Mexico-U.S. border. In El Paso del Norte, for example, the historical name of the community remained on the U.S. side (albeit in shortened form) while inhabitants of the southern side languished nameless until 1888, when Ciudad Juarez was finally incorporated (Durand and Arias 2000). Elsewhere, Mexican settlements continued to use their original name but preceded it with the adjective "new" to distinguish it from its northern counterpart. After 1848, for example, the southern portion of Laredo became known as Nuevo Laredo, even though the two settlements continued to celebrate common holidays and public events (Ceballos 1999). The town of Nogales, for its part, adopted neither of these options: on both sides of the border the settlement ~ontinued to use the original name, a solution that was probably facilItated by the fact that no river divided the northern and southern halves. In general, only those communities that arose entirely after the border was fixed made explicit in their naming the country to which they belonged-hence the mirror images of Mexicali, Mexico, and Calexico, California. Tijuana, which ultimately became the largest and most dynamic city on the border, was just a small rancho of 242 people in 1900, connected to the rest of Mexico by neither road nor rail. Its early growth and development were more closely tied to events north than south of the border, and for many years it functioned more as an extension of Los Angeles and San Diego than as a Mexican town (Zenteno 1995). In sum, the Mexico-U.S. border has not always existed as a practical reality. On the contrary, it was defined slowly but steadily through a process of social construction. The process of reification began >vith the smuggling of contraband, the first human endeavor that marked the Mexico-U.S. frontier as a significant dividing line. During the U.S. 26 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors Civil War, in particular, the border between the states of Tamaulipas and Texas provided a route around the Union's naval blockade of the Confederacy, giving life and importance to the twin communities of Brownsville and Matamoros (Hart 1987). After the war the solidification of the border continued when it prevented both U.S. and Mexican authorities from pursuing Indians, criminals, and deserters fleeing in both directions (Durand 1994). The advent of prohibition in the United States gave the border additional substance, transforming Mexican communities into staging areas for bootlegging and diversion. The expansion of bars, prostitution, and black markets gave many border cities a reputation for "sinfulness" they have yet to live down. The Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1917) also heightened the importance of the border by converting U.S. communities into locations of political refuge as well as points of assembly and debarkation for soldiers, arms, and war materiel. After the Revolution, the new Mexican government (led not coincidentally by generals from the north) increased the nation's investment in the infrastructure of the border states. These investments provided a foundation for the high rates of economic and population growth during the 1960s and 1970s. The social construction of the border probably received its most important impetus with the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924. For the first time the U.S. government itself assumed direct responsibility for defending the border against unauthoriz~d intrusio~s using physical, not just administrative, means. Even th1s systematic enforcement, however, was more symbolic than real: the Border Patrol originally consisted of just 450 officers, who were expected to guard not only the two-thousand-mile border with Mexico but also the long frontier with Canada. Although one cannot say with precision exactly when the border became something more than a mental construction, its reification as a socially, economically, and politically meaningful dividing line is mostly a product of the twentieth century. Hence, we begin our account of Mexican migration in 1900, dividing subsequent years into five periods corresponding to different alignments of social, economic, and political forces. Our review suggests that international movement within the Mexico-U.S. system has never operated solely according to the laws of neoclassical economics. Rather, the circulation of migrants has been driven by a complex set of social and economic forces understandable only by drawing on all of the theoretical paradigms discussed in chapter 2. System Assembly 27 The Era of the Enganche: 1900 to 1929 Just as railroads were crucial to the development and settlement of Mexico's northern frontier, they were likewise instrumental in enabling and promoting mass migration to the United States (Cardoso 1980). With the opening of the Mexican Central Railroad from Mexico City to the border community of Ciudad Juarez in 1884, Mexico was definitively connected to the United States through four rail lines that met across the border in El Paso: the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, the Texas & Pacific, and the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio. By 1888 service had been established between Mexico City and rn:o other border cities, Piedras Negras and Nuevo Laredo, and by 1890 VIrtually all of Mexico's principal population and production centers were connected to markets in all forty-eight contiguous U.S. states and territories. (For a map of the border states and cities, see figure 3.1.) It was this linkage by rail that made mass migration between Mexico and the United States possible, if not inevitable. The arrival of the railroads initiated a sustained boom in the American Southwest by connecting its fertile valleys and natural resources to lucrative markets and burgeoning industries back east. Just as the boom took off, ~owe~er, ~estrictive poli_cies enacted in Washington, D.C., closed off tmmtgrahon from tradttional sources in Asia. The C~inese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement ':tth Japan brought A~ian immigration to an abrupt halt, creating senous lab~r shorta~e~ m key_ sectors of the western economy, particularly railroads, mmmg, agnculture, and construction. Desperate for workers, U.S. employers turned to private labor contractors, who employed a variety of coercive measures to recruit Mexican laborers and deliver them to jobs north of the border. Being paid for each worker they provided, U.S. recruiters sought to obtain as many as possible by any means necessary short of actual enslavement (Durand and Arias 2000). The coercive policies they employed became known collectively as el enganche, which translates literally as "the hook" but might be translated more politely as "indentured." The people who employed these techniques were called enganchadores. Following the rail lines southward from the United States, enganchadores crossed through the empty borderlands and first encountered sizable population centers in Mexico's west-central states-Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, San Luis Potosi, and Zacateca~. Recruiters _arrived in towns and villages throughout this region wtth tales of htgh wages and untold riches to be had by working in the north. · · The enganchadores typically offered to advance naive peasants 28 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors System Assembly Figure 3.1 The Mexico-U.S. Borderlands --NEW MEXICO Source: Mexican Migration Project. whatever money they needed to travel northward and get a U.S. job. The loan, plus interest, would then be deducted from their wages upon arrival. Once in the United States, however, recruits usually discovered that wages were lower than promised, working conditions worse than expected, and interest rates higher than anticipated. Since they were required to work until they paid off their "debt" to the recruiter and/ or employer, they considered themselves "hooked," at least for a time (Cardoso 1980). The outbreak of World War 1 halted European immigration in late 1914, just when the war was inducing an enormous expansion in U.S. industries. Facing a tightening labor market, industrialists in Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and other cities relied even more on the enganchadores. Eventually the U.S. government itself got into the act. 29 When Congress sought to restrict immigration in 1917 by imposing a head tax and literacy test on all new arrivals, the attorney general immediately exempted Mexicans from these provisions. Once the United States entered the war, the government assumed a direct role in labor recruitment by creating its own worker recruitment program (Reisler 1976; Morales 1982). When the war ended, so did the labor program, but the United States nonetheless continued to pursue a lax immigration policy toward Mexico throughout the boom years of the 1920s. Even as Congr~ss moved to close off European immigration by implementing stnct quotas that restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, it remained silent on the issue of immigration from the countries of the Western Hemisphere. Although the total number of immigrants was capped at 357,000 in 1921, then lowered to 164,000 in 1924 and 154,000 in 1929, these numerical limitations were never applied to Mexico, whose nationals were free to enter without quantitative restriction and did so in large numbers. Within Mexico conditions in the early twentieth century also evolved in ways that encouraged massive out-migration. The decade 1900 to 1910 was the high tide of the Porfiriato, a long period of stable rule under President Porfirio Diaz, who came to power in 1876 with significant backing by U.S. industrialists (Hart 1987). As president, he promoted the development of Mexico along liberal economic lines, offering generous incentives to investors in the United States, Britain, and France to finance the development of railroads, mining, petroleum, and manufacturing. In the countryside the power of the Mexican state was used to privatize lands that for centuries had been held in common by independent towns and Indian villages. Through the consolidation of land and the mechanization of farming, property ow_ners drastically increased production (and profits), and they switched from the cultivation of basic foodstuffs (corn and beans) to the production of cash crops (sugar, cotton, hemp, wheat) for sale on international markets. Over the course of the Porfiriato, Mexico began to shift from an agrarian to an industrial footing. From 1876 to 1910 the total length of railroad track went from a mere 380 miles to more than 12,000, the production of gold and silver quadrupled, sugar production more than doubled, and exports increased tenfold (Meyer and Sherman 1991). This remarkable spurt of economic development came at a price, however. Through privatization, enclosure, and land consolidation/ more than 95 percent of rural households had become landless by 1910 (Cardoso 1980). At the same time the mechanization of agriculture and the switch to cash crops drastically reduced rural work 30 Beyond Smoke and Mirrors opportunities; the marked decline in rural wages that resulted was cruelly accompanied by an increase in food prices. Meanwhile, rural artisans who had traditionally handcrafted products for local consumption found themselves undercut by cheap, industrially produced products imported by rail from manufacturing cities in Mexico and the United States (Massey et al. 1987). In this new rural landscape some families eked out a living as sharecroppers on large haciendas, while many others migrated to Mexico's swelling cities in search of factory or service work. Although urban jobs were being created and city wages rose early in the Porfiriato, by 1900 the small domestic market for Mexican manufactures had been saturated and industrialization had stalled (Haber 1989). As displaced rural families continued to arrive in the cities looking for work, urban wages fell and conditions deteriorated, prompting a wave of violent strikes between 1905 and 1910 (Hart 1987). By 1910 the structural limitations of the Porfirian political economy had reached a breaking point, and revolt spread throughout the country. Until 1912 the Mexican Revolution was relatively peaceful and socioeconomic relations did not change radically. From 1913 to 1917, however, the Revolution entered a violent phase during which various factions fought for military supremacy; this bloody and protracted struggle brought the Mexican economy to its knees and_ led to a "demographic catastrophe." Over the course of the revolutionary decade from 1910 to 1920, Mexico experienced 1.4 million excess deaths, 500,000 lost births, and 200,000 net emigrants to the United States (McCaa 2001), the first and only instance of significant refugee migration from Mexico. (U.S. authorities built Fort Bliss in the border city of El Paso to manage the situation.) The political consolidation of the Revolution after 1917 l~d to a resumption of economic growth in the 1920s, but along new lmes .. In the new political economy, wealthy Creole landowners and foreign bankers no longer dominated the state for their own ends. Rather, the state was controlled by a dynamic, forward-looking mestizo class that sought to expand its power by arbitrating relations between labor and capital, peasants and landowners. Rather than serving the intere~ts of a narrow, landed, Creole elite, the new state would balance the mterests of an expanded mestizo-Creole elite against those of peasants and workers to promote the welfare of the nation as a whole. Within urban Mexico, the coalition of old Creole families and foreign investors gave way to a new alliance of mestizo politicians and industrialists willing to cooperate with the state in fomenting economic growth. In the countryside, hacienda owners were eliminated as a cohesive social class, and the foundations were set for a massive System Assembly 31 land redistribution (not fully realized until the 1930s). The transformation o_f _Mexico from agrarian to industrial society, launched during the Porfmato, would thus continue after the Revolution. Markets would ~ontinue t? be the main mechanism for producing growth and econo~mc expansiOn, but now they would be managed for the benefit of society by a powerful and independent state. c;>bviouslY: the forces responsible for instigating Mexican migration dur~g the first decades of the twentieth century are a far cry from the simple aggregate of cost-benefit decisions made by atomized individuals acting in isolation. In a very real sense, the cost-benefit calculatio~ls hypothesized under neoclassical economics were foisted upon Mexicans by the massive transformations going on around them, first under the Porfiriato, then under ten years of revolution, and finally w~en a new state-dominated political economy was created. Even With these massive transformations, however, Mexican migration probably would not have begun had it ...
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Running Head: COMPARATIVE IMMIGRATION

Comparative Immigration
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Date

1

COMPARATIVE IMMIGRATION

2

Q1. The meaning of citizenship in Canada, France, and the USA
The subject of immigrants within American perceptions rises with shifting emotions.
There are individuals who consider immigrants that have increased economic pressure on the
nation at the same time others think that immigrants have optimistic economic significant in
the nation. The volume of foreign citizenship has constantly been declining in the U.S
however; the immigrant numbers are on an escalating rise. The U.S has disinclined on the
incorporation of these people into the state indicated by its interest in controlling the border,
and the adaptation and settlement of immigrants in America are deemed not in the interest
reach of U.S administration.
In Canada, the immigration issue is handled in a different way from the US technique
of handling them; but the government of Canada involved in immigrant incorporation. The
official procedure which is tasked with supervision of immigrants supports the incorporation
of immigrants as well as has a tendency of favoring their citizenship acquirement
(Bloemraad, 2006). The local and federal governments of Canada provide public support in
form of incorporation programs like offering language classes to immigrants along with a
program for immigrants to get jobs in the nation. In addition, the policy of multiculturalism
ratified by the administration offers for the provincial as well as local equivalents to
encourage incorporation by finding public acknowledgment.
The immigrant integrations in France are different from Canada. France has programs
which ensure immigrants are fully incorporation to the community, but the immigrants
should demonstrate that they are entitled to be acknowledged as their authentic citizens.
These immigrants supposed to have a permanent nationality with self-sufficient to facilitate
welfare and to be assimilated linguistically as well as to be conscious of their rights plus
duties carried out as expected of French citizens (Reimers, 2012).

COMPARATIVE IMMIGRATION

3

Immigrant naturalization in France is completely dependent on the dominion of the
nation and the person’s desire. The subject of France immigrants entails complex connection
between the state, the immigrants and the nation. The administration trough agencies of
immigration typically make a decision on the immigrant proportion of the population which
is incorporated within French society. The increase in the immigrant number of France is a
signal of their willingness to incorporate them. The immigrant naturalization is done through
a formal procedure to illustrate the government intention of assimilating foreign people to
France community. However, in spite of France government willingness of providing
immigrants citizenship, the government has as well put into practice measures of managing
the immigrants’ flow into the nation.
The gains of American citizenship can’t be compared to such entitled to immigrants
who have permanent nationality in the nation. The foreign people with acquired citizenship
are entitled to gains not limited to family sponsorship along with benefits of social welfare.
America offers finance only to legally recognized immigrants; meaning people who entered
the nation through genuine and legitimate means. On the other hand, in Canada benefits are
given to those immigrants who have acquired Canadian citizenship. While neutralization
citizenship in France has a number of contradicting notions like once immigrant acquires
citizenship, they are separated from foreigners who are yet given a government errand to
become France residents while those who meet the criteria go through tests to assess their
worthiness to become their citizens. Consequently, the granted citizenship signifies difference
which exists between people who became citizens through birth and such given to foreign
people. Even at the time of formal procedure of carrying out the ceremony, the officials of the
state, as a rule, make it apparent that newcomers have a long line of attack to go for becoming
authentic French people.

COMPARATIVE IMMIGRATION

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Q2. How did cognitive and affective (emotional) factors influence the citizenship
decisions of the Castillo family?
For one to acquire citizenship it is influenced by the number of factors and these
factors are not limited to resources that consist of cognitive factors such as material plus the
informational costs with benefits that such a person will bring into the state (Braubaker,
1992). In this case of Castillo family, cognitive and a...


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