The U.S.-Mexican War and
the Peoples of the Year 2000

Inputs from Politics:

"Undocumented" Immigrants

Overview

Inputs from History

The great fact is not illegal migration. It is migration as such -- any kind. Migration now, in all of North America, is like that from the United States into Texas and the Plains, almost two centuries ago:

medical conditions have improved, compared to earlier
food supplies have improved, compared to earlier
infant mortality has dropped, compared to earlier, but

population has still flowed from farms into nearby lands and nearby cities, and
population has still flowed from impoverished farms and impoverished slums, toward distant lands and cities where conditions are better.

Back home, parents have no way to provide for children on the old place. Children who go to the nearby city are limited in what they can do for siblings who join them. Mama and Papa Bird never admit, at least not in decent conversation with other big birds, that they are expelling chicks from the nest.

When this movement spills across national borders, the receiving nation fears that the migrants are introducing an alien culture, or dangerous labor standards. It tries to regulate and limit the movement. The legal immigrants continue to arrive, and so do a portion of those now defined as illegal.

People in the communities from which the migrants came now insist that the legal definitions are hostile and discriminatory -- that there is really no difference between one kind of migrant and another. In the late 20th century, this becomes the formula that the illegal immigrants are simply "undocumented."

And all of this describes the movement from the United States into Texas, in the early 19th century, just as much as it does that from Mexico into the United States, in the late 20th century.

Reactions to the recent migration, in the United States, have run to restriction and controversy:

legislative bodies have slashed the public benefits that are available to immigrants in general, or illegal immigrants in particular
school systems have adopted systems of bilingual education in order to ease the assimilation of immigrants, and have then been pushed to drop such systems -- only supposedly in order to speed such assimilation
government agencies have imposed red tape and high fees that discourage both legal immigration and new citizenship, while stepping up the severity of police surveillance in order to discourage illegal immigration
academics have engaged in a paper war, throwing at each other analyses to show:

that immigrants do or do not depress the employment and pay of other marginal workers
that immigrants do or do not constitute a drain on tax moneys.

Debate on these measures has just as regularly concealed the larger picture:

that large-scale migration is a historical trend of which illegal immigration is only a part
that some of the verbal debate is a set of claims to status and money, coming from rival educational, police, mercantile, and media establishments
that individuals and families are constantly generating their own networks as solutions to the migration "problem"
that the movement from one nation to another needs to be seen alongside:

the movement of the country poor into cities, in many nations
the shift into modernity and "mestizo" identity of many people who would once have been considered backward and "indigenous"
the movement of some immigrants into areas and economic sectors vacated by African Americans
the construction of international labor markets in which, migration or no, and laws or no, the pricing of labor operates without regard to political boundaries.

References:

Binacional Study on Migration, Migration between Mexico & the United States (1997)
Demetrios G. Papademetriou & T. Alexander Aleinikoff, "La encrucijada y el futuro," La Jornada: Masiosare, 3 May 1998.
Julian L. Simon, Immigration: The Demographic and Economic Facts (1995)
Philip Martin, "Mexico-US Migration Three Years after NAFTA," Migration News Monthly (1997)
Stephen A. Camarota, The Labor Market Impact of Immigration: A Review of Recent Studies (1998)
David M. Heer, Undocumented Mexicans in the United States (1990)

The U.S.-Mexican War and the Peoples of the Year 2000

Inputs from Politics:

"Undocumented" Immigrants

The U.S.-Mexican War and
the Peoples of the Year 2000