Mexico, Markets, and Migrants

March 20, 1998

Moderator: T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Senior Associate, International Migration Policy Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Panelist: Professor Douglas Massey, Dorothy S. Thomas Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania

Mr. Aleinikoff welcomed Mr. Massey to the Carnegie Endowment and introduced him to the audience. At a time when the United States is building new walls on the Mexican border, hiring a record number of Border Patrol officers, and enacting new laws to deport immigrants more quickly, Mr. Massey scoffs at these measures and argues that they will only encourage continued emigration from Mexico into the United States accompanied by stagnant wages, declining labor standards, and an impoverished underclass of Mexican-Americans.

According to Mr. Massey, the typical American debate about Mexican migration to the United States involves the erroneous assumption that Mexicans flock to the United States as a result of a cost-benefit analysis. This line of thought holds that Mexicans move to the United States because higher wages are available there. Mr. Massey, however, avers that the rush to the north is driven only partly by mass disparities of income. It is the disconnect between U.S. immigration policy toward Mexico and its realities that compelled Mr. Massey to write his article "March of Folly" that appeared recently in the American Prospect.

Mr. Massey claims that three basic forces affect the decisions and motivations of Mexican migrants: market consolidation, human capital formation, and social capital formation. The liberalization of the Mexican economy and the shift to neoliberal open markets begun under the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid, codified by President Carlos Salinas, and cemented by NAFTA signified a radical transformation of the Mexican economy that left many people jobless and with scant access to credit. Since most Mexicans do not have full access to the nascent Mexican credit, capital, and insurance markets, they see moving to the United States as a way of overcoming these market liabilities and minimizing risks. For example, reasonable housing mortgages are very difficult to secure in Mexico. Migration also becomes a substitute for credit. In effect, migration is the poor Mexicans' MasterCard: Migrant remittances amount to $4 billion per year.

By migrating to the United States, Mexicans acquire significant human capital as well. This means they acquire the necessary linguistic skills and cultural knowledge to navigate the U.S. labor market. The Bracero program, for instance, was designed to jump-start human capital in Mexico. Once Mexicans have acquired human capital, future trips to the United States become easier and less costly, thus increasing migration. Similarly, relatives and friends of Mexican migrants benefit from accumulated social capital. When someone migrates, the costs and risks to the migrant's relatives and friends drop, inducing some of them to migrate too. This process leads to the expansion of interpersonal migration networks and increased migration.

Mr. Massey remarked that U.S. punitive crackdowns against Mexican immigrants at the border have either not worked at all or simply succeeded in redirecting the immigrant flow to other parts of the border. He blasted most aspects of U.S. immigration policy toward Mexico as misguided and ineffectual and proposed a 12-step program for a healthier North American labor market. These steps would include creating a new category of temporary visas with U.S. residence and work privileges, charging a $300 fee to migrants for each visa issued, drastically reducing the personnel and resources devoted to border enforcement, and increasing the number of permanent resident visas available to Mexicans and Canadians to 60,000 per year.

At the end of his presentation, Mr. Massey emphasized that stopping or reversing migration from Mexico is no longer possible. In his view, the question is not if the United States should have a temporary migration program, but rather how to turn the existing U.S.-Mexico migratory relationship into an advantage.