Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

Abstract

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America combines essays from scholars based in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Germany to challenge the ossified ideas about migration that have emerged in national historiographies. Contributors draw upon recent migration scholarship to debunk the dominant image of the typical migrant as a male crossing an international border. This includes recognizing the movements of groups thought to be sedentary, such as indigenous people and women; it also entails analyzing internal migration and historicizing the formation of borders. The vast majority of contributions are well written, with a lucid introductory synthesis and historiographical chapter by Dirk Hoerder. When unmoored from a myopic focus on the transatlantic journeys of Europeans to the United States, the North American framework is quite useful because it unites subfields of migration scholarship that are often treated separately. The significance of creating scholarly dialogue between the ever-expanding fields of migration history in the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, Central America, and the United States, not to mention studies of the southwestern borderlands, should not be overlooked. For scholars already well versed in current migration theory, this comparative aspect represents the volume’s greatest strength.In the early to mid-nineteenth century, the borderlands between the United States and Canada in the north and Mexico in the southwest were crisscrossed by thriving networks of small-scale trade and seasonal migration. This created integrated communities of European-origin settlers and indigenous peoples that spanned international political borders, even as the latter shifted. Small groups of professionals and political exiles also moved between the Caribbean and the United States with significant effects in both. The existence of these transborder communities points to one of the volume’s recurring arguments: there are often more cultural commonalities across political borders than between subregions within them. This is not to say that political borders were meaningless. Trade policies enacted by the governments of the United States and Mexico created shifting economic inequalities on the border throughout the nineteenth century.Later in that century, the presence of railroads, commercial agriculture, and finance capital increased in the northern United States, the southwestern borderlands, and the Caribbean. Economic development and liberalization created new connections throughout the region at the same time that it displaced many people and destroyed local markets; some long-standing migratory practices became untenable, and new migrant streams were created. In Mexico, liberal economic policies enacted during the porfiriato broke up the communal holdings of church lands as well as those belonging to indigenous people, causing internal and international migration. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 increased migration to the United States. Despite linguistic and cultural similarities, Mexican immigrants were not initially welcomed by Spanish-speaking residents north of the border, again showing the need to historicize borders. Throughout Canada, the growth of railroads brought new competition in the form of distantly produced goods and people competing for agricultural lands. Small-scale farmers and indigenous people, themselves engaged in long-standing patterns of seasonal migration, were forced to migrate elsewhere. Emancipation in North America and the various parts of the Caribbean over the course of the nineteenth century allowed previously enslaved people to migrate. The rise of commercial agriculture played an important role in shaping their destinations.After a period of relative porosity, land and sea borders were militarized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on grounds of racial and economic concerns. In the late nineteenth century, the United States banned Asian immigration and con tract labor. Such restrictions influenced relations among states in North America and show the importance of a continental perspective. Fearing that Asians would enter the country from Canada or Mexico, the United States began guarding its land borders more stringently and pressuring neighboring countries to adopt similar restrictions. Canada acquiesced; Mexico did not. By the 1930s, racial and economic arguments were put forth throughout the region in an effort to halt immigration and deport foreigners. Although people continued to migrate, especially within nation-states, cross-border migration would not reach pre-Depression levels until the 1970s.The connections among different states and organizations within North America have become especially apparent during the past decades. During the 1980s, refugees from the wars in Central America began heading north to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Many spent time in multiple countries in search of legal recognition of their refugee status. However, a combination of unresponsive states and Cold War politics barred many from obtaining legal residence, forcing them to enter Mexico, the United States, or Canada illegally. Migrants received legal help, information about possible destinations, and material aid on their journeys from transnational networks of activists and organizations. More recently, Canadian guest worker programs have been lauded by the international community as a model of temporary migration that should be emulated elsewhere, a somewhat discouraging trend considering the abuses built into the system.