Migration in the Americas: Mexico and Latin America in Comparative Context

Abstract

Because Mexico–U.S. migration represents the largest sustained migratory flow between two nations worldwide, much of the theoretical and empirical work on migration in the Americas has focused on this single case. Yet in the past few decades, migration has emerged as a critical issue across all nations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Indeed, over the past fifteen years, this region has changed its historical position from a net migrant-receiving region to one of the leading sending areas of the world. In this volume, we offer the first systematic assessment of Latin American migration patterns using ongoing research on the Mexican case as a basis for comparison. We include work by leading scholars of migration who draw on a common source of comparable data. Our specific purpose is to determine whether and how Mexican migration is similar to or different from migration in other countries of the hemisphere. The analyses are comparative and based on data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) and the Latin American Migration Project (LAMP), which together offer the most comprehensive and reliable source of data on migration from Latin America and the Caribbean. Each chapter examines specific propositions or findings derived from the Mexican case that have not yet been tested for other Latin American or Caribbean nations. Work from Mexico has now produced a fairly conventional account of migration and settlement in the United States, but we know very little about how Mexican patterns generalize to other migratory flows in the region. A major shortcoming of prior research is its overreliance on data from just one country. To the extent that other countries have been studied, most of the research to date has been conducted on a case-by-case basis rather than comparatively. As a result, conclusions about migration trends and patterns in Latin America are derived from a diverse array of studies that make use of divergent data, methods, and theoretical models. In this volume, we seek to remedy this lack of coherence by systematically comparing Mexico to other source countries in the Americas using a common framework of data, methods, and theories. In doing so, we hope to situate findings about Mexico–U.S. migration in the larger context of migration in the Americas and to discover how country-specific characteristics affect patterns and processes of emigration. Such a comparative approach to the study of migration represents a unique and innovative contribution to scholarship on international migration—a topic of considerable interest in the twenty-first century. The chapters derive from papers originally presented at a conference held at Vanderbilt University in May 2008. With support from Vanderbilt’s Center for the Americas, the conference brought together an interdisciplinary set of scholars from universities throughout the Americas who were instructed to base their analyses, at least in part, on data collected by the MMP and the LAMP in 118 Mexican communities and 35 communities from eight other nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In their comparative breadth, the resulting chapters offer a new perspective on the causes and consequences of migration in the Western Hemisphere. In this introduction, we underscore some of the salient challenges and rewards of doing comparative work on migration. We begin by describing the structure and organization of the MMP and LAMP, highlighting their origins, developments, and strategies of data collection. These projects, and the important gaps in data they were designed to overcome, explain why research done to date has generally not been comparative and why it has failed to discern which causes and consequences of migration are unique to Mexico and which apply as well to other countries and regions. We conclude by looking to the future to consider how truly comparative investigations might better inform research on migration in the Americas.