The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States

Abstract

The decade of the 1970s ended a long period of economic growth based on a development model applied widely in the years after World War II. The fundamental aim of this model was to create and sustain internal markets that could serve as springboards for broader economic growth. In industrial nations, governments employed regulation, spending, and monetary policies to generate consumer demand capable of supporting mass production and sustained growth. In developing nations, officials undertook large-scale spending and investment to generate income and eliminate bottlenecks in production; at the same time they erected barriers to the entry of foreign goods and services, thus creating internal demand that national producersboth public and private-could satisfy to initiate and sustain industrialization. The promotion of economic development through these strategies instigated new migratory movements. In the developing world, much of the geographic mobility was internal, with high rates of rural-to-urban migration and rapid urbanization. In developed countries, domestic labor reserves were quickly exhausted, and foreign workers were imported to enable rapid economic growth without inflation. In Western Europe, for example, immigrant workers were initially recruited from culturally similar but less advantaged countries in the south, such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, but by the 1960s these sources were tapped out and migrants from culturally dissimilar and much poorer nations in North Africa and the Middle East were recruited in their stead. By the early 1970s, a series of guest-worker agreements and bilateral treaties had brought hundreds of thousands of Turkish workers into Germany and large numbers of Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians into France.' In the United States, foreign workers were imported under the aegis of the 1942 Bracero Accord, which over the next twenty-two years arranged for the recruitment