Wage Policies, Employment, and Puerto Rican Migration

Abstract

It is necessary to understand the forces influencing Puerto Rican migration to truly assess the economic status of Puerto Ricans in the United States. The migratory response reflects the aspirations of workers and their families and represents a relative dissatisfaction with economic conditions on the island. Moreover, the Puerto Rican migratory phenomenon is fundamentally different from the place-to-place European migrations of the twentieth century or the periodic movements of workers from Yugoslavia and Turkey to Western European countries. The Puerto Rican experience is characterized by both features. There is a good deal of cyclical mobility of workers between the island and the United States and longer-term secular movements from the island to the United States. My contention in this chapter is that we must examine both the cyclical and secular nature of Puerto Rican migration to fully comprehend its effects on the economic status of the Puerto Rican population in the United States.