Mexican Migrant Workers Research Articles

The Development of U.S. Immigration History: Historical Factors, Formation Mechanisms, and Migrant Groups

Regional economic integration has emerged as a significant focus for China in the post-pandemic era, as the nation seeks to establish mutually beneficial relationships with external economies and promote national development. In this study, the entropy method is employed to construct an index system tailored specifically to the four provinces within the Yangtze River Delta region. This research aims to explore the advantages and challenges of regional economic integration in China by conducting a comparative analysis of the Yangtze River Delta. The study also evaluates the merits and drawbacks of different integration models, drawing on examples from developed countries. The ultimate goal of the research is to provide insights and recommendations for China's regional economic integration, thus contributing to the country's overall prosperity. The results revealed that factors such as economic downturns caused by the pandemic have led the United States to experience a resurgence of racism and xenophobia, reminiscent of historical periods of American nativism, marked by economic insecurity and rapid demographic changes due to mass immigration. However, unlike previous eras with unrestricted immigration, the U.S. has tightened border policies and reduced the number of immigrants, using violent methods to expel unauthorized immigrants, such as Mexican migrant workers, along with their children born in the U.S., forcing them to move to a country where they may not speak the language or understand the culture.

Managing the Migration: Latino Intermediaries and the Expansion of United States Migratory Labor from World War I through the Bracero Program

Abstract This article charts the migration of ethnic Mexican agricultural workers to the Midwest in the years following the United States’ entrance into World War I, the formalization of an interstate labor recruitment apparatus, and the role of ethnic intermediaries. The introduction of the term “Latino intermediary” here is used to describe the Mexican American truckers and crew leaders who most directly upheld the Midwest's agricultural industry and labor regime. From the end of World War I through the end of the Bracero Program, Latino intermediaries straddled the line between serving the interests of other ethnic Mexican migrant workers, growers, and themselves. While some intermediaries developed profitable business operations, their success often came at the expense of other Latino migrant agricultural workers. Examining the critical role of Latino intermediaries in sustaining Midwestern agribusiness deepens our understanding of how migration from the Southwest to the Midwest was managed and how Latinos negotiated emerging tensions of class and ethnicity.

Wage inequality of Mexican immigrants by type of job qualification in the United States

The objective of this research is to analyze the characteristics of the labor market insertion of Mexicans by type of qualification and their wage differences in relation to native workers in the United States. The hypothesis is that there is a wage inequality between Mexican migrant workers and native workers, accentuated among skilled workers, due to a segmentation of the U.S. labor market. The methodology used to analyze each of the components that add up to the wage gap between Mexican and native workers is the Ñopo decomposition. The results showed the opposite of what is established by the human capital theory since the wage difference between Mexicans immigrants and natives by type of job qualification is mostly unexplainable from a statistical point of view and escapes modeling. This means that having citizenship and education does not eliminate the differences between Mexicans and natives. This allows us to accept the hypothesis, except in the case of low-skilled Mexican immigrants, since they have a wage differential in their favor.

Mexican Migrant Farmworkers in Canada

This essay focuses on Mexican migrant farmworkers employed in the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. During this time, Mexican workers became essential yet expendable while their agricultural employers reaped the material rewards as an essential industry. Through the lens of racialization and structural vulnerability, I explicate how the Mexican and Canadian states facilitated the continuation of capital accumulation in agriculture through the subjugation of Mexican workers. I seek to contribute to the nascent literature on the pandemic in relation to temporary-labor migration programs, Mexican migrant workers, and the racialization of workers to produce a tractable and cheap labor force.

Construction employment mortality among Mexican immigrants in the South Eastern United States, 2003-2013

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate occupational and non-occupational mortality among Mexican immigrants in the South Eastern United States. The construction industry has the highest burden of occupational fatalities in the USA of all industries, and foreign-born Hispanic workers are disproportionately affected. Design/methodology/approach Data were obtained from 3,093 death certificates maintained by the Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta, Georgia. Standardized mortality ratios (SMR) were used to compare occupational-related deaths among construction industry occupations, and logistic regression models were used to examine the relationship between manners of death not related to occupation and employment in the construction industry. Findings The proportion of Mexican immigrants who died from occupational injuries is higher among all construction workers (SMR = 1.31), roofers (SMR = 2.32) and carpenters (SMR = 2.25) than other workers. Among the population in this analysis suicide [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 0.63] and death from natural causes (aOR = 0.70) were inversely related to work in the construction industry. Research limitations/implications Interventions to reduce occupational fatalities among Mexican migrant construction workers should target roofers and carpenters. Future research should further investigate the industry’s association with suicide and natural death. Originality/value This is one of the first analyzes that investigated associations between construction industry employment and non-occupational fatalities among immigrants. The analysis provides evidence that a large portion of the Mexican immigrant population is used in the construction industry (38%) and face elevated risks for occupational fatalities and the results of this investigation should encourage greater surveillance of occupational illness and injury among foreign-born immigrants who work in construction, as well as other high-risk industries.

Refashioning Paradise in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

This paper explores how Helena Maria Viramontes deconstructs the myth of paradise in her novel, Under the Feet of Jesus. California, the setting of the novel, has been portrayed as “a Second Eden,” or “paradise” on earth, through American mass media and culture. What is problematic is that it effaces exploited Mexican migrant workers. This study demonstrates that Viramontes deconstructs the myth by offering the reality of Mexican migrant workers’ hardship. Furthermore, it demonstrates that through Estrella, Viramontes shows the potential of building a new paradise. In the refashioned paradise, Viramontes presents Estrella as a Christ-like figure. And it is a cosmopolitan paradise in which the citizenship is extended to Mexican and other non-white migrant workers without suffering exploitation and racial discrimination.

Mourning across Borders: Multidirectional Memory in Tim Z. Hernandez's All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon

In the documentary novel All They Will Call You (2017) Tim Z. Hernandez brings to light the life stories of the Mexican migrant workers who fatally died in a plane accident as they were being deported from California to Mexico in 1948. Inspired by Woody Guthrie's song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon” (1961), the novel interweaves testimony, documentation, historical contextualization, and fictional mechanisms to involve the reader ethically in the pursuit of an alternative truth – one that underscores the dialectical relationship between the migrants’ lives, their communities, and neocolonial US–Mexico relations. The author entwines the lives and deaths of US and Mexican citizens and gives them historical and affective significance within the “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg) of a community of mourning enacted within and beyond his narrative. His “mestizx consciousness” (Anzaldúa), a lived awareness of the power imbalances that silence the subaltern across the US–Mexico border, manifests itself through the phenomenological leitmotif of la huesera. This southwestern tale and feminine archetype explains the impulse to bring into being a “new memory” (Irizarry) of a reconstructed community around the plane wreck and to challenge the “hierarchy of grief” (Butler) that silenced the migrants’ life stories.

Labours of Love: Family, Human Rights, and Worker Invisibility in Seasonal Mexican Farm Worker Agricultural Migrations to Canada, 1974–Present

This article provides a focused review of the history of seasonal and “foreign” farm labour migration in Canada, and in particular the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). It underscores how Mexican migrant workers in particular have been portrayed in Canadian narrative discourses, drawn primarily from political and journalistic sources in Canada in the postwar period. Extended to Mexico in 1974, the SAWP has a longer history of managed agricultural migration in Canada that is also introduced. The article discusses leitmotifs linked to the history of temporary migration between Mexico and Canada: the fundamental place of family and gender relations; the trope of the male migrant as “breadwinner” (despite the later emergence of women migrants in the program); Mexican officials based in Canada and their role in mitigating labour disputes and unionization efforts among the seasonal migrant class in Canada; and the subjective, “subaltern” stories of migrant workers uncovered through an oral history case study carried out in British Columbia and Manitoba from 2012–2015. It introduces other thematic problems including exclusion/invisibility, human rights, patterns of remuneration, and “complementarity” in farm work, in a context of prior reliance upon the managed internal migration of First Nations’ harvest workers in both Ontario’s and Manitoba’s agricultural sectors.

Mexicans and the Origins of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States: A Reassessment

This article challenges what Isaac Campos calls the “Mexican hypothesis” regarding marijuana criminalization in the U.S. The Mexican hypothesis holds that Mexican migrant workers brought marijuana to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, and that marijuana prohibition was a racially-motivated effort to criminalize and control those workers. Campos traces the origins of this hypothesis to the earliest scholarly histories of marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s, and charts its remarkable and influential hold on both the popular and scholarly imagination in the half century since then. Drawing from more recent scholarship on marijuana in the U.S. and in Mexico (including his own) and examining primary sources, Campos demonstrates that the original evidence for the Mexican hypothesis was extremely weak, that marijuana was quite rare in Mexican immigrant communities, and that several other factors better explain the expansion of marijuana use and its criminalization in the early twentieth century United States.

Concurrence and selection of sexual partners as predictors of condom use among Mexican indigenous migrant workers.

To identify if the selection of mixed sexual partners and the existence of concurrent partners are predictors of condom use in indigenous migrant agricultural workers from Colima, Mexico. Analytical cross-sectional study using an egocentric sexual network approach. Community interviewers applied a structured questionnaire to 192 indigenous migrant workers in a sugarcane agro-industrial context. Data were analyzed with binary logistic regression; odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI 95%) were estimated. In the logistic regression model, adjusted odds (OR; 95% CI) of steady condom use were lower within partnerships of the same indigenous ethnicity compared to other partnerships (0.30; 0.17-0.53), partnerships that were concurrent to other partnerships (0.27; 0.15-0.50), and partnerships that used illegal drugs during sex to other partnerships (0.23; 0.11-0.49). Those variables were actually associated with increased risk of unprotected sex (occasionally or never using condoms), and therefore exposures were unprotected. Sexual partners of the same ethnicity, concurrent partnerships and partnerships that use illegal drugs favor the low frequency of constant condom use and, in turn, the vulnerability to STIs and HIV transmission in indigenous migrant agricultural workers.

The Interconnection of Race, Class, and Environment in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus

In this paper, I explore Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus published in 1995, in terms of what I call “postcolonial environmental injustice.” That is, I demonstrate that through the hard life of Estrella’s family, Viramontes shows how Mexican workers have been oppressed in American society. They have been exploited as cheap, “illegal” laborers without legal protection; They have been threatened by dangerous working conditions. In addition, I explore this work with postcolonial approach, on the basis of the historical background that through the Mexican War in 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 Mexicans lost their lands and property rights; Since then, Mexican laborers have been exploited as “illegal” migrant workers. In short, I demonstrate that in Under the Feet of Jesus, Viramontes shows the postcolonial environmental injustice that has been done on Mexican migrant workers. By shedding a spotlight on these invisible migrant workers who are racially, socioeconomically, and environmentally underprivileged and oppressed, Viramontes ultimately critiques American society.

The role of social networks in the retention of /f/ aspiration among Mexican migrant workers in the Pacific Northwest

Abstract Fricative /f/ aspiration (i. e., /f/ -> [h] in words such as afuera ‘outside’ and fui ‘went.1sg’) is a nonstandard rural feature of Spanish that occurs in a Pacific Northwest speech community of migrant farmworkers of Mexican descent. While the historical change in Spanish from /f/ > [h] has an extensive literature (see Naro 1972; Penny 1990; Pensado 1993; Torreblanca 1984), the social and linguistic factors that condition the variable’s synchronic use are poorly understood (Renaud 2014). This study examines the current trajectory of /f/ aspiration in the context of migration in the U.S., utilizing sociolinguistic interviews conducted with 28 participants ranging in age from 17 to 71, born in either Mexico or the U.S. The study demonstrates that speakers who are more tightly integrated into local family and agriculture networks are more likely to produce [h]. A significant interaction between gender and age is also found: while women of all ages are sensitive to the standard variant and use less of the stigmatized variant [h] overall, young men are robust producers of [h]. It is suggested that this variant holds covert prestige among men of Mexican descent working in agriculture in the migrant setting of the Pacific Northwest.

The Vulnerable Harvest

This essay explores contemporary literary and artistic strategies to reframe discourses of immigration in the United States, which have frequently represented immigrants as terrifying and disruptive threats or, alternatively, as defenseless and abject victims. The essay analyzes two artistic representations of undocumented Mexican laborers in the US dairy industry, the art exhibition The Golden Cage: Mexican Migrant Workers and Vermont Dairy Farmers (2008), by Caleb Kenna and Chris Urban, and the young adult novel Return to Sender (2009), by Julia Alvarez. Both the exhibition and the novel draw on the same poetics of vulnerability that the United Farm Workers’ Take Our Jobs campaign employs and that Judith Butler theorizes, serving as artistic representations of the ways in which immigrant farm laborers, farmers, and the national food supply are all exposed to risks as a result of unsustainable immigration policies. The essay posits that this artistic focus on the shared vulnerabilities of all residents functions as a strategic disruption of other portrayals of immigration, offering a counternarrative of interconnectedness and mutual responsibility to define the boundaries of our national and international communities.

The Precarious Position of Latino Immigrants in the United States

A majority of Mexican and Central Americans living in the United States today are undocumented or living in a marginal, temporary legal status. This article is a comparative analysis of how Mexican and non-Mexican Latino immigrants fare in the U.S. labor market. We show that despite higher levels of human capital and a higher class background among non-Mexican migrants, neither they nor Mexican migrants have fared very well in the United States. Over the past four decades, the real value of their wages has fallen across the board, and both Mexican and non-Mexican migrant workers experience wage penalties because they are in liminal legal categories. With Latinos now composing 17 percent of the U.S. population and 25 percent of births, the precariousness of their labor market position should be a great concern among those attending to the nation’s future.

Mexican migrant workers and workplace communication: the influence of informal labor on English language usage, literacy, and perceptions of ‘the American Dream’

This article describes the findings of an exploratory field study of Mexican migrant workers and the daily realities they experience when it comes to communicating for work in the United States, mainly in informal sectors of the economy. In unstructured interviews or ‘conversations,’ migrants share narratives about the type of communication they do at work, communication challenges, what they perceive as strengths and weaknesses/easy or difficult communication, and what profession they held when in Mexico. In addition, they provide insight into their feelings about the current state of the immigration in the United States, how much they know about the immigration debates, and how this might impact how they communicate at work. The article features migrant narratives, social-political-economic implications, and implications for continued research possibilities in this area, which is largely unexplored by communication research.

‘Domestic transnationalism’: legal advocacy for Mexican migrant workers' rights in Canada

Every year thousands of Mexicans travel to Canada to work in Canadian fields and greenhouses under the Mexico-Canada Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. While the programme is often praised, it has also been the subject of persistent criticism about its failure to meet certain human rights standards. In this article, we examine the legal strategies civil society advocates of migrant workers have adopted to promote migrant workers' rights in Canada. Specifically, we examine legal struggles undertaken by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to challenge Ontario government legislation that does not permit collective bargaining by farmworkers in the province. We argue that this case demonstrates that despite the fact that many of the workers involved are transnationalized, appeals to international bodies or to international human rights standards have been of limited utility in promoting their rights. Despite frequent arguments about the increased relevance of international human rights and citizenship norms and transnational human rights advocacy, in this case the national and sub-national scales remain predominant. The result, we argue, is a form of ‘domestic transnationalism’, in which domestic political actors engage in advocacy within domestic legal institutions to promote the rights of a transnational mobile labour force.

Retirement and health benefits for Mexican migrant workers returning from the United States.

In the absence of a bilateral agreement for the portability and totalization of social security contributions between the United States and Mexico, this article examines the access to pension and health insurance benefits and employment status of older Mexican return migrants. We find that return migrants who have spent less than a year in the United States have a similar level of access to social security benefits as non-migrants. Return migrants who have spent at least a year in the United States are less likely to have public health insurance or social security benefits, and could be more vulnerable to poverty in old age. These results inform the debate on a bilateral social security agreement between the United States and Mexico to improve return migrants' social security.

Migration, agribusiness and nutritional status of under five children in northwest Mexico

The aim of this study was to examine the nutritional status of under five children from Mexican migrant workers families within the context of global food markets. The sample included 404 children less than five years old coming from farms and agricultural communities at northwest Mexico. Prevalence of stunting and underweight of children appeared very similar to that for indigenous children from the national sample survey (difference 0.9 and 1.6 percentage points, respectively). Compared to the national sample of Mexican children, stunting and underweight seemed higher in migrant children (difference 17.7 and 4.5 percentage points, respectively), but wasting, an indicator of both chronic and acute undernutrition, appeared to indicate a process of nutritional recuperation. Migrant children living in poverty and suffering from chronic untdernutrition, poor performance and scarce education opportunities, will become agricultural workers with low productivity and poor general health. Consumer's demands on social and environmental standards of fresh food production in developed countries are an opportunity to impact lives of migrant agricultural workers, their families and communities

Labor Market Outcomes for Legal Mexican Immigrants Under the New Regime of Immigration Enforcement*

OBJECTIVES: This paper documents the effects of increasingly restrictive immigration and border policies on Mexican migrant workers in the United States. METHODS: Drawing on data from the Mexican Migration Project we create a data file that links age, education, English language ability, and cumulative U.S. experience in three legal categories (documented, undocumented, guest worker) to the occupational status and wage attained by migrant household heads on their most recent U.S. trip. RESULTS: We find that the wage and occupational returns to various forms of human capital generally declined after harsher policies were imposed and enforcement dramatically increased after 1996, especially for U.S. experience and English language ability. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that the labor market status of legal immigrants has deteriorated significantly in recent years as larger shares of the migrant workforce came to lack labor rights, either because they were undocumented or because they held temporary visas that did not allow mobility or bargaining over wages and working conditions.

Chandler's Hotel San Marcos: The Resort Impact on a Rural Town

This paper looks at the role of the elite and ambitiously designed San Marcos Hotel in the small farming town of Chandler, 25 miles south east of Phoenix, Arizona. The study traces the hotel's impact on the town's 2000 or less white farmers, and the sizeable population of Mexican migrant workers, questioning how a real city can thrive amidst a landscape dedicated to recreation and luxury. What is the impact of high-style design in a pioneering town, how can local people find their identity in a resort milieu, and what might be the tourist impact on the high immigrant populations common to many resort areas at the time? Using reports from the local Chandler Arizonan since 1912, oral histories and miscellaneous archival materials, the paper traces an evolving identity during the town's early decades. The paper responds to a call for locally based histories of rural towns, shedding light on a key period in North American town making, while contributing to a growing research about resort environments.