La inmigración y la economía de los EE. UU.

Immigration and the US economy

As the twenty-first century dawned in the United States, twin crises of immigration and the economy preoccupied its the citizens. A long-term economic crisis of deindustrialization and the so-called “race bottom” devasted the manufacturing sector that had sustained the U.S. middle class for a generation. Austerity measures gained traction tax reforms qutted the public sector and social service and even basic public institutions like schools and libraries faced cutbacks. Costs for health care and higher education skyrocketed, while the housing market boomed and the burst.

In what seemed like a paradox, this economic crisis coincided with a huge rise in immigration , especially undocumented immigration. While right-wing populist from Lou Dobbs to Pat Buchanan blamed immigrants for the economic crisis, in fact the relatinship was significantly more complicated. In facts, as I Will show, some of the same forces that underlay the economic crisis also underlay the rise in immigration.

Neoliberal restructuring pushed migrants out of Mexico and Central America just as it Drew them to the United State. The race to the bottom led those the industries that did not move abroad to replicate Third World conditions at home, with immigrantworkers. An increasingly stressed middle class in the United States relied more and more on low-cost godos and services provided by immigrants. Meanwhile antiimmigrant legislation and histeria justified the super-exploitation of immigrant, and specially undocumented immigrant, workers.

Antecedents to illegality

Immigration has shaped the economy of the United State since the country was founded. Mexican migrant workers playe dan important role in U.S. economuc development as an exploitable labor forcé deprived of legal rights starting in the ninteenth century. Undocumentedness, though, is a recent phenomenon, becoming important to the economy in the late twentieth century. Until the Civil Rights era, the mere fact that worker was mexican was enough to justify legal and economic subordination. Mexicans were consitently accorded special treatmen under immigration law because they were seen as necesary, temporary workers rather than as potential immigrants to be admitted or excluded. Theyu were legally discriminated against-but not by having their entry restricted.

The legal and ideological mechanisms for maintaining a cheap, exploitable mexican labor forcé changed in the 1960s as overt racial discrimination became less aceptable. After 1965, and specially after 1986, new exclusions and new a ideology and structureof supposedl race-blind “Illegality” became the principal method of justifying the marginalization of Mexican, and increasingly other Latin American,workers, even as they became even more important to the U.S. economy.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Mexicans labored inside their own national territory on U.U.-owned mines railroads , and after 1848, as “aliens” of varios statuses inside their former territory takem by the United States. In Mexico they did “Mexican Work” and received a “Mexican wage” and “lived in sgregated quarters apart from American management”. However, “although living separately, they labored for operations that connected directly to the heart of the american economy”.

When these (mostly) men crossed into the United States, they carried the border, and the segregated conditions, with them. “Mexican migration to the United States”. Gilbert Gónzales concludes, “Was a sigle process originating in Mexico and… was the social consequence of American capital expansión into Mexico”. “Recruites laborers whether destined for northern Mexico oro f the United States, travel in parties, under a boss, or “cabo” eho holds the tickets”, wrote U.S. Bureau of labror staticseconomist Victor S. Clark in 1908. After “crossing a virtual open border, Mexican workers were again housed in company towns, confined to “Mexican work” treates to dual wages, and segregated socially… the workers” experiences in Mexico continued in the United States”. By law and by custom, Mexicans were consistently viewed as foreifners and as temporary workers, and welcomed as suchrather tan as potential immigrants.

“Rather than interpreting segregation as a means of keeping people out of the “mainstream oro f “marginalizing” them to the social and economic periphery, segregation was a method of integrating Mexican inmigrants and their families into the heart of the American economy… Segregated settlements brought a variations of the border to the emp´loyers” doorsteps”. Mexican worked in the mines and railoads of the southwest, and migrated to the factories and urban centers in the midwest.

The special treatment mexicans recived unde U.S. immigrationlaw reflected their economic importance—and the waysthat society, and the law, saw them as workers to be exploited rather tan potential immigrants who could gain rights. Mexicans were exempted from the literacy requirement and head tax imposed on immigrantsin 1917 and were note ven required to enter through an oficial porto f entry or inspection point until 1919. Until 1924, the new borde between the United States and Mexico was virtually unpoliced, and migration flowed openly. Because they were not considered potential immigrants at all, Mexicans were consistently exempted from the increasingly restrictive immigration legislation implemeted in the late niniteenth and erly twentieth centuries.

Clark reported that wgile “complete statistics of those who cross the frontier are not kept, an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Mexican crossed each year to work in the United States on a temporary basis. “Except in Texas and California, few Mexicans become permanent residents, and even in those two states a majority are transient laborers who seldom remain more tan six months at a time in this country. In agricultura, Clark reported, “The main value of the Mexican… is as a temporary worker in crops where the season is short… They are not permanent, do not acquire land or establish themselves in Little cabin homesteads, but remain nomadic and outsides of American Civilization.

Because their laborwas so essential to the growing mining, railroad, and agricultural industries of the sothwest, even the most restrictive immigration laws has to make accommodations to ensure that Mexicans labor was available to U.S. employers. Mexicans were treated separately by immigration legislation because growing agribusiness interests in the southwestwielded their political clout to ensure their countinuing Access to MExican labor, and because congress conceptualized Mexicans more as workers tan as potential immigrants. Thus Mexicans were invited into the country-with or without documents, or different types of specifically work authorizing, rather tan immigration, documents- and just as easly expelled if they didn´t remove themselves and simply disappear whn their labor was no longer needed.

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