Quantitatively, migration between the United States and Mexico is the world’s most significant bilateral relationship in what Stephen Castles and I have called the Age of Migration.1 In many respects, that problematic relationship reflects global trends and issues that demarcate the era since roughly 1970 from previous epochs in the history of international migration. The U.S.-Mexico migratory impasse is emblematic of a global conundrum arising above all from persistent developmental gaps between states and societies, demographic disequilibria, and limitations in governmental capacities to regulate international migration.
For reasons of parsimony, this chapter cannot dwell on migration in global history prior to the modern era. Suffice it to recall Kemal Karpat’s observation that rarely has migration not figured importantly in understanding a given historical epoch.2 The distinctiveness of migration in the modern era arises from the nation-state’s inception in Europe and the gradual emergence of an international system that eventually encompassed the world. The term international migration exactly refers to movement of persons across the national boundaries of sovereign states. Thus, all international migration is inherently of political significance as it involves movement of persons from one sovereign jurisdiction to another.3 The creation of the European Union (EU) in 1994 has somewhat complicated what is often referred to as the Westphalian system of national states. While the twenty-seven states that composed the EU by 2007 remained sovereign entities, they answered to a layer of European governance as well.4 The significance of international migration and regional integration in Europe to understanding the U.S.-Mexico migration impasse will be examined in some detail later in this chapter.
The key endeavor of this chapter is to demonstrate that immigration is not a new phenomenon either globally or in the United States. On the contrary, for the United States in particular, it has been a constant feature of life in America since its inception. By placing contemporary immigration to the United States in the larger and broader story of global migration trends and U.S. immigration history, it argues for policy changes that are consistent with the main lines of development of this longer immigration story.
The European states that forged the modern world usually were ruled by monarchs who subscribed to mercantilism.5 Such governments sought to increase national wealth through extensive trade, particularly between metropoles and colonies. European colonization of the New World, including North and South America as well as Australia and New Zealand, began in the fifteenth century and involved diverse movements of persons, ranging from massive forced migrations of African slaves to the Caribbean, Brazil, and what became the American South, to large movements of indentured servants, to migrations of religious dissidents such as Quakers, Puritans, and, in the case of Maryland, Roman Catholics. Generally, however, European mercantilist metropoles opposed mass expatriation of their subjects on economic and legal grounds. Mercantilist thinking regarded emigration as an economic loss and subjects usually were regarded as virtual property of sovereigns. Moreover, expatriation could deprive sovereigns of potential military conscripts. This anti-emigration norm, in addition to the high cost of overseas transportation, constrained European migration to the New World until the early nineteenth century.
Some Europeans, of course, did relocate to the New World prior to the 1830s, and these movements divergently affected the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch, Russian, and Swedish colonies in South and North America. In most of the New World areas affected by European immigration, indigenous populations usually paid a heavy price in terms of death by disease, subjugation, or forced emigration. In the British colonies in North America, the crown’s opposition to colonial efforts to induce British subjects to immigrate to them became an important source of resentment among British subjects in the colonies.6
Already by the mid-eighteenth century, British colonists along the Atlantic seaboard in North America were pushing relentlessly westward onto Indian lands.7 This was a factor in what is called the French and Indian War in the United States, which became a North American theater in a worldwide struggle between France and Great Britain. Following the conclusion of that war, further influxes by American colonists eastward into Ohio deeply strained ties between American subjects and the British crown and eventually contributed to the historic rupture achieved through the American Revolution.
The early decades of the newly founded American republic witnessed astounding population growth because of a high birthrate but relatively little growth owing to immigration.8 However, the fledgling and militarily weak republic displayed a pattern of bellicose behavior toward North American neighbors like Spain’s North American possessions, including Florida and Mexico, and North American Indians’ lands, which were viewed as empty. Kagan claims the inducements to expansionism were deeply embedded within the legal and institutional structures of the “liberal” American republic. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established the means for incorporating new territories and granted equal rights and self-government to new settlers, virtually ensuring that no elected government would ever cede the territories.9
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a number of factors coalesced to undermine the mercantilist status quo. The revolution in France had spawned new ideas such as the citizen’s right to emigrate. Developments in maritime travel also began to make transatlantic voyages more accessible to persons of modest means. By the 1820s and 1830s, the huge increase of the Irish population caused alarm, especially as so many poor Irish poured into England and Scotland. Local governments began to subsidize the emigration of the poor to North America and elsewhere. By the mid-1820s a consensus emerged on the desirability of emigration as free trade and liberal ideas supplanted mercantilist notions.
By the 1830s the dire socioeconomic and political situation in Ireland, which had been fully incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1800, precipitated mass Irish immigration to the United States, the onset of a century of European immigration to the New World that would involve almost 60 million persons.10 In some instances, European governments did not actively oppose emigration of their subjects or citizens. However, in others, European governments simply could not interdict emigration, despite policies opposing it. This would not be the only time that migrants and their families, seeking to improve their lives, contravened formal governmental policies.11
The vast European emigrations after 1830 recast societies in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Southern Cone of South America. The single largest recipient of European migrants during this period, of course, was the United States, which, as a result, became a “nation by design.”12
Nevertheless, citizens of the new American republic from its earliest days proved ambivalent about the effects of international migration. One reason stemmed from the “feedback loop” created by relatively easy access to U.S. citizenship for white male European immigrants. Supporters of Alexander Hamilton feared that immigrants would naturalize and vote for Thomas Jefferson and his allies. Hence, they greatly increased the residency period necessary to apply for U.S. citizenship, and they empowered the federal government to deport seditious aliens. However, by 1802, owing in part to the “feedback loop” effect of Germans and Irish voting for Jefferson and his allies, the period of residency required to become a U.S. citizen was shortened.13 It eventually became a five-year period in which, after three years, as of 1824, adult white male immigrants could declare themselves intending citizens and thereby gain many of the rights and obligations of U.S. citizens, including the right to vote.14
Between 1830 and World War I, European migration to the United States resulted in the emergence of one of the world’s principal economic and military powers. Aside from African slaves and American Indians, few non-Europeans became involved until the late nineteenth century, when Asians in particular began to arrive in substantial numbers.
Still, Americans remained persistently ambivalent about international migration. In 1819 the United States imposed passenger regulations to deter immigration of paupers. The mass arrival of Irish Roman Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s sparked widespread mob violence against them and the growth of a nativist political movement commonly called the Know-Nothings. Many municipal governments along the Atlantic coast sought to prohibit the arrival and settlement of the Irish. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1849 struck down such efforts and held that the federal government possessed plenary powers over immigration.15 The 1850s witnessed the apogee of the electoral appeal of a nativist third party in U.S. national elections before that movement merged into the Republican Party.16
As recounted by Robert Kagan, American leaders and politicians in the first half of the nineteenth century routinely expressed hostile and aggressive views toward Spain’s rule over areas such as Florida, which eventually would be sold to the United States under constraint. Although Spain possessed the world’s third largest navy and armed forces that greatly outnumbered those of the United States, Americans largely viewed the conquest of Spanish dominions in North America as inevitable, much as they viewed Indian lands. American settlers encroached on Spain’s dominions. Between the American Revolution and 1800, the Anglo-Saxon population of the trans-Allegheny region grew from 30,000 to 300,000, greatly increasing the kinds of pressures and disagreements that led to the Natchez Rebellion of 1799, after which the United States seized control of the entire region.17
After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, the new state outlawed slavery in 1829 thereby precipitating a revolt in Texas, led by American-background settlers and armed volunteers from the United States who wanted to restore the institution of slavery. After gaining its independence from Mexico, the possible entry of the new republic of Texas into the United States exacerbated the long-standing dispute between the North and the South over slavery. It was in the context of this complicated and bitter intersectional dispute that a slave-owning Southerner, James K. Polk, was narrowly elected president in 1844. He quickly moved to annex Texas in 1845 and in early 1846 dispatched U.S. troops to a disputed zone between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. When Mexican troops challenged them, Polk declared war. By the end of the fighting, Mexico had lost half of its territory, a loss exacerbated by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 in which Mexico ceded thirty thousand additional square miles of land to the United States.18 Hence, the war of 1847 added a significant Hispanic population to the United States and created porous borders as well as short-term labor migration possibilities long before the huge influx of Europeans after 1865. A significant Hispanic presence in the United States originated from U.S. seizure of Mexican land.
After the defeat of the Confederacy, European emigration to the United States reached new heights. Various states and territories vied with one another to attract immigrants. Those who declared themselves intending U.S. citizens became eligible for grants of land under the Homestead Act of 1862.19 By the 1880s the composition of European immigration to the United States had changed, as more and more Eastern and Southern Europeans arrived. The sheer volume of immigration contributed to the reemergence of nativist movements. Some viewed the new waves of immigrants as racially inferior and as posing a cultural threat to American society. Others opposed immigration on economic grounds, claiming it depressed wages and undercut working conditions—a viewpoint often expressed by unions.20
On the U.S. Pacific coast, the growing presence of Asians—especially Chinese—sparked an extensive nativist reaction that resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. This measure began what Roger Daniels has termed the closing of the Golden Door, a decades-long process of growing immigration restrictionism in the United States that culminated in the adoption of the Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924, which dramatically curtailed international migration.21
The growing anti-immigrant climate in the United States coincided with more restrictive approaches to international migration in other areas of the New World, such as Australia, Canada, and Argentina. Hence, by the 1930s the era of mass European immigration to the New World had largely come to an end. Indeed, by the 1920s France became the world’s leading land of immigration.22
The creation in 1907 of the first federal commission to study the effects of international migration on American society, the U.S. Immigration Commission, usually called the Dillingham Commission, played an important role in the sea change in U.S. federal government policy toward international migration. The commission largely began American social science inquiry into international migration, thereby reflecting the Progressive movement’s belief that public policies should be informed by scientific understanding.23
Some of the research suggested that international migration diversely affected various segments of American society. Employers and owners of capital benefited from international migration as did highly skilled workers. The economic effects of immigration were less beneficial for the least qualified workers who were frequently of immigrant stock themselves. In certain sectors, international migration had “crowding out” effects that tended to depress wages. Such findings contributed to the restrictive tenor of the recommendations made by the Dillingham Commission to the U.S. president and Congress.24 Several subsequent presidential vetoes thwarted congressional efforts to change U.S. immigration law and policy to reflect the commission’s recommendations. However, the intense American nationalism unleashed by U.S. entry into World War I stoked anti-immigrant sentiments and led to a new federal law in 1917 requiring a literacy test for aspiring immigrants, which would be followed by the era-ending Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924.25
While the growing appeal of immigration restrictionism constituted the dominant theme over the half century between 1875 and 1925 in U.S. immigration history, a less noticed trend involved expanding Mexican migration northward, especially during the Mexican Revolution. Zolberg estimates that as many as 500,000 Mexicans came to the United States between 1900 and 1910.26 Some arrived as refugees fleeing the civil war, but more came to work in agriculture and other sectors of the U.S. economy. By 1917 the U.S. secretary of labor would grant a waiver to the 1885 law barring foreign contract labor on the grounds of a wartime labor emergency.27 Authorized recruitment of Mexicans for employment in the United States continued until 1921. Over that period, about 500,000 Mexicans came to the United States, most of them after the Armistice. But only half of them were registered. Moreover, the end of the first bracero recruitment period did not bring about an end to Mexican labor migration to the United States.28 Large numbers of Mexicans continued to find employment in the Southwest and Midwest, especially in the Chicago area. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many municipal and county governments encouraged repatriation of Mexican workers and their families.29 Tens of thousands of Mexicans left the United States, sometimes with the assistance of the Mexican government.30
During World War II the Mexican and U.S. governments signed a bilateral agreement authorizing temporary legal employment of Mexican workers mainly in southwestern agriculture. Between 1942 and 1964, when the United States unilaterally terminated further recruitment of Mexicans, some 5 million Mexicans were admitted to the United States to perform temporary services of labor.
The bracero era remains an important reference point for twenty-first-century debates about migration between Mexico and the United States. The bilateral accord of 1942 set out procedures for recruitment and temporary employment of Mexican citizens by U.S. employers. However, employers in Texas chafed at the procedures and requirements. Many began or continued to hire Mexican workers outside of the agreed upon bilateral framework. This led to Mexican counteraction and eventually a call for imposition of employer sanctions by the United States so as to punish employers who flouted the law.
American progressives embraced Mexico’s advocacy of the imposition of employer sanctions. Indeed, both the House and Senate bills that eventually became the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA) included employer sanctions provisions. But, largely because of the opposition of the future U.S. president, Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas), section 272 of the INA became known as the Texas Proviso, which stipulated that employment of illegal aliens, “including the usual and normal practices incident to employment,” did not constitute “harboring.” The INA made harboring of illegal aliens a felony punishable by as many as five years in prison and a $2,000 fine.31
Despite the existence of bilaterally authorized and other frameworks for temporary legal employment of Mexicans during the era, there were significantly more illegal entrants recorded than legal entrants. In 1954 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began Operation Wetback, an enforcement effort that resulted in the expulsion of a million Mexican citizens in that year alone. One scholar noted, “The bracero program, instead of diverting the flow of wetbacks into legal channels, as Mexican officials had hoped, actually stimulated unlawful emigration.”32
Nevertheless, when the United States unilaterally terminated the era in 1964, the Mexican government made it clear that it desired renewal of bilaterally authorized temporary employment of Mexican workers.33 The termination of bracero policy by the United States reflected the heightened awareness of the civil rights era and the emergence of new actors like the United Farm Workers, a union largely made up of Mexican Americans who opposed temporary foreign worker policies on the grounds that such policies favored employers and disadvantaged workers.
The U.S. Congress adopted a sweeping reform of U.S. immigration law that eliminated the discriminatory visa preference system instituted in the 1920s. Curiously, the lawmakers assumed European-origin immigrants would be the major beneficiaries of an amended legal immigration policy—but they were wrong.34 Most Western European states were well on their way to becoming lands of immigration, although the full consequences of post–World War II guest-worker policies still were unforeseen in 1965.35
While the 1965 reforms were generally praised, they did apply quantitative restrictions to the Western Hemisphere—including Mexico—for the first time and placed a twenty-thousand-person cap on total immigration from each country per year. Thus, the 1965 amendments unexpectedly opened up to the entire world legal immigration to the United States, and by 1968 Latin Americans and Asians—not Europeans—were the major beneficiaries. But the imposition of quantitative restrictions on the Western Hemisphere and the twenty thousand cap were intended to prevent feared excessive immigration from Latin American countries experiencing rapid population growth.
Despite long-standing patterns of migration around the world, beginning in the 1970s six relatively new tendencies developed that demarcate what can be considered the contemporary Age of Migration:
1. The globalization of migration. Migratory movements began to crucially affect more and more countries at the same time. Moreover, immigration countries tend to receive migrants from a larger number of source countries so that most countries of immigration have entrants from a broad spectrum of economic, social, and cultural backgrounds.
2. The acceleration of migration. International movements of people are growing in volume in all major regions at the present time. This quantitative growth increases both the urgency and the difficulties of government policies. However, as indicated by the decrease in the global refugee total after 1993, international migration is not an inexorable process. Governmental policies can prevent or reduce international migration, and repatriation is a possibility.
3. The differentiation of migration. Most countries do not simply have one type of immigration, such as labor migration, refugees, or permanent settlement, but rather a whole range of types at once. Typically, migratory chains that start with one type of movement often continue with other forms, despite (or often because of) government efforts to stop or control the movement. This differentiation presents a major obstacle to national and international policy measures.
4. The feminization of migration. Women play a significant role in all regions and in most (though not all) types of migration. In the past, most labor migrations and many refugee movements were male-dominated, and women were often dealt with under the category of family reunion. Since the 1960s, women have played a major role in labor migration. Today, women workers form the majority in movements as diverse as those of Cape Verdians to Italy, Filipinos to the Middle East, and Thais to Japan. Some refugee movements, including those from the former Yugoslavia, contain a significant majority of women as do certain networks of trafficked persons. Gender variables have always been significant in global migration history, but awareness of the specificity of women in contemporary migrations has grown.
5. The growing politicization of migration. International migration increasingly affects domestic politics, bilateral and regional relationships, and national security policies of states around the world. There is an increasing realization that migration policy issues require enhanced global governance and cooperation between receiving, transit, and sending countries.
6. The proliferation of migration transition. This occurs when traditional lands of emigration become lands of immigration as well. More and more states—as diverse as Poland, Spain, Morocco, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Turkey—are moving into this category.
While the six general tendencies that demarcate the Age of Migration can be discerned around the world, quite distinctive regional patterns of international migration have developed in each, suggesting that the emerging world of regions of the twenty-first century will remain highly differentiated.36 Sub-Saharan Africans are thought to have the highest propensity to migrate. But until quite recently, poverty constraints meant that most international migration by Africans remained within Africa.37 Severe poverty constraints in sub-Saharan Africa in the past are giving way to more extensive interregional migration by sub-Saharan Africans in the Age of Migration.
Large flows of sub-Saharan Africans from Central and West Africa head either toward Spain and its Canary Islands or Morocco or Libya, which often is a transit country for migration to Italy. Many such migrants perish en route, as witnessed by the tragic late 2006 case of trafficked Africans who were abandoned by their traffickers off of the Canaries and left to drift to Barbados.38
Failed states and civil wars have led to massive refugee flows and internal displacements. The fighting in Somalia, for instance, has led to mass emigration to nearby countries like Egypt and Yemen. Large numbers of Somalis have perished en route. Wage remittances from Somali emigrants sustain much of the remaining population.
To the south, in the Great Lakes region, civil wars and genocides have precipitated staggering population displacements. However, settlements of conflicts in countries like Mozambique, Angola, and Liberia have led to large repatriations of former refugees.39 In South Africa the successor governments to the apartheid regime have confronted enormously complex migration-related issues. Large numbers of Africans from states as far away as Nigeria have flocked to the South African El Dorado. Meanwhile, many South African citizens remain unemployed, underemployed, and desperately poor. This has led to anti-immigrant violence. The political crisis in Zimbabwe has greatly exacerbated an already adverse situation. The immigration policy debate in South Africa in some respects resembles that in the United States since the 1970s. There are advocates and foes of legalization, temporary foreign worker recruitment and enforcement of employer sanctions. Border enforcement and deportation issues are also salient and affect South Africa’s ties with its neighbors.40
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), six distinctive patterns of international migration can be discerned. One involves religious pilgrimages centered on the Islamic holy sites, especially in Saudi Arabia. The best understood phenomenon involves immigration to Europe, which includes legal recruitment for employment abroad, family reunification migration, human trafficking, illegal migration, and flows of refugees and others seeking asylum. A third pattern involves labor migration from within the MENA mainly to oil-rich states, especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council area. Vast numbers of migrant workers outside the MENA, principally from South Asia and Southeast Asia, make up another distinctive stream as do flows of refugees and asylum-seekers to MENA area states. Turkey, for instance, has a large gray area, or tolerated alien population of millions, that includes many who have fled conflicts and repressive governments in the area. Iran similarly hosts a large refugee population consisting principally of Azeris, Iraqis, and Afghanis.41 A final pattern involves so-called suitcase migrants from countries like the Ukraine who journey to countries like Turkey to engage in petty trading.
Turning to Latin America, international migration generally appears less linked to violence and conflicts as compared to Africa or the MENA. However, the isle of Hispaniola, comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, stands as an exception. Haitian migrants to the Dominican Republic encounter great hostility and sometimes violence.42 This can scarcely be regarded as insignificant as the isle’s population amounts to half of the Caribbean population. The dominant pattern of Latin American immigration to the United States and Canada is being supplemented by increasing Latin American immigration to Portugal, Spain, and Italy. Spain has signed bilateral labor recruitment accords with several Latin American states such as the Dominican Republic and Ecuador. Other key patterns involve movement of foreign workers from nearby states to Argentina and Brazil. Argentina recurrently legalizes illegally resident populations. There are also large flows northward from Central America through Mexico to the United States. In the past, Guatemalan migrants in southern Mexico have encountered great difficulties and repression.
In East and Southeast Asia, governments jealously guard their sovereign prerogatives in regulation of migration. There is less support for movement toward regional frameworks to regulate international migration than there is in sub-Saharan Africa, the MENA, or Latin America, although the track records of regional frameworks in these areas are not encouraging either.43
Major patterns of international migration in Asia include vast movements of temporary foreign workers from poorer areas to more developed areas; the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia have become significant recruitment poles. A key question for the future concerns China: Will it become a net importer of migrants in coming years? All indications point in that direction.
Japan receives significant inflows of legal immigrants, like ethnic Japanese Brazilians, but also student and trainee inflows that frequently result in legal and illegal employment. As in most of the world, human trafficking is now taken as a serious security issue by Japanese authorities. But the shortcomings of Japan’s anti-trafficking policies are subjects of criticism.44
The scope of international migration in Asia, which is home to half of the world’s population, renders futile an effort to cover it comprehensively. Thailand is going through migration transition and receives large inflows of foreign workers from nearby states. Many governments of Asian states, such as the Philippines, place great store in their policies facilitating emigration. As a general rule, such Asian states do a poor job protecting the interests of their expatriate populations abroad, especially in the MENA area. However, governments like those of India and the Philippines have stepped up efforts to protect expatriates in the twenty-first century much as Mexico has done.45 And they have become more solicitous toward their expatriate population’s needs, including extending some voice and representation to them in government, much as witnessed in Mexico in recent years.46
Understanding migratory developments in Europe also is pertinent. By the twenty-first century most European states had gone through the transition from zones of emigration to lands of immigration, though the timing of the transition varied greatly between European states. A key matter of relevance to U.S.-Mexico immigration debates stemmed from the results of post–World War II guest-worker policies. Many West European states, such as the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland, implemented temporary foreign worker recruitment policies similar to the 1917 and 1942 bilateral agreements between the United States and Mexico. The term guest worker derives from the German term Gastarbeiter, which precisely expressed the intent of German recruitment policy. The guests were to return home. In Switzerland a different term was used: seasonal workers. These foreign workers were expected to repatriate within a year. Neither the Germans nor the Swiss foresaw their foreign worker recruitment policies resulting in large-scale settlement that would transform both countries into lands of immigration. But that is what happened by the 1970s.
Much of Europe, although not Switzerland, has since become part of the EU. The deepening and enlargement of the regional integration framework since the mid-1980s has created a European space and European governance, but as yet no completely uniform EU immigration policy, although considerable progress has been made toward that goal.
As a polity in its own right, the EU interacts with its neighbors to the south and the east. Unsurprisingly, international migration-related matters dominate and usually complicate the EU’s relations with its neighbors, including Morocco, Turkey (which seeks accession to the EU), and Ukraine (which also hopes to join the EU).
It should be evident that the U.S.-Mexico impasse over migration is far from sui generis. On the contrary, when viewed in comparative context, the U.S.-Mexico immigration relationship involves many of the issues and challenges that characterize other areas of the world where diverse historical and developmental circumstances have resulted in more and less developed states coexisting as neighbors or in proximity to one another. One major consequence of globalization processes since roughly 1970 has been to intensify interactions between societies in general and, in particular, between neighbors.
As late as 1970, fewer than 750,000 Mexican nationals lived in the United States. As we saw in more detail in chapter 1, by 2008 an estimated 10% of the Mexican population lived in the United States, some 12 million persons about equally divided by legal and illegal status.47
In the early 1970s the Richard Nixon administration became concerned about growing illegal migration from Mexico, a concern also manifested in Western Europe. Although scarcely understood at the time, similar forces were propelling illegal migration on both sides of the Atlantic—huge wage differentials between the more socioeconomically developed areas and their less-developed hinterlands to the south. On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants moved from low-wage, labor-rich areas to high-wage, labor-scarce areas, thereby improving their productivity as measured by earnings.
Most Western European states adopted and enforced employer sanctions by the mid-1970s as part of broader strategies to deter unlawful migration and alien employment.48 In the United States, advocacy of employer sanctions encountered fierce resistance.49
Nevertheless, the Nixon administration created an interagency unit to examine possible federal responses to growing illegal migration. The Jimmy Carter administration then created the Interagency Task Force on Immigration Policy, which issued its staff report in March 1979. That same year Public Law 95-412 created the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (SCIRP), the second such federal commission in U.S. history, to make recommendations to the president and Congress concerning both illegal and legal immigration. SCIRP made known its recommendations in its final report submitted to President Ronald Reagan and Congress on April 30, 1981. It called for a legalization period followed by imposition and enforcement of employer sanctions. It also recommended implementation of a counterfeit-resistant employment eligibility document among other measures.50
Both houses of the U.S. Congress then commenced work on immigration legislation, but a legislative stalemate persisted until November 1986, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and President Reagan signed it into law. Significantly, the new law did not include a fraud-resistant employment eligibility document. Instead, regulations were adopted that allowed many forms of identification to be used to satisfy the new I-9 form requirement that obligated employers and new hires to provide evidence of legal eligibility for employment. Use of fraudulent documents quickly became pervasive, enabling ineligible foreign workers to easily circumvent the 1986 law.51 Hence, the United States did not implement a credible employer sanctions regime in 1986 and had not done so by 2008, despite episodic enforcement efforts in some industries. Consequently, illegal migration to the United States continued to surge throughout the 1980s and 1990s and into the twenty-first century.
During the George H. W. Bush presidency, Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas suggested that Mexico be allowed to enter the free trade area created by Canada and the United States in 1988, mainly in response to exaggerated fears of loss of trade with Europe owing to proposed deepening of regional integration there. During the run-up to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into force in 1994, immigration issues were avoided in negotiations because U.S. and Mexican viewpoints on illegal migration so differed. Nevertheless, both the new U.S. president Bill Clinton and President Salinas advocated signature and ratification of the treaty on the grounds that it would ease illegal Mexican migration to the United States through trade liberalization and the creation of a better climate for investment in Mexico, which would create more jobs.52
Nevertheless, one particularly prescient U.S. scholar warned that trade liberalization would increase illegal migration from Mexico to the United States over the short to medium term before helping to abate it over the long run. Philip L. Martin’s theory of a migration hump pursuant to trade liberalization between Mexico and the United States warned that NAFTA would engender a kind of a race between job-creating investments and factors likely to increase Mexican emigration northward, such as the loss of jobs in the ejido sector of small-scale agriculture that produced beans and corn and sustained up to one-third of Mexico’s population. That sector would be devastated by the loss of governmental subsidies and by competition with more efficient U.S. agriculture.53
As Martin predicted, Mexican immigration to the United States soared after 1994. In 1996 the United States adopted another immigration law that bolstered the Border Patrol, expanded detention facilities for aliens, expedited deportation of criminal aliens and sought to improve interdiction especially at the U.S.-Mexico border. Significantly, the 1996 law did not improve enforcement of employer sanctions. One result of the shift away from workplace law enforcement to border interdiction was a steady increase in migrant deaths at the border.
A number of events converged in 2000 to change the political environment surrounding the U.S.-Mexico immigration impasse. The major U.S. trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, announced it would no longer support enforcement of employer sanctions, a stunning reversal of long-standing policy. Concurrently, a new Mexican president, Vicente Fox, came into office with a pro-American reputation and an avowed goal of improving the lives of Mexicans abroad. Then George W. Bush became the U.S. president-elect and soon announced that he planned to revolutionize U.S. foreign policy and make U.S. ties to Mexico and Latin America as well as immigration reform his highest priority.54
Strikingly emblematic of the global pattern in which migration issues have come to the fore in bilateral, regional, and global diplomacy, the new U.S. president made his first trip abroad to President Fox’s ranch in Mexico in early 2001. The two presidents then created a bilateral cabinet-level committee to work out the details of the U.S.-Mexico immigration policy initiative. Interestingly, rumors flew about a European referent to NAFTA. In an address to a summit of the NAFTA heads of state in Ottawa, President Fox spoke of his vision of unfettered migration between the NAFTA partners, thereby seeming to evoke the freedom of labor mobility enjoyed by citizens of now EU member-states instituted in 1968. However, by the time of President Fox’s triumphal late-summer visit to the United States in 2001, when he addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress, it had become clear that many would not support the initiative. President Fox returned home empty-handed, and the attacks of 9/11 soon put immigration reform on the back burner.55
After his reelection in 2004, President Bush again made achieving comprehensive immigration reform a top priority. But congressional efforts to reform immigration came to naught in 2006 and 2007, despite massive demonstrations in support of immigration reform—especially legalization—in the spring of 2006.
Hence, the U.S.-Mexico migration impasse endured. When viewed globally, such a status quo is not uncommon. The EU is in a similar migratory policy impasse with many of its neighbors to the south and the east. South Africa is at loggerheads over migration with many of its poorer neighbors. The wealthy member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are embroiled in endless controversies with migrant homelands like India and the Philippines.
Everywhere the underlying problems and issues are similar. Glaring socioeconomic disparities between high-wage and labor-scarce areas and low-wage, labor-abundant zones propel largely one-way migration flows. The wealthier states have no interest in striking reciprocity agreements with the poorer states as the vast majority of their workers will not benefit from labor mobility rights to the poorer area. Consequently, international migration represents the most important area in the international political economy wherein no international regime, an agreed upon set of rules, obtains.56
Most Americans and Mexicans rue the long bilateral impasse over migration. Most Americans have no problem with authorized permanent resident aliens. However, illegal migration constitutes another matter, not only because it contravenes the law but also because of the problematic status of illegally resident aliens. A majority of Americans appears to support a path to legal status for noncriminal illegally resident aliens, especially those living in family households with legally resident or U.S. citizen family members. Most Americans also support more credible enforcement of immigration laws such as employer sanctions, making the carrot and stick approach advocated by SCIRP and partially realized by IRCA the key to any workable strategy to end the impasse.
NAFTA also might help, but only if the partner states get the European referent right. Freedom of labor mobility à la 1968 in Europe constituted a nonstarter in the North American context because the socioeconomic gap between Mexico and its partners simply was too large.
In the history of European regional integration, which is a security-driven federative project unlike NAFTA, the member-states made a commitment to leveling the economic playing field within the European space through investments of structural (and later regional) funds in less well-off areas. Italy, which lagged behind the other founding members of the European Community, became a major beneficiary of such investments, which often improved transportation infrastructure. This may constitute a more genuine European referent for the NAFTA partners. Investments in Mexican infrastructure would likely benefit the United States and Canada as much as Italy’s economic growth benefited the other five member states of the then–European Community, the forerunner of the EU. Finally, the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007 merit careful scrutiny by the NAFTA partners. Under accession rules, the core fifteen member-states had the option to temporarily block freedom of labor mobility from the acceding new member states for up to seven years. But the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Sweden chose not to do so, and substantial migration resulted. Later, other core states like Spain and Portugal also rescinded their temporary bars on freedom of labor mobility from the states that joined on May 1, 2004.
The accessions had a considerable legalization effect for citizens of the accession states already present in the core-fifteen EU states. Overall, the economy of the EU benefited from the measure and migrants and their families benefited the most from it. The net effects of the measure served to reduce the socioeconomic gap between the core fifteen and newly acceding states, which is another goal of the EU.57
The recent enlargements are of particular interest to the NAFTA partners because the socioeconomic gap between the United States and Mexico and, to a lesser extent, between Mexico and Canada, closely approximates the gap between the core fifteen states and those that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007.58 However, the regional integration frameworks in North America and Europe differ a great deal, with most American citizens locating politically legitimate decision making squarely within the sovereign state, whereas many Europeans seem increasingly willing to locate political legitimacy at the international level.59
In 2005 the Council on Foreign Relations established a commission consisting of luminaries from the NAFTA partners to reflect upon North America’s future.60 Creation of a common labor market in North America by January 1, 2010, figured among their many recommendations. That commission and its recommendations had attracted little attention or support in the United States as of 2008. Thus, a major question to ponder is, Can a nation by design, shaped since its inception by immigration but generally deeply ambivalent about it, adapt once more to the changed circumstances of the times? The answer is unclear. But the deeper message of U.S. historical experience suggests that it will continue to accommodate newcomers who eventually will be accepted as Americans, even if this incorporation process spans several generations.61 In all likelihood Mexicans will end up like the Irish, once despised and tormented, but eventually accepted, even if grudgingly.