The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States

Jorge Durand, Douglas S. Massey, and Emilio A. Parrado

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 producers—both public and private—could satisfy to initiate and sustain industrialization.	1
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.1	2
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 and importation of 4.6 million temporary workers from Mexico. When the program finally ended in 1964, the United States did not stop employing Mexican workers; it simply shifted from a de jure policy of active labor recruitment to a de facto policy of passive labor acceptance, combining modest legal immigration with massive undocumented entry. Despite successive amendments to the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act (in 1965, 1976, 1978, and 1980) intended to restrict Mexican immigration, the number of legal immigrants rose from 38,000 in 1964 to 67,000 in 1986; and over the same period gross undocumented migration grew from 87,000 to 3.8 million entries per year.2	3
The postwar model of industrial growth based on internal market development came undone in the early 1970s, and over the course of the next decade it was progressively abandoned in favor of a new economic model based on international trade. In developed nations, production grew more capital intensive and markets fragmented as mass production methods gave way to just-in-time delivery, flexible accumulation, out-sourcing, and continuous flow manufacturing, all carried out on a global scale. In developing nations, state bureaucracies were slashed, government-owned firms were privatized, and tariff barriers were dismantled to expose formerly protected, insular economies to the full force of global competition.	4
These changes came earliest in Mexico's northern border region, where in the 1970s the government launched an ambitious industrialization program based on export processing.3 Binational agreements were negotiated to create a special trade zone along the border within which companies could import unfinished inputs into Mexico, assemble them into final goods, and then reexport them back to the United States paying tax only on the value added (that is, the relatively small cost of labor inputs). Soon maquila factories were sprouting up in cities throughout northern Mexico, initiating a wave of rapid economic and demographic growth along the border.	. . .