New Reality at the Mexico-U.S. Border
This post is part of a blog series featuring our global conference on April 13, 2021, “Encuentro: Defending Migrant Rights Across the Americas”
For most of the 20th century, migrants arriving at the nation’s southern border were young adult Mexican men on their way to jobs in the United States. From 1942 to 1965, the annual inflow was legal, with 90% entering on temporary work visas and 10% arriving on permanent resident visas. Both sets of migrants mostly circulated back and forth seasonally and the nation’s Mexican-origin population grew slowly.
In 1965, Congress terminated the temporary visa program and enacted numerical limits on legal immigration from the Americas, curtailing Mexicans’ access to entry visas. Since the conditions of labor supply and demand had not changed on either side of the border, the circular labor quickly resumed under unauthorized auspices, eventually stabilizing at roughly the same level it had achieved in the late 1950s. From 1965 through 1985, 85% of unauthorized entries being offset by departures, yielding a slow-growing undocumented population.
Beginning in 1986, the United States launched what would become a multi-decade program of militarized border enforcement that steadily drove up the costs and risks of unauthorized border-crossing. As migrants were diverted into ever more remote and dangerous sectors of the border, they abandoned the strategy of circular migration. Rates of return migration fell, trip durations lengthened, and migrants arranged for spouses and children to join them. As a result, the rate of undocumented population growth accelerated and what had been a circular flow of male workers was transformed into a settled population of families.
Beginning around 2000, the rate of undocumented population growth began to slow. In that year, border apprehensions peaked at around 1.6 million arrests, 98% Mexican. Lost in the surfeit of Mexicans were migrants from Central America, who had begun appearing in the cross-border flow around 1980. Prior to that date, few Central Americans entered the United States in any legal status, but after the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979, the U.S. intervened militarily to provide support for right-wing paramilitaries in El Salvador and Guatemala and launched a clandestine invasion of Nicaragua from Honduras. The ensuing paroxysms of violence destroyed the region’s economy and displaced tens of thousands of people who joined the flow of undocumented Mexicans northward toward the United States.
After 2000 the net volume of undocumented Mexican migration steadily fell and turned negative after 2008, with the number of undocumented departures exceeding the number of undocumented entries. Apprehensions of Mexicans fell from 1.6 million in 2000 to just 166,000 in 2019 as the number of non-Mexican apprehensions rose from 29,000 to 685,000. Reflecting these changes, the Mexican undocumented population declined by 1.5 million persons between 2010 and 2018 as the number of undocumented Central Americans rose by 258,000.
The effective end of undocumented migration from Mexico stemmed from that country’s demographic transition, not border enforcement. Labor migration is very age-dependent. Out-migration for work begins in the late teens, peaks at 22 or 23, and then declines rapidly to low levels by age 30. Between 1970 and 2018 the total fertility rate fell from 6.6 to 2.1 children per woman, the median age increased from 16.7 to 29.2, and Mexico aged out of the migration-prone years.
The disappearance of Mexicans from the inflow revealed the presence of Central Americans, who long had been there but nonetheless were portrayed as a new “immigration crisis.” However, the present situation is a humanitarian, not an immigration crisis, and one very much of our own making. Today’s migrants arriving at the border are not workers seeking jobs but families and children seeking refuge from circumstances tied directly to the U.S. intervention of the 1980s.
As already noted, the economies of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras never recovered from the intervention; and not only did violence in the region persist, it was exacerbated by the mass deportation of gang members bred in the United States. Rather than accepting Central American migrants as people in need of protection and hearing their claims for asylum (as is their right under U.S. law), federal authorities criminalized them, separating parents from children, and isolating both within a detention system that was built not to house families over the long term but to process adult workers quickly for rapid removal.
In the late 1970s the United States faced another humanitarian crisis tied to a fraught U.S. intervention. Rather than letting hundreds of thousands of “Boat People” drown at sea, however, between 1978 and 1998 we accepted some 1.3 million Southeast Asians as refugees and granted them legal residence, enabling them and their descendants to integrate successfully into American life. We are fully capable of tending to Central Americans in the same way. Their numbers are in the tens rather than the hundreds of thousands, and unlike Southeast Asians, they have large immigrant communities already here to accept and support them. We simply need to accept our own moral responsibility for the humanitarian disaster unfolding in the region and on the border.
About the author:
Douglas S. Massey is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, he is the current president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is a member of the Council of the National Academy of Sciences and co-editor of the Annual Review of Sociology.
Massey’s research focuses on international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty, stratification, and Latin America, especially Mexico. He is the author, most recently, of Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times, coauthored with Magaly Sanchez and published by the Russell Sage Foundation.
© 2021. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.