Economic theories are fundamental for understanding the
causes of migration. However, narrow understandings of self-regulating market
mechanisms of supply and demand operating as ‘push-pull factors’ often present
a limited framework to study migration, and legitimize policies that do not
attend to the realities of migration. Gonzalez and Fernandez have provided a
strong critique of push-pull theories in the context of Mexican migration to
the U.S., arguing that a framework of imperial expansionism is better suited to
explain patterns of migration since the late nineteenth century.
Guerin-Gonzales has also shown how, in the context of Mexican removal
programs during the Great Depression, ‘voluntary’ deportations were officially
justified under economic reasons, but were rooted in cultural prejudices and
longstanding histories of racism and exclusion. Lastly, Molina’s study of
birthright citizenship shows that migration is not just an economic affair but
one that requires understanding ‘racial scripts’ and how these work in
regulating and managing migratory patterns.
Gonzalez and Fernandez have discussed how push-pull
theories rely on ‘conventional supply and demand economics’ and see push and
pull factors operating ‘independently of each other’ (p.23). Poverty,
unemployment and surplus population push people out of sending countries, while
shortages of labor pull migrants to the receiving countries. However, the
history of Mexican migration to the U.S. illustrates the limitations of
push-pull theories. It is a history marked by international economic relations
of economic domination, creating ‘two economically interconnected countries’
(p.28). We cannot understand the causes of migration without attending to
historical patterns of economic domination, such as that established by the US
in Mexico during the Porfiriato (1876-1910). By analyzing the U.S.-Mexico
relationship as a transnational mode of economic colonialism, the causes and
processes of migration acquire a different light. We first see internal migration
within Mexico, deeply influenced by the ‘power of the railroads to determine
population placement’ (p.41). This internal migration, driven by ‘large-scale
foreign corporate enterprises operating under the protection of the U.S.
government’s foreign policy’ (p.42), would set the stage for later migrations
of Mexican labor to the U.S. NAFTA has been the latest iteration of this
phenomenon, promoting the ‘deindustrialization of Mexico’ and U.S.-led export
production, and ruining ‘what remained of Mexico’s production of basic staples’
while allowing U.S. food dumping. Thus, historical developments and a history
of U.S. economic imperialism better explains the causes of migration in
this case than push-pull theories, especially considering that the ‘steady
disparity in the level of income and wages [...] cannot account for variations
in the pace of migration’ (p.45).
Guerin-Gonzales has also shown the need for nuanced
understandings of the causes and effects of migration in the context of U.S.
1930s deportation programs, which were officially framed as ‘a panacea for
economic depression’ (p.77). U.S. domestic unemployment after the Great
Depression, when ‘nearly 12.5 million workers were unable to find jobs in 1931’
(p.78), seemed to create ‘push factors.’ However, U.S. workers did not simply
migrate to places with better employment or economic opportunity. Instead, U.S.
authorities decided that the most reasonable course of action was to reduce job
competition through a removal policy of immigrant populations. This was not
just a simplistic understanding of the economic crisis, but intersected
with longstanding histories of racism and xenophobia by creating alien
populations subject to deportation. In practice, these programs ‘constructed
both Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as foreigners to be sent back to
their home country’ (p.77). Although these deportations were framed as
“voluntary” repatriations, the Mexican and the U.S governments worked closely
together to organize and execute these programs (p.86). The example of Mexican
and Mexican-American repatriations in the 1929-1932 period shows that narrow
economic theories of push-pull factors are not enough to understand migratory
processes, even if they form part of the official line of many governments.
Looking at constructions of “alienhood” and “deportability” as cultural
processes of institutionalized racism is also crucial to understand these
patterns.
Building on Guerin-Gonzales’ attention to the ideologies
running underneath ‘economics,’ Natalia Molina’s concept of ‘racial scripts’
helps clarify understandings of migration that go beyond economic analyses.
Molina has shown how ‘legislation and rulings regarding citizenship connected
immigrants and blacks,’ linking racialized groups ‘across time and space’ and
establishing the ‘long history of [U.S.] racial exclusion’ (pp. 70, 88).
Migrants themselves constantly tried to contest the parameters of
citizenship, but U.S. citizenship had historically been equated with whiteness
and non-white groups were linked together as unsuitable citizens. Race-based
immigration laws such as the 1924 Immigration Act promoted the migration of
Northern Europeans over Asians. These laws complicate a simple picture of
migration being solely the result of supply and demand mechanisms in a global,
self-regulated labor market. Governments constantly regulate access to their
territory and to citizenship, creating incentives for certain groups deemed as
“worthy” and disincentivizing those seen as “unworthy”. The concept of racial
scripts helps us understand how, in the U.S., racial exclusion (and thus
incentives for migration) was cumulatively built up through subsequent
pieces of legislation in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ultimately, governments prefer using simple economic explanations
for migration because they provide a sanitized way of regulating migration and
of justifying both restrictionism at home and intervention abroad. However, as
this answer has shown, the causes of migration are far more complex than
push-pull factors. Histories of colonialism and economic imperialism have had
huge impacts on migration, as Gonzalez and Fernandez have shown in the
U.S.-Mexico case. Moreover, there is no natural progression of migration, and
the involvement of government is constant and sometimes explicit, as was the
case during the 1930s U.S. deportations of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
Understanding these nuances of government interventionism and how they overlap
with structural ‘racial scripts’ is important to take into account when
examining the causes of migration.
Works Cited
Gonzalez, Gilbert and
Fernandez, Raul (2002) ‘Empire and the Origins of Twentieth-Century Migration
from Mexico to the United States,’ Pacific Historical Review, Vol.
71, No. 1, pp. 19-57.
Molina, Natalia (2014)
“Birthright Citizenship beyond Black and White,” in How Race Is Made in
America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts
(University of California Press), pp.68-88.
Guerin-Gonzales,
Camile (1994) “Mexicans Go Home! Mexican Removal Programs During the Great
Depression,” in Mexican Workers and American Dreams (Rutgers University
Press).
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