Search

The article reports that the U.S. is currently experiencing one of the largest waves of immigration in its history. Mexican nationals constitute a major component this flow, although much of this migration is illegal under present U.S. law. As the number of illegal aliens increases yearly, public officials are increasingly hard pressed to reconcile the stated policy of this country with the facts of the migration. The dilemma is whether to enforce existing laws more vigorously, in an effort to stem the flow, or to recognize that the immigration will persist nevertheless and should perhaps be sanctioned and extend the protection of U.S. law to persons who are now commonly exploited. In the present instance, the problem is all the more complicated by its illegality, which makes it difficult to assess its impact on the welfare both of the native and immigrant populations. Professor Wendell C. Gordon is an institutionalist, with special interests in Latin America and international economies. In his paper he adopts an historical perspective, tracing the origins of the current migration, and argues for the relaxation of laws prohibiting immigration from Mexico.

The article focuses on population commission's report in the U.S. The report of the commission and the papers accompanying it constitute a remarkable document and suggestions that could, if expanded and fully translated into policy, bring a nearly optimum demographic state into being. While discussion of population questions in both quantitative and qualitative terms has commanded attention in America since even before the nation's founding, treatment of demographic matter has been circumscribed by particular premises and objectives which have never, at least until recently, been transformed into an approach that is systematic. With the disappearance of the frontier in the 1890's, attention was directed to conservation of resources and possible shortages of agricultural land and critical minerals. Congressional concern was directed less to problems of this sort, however, than to control of immigration, demand for which issued not from fear of excessive population growth but from concern about increasing ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, labor's fear of excessive competition from immigrant workers, and so on.

The article presents response of the author on comments made by Kenneth P. Hadden on the article "Migration Attractiveness of Southern Metropolitan Areas" that was published in the September 1969 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Hadden's criticism of great width, breadth, depth and scope does raise several salient questions. His exposition to the title of my effort to examine the net migration rates of Southern Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas' (SMSA) is crucial rather than semantical or trivial. Some, noting the paper's claim that it sought one possible route to explanation of the factors associated with the patterns of net migration might think it obvious migration attractiveness was operationalized by self-definition in terms of its measure. Hadden has evidently penetrated behind this veneer to the study's philosophical and theoretical underpinnings and recognized that the actual objective must have been to study migration attractiveness sui generis rather than to assess the importance of various characteristics of SMSA units on the size, rate, and direction of the net migration patterns of these areas between 1950 and 1960. I stipulate to what Hadden styles an atheoretical orientation in failing to make the theoretical rationale explicit.

The article presents a study to analyze the thirty-one Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA's) in the Southern Census Region with a population of 250,000 or more on April 1, 1960. In the thirty-one southern SMSA's during 1955 to 1960 there were more than three white city-to-ring movers for each white ring-to-city mover. For nonwhites, there were nearly two city-to-ring movers for each ring-to-city mover. For all thirty-one southern SMSA's in this study, white and nonwhite mi- grants from the cities to the suburbs were better educated than the suburbs- to-city migrants. Also, a larger proportion of the city-to-ring migrants were white-collar workers than of the suburbs-to-city migrants. Consequently, a smaller movement of lower socioeconomic status counters the heavy volume of movement of persons of high socioeconomic status to the suburbs. Thus, the exchange of migrants between the southern cities and their suburbs tends to raise the socioeconomic levels of the suburban population while lowering the socioeconomic levels of the city population. The thirty-one southern SMSA's analyzed in this paper exhibit a diversity of nonwhite migration patterns.