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This article analyses the skills and competence acquisition of migration entrepreneurs in the H-2 visa programme, a U.S. temporary worker scheme. This programme, which nowadays largely recruits Mex...

Over the past 15 years, hundreds of thousands of children of immigrants and their families have moved from the United States to Mexico pushed by different legal and economic expulsion facto...

Chicana/o activists and artists in Greater Los Angeles have turned son jarocho, a traditional music genre from southeastern Mexico, into an organizing resource and a means to express the pl...

L’articolo sintetizza due decenni di ricerca sulla migrazione messicana a Dalton, una piccola citta in Georgia, Usa. L’analisi si focalizza sui risultati del lavoro di campo e li colloca nel contesto dello studio della crescente rilevanza delle destinazioni piccolo-medie per la migrazione messicana e latina negli Stati Uniti. L’articolo presenta innanzitutto l’approccio induttivo, costruzionista e interazionista che e stato usato. Con questi strumento analitici si e studiato il processo sociale dell’immigrazione nelle piccole e medie citta come una rete di interazioni fra immigrati e residenti di ungo periodo, come protagonisti e non solo vittime di forza strutturali di ampio respiro. Questo approccio ha permesso di scoprire diverse e inaspettate interazioni, che includono alleanze, cooperazione, fratture, tensioni, conflitti, aggiustamenti, adattamenti e ri-defnizione dei confini fra immigrati e nativi. L’articolo si chiude con una breve analisi della seconda generazione messicana in questo contesto. I risultati di questa ricerca sono un invito ad approfondire lo studio dell’arrivo dei migranti in destinazioni non metropolitani in altri paesi.

A growing number of minors have become part of the return migratory flow from the United States to Mexico. Based on a longitudinal study started in 2012, this article uses life-history narratives to analyze the return experiences of three children who arrived in the state of Morelos, Mexico, between 2010 and 2012. The findings presented here focus on a specific segment of the children’s migratory journey: leaving the United States, crossing the border and arriving in Morelos. The article contributes to the scholarship on children’s narratives of migration, which has been under-emphasized in traditional studies of United States-Mexico migration. Un número creciente de menores de edad forma parte del flujo migratorio de retorno de Estados Unidos a México. Con base en un estudio longitudinal iniciado en el 2012, este artículo hace uso de las historias de vida para analizar las experiencias de retorno de tres niños que llegaron al estado de Morelos, México, entre el 2010 y el 2012. Los resultados que se presentan están centrados en un segmento específico del recorrido migratorio de estos niños: partir de los Estados Unidos, cruzar la frontera y llegar a Morelos. Este artículo contribuye a los estudios migratorios centrados en la narrativa de los niños, la cual ha sido poco valorada en los estudios de migración entre Estados Unidos y México.

Author(s): Hernandez-Leon, Ruben; Morando, Sarah J | Abstract: Following two decades of Mexican migration to the southern United States, the second generation is entering the labor market.n We analyze the early occupational careers of fifty-eight second-generation young adults in Dalton, Georgia, a global carpet manufacturing center.n We find intergenerational occupational mobility, with children of Mexican immigrants deploying human capital skills to access better jobs than their parents.n However, the Mexican second generation faces opportunity ladders structured along gender lines, with women working in services and men laboring as bilingual supervisors and crew leaders in the carpet industry.n While bilingual skills play a critical role in the employment paths members of the second generation have started to chart, their use of bilingualism is also shaped by gender dynamics in the workplace.

En este artículo se propone la conceptuación de la industria de la migración. La industria de la migración es el conjunto de empresarios, negocios e infraestructuras que, motivados por la búsqueda de ganancias económicas, prestan servicios que facilitan y sostienen la migración internacional. Aunque la industria de la migración ha estado presente y entretejida en la literatura sobre la movilidad humana internacional desde hace mucho tiempo, las teorías de la migración la han tratado como un objeto de estudio marginal y la han reducido a sus dimensiones de ilegalidad e informalidad. En este artículo se argumenta en favor de una conceptuación exhaustiva de dicha industria, en la que se incluyen las actividades legales, ilegales, formales e informales y la interacción y articulación de la industria de la migración con los actores clave del proceso social de la migración internacional: gobiernos, empleadores, migrantes y sus redes y organizaciones defensoras de migrantes.Abstract: This article proposes the conceptualization of the term migration industry. Migration industry is the set of entrepreneurs, businesses and infrastructures that, driven by financial gain, offer services which facilitates and support international migration. Even though the concept of migration industry has long been present and intertwined with the literature on international human mobility, migration theories have always treated it as a marginal object of study and have reduced it to its illegal and informal dimensions. This article gives arguments in favor of an exhaustive conceptualization of this industry, which includes legal, illegal, formal and informal activities, and the interaction and articulation of the migration industry with the key actors of the social process of international migration: governments, employers, migrants and their networks, as well as organizations that advocate the defense of migrants.Résumé : Cet article propose la conceptualisation du terme industrie de la migration. L’industrie de la migration est l’ensemble des entrepreneurs, des affaires et des infrastructures qui, motivés par l’obtention de profits économiques, offrent des services qui facilitent et soutiennent la migration internationale. Même s’il y a longtemps que le concept d’industrie de la migration est présent et entremêlé à la littérature sur la mobilité humaine internationale, les théories de migration l’ont toujours traité comme un objet d’étude marginal en le réduisant à l’illégalité et aux affaires informelles. Dans cet article on donne des arguments à faveur d’une conceptualisation exhaustive de cette industrie qui inclut les activités légales, illégales, formelles et informelles. On traite aussi de l’interaction et de l’articulation de l’industrie de la migration avec les acteurs clé du processus social de la migration internationale : les gouvernements, les employeurs, les migrants et leurs réseaux, et les organisations de défense des migrants.

Entre le Mexique et les Etats-Unis, le transport des migrants est devenu une veritable industrie. Des compagnies d’autocars ayant pignon sur rue disputent ce juteux marche a de multiples acteurs informels equipes de camionnettes qui sillonnent les regions frontalieres. Suivant qu’ils aient ou non des papiers, les migrants font appel a l’un ou l’autre de ces modes de transport. Monterrey, Houston, Tijuana ou San Diego constituent les plaques tournantes de ce commerce dont l’objet est de vendre aux migrants les conditions de leur mobilite.

La notion de diaspora peut avoir des fonctions heuristiques dans la mesure où elle conduit les chercheurs à surmonter la division traditionnelle entre les échelles micro, méso et macro du phénomène des migrations internationales contemporaines. Du fait de son caractère multi-dimensionnel, la migration des Mexicains aux États-Unis peut être analysée à partir de cette notion. Pour ce faire, cet article tient compte des positions et découvertes des géographes français et des historiens, démographes et sociologues américains et mexicains. Sur la base de ces analyses, on peut parler d’une diaspora mexicaine pour désigner un ensemble de faits géoculturels de territorialisation, déterritorialisation et reterritorialisation, créés par les migrants d’origine mexicaine aux États-Unis. Diaspora is a notion that could play heuristic functions. At least, if may allow researchers to surmount the traditional division between micro, mesa and macro scales, specitically tor studying contemporary international migrations. Because of ifs important historical, geographical and demographie dimensions, migration from Mexico to the U.S. may be analyzed as a diaspora. Our essay discusses in what sense we could talk about Mexican diaspora. We used different sources : French geographers and American and Mexican historians, demographers and sociologists. With this background, we examine several tacts produced by Mexican migrants in the US considered as a whole, they show us different ways of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

This article deals with a largely overlooked consequence of Mexico’s process of economic restructuring in the past 2 decades: the incorporation of the country’s skilled industrial workers into U.S.–bound migratory flow. In Mexico, restructuring has transformed workplaces and undermined employment stability and wage and benefits systems that used to keep industrial workers from migrating to the United States. By studying a working-class neighborhood in Monterrey, Mexico, this article seeks to show how migration has become part of the structure of labor market opportunities of displaced manufacturing operatives and how these workers have managed to transfer skills to the oil technology and extraction industries at their main U.S. destination, Houston, Texas.

Debates about United States border control policies have generally ignored the human costs of undocumented migration. We focus attention on these costs by estimating the number, causes and location of migrant deaths at the southwest border of the United States between 1993 and 1997. We document more than 1,600 possible migrant fatalities along the border in this period. More than 1,000 of these deaths were reported by United States data sources, and the remainder were Rio Grande drowning deaths reported by Mexican sources. Additional deaths may go unrecorded because the bodies of the decedents do not come to the attention of government officials. Deaths from hyperthermia, hypothermia and dehydration increased sharply from 1993 to 1997 as intensified border enforcement redirected undocumented migration flows from urban crossing points to more remote crossing areas where the migrants are exposed to a greater risk of death.

Migration theories have fundamentally ignored the role of the migration industry in the facilitation, regulation, control and institutionalization of international human mobility. The result is a gaping theoretical hole concerning the position, contribution and relations of profit-driven actors in the social organization of international migration. In recent years a spate of theoretical and empirical studies has begun to fill this gap. Concepts such as “migration industry,”1 “migration merchants,”2 “business of migration,”3 and “immigrant place entrepreneurs”4 have developed a new lexicon to theorize the actors and infrastructures that facilitate human mobility across borders. These efforts were pioneered by Robert Harney, who coined the term “commerce of migration” to refer to the ensemble of labor, transportation and money brokers facilitating Italian emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5However, his brilliant contribution came on the eve of a wave of studies on immigrant social networks which, by focusing on the relations of reciprocity and solidarity among migrants, largely overlooked the role of profit-driven brokers in the social process of migration. In this chapter, I advance the theorization of the migration industryusing twowell-known constructs of the process of international migration and immigration. The first of these constructs, the “migration hump,” conceptualizes the rise and decline of a migratory stream through a series of distinct stages, each influenced by identifiable socioeconomic factors.6 The second construct, Aristide Zolberg’s “strange bedfellows of American immigration politics,” explains the positions and alliances of different actors in relation to immigration’s putative economic, political and cultural effects.7 Both constructs recognize the role of the migrationindustry, but only timidly and without a full-fledged consideration of the ways in which migration entrepreneurs, corporations and profitdriven private actors participate and connect with other stakeholders in the organization of international human mobility. I engage these two constructs of migration and immigration to arguethat the migration industry and its core and peripheral members play a more significant part in structuring international human mobility than has been acknowledged by most migration theories. I also utilize the migration hump and the strange bedfellows schemes to expand my prior work conceptualizing the migration industry. So far this work has focused on the role of migration entrepreneurs as facilitators of international human mobility and brokers of services demanded by sojourners in the context of migration. Building on Castles and Miller,8 I have defined the migration industry as the ensemble of entrepreneurs, firms and services which, chiefly motivated by financial gain, facilitate international mobility, settlement and adaptation, as well as communication and resource transfers of migrants and their families across borders.9