This volume examines a number of regional and sectoral developments in Mexico and assesses how they are related to undocumented migration to the United States, representing efforts to identify productive alternatives to the problem of migration.

The study of international migration and ethnic relations is rapidly expanding in the social sciences, in the humanities, and in law and medicine at universities around the world. Theories and methods are borrowed from many disciplines, but with little cross-fertilization, thereby leaving many core issues out. This authoritative book fills a gap by providing an expertly integrated overview of international migration from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Throughout the book, South to North migration is used as the main example.The authors, leading experts in their fields, ask provocative new questions such as the counterfactual, `Why do people not migrate?' and address old questions in fresh ways in a language accessible for students in a range of disciplines. Does migration from less developed countries stimulate or obstruct development? Does development reduce or increase the flows of migration? What are the dynamics of a migration process? Geography, economics, political science, social anthropology and sociology all inform this book, which is certain to become an established text in migration studies.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. At once theoretically sophisticated and poignantly written, Constructed Movements centers stories from communities in Mexico profoundly affected by emigration to the United States to show how migration extracts resources along racial lines. Ragini Shah chronicles how three interrelated dynamics--the maldistribution of public resources, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the US immigration enforcement regime--entrench the necessity of migration as a strategy for survival in Mexico. She also highlights the alternative visions elaborated by migrant community organizations that seek to end the conditions that force migration. Recognizing that reform without recompense will never right an unjust migratory system, Shah concludes with a forceful call for the US and Mexican governments to make abolitionist investments and reparative compensation to directly counteract this legacy of extraction.

This publication explores the links between trade liberalisation and migration movements in North America and discusses the issue of whether the free circulation of persons accompany the successive stages of regional economic integration.

This book contains a selection of case studies prepared for an ILO-UNHCR meeting on international aid as a means to reduce the need for emigration. It considers international assistance to and migration from Eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, Central America, the Philippines, Tunisia and Turkey, as well as looking more generally at refugee policy in the post-Cold War world and at reducing emigration pressure through foreign aid.

The changing political and economic relationships between Mexico and the United States, and the concurrent U.S. debate over immigration policy and practice, demand new data on migration and its economic effects. In this innovative study, Richard C. Jones analyzes migration patterns from two subregions of north-central Mexico, Coahuila and Zacatecas, to the United States. He analyzes and contrasts the characteristics of the two migrant populations and interprets the economic impacts of migration upon both home of migration upon both home areas. Jones's findings refute some common assumptions about Mexican migration while providing a strong model for further research. Jones's study focuses on the ways in which U.S. migration affects the lives of families in these two subregions. Migrants from Zacatecas have traditionally come from rural areas and have gone to California and Illinois. Migrants from Coahuila, on the other hand, usually come from urban areas and have almost exclusively preferred locations in nearby Texas. The different motivations of both groups for migrating, and the different economic and social effects upon their home areas realized by migrating, form the core of this book. The comparison also lends the book its uniqueness, since no other study has made such an in-depth comparison of two areas. Jones addresses the basic dichotomy of structuralists (who maintain that dependency and disinvestment are the rule for families and communities in sending areas) and functionalists (who believe that autonomy and reinvestment are the case of migrants and their families in home regions). Jones finds that much of the primary literature is based on uneven and largely outdated data that leans heavily on two sending states, Jalisco and Michoacan. His fresh analysis shows that communities and regions of Mexico, rather than families only, account for differing migration patterns and differing social and economic results of these patterns. Jones's study will be of value not only to scholars and practitioners working in the field of Mexican migration, but also, for its innovative methodology, to anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians whose interests include human migration patterns in any part of the world

This book deals with migrant-sending countries in the Western Hemisphere because that was the Commission's mandate and because the bulk of undocumented immigrants into the United States come from Mexico and other countries of the Caribbean Basin.