The End of Circular Migration and the Postponement of Stays
Since 1940’s until early 2000’s Mexican migration to the United States was characterized by being circular. Prior to 2001, migrants traveled to the United States for periods of three to five years, returned to their places of origin and, if the economic conditions demanded it, they returned to the US. This was motivated by: the wage-gap between both countries; their geographical proximity; the “easy” and “cheap” border crossing as compared to the current situation; and the conditions of precariousness and economic vulnerability in Mexico for more than three decades.
However, since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and increasingly after 2007 with the Great Recession, circular migration was threatened thus affecting the dynamics in the migratory circuit of Mexicans to the United States.
Between 2002 and 2004 unauthorized immigration to the United States became a central issue to national security under the Patriot Act Law99 resulting in the tightening of the border with Mexico, and complicating the irregular border crossing.100 During the 2000s, the US implemented federal and state laws against unauthorized immigration such as SB1070101 in the state of Arizona, the Operation Streamline102, and the verification of the legal status of workers with the E-Verify program.103 Likewise, in 2007, with the onset of the crisis, the Obama administration intensified
99 It is a law launched since October 2001 under George W. Bush administration that allows investigators to use the tools to investigate crime and, drug trafficking and possible terror links.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/highlights.htm
100 Rafael Alarcón and William Becerra “¿Criminales o víctimas? La deportación de migrantes mexicanos de Estados Unidos a Tijuana, Baja California,” Norteamérica 7 (2012): 128.
101 Ibid., 130. Law that allows authorities to request proof of residence or citizenship based on racial features.
102 Ibid., 130. Law that punishes the unauthorized border crossing with penalties that go from two months to three years of jail.
103 Ibid., 131. Requirement for employers by the authorities to verify the legal status of their employees.
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these measures at a federal level seeking to remove from US soil migrants convicted of serious felonies through the empowerment of the department of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).104 In the period 2007-2010 it was estimated that around 1.7 million Mexicans were removed from the United States considerably affecting the net balance of Mexicans in the United States.105
Meanwhile, since 2006, with the start of the war against drug trafficking by then-president Felipe Calderón, Mexico has captured the attention of the worlds media for the violence experienced in the country as a result. Eventually in 2016 Mexico was positioned as the second deadliest country in the world.106 An interminable war between government and organized crime has left high rates of civilian deaths among Mexican and non-Mexican migrants alike. This in large part down to the organized crime that controls the illegal crossings into the United States.107 This has contributed to an increment in the prices and risks associated with crossing the border illegally, made more salient by the lack of a guaranteed crossing to the other side. Insecurity, violence, and high costs have discouraged individuals who wish to emigrate to the north with many choosing to remain in Mexico.108 The most affected regions have been those of recent migration, mainly from central and southern Mexico, where high rates of unauthorized migration predominate (in some communities reaching up to 90%) compounded by the lack of possibilities to regularize their
104 Ruth Gomberg and Laura Nussbaum, “Is Immigration Policy Labor Policy? Immigration Enforcement, Undocumented Workers, and the State,” Human Organization 70 (2011): 370.
105 Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Overall Numbers of U.S. Unauthorized Immigrants Holds Steady Since 2009”, Pew Hispanic Center Hispanic Trends, September 20, 2016, accessed May 26, 2016,
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/09/20/overall-number-of-u-s-unauthorized-immigrants-holds-steady-since-2009/.
106 Elizabeth Roberts, “Report: Mexico was second deadliest country in 2016” CNN News, May 11, 2017, accessed May 25, 2017, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/09/americas/mexico-second-deadliest-conflict-2016/.
107 Oscar Martínez, Los migrantes que no importan: en el camino con los centroamericanos indocumentados en México (Barcelona: Icaria, 2010), 34.
108 Lee, “Crisis económica global,” 126.
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migratory status.109 In 2011, it was estimated that about 92% of the individuals with migratory experience in the community of Zapotitlan did not have a regular migratory status in the United States.
The Tightening of the Border and the Postponement of Staying in the US
Migrants testimonies enable a research project like this to personify the numbers present in quantitative data. It allows for a deeper understanding by contextualizing the policy in the hardening of the border and the effects in the increased. As mentioned in the previous section, the decrease in the number of Mexicans traveling to the United States is due to: (a) the increase in border surveillance by US authorities with more severe punishment for "illegal" crossing, such as imprisonment; b) new anti-immigrant laws, and c) the increase of violence on the northern border of Mexico by organized crime. The impact in the community was such that during my fieldwork in 2011 only two successful crossings attempts to the US were reported compared to 16 in 2004.
Given the situation at the border, migrants already established on the other side of the border have opted to postpone their stay in the United States to meet their economic goals.
During the 1980’s and 1990’s, most of the migrants interviewed from the community reported to have crossed to the United States mainly through the Sonora-Arizona desert. During these years, they mentioned that the averaged time to reach their destination in the United States was one week with quotas ranging from $800 to $900 US dollars. In the early 2000’s, the tightening of the border made the crossing a more difficult action forcing the coyotes110 to take
109 Ibid,. 126.
110 Colloquial name given to people smugglers in Mexico. It is normal to refer to them as coyotes as an analogy to the animal for its skills in arid climates, while migrants are referred as pollos (chickens).
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more complex routes. These new routes demanded more from the physical condition of the migrants to avoid detection by border guards. During this time, it was reported that reaching their destination took up to two weeks with prices ranging from $1000 to $1300. Despite a considerable increase in the prices and the difficulties in reaching the north, migrants mentioned that the border crossing was ‘relatively easy’, not criminalized, and on most of the occasions, people managed to cross on their first or second attempt.
From 2007 until present, prices have increased exponentially reaching as much as $6,000.
This involves longer and more extreme routes through the desert, sometimes taking up to a month from departure to arrival. This matches the macro level data. During my fieldwork in the community between 2011 and 2014, many returned migrants mentioned having stayed at the border for periods longer than a month without being able to cross and accruing debts for their failed attempts. These stories would eventually filter back to their home communities subsequently discouraging other’s aspirations of migration.
Migrants have reported new dynamics in the border crossing attempts. Previously, the Zapotitecos contacted coyotes from local or nearby communities whom accompanied them from their places of origin to their destination on the other side of the border. However, since early 2000, it has been reported that organized crime took control of the people smuggling networks at the border. In recent years, coyotes “appear to be members of vast criminal organizations involved in drug, guns and people trafficking around Tucson in Arizona.”111 Between 2000 and 2006 some migrants reported being sold by coyotes to other criminal networks before reaching their destination in the United States. “They are no longer the same people, you start the journey with
111 Lee, “Crisis económica global,” 140.
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one coyote and you end up being sold at the border. It is already a wider network, that’s how it works.”112
In interview, Beatriz mentioned that in her attempt to cross the border in 2003 she was sold in northern Mexico to another criminal network:
[...] from Hermosillo to Agua Prieta the same coyote took us from here; From Agua Prieta to there, we were already sold to another. [In] Agua Prieta they put us in a room and they told us "today you are going to stay here and on Saturday you are going to jump the border. Then the coyote [that we hired] said the he was not going to come with us anymore, he said that he was going to stay there [in Agua Prieta], and if everyone jumps to the other side I will return. If someone is left behind I will reach you and stay with you until you cross. [Then in front of us, he told the other coyote], how much are u going to give me for each guy?
Interviewer: he said that so openly in front of you?
Beatriz: yes, and we said, we are making the deal with you, and [the coyote] said
"I cannot take you there, the border patrol knows me already an if the caught me I will go to jail ..."113
Raul, the latest migrant in crossing to the United States in my sample mentioned that in 2015 he paid $5,500 US dollars being capture twice by border patrol agents and taking an approximate time of one month and one week to reach his destination in New York. On this occasion, Raul said:
[…] In 2005 I crossed to the US and it was easy. We arrived at the border, we contacted the coyote, and a week later we were in New York […] that time I paid around $900 dollars and only walked in the desert for a day for around three hours at night […] now that I crossed [in 2015], I thought I was going to die. We walked and walked in the desert for days [four days] and we were capture twice by the border patrol […] no matter where you hide, with the drones, the dogs, and the technology that they have in less than 30 minutes they find you. […] this time my
112 Veronica, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. New York City, April 22, 2017.
113 Beatriz, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. Zapotitlan, Mexico, June 2, 2011.
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body couldn’t stand it anymore, you cannot imagine the dehydration and fatigue of walking for days on the desert without knowing when you will arrive.114
Another factor that has contributed to the decline of Mexicans migrating to the United States has been the increased surveillance of the southern border by US authorities. The launch of Operation Streamline in 2005 has increased the criminalization and persecution of the unauthorized border crossings. Previously, while being apprehended, Mexicans were punished by being deported to the Mexican side of the border; however, with the launch of the Operation Streamline, migrants may face criminal charges in case of being captured by the border patrol in several occasions.115 During my fieldwork in 2011, 2 of the 29 returnees in the sample were imprisoned in maximum security jails for two months under this law.
One of these examples is the case of Luis, who in 2002 intended to cross the border several times being apprehended and deported in three occasions and reaching to the north only until his fourth attempt. In 2010, in a new attempt to cross the border, Luis, and the group he was traveling with were captured to later be imprisoned under Operation Streamline. “In there [the jail] you find everyone, coyotes, burros [known as those who carry the drugs], killers, rapist, and a lot of people imprisoned by one thing or another who violated the law.”116 After his sentence, Luis returned to the community with the warning that if he tried to reenter the US illegally in the next five years, he could face a sentence of more than six months. The criminalization of border crossing has discouraged millions of Mexicans from migrating north. After the outcome of the presidential
114 Raul, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. New York City, April 8, 2017.
115Hailey Sheldon, “Operation Streamline: The Border Patrol Prosecutions Initiative,” The Public Purpose 11 (2013) 91.
116 Raul, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. Zapotitlán, Mexico, October 10, 2012.
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elections in 2017, this scenario appears to become stricter and punish more severally the clandestine border crossing.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, not knowing whether they could return to the United States in the future, migrants already established have opted to postpone their stays to achieve their economic goals and ensure the well-being of their families and them. In the interviews conducted in 2017, all the migrants mentioned that returning to Mexico in the upcoming years was not within their plans. This means that the situation had changed in some of the cases regarding previous interviews. Difficulties and increased costs to cross the border, as well as the conditions of vulnerability and poverty in Mexico, which in the first instance forced them to leave their homeland, are most regularly cited among the main reasons for remaining in the United States.
I would love to go back to Mexico, but on vacation. There is nothing there for me or my family, there are no jobs. […] if I return I will go there just to suffer. Here we work a lot and life is difficult, we have bills to pay, food and living in general is more expensive, but one way or another, we make it.117
“It is a lonely life here, it is just work and work, many hours a day and when you go back home you only sleep and wake up to do the same thing every day, work and work. But when I was in Mexico I was complaining that I did not have a job […] I can’t go back to Mexico now; my family depends on what I earn here and I try to send as much as I can so that they can cover the expenses in Mexico.118
In an interview with Beatriz in 2013, she mentioned that her plans were to return to Mexico in the next years, once she had saved enough money to start a business in the community that
117 Mauricio, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. New York City, April 11, 2017.
118 Pedro, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. New York City, April 11, 2017.
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would allow her to maintain a stable job. However, in the most recent interview, conducted in 2017, Beatriz’s plans changed choosing to stay in the United States. She mentioned that the main reasons for changing her decision were the difficulties in recent years surrounding the border, the wage gap between both countries, and the good integration of her children in the US, of which one has US citizenship.
You know how is the situation in Mexico, it is going from bad to worse and does not seem to change soon […] At the beginning Jorge did not want to come, he told me that he was going to leave his friends, he would never learn English, and he did not like the idea of leaving his grandparents behind. Now I ask him if he wants to go back and he says no, he likes to be here, he learned English and have new friends here already. […] My daughter, she wants to go back, but only for vacations. She spends a lot of time in the house by herself because she is to young and she can’t go out.119
Another case is that of Jesus, who in 2013 claimed to have traveled to the United States for a period of no more than three years to pay a debt he had in Mexico. However, his wife, who lives in Mexico, has motivated him to stay in the United States for a longer time to pay for the household expenses and pay for the education of his children. “If it would for me, I would be in Mexico already, but I can’t. My wife tells me that the money that I send her is barely enough, that if I return, it will be more difficult to pay for the expenses we have over there.”120
From the stories of returned migrants in Mexico and active migrants in the US, we can contrast the micro and macro analysis contributing to the changes that have occurred since 2007 until present in the flow of Mexicans to the United States. Two important factors stand out from this analysis: the discourse of Mexican immigrants as illegal subjects and their criminalization, and the importance of the border as a symbolic and physical tool that perpetuates the exclusion
119 Beatriz, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. New York City, April 7, 2017.
120 Jesus, Interviewed by author. Voice recording. New York City, April 14, 2017.
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and illegality of immigrants in the US. Although these discourses are not recent, in the current Trump administration, they have taken greater force becoming fundamental for the justification of the measures of his current mandate conflicting with the principles of capital in the era of globalization.
Illegality and the Border: The Never-Ending Story
“Undocumented immigrants are at once welcome and unwelcomed: they are woven into the economic fabric of the nation, but as labor that is cheap and disposable.”121 In the Unites States as in many other countries, exclusion and inclusion policies have been fundamental tools to produce “illegal subjects”; it is precisely this condition that allows governments to turn human beings into illegals once they enter a country without authorization.122 Since the first significant flows of Mexicans to the United States in the 1920’s right up until today, Mexicans has been portrayed as an “illegal” population with no place in the structure of the US Nation-State, other than a temporal, cheap and disposable workforce. Therefore, the law produces the notion of
‘illegality’ without the intention of excluding this labor force from some sectors of the labor market.123 This notion represents in the daily life of Mexicans their vulnerability, their situation as disposable and undesirable subjects, and their potential deportability at any time.124
For its part, the border between Mexico and the Unites States can be understood for its
“boundaries as legal spatial delimitations of nations, viz. boundary lines, as opposed to the
121 Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: University Press, 2004), 2.
122 Green, “The Nobodies”, 370.
123Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 27.
124 Ibid., 27-28.
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‘borders’ of nations which are geographic and cultural zones or spaces.”125 The border, its militarization and the millions of dollars invested in it, represents a physical and symbolic barrier between Mexico and the United States that has been essential for the construction and substance of the narrative of the “illegal”.126 “It is precisely the border that provides the exemplary theater for staging the spectacle of “the illegal alien” that the law produces.”127
It is precisely these migrants who are inserted into the lower social strata of the US labor hierarchy. They complement the complex economic and political dynamics of global cities linked to remote places as is the case of Zapotitlan. These migrants as well as other big migrant groups in the US are indispensable elements in the emerging industry of services as cheap and disposal labor but excluded from many social practices of the Nation. By creating fear among migrants based on their illegality and giving such importance to the border and anti-immigrant policies, Mexican migrants have become even a more ‘perfect workforce’ willing to be exploited for low wages, in deplorable conditions, and diminishing their social interaction due to the current conditions.
After the Great Recession
Between 2010 and 2014, academics, governments of both countries, and civil society predicted that at the end of the Great Recession, the flow of Mexican migrants would stabilize and grow at the same pace as in the past three decades. However, despite the economic recovery in the
125 Kearney, Michael, “Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (1991): 45.
126 Gregory Feldman, “If Ethnography is more than Participant-observation, then Relations are more than
Connections: The Case for Nonlocal Ethnography in a World of Apparatuses,” Anthropological Theory 11 (2011):
378.
127 De Genova, Working the Boundaries, 242.
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US since 2014 the conditions to migrants have not changed positively. The conditions of violence in Mexico, the increase in border surveillance by US authorities and the prevalence of increasingly strict anti-immigrant laws, have all precipitated uncertainty among undocumented migrants living in the north. With the triumph of Donald Trump in the US elections in 2016, these measures are expected to be intensified, with an even greater impact on the migratory circuit Mexico-United States.
Proof of this has been the beginning of 2017 when the 50 Mexican consulates in the United States reported one of the most active years after the promises of Trump’s administration to act against unauthorized migration in the country. In uncertainty, despair, and paranoia about the situation, hundreds of Mexicans filled the waiting rooms of the consulates mainly in the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and New York, where most Mexicans live, to update their expired passports, apply for the matrículas consulares (consular ID’s)128, seek legal counseling about their migratory status, and processing the Mexican citizenship of their children born in the United States.129
A statement presented by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in February 2017 suggests that among the new measures taken by the new administration are: “to publicize crimes by undocumented immigrants; strip such immigrants of privacy protections; enlist local police officers as enforcers; erect new detention facilities; discourage asylum seekers; and, ultimately,
128 Monica Varsanyi, “Interrogating “Urban Citizenship” vis-à-vis Undocumented Migration” Citizenship Studies 10 (2006): 230. Matrículas consulares are ID’s issued by the Mexican government through its consular offices to migrants abroad. This document has been issued for 120 years but it has not been until after the attacks of 9/11 that a greater number of cities, agencies and businesses accept this document as an official ID.
129 Jennifer Medina, “Mexican Consulates Flooded with Fearful Immigrants,” New York Times, February 17, 2017, accessed May 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/us/mexican-consulates-flooded-with-fearful-immigrants.html?mcubz=0.
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