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When These Latinos Tell Immigration Stories, They Push Beyond Fairy Tales

Leah Donnella

Cecily Meza-Martinez comes from a small family — her grandmother was born in Mexico and worked in the fields in Southern California before transitioning to factory work. Her grandfather's family is from Spain, and he worked construction on many different projects throughout Southern California — including Disneyland. Chelsea Beck/NPR hide caption

Cecily Meza-Martinez comes from a small family — her grandmother was born in Mexico and worked in the fields in Southern California before transitioning to factory work. Her grandfather's family is from Spain, and he worked construction on many different projects throughout Southern California — including Disneyland.

It's easy to believe in a definitive American immigration story. So much of this country's mythos is built on that idea. ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ...") It foretells a fairy tale ending where parents have worked hard, sacrificed much, and settled their children into the new country. The family has assimilated, and the life that came before is a distant memory.

But it's more complicated than that. The telling of immigration stories exposes a rich array of experiences: loss, longing, duality, triumph and contradiction.

When Latino colleagues from across NPR shared their families' immigration stories for Hispanic Heritage Month, their essays were full of things achieved and things surrendered; cultures celebrated and cultures lost; decisions made by choice and by coercion. Camille Salas, a librarian, wrote about her grandfather's decision to join the Navy in exchange for U.S. citizenship. Cecily Meza-Martinez, of News Operations, wrote about her family's hardships and achievements, which included a role in building Disneyland. Producer Ana Lucia Murillo wrote about how her father crossed the border from Mexico to the U.S. in the bottom of a van marked "Laundromat."

Ana Lucia Murillo's grandfather spent a few years in Chicago in the 1970s to earn money. When Murillo's father was 17, curiosity got to him and he made the trip to Chicago, too. He took a number of buses to the border, and then coyotes helped him hide in the bottom of a van marked "Laundromat" as he was driven across. Chelsea Beck/NPR hide caption

Ana Lucia Murillo's grandfather spent a few years in Chicago in the 1970s to earn money. When Murillo's father was 17, curiosity got to him and he made the trip to Chicago, too. He took a number of buses to the border, and then coyotes helped him hide in the bottom of a van marked "Laundromat" as he was driven across.

Every family came to U.S. with an idea in mind of what its experience might be. But what shines through in these stories is the stark difference between expectation and reality.

We'll share some of their immigration stories here with you. Then, if you have one, we'll ask you to tell us yours .

Intern Monica Itxy Quintanilla's story captures some of the longing and some of the triumph:

"I was raised on stories of mango trees, waterfalls and machetes. My dad, who grew up in a small village in Honduras, glamorized his immigration to the U.S. by decorating his tales with magical realism. For the majority of my childhood, I wholeheartedly believed that mi papi flew into Los Angeles hanging onto the wing of an airplane. ... "My mother's stories were characterized by a similar sense of adventure and freedom. Born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, my mom's urban upbringing made for tales filled with street outings, botanas mexicanas and celebrations. She'd decorate her childhood stories with sparkling eyes and adjectives like 'friendly,' 'exciting' and 'communal' — all antonyms to the words she'd use to describe the United States. With my parents' overt admiration for their homeland, I inevitably begged the question, 'Then why did you leave?' "

Camille Salas is a third-generation Chicana/Tejana/Latina. Her maternal grandfather became a U.S. citizen after joining the Navy during World War II. He and other sailors of Mexican descent were asked to cross a line in the sand if they wanted to become American citizens, and so they did. Chelsea Beck/NPR hide caption

Camille Salas is a third-generation Chicana/Tejana/Latina. Her maternal grandfather became a U.S. citizen after joining the Navy during World War II. He and other sailors of Mexican descent were asked to cross a line in the sand if they wanted to become American citizens, and so they did.

Nicole Cohen, a producer on the Arts Desk, illustrates her family's competing desires in her story. When Cohen's parents moved to the U.S. from Argentina in 1982, "They never planned to stay," she wrote, and it "wasn't until I was in middle school that my dad stopped talking about moving back."

Cohen didn't see it that way. She was born in the U.S., was "stubbornly against" the idea of moving to Argentina, and sometimes refused to speak Spanish at home. But after years of annual visits to Argentina, her perspective shifted. Now, Cohen speaks Spanish with a strong Argentine accent and says that "the sounds, tastes and smells of Argentina conjure home almost as much as the U.S."

Even when it was difficult, many families worked hard to hold on to some remembrance of home. Rekha Patricio, who leads the marketing and branding team, grew up in Venezuela, but her parents, who are from India, gave her a Hindu name to remind her of her heritage.

Rekha Patricio and her two siblings were born in Venezuela to parents who immigrated there from Kerala, India. As a teenager, she and her siblings moved to the U.S. for a better educational opportunity while their parents stayed back home in Venezuela. Chelsea Beck/NPR hide caption

Rekha Patricio and her two siblings were born in Venezuela to parents who immigrated there from Kerala, India. As a teenager, she and her siblings moved to the U.S. for a better educational opportunity while their parents stayed back home in Venezuela.

When she was 16, she moved to the U.S. with her brother and sister. At first, they didn't know where they fit in. Strangers often wanted to categorize them as just one thing — usually Indian, since that's how they looked. But as Patricio grew older, she realized she didn't have to choose one identity over the other, either for herself or, later, for her children:

"I've never considered myself fully Latina or fully Indian. It has always been a juggling act between two cultures and multiple languages. Moving to the U.S. further complicated my identity, as there were more immigrants here and it was easier to label me as 'Indian' because I physically fit that box. It took a few years to get to a place where I felt comfortable enough straddling both worlds and answering the question 'Do you feel more Indian or more Venezuelan?' "

Even when they've managed to straddle two worlds, some things were still left by the wayside.

Dustin Desoto, a producer with All Things Considered, is a third-generation American with roots in Spain and Mexico. He wrote about the loss of language. When Desoto's parents were growing up, he said, they'd be hit with a switch for speaking Spanish in school. To avoid punishment, they spoke English as much as possible, even at home:

"This unfortunately trickled down to my sister and me," Desoto wrote. He never learned Spanish.

As a young man, Dustin Desoto's grandfather joined the U.S. Army in 1941. He fought in World War II and was one of the few Latinos/Chicanos to serve under Gen. George F. Patton. He fought in both the Battle of the Bulge and the invasion of Normandy. Chelsea Beck/NPR hide caption

As a young man, Dustin Desoto's grandfather joined the U.S. Army in 1941. He fought in World War II and was one of the few Latinos/Chicanos to serve under Gen. George F. Patton. He fought in both the Battle of the Bulge and the invasion of Normandy.

Other families lost connections, friends, status, belongings. Even the pursuit of U.S. citizenship had a price. Robert Garcia, who leads the Newscast division, was born in New York City in 1957, about a year after his parents left Bogotá, Colombia. Garcia's parents moved back home, but his mother, Stella, returned to the U.S. to escape Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's reign of terror. Eventually, she applied for American citizenship, but things didn't go as intended:

"The process was so long, bureaucratic, and convoluted that it outlasted her and she died in 1999 before she was fully naturalized. Some six months after her passing, Stella received a summons to appear in court for deportation, despite the fact that the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] had been mailed her death certificate. We patiently explained that neither her court appearance nor her deportation would be physically possible, and after [we received] two more increasingly threatening notices of impending deportation, the U.S. government ... finally let her rest in peace. For the record, you don't get the $700 application fee reimbursed."

Sometimes, though, the immigration story gets a little closer to the fairy tales. Which brings us back to Quintanilla. In the end, her story has the longing, the duality, the contradications, all fused to create a new, more complex American dream:

"Now, decades later, they've finally settled into a country they once felt out of place in. My dad no longer wears his beret with a red embroidered star á la Che Guevara and my mother has grown to love su casita . But their strong value of education and preservation of their culture remains intact and present in both their lives and my own. "After years of attempting to assimilate into a world I felt both included and excluded from, I've learned to stop categorizing myself into just one label. I am my Mayan ancestors, my great-grandparents, mi mami and mi papi, and myself."

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American latino theme study: immigration, an historic overview of latino immigration and the demographic transformation of the.

This American Latino Theme Study essay explores the history of Latino immigration to the U.S. with particular emphasis on issues of citizenship and non-citizenship, political controversies over immigration policy, and the global economic context in which regional migration and immigration have occurred.

by David G. Gutiérrez

Immigration from Latin America—and the attendant growth of the nation's Hispanic or Latino population—are two of the most important and controversial developments in the recent history of the United States. Expanding from a small, regionally concentrated population of fewer than 6 million in 1960 (just 3.24 percent of the U.S. population at the time), to a now widely dispersed population of well more than 50 million (or 16 percent of the nation's population), Latinos are destined to continue to exert enormous impact on social, cultural, political, and economic life of the U.S.[1]Although space limitations make it impossible to provide a comprehensive account of this complex history, this essay is intended to provide an overview of the history of Latino immigration to the U.S. with particular emphasis on issues of citizenship and non-citizenship, the long running political controversies over immigration policy, and the global economic context in which regional migration and immigration have occurred. The essay suggests that the explosive growth of the nation's pan-Latino population is the result of the intricate interplay of national, regional, and global economic developments, the history of U.S. military and foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, the checkered history of international border enforcement and interdiction efforts, and, not least, the aspirations of Latin American migrants and potential migrants themselves.

Foundational Population Movements: Mexico

The history of Latino migration to the U.S. has complex origins rooted in the nation's territorial and economic expansion. Technically, the first significant influx of Latino immigrants to the U.S. occurred during the California Gold Rush, or just after most of the modern boundary between the U.S. and Mexico was established at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48). Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (signed outside of Mexico City in February 1848), the Republic of Mexico ceded to the U.S. more than one-third of its former territory, including what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, and parts of several other states. In addition, the treaty also offered blanket naturalization to the estimated 75,000 to 100,000 former citizens of Mexico who chose to remain north of the new border at the end of the war.[2]

With exception of the approximately 10,000 Mexican miners who entered California during the Gold Rush, migration from Mexico was very light during most of the 19th century, averaging no more than 3,000 to 5,000 persons per decade in the period between 1840 and 1890.[3] This changed dramatically at the beginning of next century. As the pace of economic development in the American West accelerated after the expansion of the regional rail system in the 1870s and 1880s, and as the supply of labor from Asian nations was dramatically reduced by a series of increasingly restrictive immigration laws beginning in 1882, U.S. employers began to look to Mexico to fill a dramatically rising demand for labor in basic industries including agriculture, mining, construction, and transportation (especially railroad construction and maintenance). Drawn to the border region by the simultaneous economic development of northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. (largely facilitated by the eventual linkage of the American and Mexican rail systems at key points along the U.S.-Mexico border), at least 100,000 Mexicans had migrated to the U.S. by 1900. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 greatly intensified the movement of people within Mexico and eventually across the border, a trend that continued for the first three decades of the 20th century.

Historical migration statistics for this period are notoriously inaccurate because of inconsistent enumeration techniques, changing methods of ethnic and racial classification in the U.S., and the fairly constant movement of uncounted thousands of undocumented migrants into and out of U.S. territory. Extrapolation from both U.S. and Mexican census sources, however, provides a sense of the magnitude of population movement over this period. In 1900, the number of Mexican nationals living in the U.S. reached 100,000 for the first time and continued to rise dramatically thereafter, doubling to at least 220,000 in 1910, and then doubling again to 478,000 by 1920. In 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression, the number of resident Mexican nationals is conservatively estimated to have increased to at least 639,000. When combined with the original Mexican American population (that is, the descendants of the former citizens of Mexico who lived in the Southwest at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War), the total Mexican-origin or heritage population of the U.S. in 1930 was probably at least 1.5 million, with the largest concentrations in the states of Texas, California, and Arizona, and a smaller yet significant number working in industrial jobs in the Midwest, especially in the metropolitan areas of Chicago, Detroit, and Gary, Indiana.[4]

Despite a brief reversal of migration flows during the Great Depression, when an estimated 350,000 to 500,000 Mexican immigrants and their children were pressured or compelled to leave the country in a mass repatriation campaign coordinated by local, state, and federal officials, Mexican migration trends seen earlier in the century quickly resumed after the U.S. entered the Second World War in 1941.[5]Facing a significant farm labor shortage as a result of conscription and war mobilization, U.S. employer lobbies convinced the Federal Government to approach Mexico about the possibility of implementing an emergency bilateral labor agreement. Still stinging from the humiliation suffered by Mexican nationals and their children during the repatriation campaigns of the previous decade, Mexican government officials were at first reluctant to enter into such an agreement, but after securing guarantees from U.S. officials that contract workers would be provided transportation to and from Mexico, a fair wage, decent food and housing, and basic human rights protections, the two governments signed the Emergency Farm Labor Agreement in the summer of 1942.[6]

Soon dubbed the Bracero Program (from the Spanish colloquial word for manual laborer) this new guest worker program had a number of important long-term effects. On the most fundamental level, the program not only reopened the southern border to Mexican labor, but also more significantly, reinstituted the use of large numbers of immigrant workers in the U.S. economy for the first time since the Depression. The scale of the program remained fairly modest through the war years, with an average of about 70,000 contract laborers working in the country each year during the war. Over time, however, the Bracero Program, which was extended by various means after the war, had the effect of priming the pump for the much more extensive use of such workers. By 1949, the number of imported contract workers had jumped to 113,000, and then averaged more than 200,000 per year between 1950 and 1954. During the peak years of the program between 1955 and 1960, an average of more than 400,000 laborers (predominantly from Mexico, but augmented by smaller numbers of Jamaicans, Bahamians, Barbadians, and Hondurans as well) were employed in the U.S. By the time the program was finally terminated in 1964, nearly 5 million contracts had been issued.[7]

The guest worker program instituted in the early 1940s also had the largely unanticipated effect of increasing both sanctioned and unsanctioned migration to the U.S. from Mexico. By reinforcing communication networks between contract workers and their friends and families in their places of origin in Mexico, increasing numbers of Mexicans were able to gain reliable knowledge about labor market conditions, employment opportunities, and migration routes north of the border. Consequently, the number of Mexicans who legally immigrated to the U.S. increased steadily in the 1950s and 1960s, rising from just 60,000 in the decade of the 1940s to 219,000 in the 1950s and 459,000 in the 1960s.[8]

More importantly over the long run, the Bracero Program helped to stimulate a sharp increase in unauthorized Mexican migration. Drawn to the prospect of improving their material conditions in the U.S. (where wages were anywhere from seven to ten times higher than those paid in Mexico), tens of thousands of Mexicans (almost all of them males of working age) chose to circumvent the formal labor contract process and instead crossed the border surreptitiously. This was seen in the sudden increase in the apprehension of unauthorized immigrants, which rose from a negligible number in 1940, to more than 91,000 in 1946, nearly 200,000 in 1947, and to more than 500,000 by 1951.[9]

The increasing circulation of unauthorized workers in this era suited employers, who sought to avoid the red tape and higher costs associated with participation in the formal labor importation program, and would-be Mexican braceros who were unable to secure contracts through official means. Indeed, the mutual economic incentives for unsanctioned entry (bolstered by ever more sophisticated and economically lucrative smuggling, communication, and document-forging networks) increased so much in this period that it is estimated that at different times, the ratio of unauthorized workers to legally contracted braceros was at least two-to-one, and in some cases, was even higher in specific local labor markets. That the use of unauthorized labor had become a systemic feature of the U.S. economy is further reflected in that fact that over the 24 years of the Bracero Program, the estimated number of unauthorized persons apprehended—nearly 5 million—was roughly equivalent to the total number of official contracts issued.[10]

Although the U.S. government has never achieved an accurate count of the number of unauthorized Mexican migrants circulating or settling in the U.S. at any one time, population movement of this magnitude inevitably contributed to a steady increase in the permanent resident ethnic Mexican population. According to U.S. Census data (which again, significantly undercounted undocumented residents in each census) and recent demographic analyses, the total ethnic Mexican population of both nationalities in the U.S. grew from about 1.6 million 1940, to 2.5 million in 1950, and reached 4 million by 1960.[11]The historical significance of the Bracero Program as a precursor to neoliberal economic practices and a driver of demographic change has recently been recognized in a number of public history projects, including the Smithsonian's ongoing Bracero Archive project and the "Bittersweet Harvest" traveling exhibition.[12]

Puerto Ricans

The growth of the Puerto Rican population in the continental U.S. has even more complicated origins. Almost exactly a half-century after the end of the Mexican War, the island of Puerto Rico became an "unincorporated territory" of the U.S. after Spain ceded the island and other colonial possessions at the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898. In the first years of American rule, Puerto Ricans were governed under the terms of the Foraker Act of 1900, which established the island as unincorporated possession of the U.S. and provided a civil government consisting of a Governor appointed by the U.S. President, an Executive Council comprised of 6 Americans and 5 Puerto Ricans, and an integrated court system. In 1917, the U.S. Congress, responding to an increasingly aggressive Puerto Rican independence movement, passed the Jones Act. The Jones Act sought to quell local unrest by providing a number of political reforms including a bicameral legislature (although still under the ultimate authority of a U.S.-appointed Governor, the U.S. Congress, and President of the U.S.), and a Puerto Rican Bill of Rights. More importantly, the Jones Act granted U.S. citizenship to all Puerto Ricans except those who made a public choice to renounce this option, a momentous decision made by nearly 300 Puerto Ricans at the time.[13]

Although the authors of the Jones Act had not anticipated that their actions would open the door to Puerto Rican migration to the continental U.S., the extension of U.S. citizenship to island residents ended up having just this effect. Indeed, one of the lasting ironies of the U.S. government's action in 1917 was that even though congressional leaders had expected to continue to control Puerto Rico as a remote colonial possession, a Supreme Court ruling soon revealed the Pandora's Box Congress had opened by granting U.S. citizenship to the island's inhabitants. In the case Balzac v. Porto Rico (1922), the Court held that although Puerto Ricans on the island did not have the same constitutional standing as "ordinary" U.S. citizens (based on the logic that the Constitution's plenary power granted Congress almost unlimited authority to decide which specific rights people in unincorporated territory could enjoy), it also ruled that the conferral of citizenship allowed Puerto Ricans the unfettered right to migrate anywhere within U.S. jurisdiction. More importantly, the Court ruled further that once there, Puerto Ricans were by law "to enjoy every right of any other citizen of the U.S., civic, social, and political."[14]

Puerto Ricans soon took advantage of this oversight by exercising one of the most basic rights of U.S. citizenship—that of free movement within the territorial boundaries of the U.S. and its possessions. Beginning soon after the Balzac ruling, but increasingly after the Great Depression, growing numbers of Puerto Ricans began moving to the continent, and especially to New York City. Migration from the island was spurred by an evolving colonial economy that simply did not provide sufficient employment to keep up with population growth. Prior to the 1930s, the Puerto Rican economy was heavily oriented toward sugar production, which required intensive labor for only half the year and idled cane workers for the rest of the year. With unemployment now a structural feature of the island economy, the first wave of Puerto Ricans began to leave for the mainland, searching either for work or after having been recruited to work in the agricultural industry. Consequently, the mainland population began to grow. Between 1930 and the outbreak of the Second World War, the mainland Puerto Rican population grew modestly from 53,000 to nearly 70,000, though by now, the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans (nearly 88 percent) could be found in New York City where they became low-wage workers in the region's expanding clothing manufacturing and service sectors. In addition, Puerto Rican entrepreneurs also began to expand what would soon become a thriving ethnic economy servicing the needs of the region's rapidly expanding population.[15]

Puerto Rican emigration to the mainland accelerated after the war. Facing chronic unemployment on the island (which fluctuated between 10.4 percent and 20 percent for the entire period between 1949 and 1977), and the dislocations in both the rural and urban work forces caused in part by "Operation Bootstrap," a massive government sponsored plan to attract investment and light industry to the island, the Puerto Rican mainland population jumped from fewer than 70,000 in 1940 to more than 300,000 in 1950 and continued to climb to 887,000 by 1960. Although the systematic shift from agriculture to "export-platform industrialization" under Operation Bootstrap was intended to stimulate economic growth and lift workers out of poverty (which occurred for a minority of Puerto Rican workers) chronic unemployment and underemployment—and the economically driven migration that resulted—have been facts of Puerto Rican economic life since the 1950s.[16]

Demographic Developments since 1960

The demographic landscape of Latino America began to change dramatically in the 1960s as a result of a confluence of economic and geopolitical trends. In 1959, a revolutionary insurgency in Cuba led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Ché" Guevara shocked the world by overthrowing the regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Although Castro's political intentions remained unclear in the first months of his rule, by 1960 the ruling junta made it plain that it intended to rule Cuba under Marxist principles. In quick succession, a series of political purges and trials, expropriations, the nationalization of key industries and institutions (including labor unions and private schools), and the aborted invasion attempt by Cuban exiles at the infamous Bay of Pigs in the spring of 1961, led to a mass exodus of disaffected Cubans. Although a significant Cuban population had existed in the U.S. since the 19th century (mainly concentrated in Florida and New York City), virtually overnight the exodus of Cubans after the revolution created a major new Latino American population. Numbering fewer than 71,000 nationwide in 1950, the Cuban immigrant population shot up to 163,000 by 1960.[17]

A second wave of Cuban immigration occurred between 1965 and the early 1970s when the Castro regime agreed to allow Cubans who wished to be reunited with family members already in the U.S. to do so. Although initially caught by surprise by the Cuban government's decision, U.S. immigration officials provided a mechanism for the orderly entry of nearly 300,000 additional Cuban refugees. As a result, the Cuban population of the U.S. reached 638,000 by 1970, which accounted for 7.2 percent of nation's Latino population at the time.[18] During the 1980s, a third wave of out-migration from Cuba occurred (the infamous "Mariel boatlift"), swelling the numbers of Cubans in the U.S. by another 125,000.[19] These three major waves of post-1960 immigration provided the foundation for the modern Cuban American population, which currently stands at nearly 1.786 million, or 3.5 percent of the pan-Latino population of the U.S.[20]

The majority of Cubans and their children have tended to congregate in South Florida (nearly 70 percent of all Cubans continue to reside in Florida) but over time, Cubans and Cuban Americans—like other Latino migrants—have become more geographically dispersed over time. Although the different socioeconomic profiles of the three distinct waves of Cuban migration created a heterogeneous population in class terms, in aggregate, the immigrants that established the Cuban American population have the highest levels of socioeconomic attainment of the three major Latino subpopulations in the U.S. For example, in 2008, 25 percent of Cubans and Cuban Americans over age 25 had obtained at least a college degree (compared to just 12.9 percent of the overall U.S. Latino population); median income for persons over 16 was $26,478 (compared to median earnings of $21,488 for all Latinos); and 13.2 percent of Cubans lived below the poverty line (compared to 20.7 percent of the Latino population and 12.7 percent of the general U.S. population at that time).[21]

Political turmoil elsewhere in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s—particularly in the Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—also contributed to significant new Latin American immigration to the U.S. Again, although citizens of each of these nations had established small émigré populations in the U.S. well before the 1970s, the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s resulted in an unprecedented wave of migration as hundreds of thousands of Central Americans—many of them undocumented—fled the violence of their homelands to enter the U.S. Caught between authoritarian regimes (often overtly or covertly supported by elements of the U.S. government) and left-wing insurgencies, Central American migrants became a significant part of the U.S. Latino population by 1990, when they reached an aggregate population of nearly 1.324 million. Reflecting their diverse origins and experiences, Central Americans have clustered in different areas of the country, with Salvadorans prominent in Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.; Guatemalans in California and Texas; Nicaraguans in Miami; and Hondurans in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. Although most of the Central American nations have stabilized politically since the 1990s, the long term economic disruption and displacement caused by protracted civil- and guerilla wars in the region has contributed to the continuing growth of this population (discussed further below).[22]

Economic Factors

As dramatic as the story of Cuban and Central American political migration has been, however, the most significant development in Latino migration to the U.S. in recent history is rooted in profound economic shifts occurring both in the U.S. and in countries in the Western Hemisphere since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first signs of things to come were the end of the Bracero Program in 1964 and a major overhaul of U.S. immigration law in 1965. Although both events have been touted as part of the wave of liberal reforms (including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) that characterized this tumultuous era, the end of the contract labor program and revamping of the U.S. immigration system helped hide from view some significant changes both in patterns of immigration and the utilization of immigrant labor in the U.S. These events also tended to obscure important structural changes in both the U.S. economy the economies of Latin America that continue to the present day.

One change that largely escaped public view at the time was the gradual replacement of braceros with unauthorized workers, the vast majority of them originating in Mexico. Although the use of braceros had steadily declined in the early 1960s until Congress allowed the program to lapse at the end of 1964, there is no indication that the steady demand for labor that had driven both authorized and unauthorized migration for the previous quarter-century had suddenly dropped appreciably. Given historical trends, it is much more likely that, as the program ran down, braceros were gradually replaced by unauthorized workers—or, after their contracts expired, simply became unauthorized workers themselves.

In any case, border apprehensions began to rise again almost immediately after the guest worker program's demise. Whereas the INS reported apprehending an average of about 57,000 unauthorized migrants per year in the nine years between Operation Wetback, a federal program that deported illegal Mexican immigrants from the southwestern U.S.,and the end of the Bracero Program, apprehensions approached 100,000 again in 1965 and continued to rise sharply thereafter.[23] In that same year, the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) Amendments (79 Stat. 911) almost certainly exacerbated this trend. Although the new law greatly liberalized extant policy by abolishing the national origins quota system and providing a first-come, first-served system for eligible immigrants, for the first time in history the INA imposed a ceiling of just 120,000 legal immigrants per year for the entire Western Hemisphere. Later adjustments in the law further lowered the number of visas available to Western Hemisphere countries.[24]

On the economic front, the 1973 Arab oil embargo further disrupted the American labor market and eventually helped lay the foundations for an even greater influx of both legal immigrants and unauthorized workers. The extended period of simultaneous contraction and inflation that followed the 1973 crisis—and a series of neoliberal economic reforms that were instituted in response—signaled a massive reorganization of work and production processes that in many ways continue to the present day. This ongoing restructuring was regionally and temporally uneven, but across the economy the general long term trend was toward a contraction of comparatively secure high-wage, high-benefit (often union) jobs in the manufacturing and industrial sectors and a corresponding growth of increasingly precarious low-wage, low benefit, often non-union jobs in the expanding service and informal sectors of a transformed economy.

In the international arena, the deepening global debt crisis and austerity measures imposed on many Latin American countries over this same period by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund set the stage for even more drastic economic restructuring and displacement abroad.[25]  These developments also dramatically altered the gendered composition of immigrant flows. Whereas prior to this time, migration from Latin America to the U.S. was heavily skewed toward males of working age, economic restructuring abroad eventually led to a growing number of women and children entering the migrant stream. The gender breakdown of immigrant populations varies from region to region, (with Mexican migration, for example, remaining somewhat skewed toward males and Dominican migration heavily skewed toward females) but the general trend in Latin American immigration since the 1970s and 1980s has been a pronounced feminization of migratory flows. As a result, although men still outnumber women, the aggregate Latin American population of foreign birth in the U.S. is rapidly approaching gender equilibrium.[26]

The effects of the combination of these dramatic structural shifts have played out differently in different regions of Latin America. In Mexico, the nation that historically has sent the largest numbers of migrants to the U.S., the deepening debt crisis, periodic devaluations of the peso, and natural disasters like the great earthquake of 1985 helped to stimulate even more intense waves of out-migration by both males and females. As already noted, political turmoil and violence had similar effects on the nations of Central America. Moreover, in impoverished Caribbean nations like the Dominican Republic, the attraction of finding work in the U.S. (especially for Dominican women) has led to even more explosive growth in the émigré population. Whereas the Dominican population of the U.S. stood at fewer than 100,000 in 1970, by 1980, it had grown to more than 171,000, and as will be seen below, has continued to grow dramatically since.[27]

At the other end of the economic spectrum, ongoing economic restructuring in South America has led to a situation in which highly educated and highly skilled individuals from countries including Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, and others have emigrated to the U.S. seeking economic opportunities not available to them in their places of origin. For example, according to a recent analysis of 2000 U.S. Census data, whereas only 2.3 percent of all Mexican migrants arriving in the U.S. in the 1980s had bachelor's degrees, 30 percent of those arriving from Peru and Chile, 33 percent of Argentine immigrants, and 40 percent of all Venezuelan immigrants had at least a bachelor's degree. For different reasons, this kind of "brain drain" migration has increased significantly in recent years. For example, between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. population of Chilean and Columbian descent or origin nearly doubled, and the resident population of Argentinian, Bolivian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Venezuelan origin or heritage more than doubled.[28]

As always, the economic dependence of the U.S. labor market on both "legal" and "illegal" immigrants has inevitably cemented and extended links of mutual dependence to immigrant-sending regions and thus has also contributed to the continuing cycle of licit and illicit movement into U.S. territory. Since the 1970s, the same kinds of social networks previously established by European, Asian, and Mexican immigrants have been expanded by more recent migrants, strengthening the bonds of interdependence that have tied some immigrant-source regions to the U.S. for more than a century. The depth of this interdependence becomes clear when one considers the scale of remittances sent by migrants of all statuses to their countries of origin. One study notes that as recently as 2003, 14 percent of the adults in Ecuador, 18 percent of the adults in Mexico, and an astonishing one-in-four of all adults in Central America reported receiving remittances from abroad.[29]In 2007, Mexico alone received more than $24 billion in remittances from its citizens abroad. Before the global economic contraction of 2008, when remittances peaked worldwide, remittances constituted at least 19 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Honduras, 16 percent of El Salvador's, 15 percent of Haiti's, and 10 percent of the GDP of both Nicaragua and Guatemala.[30]In short, in-sourcing of immigrant labor has become a deeply embedded structural feature of both the supply and demand side of the licit and illicit immigration equation and is, therefore, that much more difficult to arrest with unilateral policy interventions.

The effects of these interlocking trends have been intensified by ongoing neoliberal "free trade" negotiations and agreements designed to reduce trade barriers and foster greater regional economic integration. In the U.S., the two signal developments in this area, the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and a similar initiative, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (which is currently being implemented on an incremental basis with several Caribbean, Central-, and South American nations) have been tremendously successful in increasing trade between the signatories. For example, since the ratification of NAFTA in 1994, trade between the U.S. and Canada has tripled, while that between the U.S. and Mexico has quadrupled. At the same time, however, these agreements also provided the means for U.S-based firms to export parts of their production processes to comparatively low-wage and laxly regulated economies while downsizing production capacities (and shedding higher-wage, often-unionized labor) within the borders of the U.S. Together, these structural changes laid the foundations for an intensification of two trends that have come to define the U.S. economy at the turn of the 21st century: the downsizing and outsourcing of production processes that were once based in the U.S. and a concomitant trend toward what might be called labor "in-sourcing" of ever larger numbers of both authorized and unauthorized immigrants.[31]

The stunning result of structural reshaping of the economy has been seen in two interrelated developments: the explosive growth of a Latino population with origins in virtually all the nations of Latin America, and an unprecedented explosion of the unauthorized population in the U.S. In 1970, the Latino population hovered around 9.6 million and constituted less than 5 percent of the nation's population. After that date, however, the Latino population not only grew dramatically but also became much more diverse. Overall, the nation's Latino population grew to at least 14.6 million by 1980, rose to 22.4 million in 1990, increased to 35.3 million in 2000, and approached 50 million by 2010.[32] Although ethnic Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans remain the majority of the Latino population (constituting 63, 9.2, and 3.5 percent of the total, respectively, in 2010), new immigrant influxes from elsewhere in Latin America created a more complex demography in which Central Americans (7.9 percent), South Americans (5.5 percent), and Dominicans (2.8 percent of the total) now also have significant population clusters. The three major Latino subpopulations of ethnic Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans grew substantially in the decade between the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Censuses (charting increases of 54, 36, and 44 percent respectively), but other Latino populations from sending regions in Central and South America grew at a much faster rate, ranging from an 85 percent increase in the Dominican immigrant community to a 191 percent increase in the Honduran population.

Overall, the immigrant populations of virtually all Spanish-speaking nations of the Western Hemisphere grew substantially in the decade between 2000 and 2010. The Dominican population of the U.S. increased from 765,000 to 1.4 million; the Guatemalan population jumped from 372,000 to 1.04 million; Hondurans from 218,000 to 633,000; Nicaraguans from 178,000 to 348,000, and Salvadorans from 655,000 to 1.6 million.[33] As of 2011, the combined pan-Latino population is estimated to have reached a figure of 50,478,000, more than 16 percent of the total population of the U.S.[34]

The number of unauthorized persons—again predominantly from Latin America but also from virtually every other nation on earth as well—has grown at similar rates since the 1970s. Reflecting ongoing economic displacement, chronic unemployment and underemployment, simmering civil unrest, and the escalating violence associated with the rise of the drug trade, human trafficking, and other illicit economic activities, unauthorized migration has risen along with legal immigration. It has always been difficult to estimate the actual numbers of undocumented persons within U.S. borders at any one moment, but demographers believe that in aggregate, the unauthorized population of the country rose from approximately 3 million in 1980, to about 5 million by the mid-1990s, reached an estimated 8.4 million by 2000, and peaked at between 11 and 12 million (or about 4 percent of the total U.S. population) before turning downward after the financial crisis of 2008-09. With much of the global economy in a sustained slump since then, the unauthorized population is estimated to have dropped by at least one million since 2009.[35]

While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact causes of slowing rates of unauthorized migration, heightened security measures and the ongoing recession have clearly contributed to the steep declines seen in recent years. Apprehensions reported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have dropped from a recent peak of nearly 1.64 million in 2000 to fewer than 450,000 in 2010. By 2011, border apprehensions had dropped even further to 340,252, a number that would have been almost unimaginable just five years earlier.[36]  At the same time, deportations and enforced "evoluntary departures" of unauthorized persons have risen sharply in recent years. According to data released by U.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement, deportations and other enforced departures rose from 291,000 in fiscal 2007 to nearly 400,000 in fiscal 2011—and were on an even higher numerical pace though the first five months of fiscal 2012.[37] Whether such trends continue when the economy recovers is an open question, especially given the increasingly integral role unauthorized workers have come to play in the economy.[38]

One other note should be added to this discussion. Although for reasons discussed elsewhere in this essay the phenomenon of illegal immigration has commonly been associated almost exclusively with Mexicans, one should note that most migration scholars agree that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of all persons not legally in the country are individuals who did not cross the border illegally but rather have overstayed valid tourist, student, or other visas. Thus, although illegal immigration has come to be perceived primarily as a "Mexican problem," Mexicans ultimately accounted for about 58 percent of the estimated total in 2010—the remaining 42 percent, many of them visa violators, came from virtually every other nation in the world.[39]

Future Trends

It is impossible to predict the future, but the entwined questions of Latin America immigration and the status of the millions of unauthorized Latin American immigrants currently in the U.S. will almost certainly continue to be two of the most complex and vexing issues on the American political landscape. On the one hand, growing international market competition makes it likely that the U.S. economy will continue to depend heavily on the labor of foreigners—and if patterns of regional economic integration continue, it is almost certain that Latin American immigrants of all statuses will continue to play a major role in the economic development of the nation. Indeed, before the current economic contraction, patterns of immigrant labor insourcing had accelerated to the extent that immigrants of all legal statuses were filling jobs in the U.S. at a rate comparable to the one that existed in the great age of industrial migration more than a century ago. Although the ongoing recession has clearly suppressed the hiring of both native and foreign workers, recent data reveals just how much immigrant workers have become crucial components of American economic life.

According to U.S. Census data, as recently as 2007, highly-skilled "legal" immigrants had become essential in many key economic sectors, constituting fully 44 percent of all medical scientists, 37 percent of all physical scientists, 34 percent of all computer software engineers, 31 percent of all economists, 30 percent of all computer engineers, and 27 percent of all physicians and surgeons. With citizen members of the "baby boom" generation entering retirement in ever-increasing numbers, demographers predict that pressure to recruit highly educated and highly skilled immigrants will continue to rise.[40]

In the vast occupational landscape below such elite professions, immigrant workers of all legal statuses (the U.S. Census does not distinguish between "legal" and unsanctioned workers) have also become structurally embedded in virtually every job category in the economy. As would be expected, more than half of all agricultural workers, plasterers, tailors, dressmakers, sewing machine operators, and "personal appearance workers" are immigrants. Authorized and unauthorized immigrant workers are estimated to constitute another 40 to 50 percent of all drywall workers, packers and packaging workers, and maids and housekeepers. In the next tier, immigrants comprised 30 to 40 percent of all roofers, painters, meat and fish processors, cement workers, brick masons, cooks, groundskeepers, laundry workers, textile workers, and dishwashers. Beyond their expected presence in these labor-intensive occupations, however, immigrants of all statuses are estimated to hold 20 to 30 percent of at least 36 additional occupational categories.[41] But in addition to the numbers captured in official labor statistics, it is also important to keep in mind that untold numbers of other noncitizens toil in the vast and expanding reaches of the "informal" or unregulated "gray" and subterranean "black" market economies.[42] Indeed, the turn to licit and illicit immigrant labor at all levels of the economy has been so great that it is estimated that foreign workers accounted for half of all jobs created in the U.S. between 1996 and 2000 and comprised at least 16 percent of the total U.S. work force at the turn of the twenty-first century.[43]

Of course, on the other hand, the increasingly visible use of immigrant workers and the growth and dispersal of the Latino population since the 1980s into areas such as the American South and the industrial Northeast—places where few Latinos have ever been seen in substantial numbers before—have fanned the flames of dissent and nativism among those who are infuriated not only with what they see as the unconscionable expansion of the nation's unauthorized population, but more generally, with the erosion of domestic living standards associated with the ongoing restructuring of the U.S. economy. Fears about the inexorable aging of the "white" citizen population and the rapid growth of a comparably youthful non-white Latino population have tended to heighten resentment against the foreign-born and their children—and especially against those without legal status. (In 2010, the median age of non-Hispanic white persons was 42, compared to a median age of 27 for all Latinos).[44] The widespread sense that the Federal Government—and lawmakers in both political parties—have not seriously enforced existing law obviously has also added to the frustration of those holding such views.

Consequently, in what is clearly the most dramatic recent development in the debate over immigration and border control policy, states and localities have entered the fray by enacting a range of measures designed to pressure unauthorized persons to leave their jurisdictions. Following precedents set by activists in California and elsewhere, localities such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania in the East, Escondido, California in the West, and at least 130 other American towns and cities in between have passed local ordinances that do everything from criminalizing the hiring of unauthorized day laborers, making it illegal to rent to unauthorized residents, suspending business licenses of firms employing unauthorized workers, and criminalizing the public use of languages other than English. In addition, a number of states—perhaps most notoriously Arizona, and more recently, Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, and others—have debated and/or enacted a variety of measures designed to pressure unauthorized persons to depart their jurisdictions. In 2010 alone, states passed more than 300 such laws, including measures requiring local law enforcement officials, teachers, social workers, health-care providers, private-sector employers, and others to verify the citizenship of any individual they encounter in their official duties or businesses—and make it a crime for non-citizens not to have documents verifying their legal status. Some have gone so far as to propose that unauthorized persons be prohibited from driving (or, for that matter, be barred from receiving any kind of state license), and that states not recognize the U.S. citizenship of infants born of unauthorized residents, regardless of the birthright citizenship provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Federal courts have thus far tended to enjoin or strike down such statutes as violations of federal prerogative in immigration matters, but the future in this arena of immigration and citizenship politics and jurisprudence remains uncertain.[45]

Given the tremendously unstable state of the U.S. and global economies and the highly politicized debate over border enforcement and undocumented immigration in the second decade of the century, it is impossible to predict even partial resolution to these festering controversies. Although the continuing precariousness of the economy may well lay the groundwork for the projection of more force on U.S. borders and an even more hostile climate for Latinos and non-citizens already within U.S. territory, global economic trends will almost certainly continue to create incentives for the ongoing structural use and abuse of both officially authorized and unauthorized Latino immigrant workers. Under these circumstances, it is likely that the historical debate over border enforcement, the continuing growth of the pan-Latino population, and the status of unauthorized persons will persist into the foreseeable future.

David Gutiérrez, Ph.D., is a Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and Academic Senate Distinguished Teacher and Vice-Chair, Academic Affairs. He teaches Chicano history, comparative immigration and ethnic history, and politics of the 20th century United States. His major works include Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans; Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity; Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States; and The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States since 1960. His current research is focused on immigration, citizenship, and non-citizenship in 20th-century American history and the demographic revolution, 1970s to the present. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.

[1]  Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Vol. 1, Part A-Population, ed. Susan B. Carter et al., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-177, table Aa 2189-2215, Hispanic Population Estimates, By Sex, Race, Hispanic Origin, Residence, Nativity: 1850-1990; and Seth Motel and Eileen Patten, "Hispanic Origin Profiles," (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, June 27, 2012), 1.

[2]  For brief overviews of the U.S.-Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); and Ernesto Chávez, The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008).

[3]  For detailed data on Mexican immigration during the 19th century, see Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 1, Part A-Population, ed. Susan B. Carter et al., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Ad 162-172 "Immigration by Country of Last Residence—North America": 1820-1997, 1-571.

[4]  See Arnoldo De León and Richard Griswold del Castillo, North to Aztlán; A History of Mexican Americans in the United States, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, IN: Harlan Davidson, 2006), 87, table 5.1, and 90, table 5.2; and Brian Gratton and Myron P. Gutmann, "Hispanics in the United States, 1850-1990: Estimates of Population Size and National Origin," Historical Methods 33, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 137-153.

[5]  For details of the Mexican repatriation campaigns of the 1930s, see Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

[6]  For trenchant analyses of the politics surrounding the development of the Emergency Farm Labor Program, see Manuel García y Griego, "The Importation of Mexican Contract Labors to the United States, 1942-1964," in The Border That Joins: Mexican Migrants and U.S. Responsibility, ed. Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1983): 49-98; and Katherine M. Donato, U.S. Policy and Mexican Migration to the United States, 1942-1992," Social Science Quarterly 75, no. 4 (1994): 705-29. For discussion of the Bracero Program in the global context of other "guest worker" programs, see Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

[7]  See United States Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, History of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 96th Cong. 2d Sess., Dec. 1980 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980): 51, 57, 65.

[8]  U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1978 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), table 13, 36.

[9]  Ibid, table 23, 62.

[10]  Philip Martin, "There is Nothing More Permanent Than Temporary Foreign Workers," in Backgrounder (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, April 2001).

[11]  Gratton and Gutmann, "Hispanics in the United States," 143, table 3.

[12]  For information on the Smithsonian's Bracero Archive, see http://braceroarchive.org/, accessed June 19, 2012. For the Bittersweet Harvest project, see www.sites.si.edu/exhibitions/exhibits/bracero_project/main.htm, accessed June 19, 2012.

[13]  For analysis of the convoluted politics surrounding the annexation of Puerto Rico and the framing of the Jones Act of 1917, see Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, ed. Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

[14]  See Balzac v. Porto Rico 258 U.S. 298 (1922), 308. See also José A. Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire: Notes on the Legislative History of the United States Citizenship of Puerto Ricans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

[15]  U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of the Population, 1970, Subject Report PC (2)-1E, Puerto Ricans in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1973), table 1. For incisive analyses of the establishment and expansion of the Puerto Rican community of greater New York, see Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles and Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz, "Social Polarization and Colonized Labor: Puerto Ricans in the United States, 1945-2000," in The Columbia History of Latinos Since 1960, ed. David G. Gutiérrez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004): 87-145; and Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

[16]  See James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Pedro A. Caban, "Industrial Transformation and Labor Relations in Puerto Rico: From ‘Operation Bootstrap' to the 1970s," Journal of Latin American Studies 21, no. 3 (Aug. 1989): 559-91.

[17]  Historical Statistics of the United States, 1-177, table Aa 2189-2215

[18]  See María Cristina García, "Exiles, Immigrants, and Transnationals: The Cuban Communities of the United States," in The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States Since 1960: 146-86.

[19]  See Ibid, 157-67; and Ruth Ellen Wasen, "Cuban Migration to the United States: Policy and Trends (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, June 2, 2009) www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/

R40566.pdf, accessed March 25, 2012.

[20]  See Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert, "The Hispanic Population: 2010," 2010 Census Briefs (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011), table 1.

[21]  See Pew Hispanic Center, "Hispanics of Cuban Origin in the United States, 2008—Fact Sheet," (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, April 22, 2010).

[22]  See Norma Stoltz Chinchilla and Nora Hamilton, "Central American Immigrants: Diverse Populations, Changing Communities," in The Columbia History of Latinos Since 1960: 186-228.

[23]  See INS, Statistical Yearbook, 1978, table 23, 62.

[24]  See Patricia Fernández Kelly and Douglas S. Massey, "Borders for Whom? The Role of NAFTA in Mexico-U.S. Migration," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (Mar. 2007): 98-118; Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002); and Raúl Delgado Wise and Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, "Capitalist Restructuring, Development and Labor Migration: The U.S.-Mexico Case," Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (Oct. 2008): 1359-74.

[25]  For discussion of the broad implications of these worldwide shifts in economic activity, see David Harvey, "Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (Mar. 2007): 21-44; and Cheol-Sung Lee, "International Migration, Deindustrialization, and Union Decline in 16 Affluent OECD Countries, 1962-1997," Social Forces 84, no. 1 (Sept. 2005): 71-88.

[26]  For discussion of the changing gender balance of Latin American immigration, see Jacqueline M. Hagan, "Social Networks, Gender, and Immigrant Settlement: Resource and Constraint," American Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (1998): 55-67; Shawn M. Kanaiaupuni, "Reframing the Migration Question: Men, Women, and Gender in Mexico," Social Forces 78, no. 4: 1311-48; Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Katherine M. Donato, "U.S. Migration from Latin America: Gendered Patterns and Shifts," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 630 (2010): 78-92. For a statistical breakdown of the gender balance for both foreign-born and U.S.-born Latinos see, Pew Hispanic Center, Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States: 2010 (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2012), Table 10a—Age and Gender Distribution for Race, Ethnicity, and Nativity Groups: 2010.

[27]  See Ramona Hernández and Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz, "Dominicans in the United States: A Socioeconomic Profile, 2000," Dominican Research Monographs (New York: City University of New York, Dominican Studies Institute, 2003), table 1.

[28]  See U.S. Census, "The Hispanic Population, 2010," table 1; and Çağlar Özden, "Brain Drain in Latin America," paper delivered at the Expert Group Meeting on International Migration and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Secretariat, Mexico City, Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 2005, UN/POP/EGM-MIG/2005/10 (Feb. 2006), www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/lttMigLAC/P10_WB-DECRG.pdf.

[29]  See Roberto Suro, "Remittance Senders and Receivers: Tracking the Transnational Channels," (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, Nov. 23, 2003).

[30]  World Bank, Migration and Remittances Unit, Migration and Remittances Factbook, 2011, www.worldbank.org.prospects/imigrantandremittances, accessed July 25, 2011.

[31]  See Fernández Kelly and Massey, "Borders for Whom?"; Wise and Covarrubias, "Capitalist Restructuring"; and Raúl Delgado Wise, "Migration and Imperialism: The Mexican Workforce in the Context of NAFTA," Latin American Perspectives 33, no. 2 (Mar. 2006): 33-45.

[32]  See Mary M. Kent, Kelvin J. Pollard, John Haaga, and Mark Mather, "First Glimpses from the 2000 U.S. Census," Population Bulletin 56, no. 2 (June 2001): 14; and Jeffrey S. Passel and D'Vera Cohn, "How Many Hispanics? Comparing New Census Counts with the Latest Census Estimates," (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, March 30, 2011).

[33]  See U.S. Census Bureau, "The Hispanic Population: 2010," table 1.

[34]  See Passel and Cohn, "How Many Hispanics?"; and Pew Hispanic Center, "Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States, 2010," table 1.

[35]  See Jeffrey Passel and D`Vera Cohn, "The Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010," (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, Feb. 1, 2011).

[36]  See Richard Marosi, "New Border Foe: Boredom," Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2011: A1.

[37]  See U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, "ICE Total Removals through Feb. 20, 2012," www.ice.gov/doclib/about/offices/ero/pdf/eroremovals1.pdf, accessed June 15, 2012.

[38]   For a recent analysis of the downturn in both authorized and unauthorized migration from Mexico, see Jeffrey Passel, D'Vera Cohn and Ana González-Barrera, "Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less," (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, April 2012).

[39]  Passel and Cohn estimate that of the non-Mexican unauthorized population, 23 percent originated in Latin America, 11 percent in Asia, 4 percent in Canada and Europe, and another 3 percent, or about 400,000 persons, in Africa and elsewhere in the world. See Passel and Cohn, "The Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010," 11.

[40]  See Teresa Watanabe, "Shortage of Skilled Workers Looms in U.S.," Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2008: A1; and Ricardo López, "Jobs for Skilled Workers Are Going Unfilled," Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2012: B1.

[41]  See Steven A. Camarota and Karen Jensenius, "Jobs Americans Won't Do? A Detailed Look at Immigrant Employment by Occupation," (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, Aug. 2009), especially table 1; American Immigration Law Foundation, "Mexican Immigrant Workers and the U.S. Economy: An Increasingly Vital Role," Immigration Policy Focus 1, no. 2 (Sept. 2002): 1-14; A.T. Mosisa, "The Role of Foreign-Born Workers in the U.S. Economy," Monthly Labor Review 125, no. 5 (2002): 3-14; Diane Lindquist "Undocumented Workers Toil in Many Fields," San Diego Union-Tribune, Sept. 4, 2006: A1; and Gordon H. Hanson, "The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration," Council Special Report No. 26, (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Relations, 2007). For an insightful case-study analysis of the structural replacement of domestic workers by the foreign-born in one key industry, see William Kandel and Emilio A. Parrado, "Restructuring the U.S. Meat Processing Industry and New Hispanic Migrant Destinations," Population and Development Review 31, no. 3 (Sept. 2005): 447-71.

[42]  See James DeFilippis, "On the Character and Organization of Unregulated Work in the Cities of the United States," Urban Geography 30, no. 1 (2009): 63-90.

[43]  See M. Tossi, "A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor Force, 1950-2050," Monthly Labor Review 125, no. 5 (2002): 15-28.

[44]  See Pew Hispanic Center, "Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States," table 9.

[45]  See J. Esbenshade and B. Obzurt, "Local Immigration Regulation: A Problematic Trend in Public Policy," Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy 20 (2008): 33-47; Kyle E. Walker and Helga Leitner, "The Variegated Landscape of Local Immigration Policies in the United States," Urban Geography 32, no. 2 (2011): 156-78; Monica W. Varsanyi, "Neoliberalism and Nativism: Local Anti-Immigrant Policy Activism and an Emerging Politics of Scale," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 2 (March 2011): 295-311; and Richard Fausset, "Alabama Enacts Strict Immigration Law," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2011: A8.

The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the U.S. Government.

Part of a series of articles titled American Latino/a Heritage Theme Study .

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Latinos’ Views on the Migrant Situation at the U.S.-Mexico Border

U.s. hispanics are less likely than other americans to say increasing deportations or a larger wall along the border will help the situation, table of contents.

• Hispanics’ views of proposed changes to U.S. immigration policies
• Hispanics’ views on why so many migrants try to enter the U.S. from Mexico
• How closely do Latinos follow news about the migrant situation at the border?
• Hispanics are split on whether U.S. crime levels are affected by the border situation
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology
• Appendix: Hispanic registered voters supplemental tables

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand U.S. Latinos’ views of the migrant situation at the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration policies in the United States.

For this analysis, we surveyed 5,140 U.S. adults, including 879 Hispanics, from Jan. 16 to 21, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . Here are the questions used for the report and its methodology .

The terms Hispanic and Latino are used interchangeably in this report.

The term U.S. born refers to people who are U.S. citizens at birth, including people born in the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories.

The term foreign born refers to persons born outside of the United States. The terms foreign born and immigrant are used interchangeably in this report.

Democrats and Democratic leaners are respondents who identify politically with the Democratic Party or who identify politically as independent or with some other party but lean toward the Democratic Party. Republicans and Republican leaners are respondents who identify politically with the Republican Party or who identify politically as independent or with some other party but lean toward the Republican Party. (In later uses, the terms Democrat and Republican are inclusive of those who lean to each party.)

Respondents were asked a question about their voter registration status. In this report, respondents are considered a registered voter if they self-report being absolutely certain they are registered at their current address. Respondents are considered not registered to vote if they report not being registered or express uncertainty about their registration.

A majority of U.S. Hispanics (75%) describe the recent increase in the number of migrants seeking to enter the United States at its border with Mexico as a major problem or a crisis. A majority (74%) are also critical of the way the U.S. government is handling the situation at the southern border.

But Hispanics are less likely than non-Hispanics to describe the migrant situation at the border as a crisis or to say it is leading to more crime. Both groups also disagree on the possible effects of several policy proposals on the migrant border situation.

Yet Latinos are just as likely as other Americans to follow the news about the migrant situation at the border, according to a survey of U.S. adults conducted Jan. 16-21 by Pew Research Center.

For more on the general public’s views about immigration, read “ How Americans View the Situation at the U.S.-Mexico Border .”

In December 2023, the number of encounters with migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico reached its highest monthly total on record , according to government statistics . This peak is part of a broader growth in migrant encounters at the border in recent years.

Historically, a vast majority of these encounters have involved people migrating from countries in Latin America. But more recently, migrants from all over the world, including Russia, India and China , have made up a growing share of those crossing the border.

The survey also found that 51% of Hispanics say dealing with immigration should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year, though other areas like strengthening the economy (75%), improving the education system (66%) and improving the jobs situation (65%) are higher up on their list.

Many Latinos see potential benefits in some of the policy proposals put forward to address the migrant situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, for many proposals asked about in the survey, just a third or fewer view them as helpful to the situation.

• A majority of Latinos (65%) say increasing the number of immigration judges and staff so that asylum applications can be decided more quickly would make the migrant situation better. Only 8% say it would make the situation worse.

• Latinos are split on whether making it harder for asylum seekers to be granted temporary legal status in the U.S. while they wait for their asylum hearing will make the situation better (29%) or make it worse (27%).

When it comes to making it easier for asylum seekers to work legally while they wait for a decision about their asylum applications, Hispanics (57%) are more likely than other Americans (44%) to say it would improve the border situation. This is the only policy proposal in the survey that Latinos view more favorably than other U.S. adults do.

On the other hand, Latinos are less likely than other Americans to see the benefits of increasing deportations of people who are in the country illegally, punishing businesses more severely if they hire people who are not legally allowed to work in the U.S., or expanding the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

• 33% of Hispanics say increasing deportations of people who are in the country illegally would help the border situation, compared with 55% among other U.S. adults.
• 28% of Latinos say placing more severe penalties on businesses if they hire people who are not legally allowed to work in the U.S. would help. About half (48%) of non-Hispanics share the view.
• 26% of Hispanics say substantially expanding the wall along the border with Mexico would help the situation, while 45% of non-Hispanics say the same.

Majorities of Latinos cite multiple reasons for why a large number of migrants are seeking to enter the country at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Large majorities of Latinos view bad economic conditions in migrants’ home countries (77%) and good economic opportunities in the U.S . (75%) as major reasons why many migrants are seeking to enter the U.S. at the border.

About two-thirds of Hispanics say violence in migrants’ home countries (68%) is a major reason for the border situation.

Fewer Latinos view migrants’ belief that U.S. policies allow for them to easily stay once they arrive as a major reason, though about half (55%) hold this view. Meanwhile, 44% say migrants’ belief in greater political freedoms in the U.S. is a major reason so many migrants are coming to the U.S. today.

Notably, Hispanic and non-Hispanic adults share similar views across the five migration factors asked about in the survey.   

Partisanship and views of immigration policies

Among Latinos, Democrats and Democratic leaners are just as likely as Republicans and Republican leaners to cite economic conditions in the U.S. and in migrants’ home countries as major reasons for the migrant situation at the border.

However, among all U.S. adults , Democrats are more likely than Republicans to cite good economic opportunities in the U.S. and bad economic conditions in migrants’ home countries as major reasons for the border situation.

Among Hispanics, partisan differences emerge when it comes to other factors:

• 74% of Hispanic Democrats say violence in migrants’ home countries is a major reason for the migrant border situation, compared with 50% of Hispanic Republicans who cite it as a major reason.
• 67% of Hispanic Republicans say migrants believing that U.S. immigration policies will make it easy to stay in the country once they arrive is a major reason, while 44% of Hispanic Democrats say the same.

By nativity

Among Hispanics, majorities of immigrant and U.S.-born adults view bad economic conditions in migrants’ home countries and good economic opportunities in the U.S. as major reasons for the migrant situation at the border.

Yet Latino immigrants are slightly more likely than U.S.-born Latinos to cite these economic factors as major reasons for the border situation.

• 85% of immigrants say bad economic conditions in migrants’ home countries are a major reason, compared with 74% of those who are U.S. born.
• 84% of immigrants say good economic opportunities in the U.S. are a major reason, while 71% among those who are U.S. born say the same.

Meanwhile, U.S.-born and immigrant Latinos shares similar views when it comes to violence in migrants’ home countries, migrants’ belief that U.S. policies with help them stay, and greater political freedoms in the U.S. as major reasons for why many migrants are seeking to enter the country.

About three-in-ten Hispanics (28%) say they have been following the migrant situation at the U.S. border with Mexico extremely or very closely, similar to the share saying this among non-Hispanics (30%).

Just like the U.S. general population , how much attention Latinos have been paying to the border situation differs widely by age and partisanship.

• 22% of younger Latinos (ages 18 to 49) are following the situation extremely or very closely, while 44% of Latinos 50 and older say the same.
• Immigrant Hispanics are more likely than U.S.-born Hispanics to say they follow the news about the border closely (38% vs. 22%).

By partisanship

• 46% of Latino Republicans say they are paying extremely or very close attention to the border situation, compared with 22% of Latino Democrats.

Views among U.S. Latinos are mixed on whether the current migrant situation at the border is affecting crime levels in the country, both overall and by key demographic subgroups.

• 47% of Latinos say the migrant situation at the border is leading to more crime, while 47% say it does not have an impact on crime and 6% say it is leading to less crime.
• 59% of Latinos ages 50 and older say the migrant situation at the border is leading to more crime in the U.S., while 42% of those ages 18 to 49 say this.
• 51% of Latino adults under age 50 say the migrant situation does not have much impact on crime in the country, compared with 38% among Latinos 50 and older.
• A majority of Latino Republicans (72%) say the migrant situation is leading to more crime, much higher than the share among Latino Democrats (33%).
• On the other hand, six-in-ten Latino Democrats say the increase in migrants at the border is having little impact on crime levels in the country. Just 22% of Latino Republicans say the same.  

Among non-Hispanics

• A majority of non-Hispanic adults (59%) say the migrant situation is leading to more crime, while 37% say there is little relationship between the migrant situation at the border and crime levels in the U.S.

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How Mexicans and Americans view each other and their governments’ handling of the border

U.s. christians more likely than ‘nones’ to say situation at the border is a crisis, how americans view the situation at the u.s.-mexico border, its causes and consequences, migrant encounters at the u.s.-mexico border hit a record high at the end of 2023, americans remain critical of government’s handling of situation at u.s.-mexico border, most popular, report materials.

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History Resources

The Hispanic Legacy in American History Winter 2019

Past Issues

70 | World War II: Portraits of Service | Spring 2024

69 | The Reception and Impact of the Declaration of Independence, 1776-1826 | Winter 2023

68 | The Role of Spain in the American Revolution | Fall 2023

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era | Summer 2023

66 | Hispanic Heroes in American History | Spring 2023

65 | Asian American Immigration and US Policy | Winter 2022

64 | New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers | Fall 2022

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America | Summer 2022

62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds | Spring 2022

61 | The Declaration of Independence and the Origins of Self-Determination in the Modern World | Fall 2021

60 | Black Lives in the Founding Era | Summer 2021

59 | American Indians in Leadership | Winter 2021

58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters | Fall 2020

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography | Summer 2020

56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond | Spring 2020

55 | Examining Reconstruction | Fall 2019

54 | African American Women in Leadership | Summer 2019

53 | The Hispanic Legacy in American History | Winter 2019

52 | The History of US Immigration Laws | Fall 2018

51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights | Summer 2018

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Hispanics in the United States: Origins and Destinies

By rubén g. rumbaut.

Hispanics are at once a new and an old population, made up both of recently arrived newcomers and of old timers with deeper roots in American soil than any other ethnic groups except for the indigenous peoples of the continent. They comprise a population that can claim both a history and a territory in what is now the United States that precede the establishment of the nation. At the same time, it is a population that has emerged seemingly suddenly, its growth driven by immigration from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America—above all from Mexico—and by high rates of natural increase. Today, a third of the Hispanic population is foreign-born, and another third consists of a growing second generation of US-born children of immigrants. And the label itself—“Hispanic”—is new, an instance of a pan-ethnic category that was created by official edict in the 1970s. The ethnic groups subsumed under this label were not “Hispanics” or “Latinos” in their countries of origin; rather, they only became so in the United States.

But the Spanish roots of the United States antedate by a century the creation of an English colony in North America and have left an indelible if ignored Spanish imprint, especially across the southern rim of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In US popular culture and in official narrative and ritual the American past has been portrayed as the story of the expansion of English America, suppressing if not silencing the Hispanic presence from the nation’s collective memory. But past is prologue, and no understanding of the Hispanic peoples in the United States today or of the category under which they are now grouped can ignore the historical and geographic contexts of their incorporation.

Thousands of place names, from Sacramento to Cape Cañaveral—including the states California, Colorado, Florida, Montaña, and Nevada, and the island of Puerto Rico—testify to these Spanish antecedents. Coast to coast, there are regions of the country in which every town and village bears a Spanish name, and in them can be found the first missions, ranches, schools, churches, presidios, theaters, public buildings, and cities in US history. Spanish St. Augustine in Florida, founded in 1565, is the oldest city in the United States; San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been used for Catholic worship since 1610. The New Mexico missions, one for every pueblo, were flourishing by 1630. San Antonio was founded in 1718, with a mission that would play a key role in Texan and American history more than a century later: El Alamo. San Diego, California, was founded in 1769, with the first in a chain of twenty-one missions extending to San Francisco, founded in 1776.

In the United States, the collective memory of these silent antecedents remains clouded by remnants of prejudices and stereotypes whose roots go to colonial rivalries in the sixteenth century between Spanish America and English America, and especially to anti-Spanish propaganda in Protestant Europe and America that built into the Leyenda Negra (black legend), now centuries old, whose original intent was to denigrate Catholic Spanish culture throughout the world and to portray Spaniards as a uniquely cruel and depraved race. That legend was kept alive whenever conflict arose between English- and Spanish-speaking societies in America in the 1800s, especially during the Texas Revolt (1836), the US-Mexican War (1846−1848), and the Spanish American War (1898). Two war-time slogans—“Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember the Maine!”—and the first five words of the oldest song of the US armed forces (the Marine Corps hymn), “From the Halls of Montezuma”—may be the most vivid remnants of these transformational wars in American memory. The Mexican War (largely forgotten in the United States but remembered in Mexico as “ la invasión norteamericana ”) was the United States’ first foreign war and transformed the nation into a continental power; the treaty that ended it, along with the annexation of Texas which preceded it, expanded the territory of the United States by a million square miles, while severing nearly half of Mexico’s. Five decades later, the Spanish American War gave the United States possession of Spain’s last remaining colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and transformed it into a global power.

The peoples of the conquered territories were absorbed into the expanding boundaries of the nation as second-class citizens. This was the case above all in the American (formerly the Mexican) Southwest: for a full century after the 1840s, Mexican Americans were subjected to laws, norms, and practices similar to the Jim Crow apartheid system that discriminated against blacks after the Civil War—injustices, most deeply rooted in Texas, that caused Mexicanos in the Southwest to see themselves as foreigners in a foreign land.

The countries of the Caribbean Basin, and among them particularly Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, have felt most strongly the weight, and the lure, of the US hegemonic presence. They include countries that, since the days of Benjamin Franklin (who already in 1761 suggested Mexico and Cuba as goals of American expansion) and Thomas Jefferson (who spoke Spanish fluently), were viewed as belonging as if by some “laws of political gravitation” (the phrase is John Quincy Adams’s in 1823) to the “manifest destiny” of the United States, in a Caribbean long viewed as “the American Mediterranean” (the term is Alexander Hamilton’s, writing in The Federalist in 1787). And they include countries whose ties with the US are more recent, but which have emerged as major sources of Latin American immigration since the 1980s—notably the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Colombia. Not surprisingly, given historical patterns of economic, political, military and cultural influence established over the decades, it is precisely these countries whose people have most visibly emerged as a significant component of American society.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chipman, Donald E. Spanish Texas, 1519−1821 . Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World . New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Gibson, Carrie. El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America . New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2019.

Jiménez, Alfredo, ed. Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: History. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994.

Johannsen, Robert W. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836−1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.

Pitt, Leonard. The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846−1890 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Rumbaut, Rubén G. “The Making of a People,” in Marta Tienda and Faith Mitchell, eds., Hispanics and the Future of America , pp. 16−65. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2006.

Weber, David J., ed. Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973.

Weber, David J.  The Spanish Frontier in North America . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Rubén G. Rumbaut is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Among his publications are Immigrant America: A Portrait (University of California Press, 4th ed., 2014), and Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (University of California Press, 2001), which won the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award for best book in the immigration field. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Immigration Stories

There is no single Latino immigration story

While many Latina and Latino immigrants arrive in the United States seeking work and opportunity, their reasons for immigrating—and methods of arriving—vary. Some immigrants are fleeing war and violence; others are motivated by economic hardships. Many decide to immigrate to access education and a better quality of life for future generations. Historically, U.S. immigration policies, wars, economic conditions, and political shifts have shaped patterns of immigration. Thus, Latino immigration stories will continue to evolve, and Latina and Latino immigrants of diverse nationalities will keep shaping U.S. history.

Click on the button below to learn more about the Immigration Stories exhibit case in ¡Presente!

Immigration Stories Exhibit Case

My grandparents, Abundio Delgado Sanchez and Concepción Nieves Sanchez left the city of Silao Guanajuato, Mexico in late 1906 due to... the dangerous political climate under the regime of Porfirio Diaz... The family arrived in Ciudad Juarez, and crossed the border into El Paso, Texas on June 24, 1907, on the EPE (El Paso Electric Railway). They paid three cents for the privilege of entering the United States.  

Anna Bermudez, Granddaughter of Abundio Delgado Sanchez and Concepción Nieves Sanchez 

Gustavo Torres's Immigration Story

Stories from the past.

Latinas and Latinos have been immigrating to the United States for centuries! Explore these two immigration stories.

Not all immigration journeys happen by choice. Some Latinos and Latinas, like award-winning Uruguayan printmaker Naúl Ojeda, were forced to leave their countries.  In the 1970s, amid growing political turmoil in Uruguay, Ojeda began his life in exile. He lived in several countries before settling in Washington, D.C. Ojeda described the creation of his distinctive woodblock prints as a "dialogue” between himself and the wood. 

S. Anesta Samuel grew up in the Panama Canal Zone. Her father moved from Montserrat to work on the canal. The U.S.-controlled Canal Zone was racially segregated, and Black Caribbean workers were paid lower wages. As a teenager, Samuel rejected this system and opened her own beauty salon. In 1950, she immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. There, she founded a scholarship organization for Panamanian students, called Las Servidoras (later renamed The Dedicators ). 

Immigrating from Cuba

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Latin American Immigration to the United States

Marta tienda.

Princeton University

Susana Sanchez

Pennsylvania State University

Introduction

Both the size and composition of the U.S. foreign-born population have grown since 1960, rising from 9.7 million to nearly 40 million in 2010. Latin Americans were a major driver of this trend, as their numbers soared from less than one million in 1960 to nearly 19 million in 2010. 1 The source countries also became more diverse, especially after 1970, when flows from Central America, Cuba, and Dominican Republic surged. These census-based stock measures, which combine recent and prior immigration as well as temporary and unauthorized residents, reveal little about the pathways to U.S. residence, the ebb and flow of migrants from specific countries, or the forces that produce and sustain the flows.

In this essay we provide an overview of immigration from Latin America since 1960, focusing on changes in both the size and composition of the major flows as well as the entry pathways to lawful permanent residence in the United States, with due attention to policy shifts. We argue that current migration streams have deep historical roots and that are related both to changes in U.S. immigration policy and to unequal and inconsistent enforcement of laws on the books, with myriad unintended consequences for sending and receiving communities. The concluding section reflects on the implications of Latin American immigration for the future of the nation, highlighting the growing importance of the children of immigrants for the future labor needs of an aging nation and worrisome signs about the thwarted integration prospects of recent and future immigrants in localities where anti-immigrant hostility is on the rise.

Historical Prelude and Policy Framework

Nearly a century before the English founded Jamestown (1607), Spanish settlements peppered the Americas. Even as they forged indelible Hispanic imprints in large swaths of the American Southwest, Spanish settlers Hispanicized the South American continent, later joined by the Portuguese, in an “Iberian enterprise” that R. D. Rumbaut describes as “one of the greatest and deepest convulsions in history… [an] epochal movement … that poured the occidental nations of Europe over … the New World.” 2 As such, Spain began the first wave of migration to what became the United States of America, and also populated one of its future sources of immigrants.

The longstanding power struggle between Spain and England, which carried over to the Americas, is also relevant for understanding Latin American immigration to the United States. Although most Spanish colonies had achieved independence by the middle of the 19 th century, the newly independent republics were weak politically and militarily, and vulnerable to external aggression. Given its proximity, Mexico proved an easy target for the expansionist aspirations of United States. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) combined with the Gadsden Purchase, the United States acquired almost half of Mexico’s land. The significance of the annexation for contemporary immigration from Mexico cannot be overstated. Not only were social ties impervious to the newly drawn political boundary, but economic ties also were deepened as Mexican workers were recruited to satisfy chronic and temporary labor shortages during the 19 th and 20 th century—an asymmetrical exchange that was facilitated by the maintenance of a porous border. The Bracero Program, a guest worker program in force between 1942 and 1964, is a poignant example of U.S. growers’ dependence on Mexican labor facilitated both by legal contracts combined with growing reliance on unauthorized labor.

Fifty years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States intervened in Cuba’s struggle for independence against the Spanish crown, which lost its last colonies in the Americas and the Pacific region. As part of the settlement, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and was ceded temporary control of Cuba. Both the U.S.-Mexico War and the Spanish American war established foundations for U.S.-bound migration. Mexico and Cuba have been top sending countries for most of the 20th century and into the 21st Century, with the Philippines ranked second since 1980. 3 Notwithstanding intermittent travel barriers imposed by the Castro regime, Cuba also has been a top source of U.S. immigrants during the last half of the 20 th century, consistently ranking among the top three Latin American source countries, and among the top ten worldwide.

The underpinnings of contemporary migration from Latin America also are rooted in policy changes designed to regulate permanent and temporary admissions, beginning with the Immigration Act of 1924. Although widely criticized for establishing a racist quota system designed to restrict migration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the 1924 Act is also relevant for contemporary Latin American immigration because it explicitly exempted from the quotas the independent countries Central and South America, including Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Both countries currently are major sources of undocumented migration; however, the circumstances fostering each of these undocumented streams differ.

Table 1 summarizes key legislation that influences Latin American immigration today, beginning with the most recent comprehensive immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA). Although INA retained the quota system limiting immigration from Eastern Europe and that virtually precluded that from Asia and Africa, the legislation established the first preference system specifying skill criteria and imposed a worldwide ceiling. But in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the 1965 Amendments to INA dismantled the overtly racist quota system. Two aspects of the new visa preference system are key for understanding contemporary Latin American immigration, namely, the priority accorded to family unification relative to labor qualifications and the exemption of spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens from the country caps, which in effect favored groups exempted by the 1924 Act. This included Mexican Americans whose ancestors became citizens by treaty and the relatives of braceros who had settled throughout the Southwest during the heyday of the guest worker program, but over time came to include the relatives of newcomers who sponsored their relatives after naturalization. The simultaneous termination of the Bracero program coupled with the extension of uniform country quotas for the Western hemisphere after in 1978 was particularly consequential for Mexico, with the predictable consequence that unauthorized migration climbed.

Sources: Fix and Passel 1994, Jasso and Rosenzweig 1990, Wasem 2009, 2011 and U.S. DHS website.

When an exodus from Cuba began in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, the United States had not established a comprehensive refugee policy. Although not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention or Protocol and despite a highly unbalanced economic and political relationship with the United States, Cuba has influenced the development and execution of U.S. refugee policy in myriad ways. That Cuban émigrés instantiate the ideological war between the United States and Castro’s socialist regime not only forced the U.S. government to define its refugee policy, but also began a period of exceptions to official guidelines. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) allows Cuban exiles to apply for permanent residence after residing in the United States for only one year. Unlike Haitians, Dominicans, or other Latin Americans, very few Cubans are repatriated if they land on U.S. soil, even if they enter through land borders. 4

Cubans seeking asylum in the United States are the main Latin American beneficiaries of the 1980 Refugee Act, and they have enjoyed preferential admissions and generous resettlement assistance both before and since the 1980 Act. 5 In response to a third major Cuban exodus during the mid-1990s, the U.S. government negotiated the Cuban Migration Agreement (CMA), which revised the CAA by establishing what became known as the “wet foot/dry foot” policy. By agreement, Cubans apprehended at sea (i.e., with “wet feet”) would be returned to Cuba (or a third country in cases of legitimate fears of persecution); those who successfully avoided the U.S. Coast Guard and landed on U.S. shores (i.e., with “dry feet”) would be allowed to remain and, in accordance with the provisions of the 1966 CAA, qualify for expedited legal permanent residence. 6

A third major amendment to the INA, the 1986 Immigration Control and reform Act (IRCA), in principle mark a shift in the focus of U.S. immigration policy toward a growing emphasis on enforcement. IRCA granted legal status to approximately 2.7 million persons residing unlawfully in the United States, including the special agricultural workers who only were required to prove part year residence. Over 85 percent of the legalized population originated in Latin America, with about 70 percent from Mexico alone. 7 Rapid growth of unauthorized immigration post-IRCA also intensified enforcement efforts. The 1996 Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which intensified fortification of the border, expanded criteria for deportation, and made a half-hearted effort to strengthen interior enforcement through the employment verification pilot programs. More than a decade after IRCA Congress approved another legalization program, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), which conferred legal permanent resident status to registered asylees (and their dependents) from Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala and nationals of former Soviet bloc countries(and their dependents) who had resided in the United States for at least five consecutive years before December 1, 1995. According to Donald Kerwin, less than 70,000 asylees were legalized under NACARA through 2009, but in typical fashion a series of patch quilt solutions for specific groups have been enacted since IRCA. 8

Finally, as part of its humanitarian goals, Congress also enacted legislation offering Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Central Americans displaced by civil wars or natural disasters. TPS status is time limited; does not offer a pathway to permanent resident status; and requires acts of Congress for extensions. 9 Once the period of protection expires, its beneficiaries are expected to return to their origin country. Among those displaced by civil conflict, some claim political asylum while others lapse into unauthorized status along with thousands denied asylum.

Collectively, the legislation summarized in Table 1 represents the major pathways to attain LPR status, namely family unification, employer sponsorship, and humanitarian protections. Family reunification gives preference to prospective migrants from countries with longer immigration traditions, like Mexico, because they are more likely to have citizen relatives in the United States who can serve as sponsors, but over time this pathway has become more prominent as earlier arrivals naturalize in order to sponsor their relatives. With the exception of Argentinians during the 1960s and Colombians during the early 1970s, relatively few Latin American immigrants receive LPR status through employment preferences. Rather, the majority of Latin Americans recruited for employment enter as temporary workers or through clandestine channels. Neither unauthorized entry or temporary protected status provides a direct pathway to LPR status, but both statuses can evolve into indirect pathways via comprehensive (e.g., IRCA) or targeted (e.g., NACARA) amnesty programs. In what follows we use the three pathways to illustrate how each differs for specific countries, and to identify the economic and political forces undergirding changes over time.

Recent Trends in Latin American Immigration

Figure 1 uses data from the decennial census to portray changes in the U.S. Latin American-born population from 1960 to 2010 by region of origin. The graphic representation reveals the regional origin diversification that accompanied the 12-fold increase in the Latin American-born population since 1970. Despite the continuing Mexican dominance among Latin American-born U.S. residents, flow diversification resulted in a more balanced sub-regional profile in 2010 compared with prior decades. The Caribbean share of Latin American immigrants peaked at 31 percent in 1970 but fell to 20 percent in 1980 and has remained at 10 percent since 2000. Over the last 50 years the Central American share of all Latin American immigrants rose from about six percent in 1960 to about 15-16 percent since 1990, when about 12 percent of Latin American immigrants originated from South America.

“Caribbean” includes Cuba and the Dominican Republic; “Central America” includes Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama; and “South America” includes Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Source: Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850–2000,” Population Division Working Paper No. 81 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2006); and American Community Survey, One-Year Estimates for 2010.

Table 2 reports the major source countries that drove the changes reported in Figure 1 . Only countries comprising at least two percent of the decade total Latin American-born population are separately reported, which qualifies a maximum of six countries after 1970 but only three in 1960. Not surprisingly, Mexicans remain the dominant group throughout the period, but owing to large swings in immigrant flows from the Caribbean and Central America, the Mexican share fluctuated from a high of 73 percent in 1960 to a low of 48 percent in 1970. Cubans were the second largest group among the Latin American-born population through 2000, but their share varied from a high of 27 percent in 1970 to less than 6 percent in 2010, when Salvadorans edged our Cubans for second place.

(in percentages)

Source: Gibson and Jung, 2006, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850-2000, and 2010 ACS 1-Year Estimates

The decade-specific profile of main source countries also reveals the ascendance of Colombians and Dominicans during the 1960s and 1970s, with Central Americans following during the 1980s. Although Argentina ranked among the top source countries during the 1960s and 1970s, when the United States benefitted from the exodus of its highly skilled professionals, the “brain drain” was not sustained. Political repression and economic crises rekindled Argentinian emigration during the late 1970s, and early 1980s and again at the beginning of the 21 st century, but Spain, Italy and Israel are the preferred destinations. Today, unlike Colombia, Argentina is not currently a major contributor to U.S. immigration.

The stock measures reported in Table 2 and Figure 1 portray the cumulative impact of immigration, but reflect immigration trends imperfectly because they conflate three components of change: new additions; temporary residents, including the beneficiaries of protection from deportation; and unauthorized residents. Thus, the foreign-born population based on census data overstates the immigrant population, which consists of persons granted legal permanent residence (LPR) in any given period, including refugees and asylees. Therefore, to explain the ebb and flow of Latin American immigration over the last half century, we organize the remaining discussion around the three sources of immigrants: LPRs; refugees and asylees; and unauthorized migrants granted legal status.

Legal Permanent Residents

Table 3 reports the number of new LPRs from Latin America over the last five decades, with detail for the major sending countries from the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and South America. Since the 1960s, Latin Americans comprised about one-third of new LPRs, with the period share fluctuating between 31 percent during the 1970s to 41 percent during the 1990s. For each period there is high correspondence between the dominant foreign-stock population countries ( Table 2 ) and the number of new legal permanent residents admitted from those countries ( Table 3 ); therefore, we use these nations to organize our discussion of specific streams.

(in thousands)

Sources: Decades 1961-1970 and 1971-1980 from Statistical Abstract of the United States 1984. Decades 1981-1990, 1991-2000 and 2001-2010 from 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2010 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.

Mexicans comprise the largest share of legal immigrants from Latin America, typically 40 to 45 percent per cohort except for the 1980s and 1990s, when the IRCA legalization was underway. The vast majority of Mexicans granted LPR status—88 percent in fiscal year 2010 for example—are sponsored by U.S. relatives; less than 10 percent qualified under the employment preferences. 10 Mexicans comprised nearly 60 percent of all new LPRs from Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to the large number of status adjusters under IRCA. Moreover, Mexican immigration would have been higher in each decade if the family-sponsored preferences were not numerically capped. Along with Filipinos, Chinese and Indians, Mexicans are greatly oversubscribed in the family sponsored preference categories and thus thousands of Mexican family members wait for years for their visa priority date. For example, in 2010 unmarried Mexican adult children sponsored by U.S. residents had waited 18 years for to receive their entry visa. 11

Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are the major immigrant sending nations from South America. Although their initial levels of immigration differ, all three countries witnessed gradual increases during the 1970s, but thereafter their immigration flows diverged. Colombia was the largest single source of immigrants from South America throughout the period. Stimulated by prolonged political instability, armed conflict and drug violence amid sporadic economic downturns, Colombian emigration gained momentum over the latter half of the 20 th century. The early waves largely involved upper class professionals with the resources to flee, but as the internal armed conflict escalated, members of the working classes joined the exodus. 12 Legal immigration rose 60 percent between the 1970s and 1980s and nearly doubled after 2000.

Ecuadorian immigration trebled since 1961, rising from 37,000 during the 1960s to over 110,000 during the most recent decade. Demand for Panama hats produced in the provinces of Azuay and Cañar triggered the early waves of Ecuadoran immigrants during the late 1950s, but deteriorating economic conditions augmented subsequent flows from these regions, which were facilitated by dense social networks established by earlier waves. 13 The collapse of oil prices in the 1980s combined with spiraling unemployment, wage erosion and inflation rekindled emigration, which averaged 17,000 annually. Following the collapse of the banking system in the late 1990s, emigration rose from approximately 30 thousand annually between 1990 and 1997 to over 100 thousand annually thereafter. 14 However, Spain replaced the United States as a preferred destination during the 1990’s, hosting nearly half of all Ecuadorian emigrants between 1996 and 2001 compared with about 27 percent destined for the United States. 15 Hyperinflation and massive underemployment resulting from the 1987 structural adjustment measures also accelerated Peruvian outmigration during the 1990s, more than doubling the number of new Peruvian LPRs, but the Peruvian share of the Latin American-born population never reached two percent. Except for the modest dip between the 1960s and 1970s, immigration from the rest of Latin America mirrors the Peruvian trend—doubling between the 1970s and 1980s and then continuing on an upward spiral that exceeded 400,000 since 2001 ( Table 3 ).

Civil wars and political instability triggered the formidable influx of Salvadorians, Hondurans and Guatemalans to the United States. Emigration from El Salvador, the smallest but most densely populated of the Central American republics, is particularly noteworthy because of the sheer numbers that received LPR status—over 215,000 during the 1980s and an additional half million over the next two decades. That thousands of Salvadorians arrived seeking asylum largely explains why their LPR numbers exceed the annual caps for several decades. Hundreds of thousands lapsed into undocumented status when they were denied asylees status, but a large majority of Salvadorian asylees successfully adjusted to LPR status under NACARA.

Like El Salvador, Guatemala witnessed prolonged civil conflict, which escalated after 1978 and initiated a mass exodus of asylum seekers during the 1980s and 1990s. Those who arrived before 1982 qualified for status adjustment under IRCA but later arrivals did not. Although political instability is credited for the surge in Guatemalan immigration, Alvarado and Massey claim that neither violence nor economic factors predicted the likelihood of outmigration; rather, they portray Guatemalan emigration as a household decision to diversify income streams by sending young, skilled members to join U.S. relatives. Their interpretation is consistent with Hagan’s ethnographic account that chronicles how establishment of sister communities in U.S. cities enabled further migration via family unification. 16 By 2010 Guatemala became the fourth largest Latin American-born group in the United States. The increase in Guatemalan legal resident admissions since 2001 also reflects the status adjustments authorized by NACARA.

By contrast to Guatemala and El Salvador, the rise in Honduran immigration has been more gradual, except for the 1980s, when it nearly trebled compared to the prior decade. Unlike Nicaraguans, Salvadorians and Guatemalans, Hondurans could not claim asylees status. Rather, skyrocketing poverty and unemployment during the 1980s and 1990s is responsible for the surge in emigration. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch aggravated the country’s economic woes, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. An estimated 66,000 thousand Hondurans sought refuge in the United States and were granted temporary protected status (TPS), which does not confer a path to legal permanent residence. Unless renewed in 2013, Hondurans granted TPS will join the unauthorized population, which, according to the Office of Immigration Statistics, rose from 160,000 to 330,000 between 2000 and 2010. 17 Currently family sponsorship is the main pathway to legal permanent residence for Hondurans, accounting for 85 percent of the recent LPRs.

The last major LPR flow since 1960 is from the Dominican Republic, which began in the wake of the political upheaval following dictator Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, but failed economic policies fueled the flow once the political scene stabilized. Since 1961 the number of new LPRs more than trebled, exceeding 330,000 during each of the last two decades. Despite modest economic growth during the 1990s and the revival of tourism, persisting high unemployment buttressed by deep social networks has maintained a steady exodus. 18 Dominicans have been taking full advantage of the family unification provisions of the INA by sponsoring relatives; virtually all Dominicans granted LPR status in 2010 benefitted from the family sponsorship provisions of the INA. 19

Refugees and Asylees

By definition, refugee and asylees flows precipitated by political upheavals and natural disasters are unpredictable both in timing and size, but how they impact immigrant admissions also depends on the idiosyncratic application of U.S. immigration and refugee policy. Since 1960 Cubans have dominated the refugee flow from Latin America, but armed conflicts in Central America and Colombia as well as natural disasters also contributed to the growth of humanitarian admissions in recent decades. The Cuban exodus has been highly unpredictable owing to barriers imposed by the Cuban government and the level of acrimony between Havana and Washington.

Cuban emigration began shortly after Fidel Castro assumed the reigns of the island nation. By 1974, 650,000Cubans left for the United States. 20 Dubbed the Golden Exile because the vast majority of the first wave were professionals, entrepreneurs, and landowners, Cuban émigrés were granted visa waivers and parolee status, and were offered a range of services to facilitate their labor market integration, including certification of professional credentials, a college loan program, and bilingual education. 21 Partly because they were fleeing a socialist state and partly because they did not fit the UN definitions of refugees, Cubans enjoyed a privileged position among the U.S. foreign-born population formalized by the 1966 Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act (CAA).. Importantly, CAA put Cubans on a fast track to citizenship.

A second major exodus occurred in April 1980, when the Cuban government opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave, including prisoners and lunatics. About 125,000 thousand “Marielitos” arrived on U.S. shores in a few short months, and were joined by 35,000 thousand Haitians. 22 Although Marielitos did not formally qualify as refugees according to the guidelines of the newly enacted Refugee Act and were technically ineligible for federal funds, they were accorded refugee status by Congressional decree, illustrating yet again, the idiosyncratic application of U.S. immigration law. A third migration wave occurred in the mid-1990s when the Cuban government lifted the ban on departures. Rather than extend the welcome gangplank as in prior years, the U.S. government interdicted Cuban fugitives attempting to circumvent legal immigration channels and returned them to Guantanamo. Within a year, 33,000 Cubans were encamped at Guantanamo, but in yet another predictable exception to immigration law, the majority were paroled and granted LPR status. 23 Although accompanied with less media fanfare than the 1980 Mariel boatlift, the largest number of Cubans to arrive in a single decade came after 2001; since that date nearly 320,000 thousand Cubans were granted LPR status. Under the provisions of the Wet Foot/Dry Foot agreement, Cubans interdicted at sea or apprehended on land are deportable, but in practice very few are returned because they are entitled to request asylum and most do so.

Central Americans and Colombians also have used the humanitarian pathway to acquire legal permanent residence, albeit with far less success than Cubans. Salvadorian and Guatemalan asylee approval rates were less than three percent between 1983 and 1990 compared with 25 percent for Nicaraguans. 24 Alleging discrimination against Central Americans, religious organizations and immigrant rights advocates filed a class action lawsuit on their behalf, American Babtist Church v. Thurnburgh (ABC). As part of the 1991 settlement Congress allowed Central Americans denied asylum to reapply for review, and they achieved much higher success rates. However, the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) made the asylum rules even more difficult by adding provisions to resettle asylum seekers to third countries; by requiring asylees to file applications within a year arrival to the United States; by precluding appeals to denied applications; and by imposing high processing fees. After 1997 ABC class members were allowed to adjust their status through NACARA, where approval rates were over 95 percent. 25

Two major natural disasters rekindled asylees from Central America at the turn of the 21 st century, when Hurricane Mitch (1998) and a massive earthquake (2001) left over a million Salvadorans homeless. Drawn by a sizeable expatriate community in the United States, thousands of displaced Salvadorians made their way to the United States. In a humanitarian gesture, Congress granted Temporary Protected Status to Salvadorans residing in the United States as of 2001, and renewed the protection several times. As of 2010, over 300,000 Honduran (70K), Nicaraguan (3.5K), and Salvadoran (229K) citizens benefitted from temporary protected status (TPS). 26 The status protections accorded to the victims of Hurricane Mitch and the Salvadoran earthquakes are set to expire in 2013. In the current political climate, it is uncertain whether their temporary protections will be extended; if they are not, many will probably join millions of others as undocumented residents.

Unauthorized migration

The growth of undocumented immigration since 1960 is not only a distinctive feature of the current wave of mass migration, but also a direct consequence of selective enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. As of March 2010 an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants resided in the United States, down from a peak of nearly 12 million in 2007, but 29 percent higher than the 2000 estimate of 8.5 million. 27 Latin Americans make up over three-fourths of undocumented residents, with 60 percent from Mexico alone. The collapse of the housing and construction industries during Great Recession fostered the first significant decline in the size of the undocumented population, reversing two decades of continuous growth. Removals from Latin America since 2001 more than quadrupled relative to the prior decade, which partly explains the shrinking unauthorized population, albeit less than changes in labor demand.

Several factors have fueled the growth of unauthorized migration from Latin America, beginning with the abrupt termination of the Bracero program in 1964, following a 22-year period during which U.S. growers became dependent on pliable Mexican labor. In some ways the 1965 Amendments constructed an illegal immigration system by default because the disproportionate focus on family visas gave short shrift to labor needs; because the Texas Proviso protected employers who willfully hired undocumented workers until IRCA imposed employer sanctions; and because the cap on family visas (except for immediate family members of U.S. citizens) produced long wait lists for countries with long immigration traditions. Furthermore, the integration of separate hemispheric ceilings into a single worldwide total in 1978 dramatically curtailed the number of visas available to Mexico, the largest single sending nation. As occurred when the Bracero program ended, unauthorized entry provided an alternative pathway to the United States, one greatly facilitated by the existence of strong social networks that were fortified over decades of relatively unrestricted migration.

Finally, decades of lax and inconsistent enforcement enabled millions of persons to enter without inspection, while shoddy monitoring of temporary visitors permitted hundreds of thousands of legal entrants to overstay their visa. Since 1986, however, U.S. immigration policy has been dominated by a growing emphasis on border enforcement, with heightened penalties for persons who enter without authorization as well as for nonimmigrants who remain in the country after their visas expire. Because IRCA’s employer sanctions provisions were never seriously enforced, unauthorized immigration rose during the 1990s, when the housing and construction industries—both dominated by unskilled workers—expanded. Weak interior enforcement basically left in place the lynchpin of unauthorized migration, namely employers’ ability to hire unauthorized foreign workers essentially without reprisal.

Even as IRCA’s comprehensive amnesty program was winding down, unauthorized migration was on the rise. In fact, during the 1990s, between 70 and 80 percent of all new migrants from Mexico were undocumented, and this share rose to 85 percent between 2000 and 2004. 28 In a feeble attempt to reduce employment of unauthorized workers, the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Responsibility and Illegal Immigration Act (IIRIRA) authorized three pilot programs to verify employment eligibility, but protected employers from fines for declared good faith efforts to comply with verification requirements. Not surprisingly, IIRIRA did little to restrict the unauthorized flow from Latin America because interior enforcement remained weak; because the social networks sustaining the flows were already very deeply entrenched; and because the people smuggling networks and fraudulent document industries developed new avenues to circumvent the laws.

Future Challenges and Uncertainties

Migration is part of a multiphasic demographic response to unequally distributed social and economic opportunities that is simultaneously determined by micro and macro-level forces, many of which can not be predicted, such as sudden flows triggered by civil wars or natural disasters, or rigorously managed through policy measures, as demonstrated by the failure to seal the U.S.-Mexico border. Like most nations with long immigration traditions, the United States strives to balance economic, social and humanitarian goals through its admission preferences while also ensuring compliance with the laws. But an appraisal of Latin American immigration exposes numerous instances where extant laws have been systematically disregarded or applied in a capricious or discriminatory manner. Striking examples include the preferential treatment accorded to Cuban émigrés compared with Haitians who arrive on U.S. shores in similar situations; the explicit protection of employers who hire unauthorized workers by not holding them accountable for violating the law; and differential treatment of asylum applicants according to national origin. Fairness is not a defining feature of U.S. immigration policy toward Latin Americans.

Historically and now, Latin American immigration has afforded the United States myriad economic benefits, including lower prices for goods produced in industries that employ immigrant workers, increased demand for U.S. products, and higher wages and employment for domestic workers. That new immigrants accounted for half of the labor force growth during the 1990s added significantly to the economic prosperity enjoyed by average Americans. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that the current admission criteria that favor family unification over employment needs are well aligned with future economic needs of an aging nation. Suggestions to adjust employment visas with fluctuations in labor needs, while intuitively compelling, ignore that two-thirds of U.S. immigrants enter under family preferences and that the momentum for future flows is already baked in the system in the form of visa backlogs for Mexicans and others. Beyond immediate family relatives of U.S. citizens, however, it is worth reconsidering the social and economic value of maintaining the extended family preferences, which have become a key driver of Dominican and Salvadorian immigration in recent years.

Notwithstanding the visa backlogs for family sponsored relatives of Mexicans, there is some evidence that net migration from Mexico has slowed and may have even reversed. 29 Bleak job prospects following the Great Recession are a key reason for the slowdown, but record high deportations under the Obama administration, a militarized border, and stepped up interior enforcement are contributing factors. Whether this slowdown in Mexican migration is a temporary blip or the beginning of a long-term reversal is yet unclear, and likely will depend both on the future pace of the U.S. recovery from the recession as well as the success of the Mexican government sustaining economic growth and dealing with its plague of drug-related violence. Lower fertility throughout Latin America also portends less surplus labor in the years to come.

Equally uncertain are the integration prospects of Latin American immigrants and their offspring, which is the looming issue for the future of the nation. The rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in response to an unprecedented geographic dispersal of Latin American immigrants highlights the formidable integration challenges facing the nation, which can thwart economic prospects in the years ahead while also fomenting ethnic conflict. Several worrisome trends warrant consideration. The recent Supreme Court decision upholding the states rights to empower local police to check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the country illegally bodes ill for the integration of Latin American immigrants, particularly those with indigenous roots who pose ready targets for racial profiling.

Another concern is the persisting achievement gap between the offspring of Latin American immigrants and their American-born counterparts. That births outpaced immigration as a component of Hispanic population growth after 2000 underscores the urgency of closing the education gap so that the children of Latin American immigrants can become productive replacement workers for the aging white majority. Recent trends are not encouraging, however. State and local governments have gouged education budgets in the interest of fiscal restraint, which not only reduces educational investments in future workers—large majorities of them children of immigrants—but also compromises the nation’s competitive advantages over the medium and long term.

Finally, the unresolved status of 11 million unauthorized immigrants, of which three-quarters are from Latin America—remains a thorny social, political, and moral issue. Legal status profoundly affects prospects for economic and social mobility. Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark estimated wage penalties for unauthorized status at 14 to 24 percent, and the benefit of legalization at six percent. 30 This represents a formidable economic stimulus that can generate substantial multiplier effects via consumption. Our review of Latin American immigration reveals that thousands have benefitted from status adjustments through several group-specific Congressional acts. In the interest of transparency and uniformity in the application of immigration laws, a blanket amnesty will advance U.S. economic interests while advancing social cohesion. Another blanket amnesty will go a long way toward aligning our liberal democracy with the realities of Latin American immigration.

Contributor Information

Marta Tienda, Princeton University.

Susana Sanchez, Pennsylvania State University.

The University of Arizona Press

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