Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation

11. Migration Policy and the Asymmetry of Power: The Mexican Case, 1900-2000

11 migration policy and the asymmetry of power: the mexican case, 1900–2000 Jorge Durand Translated from the French by Amy Jacobs Mexico is a country of emigrants that does not fully recognize itself as such. The low national awareness of this reality has been due essentially to two factors: the proximity of the receiving country and the fact that emigration is unidirectional. Eighty-eight percent of Mexican emigrants are bound for a single destination—the United States—and nearly 80 percent of them are concentrated in states that were once part of Mexican territory: California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and New Mexico. Most Mexicans who leave do not break definitively with their country, in contrast to emigrants from other countries; the option of return is always there. Mexican emigrants may well go back for the holidays, to bury a relative , to keep an eye on ongoing personal business, or even to attend a soccer match. Mexicans have been leaving Mexico in great numbers since the late nineteenth century; emigration is thus both a massive and historically deep phenomenon for this country. In 1926, the anthropologist Manuel Gamio noted an emigrant population numbering close to a million (917,000). The 2000 U.S. census reported 9.3 million Mexican-born immigrants.1 The migration question is a permanent, fundamental issue in national and bilateral policy. But while over the twentieth century there were both changes and continuities in political discourse on emigration, the Mexican position has always been informed by a fundamental, immutable principle: the constitutional right to freedom of movement. Despite rare exceptions that confirm the rule, the Mexican authorities have never tried to prevent their compatriots from leaving. Nonetheless, official assessments and arguments with regard to emigration changed several times in the course of the twentieth century, and with them Mexican policy, which I shall review before examining Mexico’s current position in greater detail. the “disease” of emigration (1910–40) At the dawn of the twentieth century, Mexican emigration to the United States was already a mass phenomenon. The railway line between the two countries, inaugurated in 1884, undoubtedly enabled the supply of Mexican manual labor to meet rising demand from U.S. employers. The Mexican authorities of the time did not perceive the departure of Mexicans as a desirable development.They viewed Mexico as a depopulated country with enormous natural wealth, a country that was itself in need of immigrants to exploit its resources. “There is work for all in Mexico, Mexicans and foreigners. Work abounds. What is missing is muscle and spirit, hands and brains,” affirmed the Progreso Latino in 1906.2 Emigration was also viewed negatively because emigrants were going to former Mexican territories that had been annexed by the United States. After the 1845–1848 war with the United States, Mexico developed a policy encouraging Mexicans “on the other side” to repatriate—with little success, however.3 For many early twentieth-century editorialists, the emigrants were traitors to the Mexican cause. The Catholic Church itself was of this opinion, as the then-weekly Catholic magazine La Epoca made clear: “The [emigrants’] lack of patriotism swells to enormous proportions when we realize [they] are going to work in, and thereby use their labor to develop, a nation we have always considered our enemy, always thought of as responsible for the greatest misfortunes and sorrows of our nation.”4 In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Mexican authorities opted for dissuasion and propaganda to rein in emigration. Handbills and posters distributed in villages described the dreadful living and working conditions of emigrants. The worst problem bore the name enganchadores, recruiters who paid the future emigrant worker an advance in exchange for his or her pledge to reimburse the sum in work hours. Hiring centers functioned as private businesses, and recruitment was an extremely exploitative system that left matters of hiring, moving, and paying workers, as well as the organization of workers’ camps and the assignment of workloads, entirely in the hands of private individuals. The system gave rise to child labor, private militias, extremely one-sided contracts, lifelong debt, and miserable living and working conditions. The situation worsened with the outbreak of revolution in 1910. Thoumigration policy and asymmetry of power 225 sands of people fled the dangers and desolation of war in the direction of the northern border. This was the only occasion on which the United States granted Mexicans official...