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Introduction
- University of Texas Press
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Introduction Complex Causation When Claudia boarded a migrant boat to Puerto Rico she had no idea that her migration was conditioned by globalization, neoliberalism, or even chronic poverty—she just missed her husband. He had migrated a few years earlier and Claudia was motivated by love, longing, and the anxiety that another woman would replace her. The anxiety generated a sense of urgency. Claudia had no idea that her family was transnational; that her perceptions were conditioned by relative deprivation; that a culture of migration—routine boat travel, easy access to smugglers, official corruption —predisposed and facilitated her migration. All of these factors were bearing down imperceptibly as Claudia exercised her free will and acted on her love and longing. Her simple human concerns had been permeated but nevertheless remained simple and human. And she had no idea that she would become a statistic for family reunification, for the feminization of migration, and, ultimately, for migrant interdiction operations. She just missed her husband. Thousands of undocumented Dominicans attempt the crossing to Puerto Rico, a sixty- to ninety-mile journey on wooden boats known as yolas. As a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rico attracts migrants with its dollar economy and its access to the mainland without passports and visas. For some migrants Puerto Rico is the final destination ; for others it is a temporary residence before continuing to New York and other U.S. cities. 2 Undocumented Dominican Migration Individual decisions to migrate result from the dynamic interactions of structural, cultural, and personal factors that motivate or dissuade a given migrant. One migrant is more affected by some factors and another migrant by others, and many factors are never explicitly taken into account , but migration is always multiply determined by a causal composite . Structural forces predispose migration and a culture conditioned by poverty sustains it, but decisions to migrate, to stay home, and to return home are then precipitated by more immediate personal concerns. An appreciation of such concerns—aspirations, responsibility, desperation , beliefs—restores the emotive cognition that is irrelevant to most migration scholarship but critical to migrant motivation. The inclusion and integration of personal factors also avoids the causal determinism that is characteristic of structuralist arguments and the overemphasis on quantifiable data that is prevalent in social-science scholarship generally. Undocumented migration is idiosyncratic, chaotic, and poorly suited to fixed systems that purport to explain motivation structurally and statistically. Migrants are social beings whose collective individual actions are transforming the very structures that mobilize them, and they are human beings whose humanity is simplified and devalued when adapted to the rigid limitations of empiricism. The complex causation of migration does not entail the operations of macro-level factors on passive actors or the isolation of individual action from its context; it rather entails the mutual interactions and evolutions of the mentioned overlapping spheres—structural, cultural, and personal—as they negotiate a “balance of causal priority.” Frustration, ambition, vulnerability, flight, compulsion, loss, perception, values, knowledge and its interpretations , individual responses to structural pressures, and other unquantifiable factors make decisions to migrate very subjective and very human.1 The migration theory that most resembles this complex of causal factors is known as “cumulative causation,” a concept that was introduced by Gunnar Myrdal in 1957 and later developed by Douglas S. Massey. Myrdal, who was primarily concerned with circular causation as it relates to poverty, recognized that a process of social change can develop an internal, cumulative, accelerating momentum. In Massey’s development of the concept, “causation is cumulative in that each act of migration alters the social context within which subsequent migration decisions are made, typically in ways that make additional movement more likely.” International migration tends to become self-perpetuating primarily because migrant networks and a culture of migration in sending communities facilitate new departures.The cumulative expansion of net- [54.160.243.44] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:03 GMT) Introduction 3 works—each new migrant links to family, friends, and community relations , which in turn link to others—provides knowledge that modifies perceptions and resources that reduce the expense and risk of migration. Social and economic changes in sending communities themselves—the familiarity with higher standards of living abroad, the beneficial effects of remittances on neighboring families, an enhanced sense of relative deprivation—are also conducive to continued and increased migration. As Massey sees it, the decision to migrate is “increasingly disconnected from social and economic conditions in the sending community and determined more by the...