Skills of the "Unskilled": Work and Mobility among Mexican Migrants by Jacqueline Hagan, Ruben Hernandez-Leon, and Jean-Luc Demonsant (review)

This is an important book that is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the interconnection between international migration, social mobility, and work skills. It addresses the common assumption that migrants with little education are uniformly unskilled and unable, or not given the opportunity, to acquire skills during the course of migratory movements. It asks four main research questions (8): What is the total human capital of migrants who have little education, and how can we identify it? What is the context in which migrants obtain these skills? To what extent are the skills sets gendered? and Which skills can be more easily transferred between sending and receiving places? The authors' basic argument is that migration is more than just yielding higher income; it "is also a social process through which migrants learn and develop valuable but often hard-to-measure skills and transfer them across regional and international labor markets" (8). Drawing upon Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge, the authors develop a classification of skills that will be very useful for researchers wanting to go beyond such broad occupational categories as "unskilled" or "semi-skilled."

The five-year study upon which this book is based used a very sophisticated mixed-methods approach that started out with exploratory fieldwork in North Carolina examining the various skills and their acquisitions of 50 Mexican immigrants working in construction during 2007–2009. The next step involved fieldwork in 2009 with 79 return migrants, both males and females, in the various communities in Guanajuato. The final stage of data collection was a representative survey of 200 return migrants in the town of Leon (located in the state of Guanajuato). The authors chose Leon because it provided the urban context for opportunities to acquire some skills prior to migration to the United States. About 80 percent of the return migrants are men; this percentage is typical for the sex ratio of Mexican return migration, since women tend to stay in the United States longer than men.

The book shows how the development of skills starts in late childhood and early adolescence and is a mix of formal education and skills learned in home-based and family-owned businesses. This skill foundation is the start of a lifelong acquisition of new skills and re-skilling in both places of origin and those of destination. Mexican migrants in the United States, in most cases, clearly use the skills that they learned in Mexico and apply them to the new work environment. Similarly, upon returning home, migrants are often able to transfer skills acquired in the United States for work in Mexico, or at least some modification of them. The skills transfer to the United States and back to Mexico is clearly gendered: women are more able to transfer English language and social skills than are men, whereas men are more likely to transfer on-job and off-job technical skills back and forth. About half of all male return migrants were able to transfer overall skills to the United States and back to Mexico. While only 26 percent of female migrants could transfer overall skills from Mexico to the United States, when they returned to Mexico, more than half of the female migrants were able to transfer their skills acquired in the United States. And in terms of social mobility, the mean skill level of return migrants in Mexico was slightly above their skill level prior to migration to the United States; this finding holds for both men and women. Another important result indicates that 70 percent of Mexican migrants in the United States held only 1–2 jobs, indicating a substantial degree of job stability (although some of it might also be due to the lack of wider job opportunities).

Two of the main conclusions drawn by the authors are as follows: first, rather than talking about...