New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration

13. Assimilation in a New Geography

Chapter 13 Assimilation in a New Geography Douglas S. Massey The foregoing chapters have clearly documented the remarkable transformation of immigration to the United States that began during the 1990s and continued into the early years of the twenty-first century. During this time, immigration shifted from being a regional phenomenon affecting a handful of states and a few metropolitan areas to a national phenomenon affecting communities of all sizes throughout all fifty states. Although this geographic diversification of destinations was experienced by all immigrant groups, it was most evident among Mexicans and, to a lesser extent, other Latin Americans. Among major immigrant groups, the diversification of destination was least evident for Asians. As a result of this unprecedented geographic transformation, millions of native white and black Americans found themselves directly exposed to the Spanish language and to Latin American culture for the very first time. CAUSES OF GEOGRAPHIC DIVERSIFICATION The fact that the geographic diversification was most significant among Mexicans suggests the relevance of United States border policies to the transformation. The 1990s were characterized by the selective hardening of the border in two sectors—the Tijuana–San Diego and Juarez–El Paso border crossings in California and Texas, respectively, which earlier had been the two busiest border-crossing points, where more than 80 percent of undocumented migrants had entered the United States (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). The placement of steel walls and metal fences in these sectors was accompanied by the deployment of newly hired U.S. Border Patrol officers and newly purchased detection equipment on the American side, and together these measures raised the odds of apprehension to the 343  point where the likelihood of capture became quite high (Durand and Massey 2003). In response, migrants quite rationally sought out new crossing points that lacked such concentrations of enforcement resources, notably the desert between Sonora State and Arizona, thereby deflecting migratory flows away from historical pathways and toward new destinations outside traditional gateway cities in California, Texas, and Illinois (Orrenius 2004). Although the diversification of destinations was most pronounced among Mexicans, it was not confined to them, and its emergence among other immigrant groups, especially Latinos from Central and South America, suggests that other forces besides border enforcement were also at work in effecting the transformation. Judging from the chapters in this volume, foremost among these forces is the restructuring of manufacturing , particularly nondurables manufacturing, and food processing that occurred in the final decades of the twentieth century. Producers of apparel, meat, poultry, and other agricultural products came under intense competitive pressure during the 1990s as the economy globalized and foreign producers gained access to American markets. In order to keep plants in the United States and prevent their relocation overseas, American firms responded by consolidating ownership to achieve administrative efficiencies and economies of scale. Then, in factory after factory, the consolidated corporate owners undertook a massive deskilling of the productive process, a deunionization of the workforce, and the subcontracting of labor. These actions often required closing unionized factories with skilled workers in metropolitan areas and opening new, larger, and more efficient factories with unskilled workers in nonmetropolitan areas. In some cases, plants in smaller communities that were unionized were simply closed and reopened under a new production regime and new terms of employment; in the process the workforce in such factories shifted from predominantly native to predominantly foreign. This restructuring of production may have been taken to ensure survival in a global market and preserve American jobs, but it made the jobs that remained in this country much less attractive to native-born workers. In addition, the relocation of plants to nonmetropolitan areas may have worked to escape the areas where unions were centered, but it placed the plants in a demographic setting characterized by a declining, aging population and few young people, thereby necessitating the recruitment of workers from elsewhere. The only people really interested in moving to nonunionized plants located in small towns in out-of-the-way states were foreigners, mainly workers from poorer nations in Latin America, particularly Mexico. 344 New Faces in New Places In most cases, immigration to new destinations in the South and Midwest did not simply erupt spontaneously, but was jump-started by private recruitment efforts. Companies took out ads in Mexican newspapers and broadcast the availability of jobs on Mexican radio and then sent down subcontractors to recruit workers directly, at times under the...