lasaforum spring 2017 : volume xlviii : issue 2

DEBATES / Latin American Transformations: 50 Years of Change

Migration in the Contemporary History of Latin America: An Overview of Recent Trends by Alejandro Portes | Princeton University and University of Miami | [email protected]

It is possible to tell much of the history of descent in Argentina and descendants American agriculture and, in time, the Latin America through the migrations that of Indian indentured workers matched largest foreign minority in the United have taken place there. It is even possible to the population of African descent in the States. More and more, this flow became say that migrations are largely responsible Guianas; meanwhile the Chinese became spontaneous and self-driven, rather than for the social makeup of the region and a visible component of the Cuban and the result of deliberate recruitment. for its economic evolution over time. Peruvian populations and the Japanese of This feat has been due not to the absolute the Brazilian. With notable exceptions, the mostly rural size of successive migration flows but to population of Latin America stayed put in their different composition, intent, and Deliberate recruitment was also the system the second half of the nineteenth century consequences. We can distinguish at least used by ranchers and growers in the newly and the first decades of the twentieth. The five types of migration into and out of the acquired U.S. states of California and Texas economic lifeblood of the region consisted region: to find Mexican labor for their expanding of the export of commodities—agricultural ventures. Over time, Mexican migration to products and metals—and the import of • Colonizing migrations the United States became a self-sustained industrial goods from Europe and, later, • Coerced migrations flow. But its origins are in these deliberate the United States. Economic production recruitment efforts in the nineteenth and centered on the countryside, and that is • Induced migrations early twentieth centuries. where most of the population remained. • Spontaneous inflows and outflows Urban life was restricted to one or two In the twentieth century, the colonizing, main cities per country. Not surprisingly, • Refugee flows coerced, and induced migrations that had most of these cities were also ports, populated the continent for three centuries channeling the flow of rural commodities Colonizing and coerced migrations gave way to a new form of migration that for export and receiving and consuming defined the colonial era after the European did not depend on any deliberate effort on most of the manufactured imports. Latin conquest of the Americas. Europeans the part of the receiving societies. Instead, American elites, who derived their wealth migrated to their “New World” in search these societies found themselves in the from the land, lived in those cities, which is of economic gain and social status. Many position of regulating what economists where the cultural and political life of the more Africans crossed the Atlantic in a came to label an “inexhaustible labor time was centered. forced labor migration of slaves, who in supply.” the plantations and low-altitude mines This simple urban/rural scheme was of Spanish and Portuguese America to change dramatically with the Great replaced a mistreated indigenous labor Spontaneous Migrations: Internal and Depression and the subsequent advent force that had been decimated by Eurasian External of import substitution industrialization epidemic diseases against which they had (ISI). Started by necessity because of the no defenses. This led to the repeopling Flows that begin with deliberate dearth of industrial exports from the core of the Caribbean and Atlantic coast recruitment can reproduce themselves over countries during World War II, import colonies/countries that transformed the time through the power of social networks. substitution industrialization was extended demographic profile of the region. It shifted News of the opportunities in places of subsequently as a means to overcome the from a white-mestizo-indigenous mosaic to destination pass through word of mouth centuries-old dependence of the region on a predominately white-mulatto-black one. from migrants to kin and communities agricultural and mineral exports. Strongly left behind, insuring a steady flow of advocated by the United Nations Economic The end of slavery in the nineteenth new recruits. In North America the flows Commission for Latin America under the century produced a new shortage of labor initiated by deliberate recruitment endured leadership of Argentine economist Raúl in much of the region. The new mechanism and became self-reproducing. Despite Prebisch, import substitution promoted devised to meet this situation was deliberate campaigns of deportation in the emergence of new industrial elites in deliberate recruitment to induce migration. the early 1930s, the mid-1950s, and now a number of large and medium countries, So successful were these recruitment the 2000s, Mexican migrants continued such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and programs that descendants of Italian moving north, becoming the mainstay of Mexico. laborers came to rival natives of Spanish

12 The ISI model also produced two industrial technology imported by the Latin America to the United States are fundamental features relevant to our multinationals was labor-saving. As a overwhelmingly spontaneous. There is no story. First, industrial production was consequence, the bulk of this population need to recruit Dominican urban workers, concentrated in the one or two cities per had to create not only their own housing Guatemalan rural laborers, or Colombian country where markets and productive solutions in the peripheral settlements, but and Argentine professionals to come north. infrastructures actually existed. Second, also their own economic solutions through That “recruitment” is done by advertising in due time, multinational corporations invented employment. Consequently, the through the media and by the levels of jumped the tariff barrier established by ISI informal economy of these cities exploded, relative deprivation that they trigger. These policies to compete directly with domestic becoming larger, in many instances, than self-driven flows from Mexico, Central industry. Multinationals not only elbowed that regulated by the state. The response of America, and elsewhere in the region form aside local industrialists but brought in Latin American masses to the constraints of the immediate precedent for the rapid technology that was capital- rather than dependent economies and the defects of the growth of the Hispanic population of the labor-intensive. ISI model, as applied in the region, came to United States, now approaching 60 million. dominate the physical, demographic, and The concentration of industrial economic landscape of Latin America to What goes around comes around. The employment in the largest cities then our day: gigantic urban heads on dwarfish distortions of Latin American economies triggered a spontaneous flow of bodies; pervasive poverty and economic by foreign capital, including limited migrants from the smaller towns and the informality; rising crime and increasing employment opportunities, rising countryside. Slow at first, rural-urban insecurity in both city and countryside inequality, and unreachable expectations migration became a flood by the 1950s represent some of the key features inherited find their counterpart in the movement of and 1960s, rupturing the traditional urban from internal migrations in the twentieth a not inconsiderable part of the population order inherited from colonial times. Unable century. to major cities and abroad. The neoliberal to afford housing within the established model that replaced import-substitution did city, the migrant poor created their In due time, the poor and not-so-poor in not resolve the problems created by earlier own solutions by the simple expedient a number of countries started borrowing policies. It compounded them. As a result, of occupying vacant land in the urban a page from what Mexican peasants had population displacements, internal and periphery and building shacks on it. been doing for decades, namely heading external, have continued to our day. About north. The onset of spontaneous migration one-tenth of the Mexican population now Due to these massive internal migrations, flows from Latin American countries to lives in the United States, and comparable the urban systems of Latin America came the United States in the last half century proportions of Colombians, Ecuadoreans, to acquire the profile with which we are had as immediate causes two factors: Peruvians, and Central Americans have familiar today: first, deep demographic first, conditions of continuing economic also moved abroad. With some notable imbalances, with one or two cities per scarcity, lack of employment opportunities, exceptions, Latin America has yet to find its country concentrating both population and and rising public insecurity in the sending way into and its place within the developed economic resources: second, the emergence countries; second, the relentless penetration world. The continuing out-migration of its of vast belts of unregulated settlements by the institutions of advanced capitalism, population reflects that reality. surrounding these “primate” cities. including multinational corporations, and Suburban shantytowns, with different the consequent diffusion of consumption names in each country but evocatively expectations out of reach for the majority Refugees called villas miserias in Argentina, became of the Latin American population. A signature features of Latin American logical way to right the balance between The legal figure of “refugee” is a relatively urbanization in the late twentieth century. imported consumption aspirations recent creation under United Nations and local economic scarcity is to move auspices. Almost since independence, The ISI model, perverted by the dominance to the places where these aspirations a tradition existed in Latin America of of the multinationals, was incapable of originally came from, which is what providing asylum to those persecuted providing suitable employment to the an increasing number of people started politically in another country. This legal masses of internal migrants since the doing. Contemporary migrations from figure was commonly used by the losing

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side in interelite political struggles but was “The Wall” and Labor Immigration seldom employed on a mass scale. Mass international migration in Latin America The promise by U.S. President Trump has been primarily driven by economic to build a wall on the southern border incentives: from Bolivia, Chile, and plays well in conservative circles but Paraguay to Argentina and from Colombia it will be, at best, a costly redundancy. and Peru to Venezuela. Peasants and poor Since 2008, undocumented migration people escaping civil wars or other political from Mexico has declined dramatically. violence were seldom granted a defined Net Mexican immigration, taking into legal status in the receiving country, which account arrivals and departures, is now handled the flow as best it could on an ad estimated to be near zero. Agricultural hoc basis. and other unskilled labor demand, formerly sourced by undocumented The largest movement of people defined migration, is now increasingly met by the legally as refugees and granted resettlement H-2 program of temporary visas, greatly assistance in the contemporary period is expanded by the Obama administration. that triggered by the Cuban Revolution In 2015, Immigration and Customs and received in the United States. Enforcement (ICE) deported 268,000 Consequences of Cuban refugee migration undocumented Mexicans. In the same over several decades have been momentous year, U.S. Immigration Services (USCIS) and would require separate treatment. It granted 268,000 H-2-A visas for Mexican would suffice to note that the reception agricultural workers and another 95,000 granted to Cubans in the United States H-2-B visas for other unskilled workers. was far more favorable than that awaiting In effect, the United States now has a subsequent claimants for asylum fleeing temporary labor program. The only murderous civil wars in Central America. positive effect of the “wall” will be to The U.S. government routinely denied provide employment for hundreds of these latter requests, confining Salvadorans, Mexican workers who, inevitably, will be Guatemalans, and others to a precarious those who build it. legal status if they remained in U.S. territory or putting their lives at peril if they were forced to return to Central America. This disparity shows clearly that the status of “refugee” does not depend on the situation of individuals but on the geopolitical priorities of the receiving states. Cubans were warmly received as U.S. allies in the global struggle against communism, even as Central Americans were routinely denied asylum as they fled right-wing regimes considered allies of the United States in that same global struggle.

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