BECOMING ILLEGAL: MODELING RATIONALITY AND MORALITY OF UNAUTHORIZED MIGRANTS
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Emily Ryo August 2011
© 2011 by Emily Ryo. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/pb496ks0860
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
David Grusky, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Michele Dauber
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Tomas Jimenez
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii Abstract
Why do millions of otherwise law-abiding people violate immigration laws? Past research on legal noncompliance shows that people’s views about the law and legal authority are important determinants of their willingness to comply with the law, above and beyond economic considerations. A more comprehensive understanding of unauthorized migration thus requires a serious consideration of normative factors such as people’s moral values and beliefs about the legitimacy of legal authority. This
dissertation takes up that task through three papers that investigate the ways in which
current and prospective unauthorized migrants view the U.S. immigration system and
their acts of legal noncompliance.
The first paper draws upon a unique set of focus group data with current and
prospective unauthorized migrants from Latin America to analyze how they make sense
of their noncompliance with U.S. immigration law. The second paper uses data obtained
from a survey that was designed specifically for this study, to examine three important
dimensions of legal values among prospective migrants from Mexico. The third paper
develops and tests a decision-making model of unauthorized migration that considers not
only the economic motivations of prospective migrants, but also their beliefs, attitudes,
and social norms regarding U.S. immigration law and legal authorities. Together, these
papers show that even in the context of unauthorized migration in which individuals are
strongly motivated by economic need, the decision to migrate illegally cannot be fully
understood without considering an individual’s underlying values and norms.
iv Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to a great many individuals who made this project
possible. David Grusky was the consummate advisor, providing me with incredible
support and encouragement throughout my graduate education and the undertaking of
this project. He expertly guided me through all the heady logistics and pitfalls of
designing and administering a large-scale survey, and spent countless hours patiently
guiding me through numerous theoretical and empirical issues. He gave me a home at
the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality and provided all the resources that a
graduate student could possibly want or need. I am immeasurably grateful for his
kindness, patience, humor, and intellectual brilliance. I will always look to him as a
model for what it means to be a great teacher, mentor, and scholar.
Michele Dauber gave me the original inspiration for this project and provided the
means possible to pursue it. Over the years, she single-handedly pulled me back into my
work every time I lost my way, and never lost faith in the importance of my work and my
ability to complete it. She is a mentor and role model like no other, and she taught me
how to nurture and mentor other students. Her commitment to social justice and equality
is a source of great inspiration that grounds my work in general and this project in
particular. It is an understatement to say that her brutal honesty, caring mentorship, and
steadfast friendship have been, and will continue to be, critical to my growth as a scholar.
I owe very special thanks to Michael Rosenfeld, whose kind advice and encouragement over the years were critical to my endeavors and successful completion of this project. He guided me through the early field work days of this project, and taught me how to not fret the small stuff but do obsess over getting the important things right. It
v was his idea for me to collect my survey data through the Mexican Migration Project
(MMP); without his efforts and confidence in my abilities, I might not have had the opportunity to collaborate with the MMP. He always found the time to read my writing, especially at critical junctures, and I am extremely thankful for his generous gifts of time, insight, and understanding.
I am also deeply grateful to Tomás Jiménez, Abel Valenzuela, and Mark
Granovetter. They each played a critical role in shaping my graduate education, supporting me through this project, and reading various drafts of different papers that comprise this dissertation. I might still be stuck in dissertation purgatory had Tomás
Jiménez not come at the right time to push me along; for that, I am eternally grateful. I cannot begin to thank him sufficiently for his meticulous readings of my writing, for his incisive critiques, and for his constant support and encouragement. I might not have made it through the Institutional Review Board process to have gotten this project off the ground had it not been for Abel Valenzuela and his sage advice. I am also indebted to
Abel for his unfailing support over the years—both personal and professional. Finally, I might not have ended up at Stanford at all had it not been for Mark Granovetter, who persuaded me that Stanford was exactly where I needed to be to experience the “strength of weak ties.” My training and my work at Stanford have been influenced in so many ways by Mark’s scholarship and his dedication to and love of teaching.
This project simply would not have been possible without the support of Douglas
Massey and Jorge Durand, co-directors of the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). They generously allowed me to participate in the MMP, provided invaluable guidance and encouragement along the way, and afforded me enormous freedom to pursue my work in
vi collaboration with the MMP. The time that I spent working with the MMP has been one of the most significant and rewarding learning experiences of my life. I am much indebted to Jorge Durand for his extraordinary openness to new ideas, his creativity, and his patient, hands-on shepherding of my survey. I also owe a great deal to the MMP interviewers and staff. In particular, I was extremely fortunate to have met and worked with Quike González, who oversaw the administration of my survey in Mexico. He is easily one of the most talented and compassionate people I have met; I am proud to call him my hermanito. I am also very grateful to Karen Pren and Verónica Lozano for their tireless assistance with data entry and management.
I have been blessed to work with a number of very special undergraduate research assistants at Stanford over the years. In particular, Maggie Guadalupe, Estella Cisneros, and Bianca Ordaz deserve much credit for their contributions to this project. I have benefited greatly from the helpful feedback and insightful comments that Tino Cuéllar,
Allegra McLeod, and Nancy Abelmann provided on different parts and drafts of this dissertation. Others, especially Soo Kang, Jane Paek, Betsy Schmitt, Chris Queen, Jinny
Kim, Rosanna D’Costa, Renata Miller, Martha Chiu, Tahu Kukutai, Asaf Levanon,
Lynny Chin, Kendra Bischoff, Songhua Hu, and Victor Thompson have cheered me on for a long time; I count my blessings to have had their faith and friendship. I am especially thankful to Victor for the many laughs and conversations we have shared during our years at Stanford; they have been a source of much emotional and intellectual sustenance. I owe heartfelt thanks to Brisia Lopez and Roxana Torres, two women with enormous hearts who gave me precious breaks from my childcare duties so I could write.
vii To Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, for
whom I served as a judicial clerk during my leave of absence, I owe an incredible year of
“break” from this project. She provided me the rare opportunity for the kind of
intellectual and personal development that law students and lawyers only dream about.
She allowed me to gain an insider’s view of the judicial system that has had a deep
impact on my thinking and research agenda. I am deeply grateful for her interest in my
work, investment in my future, and her mentorship.
Words cannot express how thankful I am to my parents and sisters. When I was
little, my parents uprooted and transplanted our family from Korea to the United States in
search of a better life for their five girls. My parents did not speak the language nor knew
the culture, but against all odds and with very little means, they persevered through
unimaginable hardship to keep us here. Without their strength and courage, I could not
have come this far. They also gave me the greatest gift of all—my four loving sisters, who have always stood by my side, through thick and thin.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Andy. He has been more than a partner when it comes to this project. He wore many different hats during the years I
have worked on this dissertation, including travel agent, editor, tech support, life coach, to name only a few. Through it all, he never faltered and never lost faith; he has been my one constant, my anchor. Nothing would be possible without him. During my time at
Stanford, I have been blessed to have my two sons, Ethan and Noah; they claim the special privilege of singularly slowing down my work to teach me what is truly important in life. They are the light and joy of my life, and my one desire is that through my work I can help create, in however small a way, a more just and compassionate world for them.
viii
Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ...... iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v
TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... ix
LIST OF TABLES ...... x
LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi
1. INTRODUCTION...... 1 REFERENCES ...... 6
2. MAKING SENSE OF THE U.S. IMMIGRATION SYSTEM: VIEWS FROM THE OTHER SIDE ...... 7 INTRODUCTION ...... 7 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...... 8 UNAUTHORIZED MIGRANTS: NEUTRALIZATIONS AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS ...... 12 DATA & METHOD ...... 14 RESULTS ...... 17 DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION ...... 40 REFERENCES ...... 46
3. MORAL AGENCY IN UNAUTHORIZED MIGRATION: AN ANALYSIS OF LEGAL VALUES OF PROSPECTIVE MIGRANTS ...... 54 INTRODUCTION ...... 54 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...... 56 TYPOLOGY ...... 60 DATA & METHOD ...... 65 RESULTS ...... 73 DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION ...... 78 REFERENCES ...... 83
4. MODELING UNAUTHORIZED MIGRATION: ECONOMIC AND NORMATIVE VALUES OF PROSPECTIVE MIGRANTS ...... 101 INTRODUCTION ...... 101 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ...... 103 A NEW MODEL OF UNAUTHORIZED MIGRATION ...... 112 DATA & METHOD ...... 116 RESULTS ...... 132 DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION ...... 141 REFERENCES ...... 149
ix
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Aggregate Characteristics of Focus Group Participants ...... 52
Table 2.2 Characteristics of Focus Group Participants by Site ...... 53
Table 3.1 Typology of Attitude Classes...... 92
Table 3.2 Description of Variables and Corresponding Survey Items ...... 93
Table 3.3 Descriptive and Bivariate Statistics for Legal Values, Communities 1-8 ...... 94
Table 3.4 Descriptive and Bivariate Statistics for Legal Values, by Prevalence of U.S. Migration in the Community ...... 95
Table 3.5 Estimated Conditional Probabilities (Model 2, Table 3.A3) ...... 96
Table 3.6 Estimated Latent Class Probabilities (Model 2, Table 3.A3) ...... 97
Table 3.A1 Latent Class Profiles, Do Not Intend to Migrate Illegally ...... 98
Table 3.A2 Latent Class Profiles, Intend to Migrate Illegally ...... 99
Table 3.A3 Fit Statistics for Confirmatory Latent-Class Models ...... 100
Table 4.1 Descriptive and Bivariate Statistics for Variables Used in Analysis of Intent to Migrate ...... 163
Table 4.2 Binary Logistic Regression Analysis of Intent to Migrate Illegally ...... 164
Table 4.A1 Characteristics of the Surveyed Communities and Their Surrounding Municipalities ...... 165
Table 4.A2 Description of Measures Used in the Analyses of Intent to Migrate Illegally...... 166
Table 4.A3 Comparison of Respondents Intending to Migrate Legally vs. Illegally ...... 168
x
List of Figures
Figure 3.1 Four Ideologies underlying the Eight Latent Classes ...... 88
Figure 3.2 Proportion of Adult Population with Migration Experience ...... 89
Figure 3.3 Confirmatory Model with Three Latent Variables ...... 90
Figure 3.4 Eight Latent Classes by Intent to Migrate and Not Migrate Illegally ...... 91
Figure 4.1 Schematic Diagram of Decision-making in Unauthorized Migration...... 161
Figure 4.2 Dependent Variable for the Logistic Regression Analysis ...... 162
xi 1. Introduction
There are two enduring images of unauthorized migrants in the American public
imagination.1 The first image envisions unauthorized migrants as calculating economic
agents who cross the border in search of financial gains despite laws prohibiting their
movement. The assumption is that the law is of no consequence to these migrants, save
for the added economic cost the legal barrier presumably imposes. The second of these
images envisions unauthorized migrants as passive agents who are all but pushed into the
migration stream by various socioeconomic forces. These dueling conceptions are also
prevalent in academic understandings of migrants generally.2 In microeconomic theory
(see, e.g., Borjas 1989; Chiswick 2000), migrants are presented as overly rational,
atomized actors. By contrast, in sociological theories, which often focus on macro
structural determinants of migration (see generally Jennissen 2007; Massey et al. 1993),
migrants generally are described as overly socialized actors without much individual
agency.3
What is lost in these two opposing views is an understanding of unauthorized
migrants as moral agents whose decisions and behaviors are also constrained and guided
1 In this dissertation, I focus only on “voluntary” migration, leaving aside “forced” migration (e.g., refugee flows, asylum seekers, human trafficking). I recognize, of course, that the line between these two types of migration is often blurry in practice (Castles 2003; Cornelius and Rosenblum 2005:102). 2 This dichotomy follows the crude distinction that James Duesenberry (1960:233) once made between the nature of economic and sociological approaches to studies of social phenomenon: “Economics is all about how people make choices. Sociology is all about why they don’t have any choices to make.” 3 Even the network theory of international migration, which was originally developed to bridge the micro-macro divide (Boyd 1989:641-42), has the tendency to reduce migrants into cultural automatons of a sort.
1 by values and norms. This significant gap in knowledge about unauthorized migrants
exists because leading theories of international migration surprisingly do not make a
distinction between authorized and unauthorized migration. In effect, what these theories
of international migration address is the question of why people migrate, but they do not
address the question of why people migrate despite legal prohibitions on their movement.
In other words, why do millions of otherwise law-abiding people violate immigration laws? This is a question that cannot be answered without a careful consideration of the prospective migrants’ beliefs and attitudes (what I refer to as “normative values”)
towards immigration law and the legal authorities that regulate their behavior.
There are good reasons to think that prospective migrants’ values and norms
might play a significant role in shaping their decision to migrate illegally. In research on
legal noncompliance, researchers consistently find a significant link between non-
instrumental, normative considerations, such as people’s moral values and beliefs about
the legitimacy of legal authority, and their decisions to obey or disobey the law (for a
review, see Tyler and Darley 2000:711-13). While these normative factors have been
examined in many different areas of law, they have never been systematically analyzed in
studies of unauthorized migration. This dissertation takes up that task through three
papers that develop a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding the nature
and role of normative values of prospective migrants in unauthorized migration. Taken
together, these papers seek to answer the fundamental question of why there are so many
unauthorized migrants in the United States.
In the first paper, I draw upon a unique set of focus group data with current and
prospective unauthorized migrants from Latin America to explore how they view the U.S.
2 immigration system and their acts of legal noncompliance. The migrants generally view
themselves as law-abiding and do not question the legitimacy of national borders. The question that naturally arises, then, is how these migrants reconcile these views with their
violation of U.S. immigration law. My analysis of the focus group data shows that
migrants engage in justificatory narratives that rely on a number of “neutralization
techniques” that Sykes and Matza (1957) outlined: (1) denial of responsibility and appeal
to higher loyalties, (2) denial of injury, and (3) condemnation of the condemners. The
results show that first, these justificatory narratives are prevalent, easily accessible, and
not mere artifacts of the focus group process. Second, the justificatory narratives reveal a
great deal about the tensions and complexities inherent in the migrants’ legal
consciousness and their sense of agency. Specifically, my findings suggest that the legal
consciousness of unauthorized migrants is at once one of conformity and acquiescence,
as well as resistance and critical awareness.
In the second paper, I analyze three important dimensions of legal values among
prospective migrants from Mexico, using unique data from the Becoming Illegal Survey
(BIS)—a large-scale survey that I designed for the purposes of this study and
administered in collaboration with the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). This analysis
shows a significant difference in legal values of those individuals intending to migrate
illegally versus those who do not intend to migrate. Consistent with the theory of culture
of migration, however, I find that some of these differences disappear in communities
with a long history and high prevalence of out-migration to the United States. This result
suggests that deeply-ingrained community practices might attenuate the salience of
individual legal values in decisions to migrate illegally. I also develop a typology of
3 distinct attitude classes based on these legal values and examine the typology using latent
class analysis (LCA). A notable finding from the LCA is that the largest proportion of
both prospective unauthorized migrants and non-migrants belongs to the same latent class—one that is characterized by a system of values that rejects an absolutist view of the rule of law and the legitimacy of U.S. authority to restrict international migration, and endorses family necessity as a justification for unauthorized migration.
Finally, in the third paper, I draw upon the BIS and MMP data to develop and test a decision-making model of unauthorized migration that considers not only the economic motivations of prospective migrants, but also their beliefs, attitudes, and social norms regarding U.S. immigration law and legal authorities. The results indicate that some, though not all, economic considerations, and a number of important normative factors, shape decisions to migrate illegally. On the cost-benefit side, the following economic variables were significant in the analysis of intent to migrate illegally: (1) perceived availability of jobs in Mexico and the United States, (2) expected wages in the United
States, and (3) perceived costs and dangers of crossing the border. Remarkably, neither the perceived risks of apprehension nor the severity of sanctions upon apprehension was significantly related to people’s intent to cross the border illegally.
In terms of normative factors, the significant variables in the analysis of intent to migrate illegally were: (1) general attitude toward the law (i.e., belief that disobeying the law is sometimes justified), (2) morality of violating U.S. immigration law (i.e., whether it is okay to migrate illegally to make more money in the United States even if one has a good job in Mexico), (3) views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority (i.e., whether or not
4 Mexicans have a right to be in the United States without permission from the U.S. government, and whether the U.S. immigration service treats Mexicans fairly), and
(4) descriptive norms (i.e., how many family/friends have tried to cross illegally in the past). Moreover, the model that included these normative variables fit the data significantly better than a model containing only the economic variables, suggesting that that the neoclassical model, though useful, is insufficient in explaining noncompliance with immigration law.
In sum, these three papers contribute to the research on international migration and the literature on legal noncompliance by refining, enriching, and deepening our understanding of unauthorized migrants. Specifically, this dissertation develops a new theoretical framework and provides empirical support for the idea that even in the context of unauthorized migration in which individuals are strongly motivated by economic need, the decision to migrate illegally cannot be fully understood without considering an individual’s underlying values and norms.
5 REFERENCES
Borjas, George J. 1989. “Economic Theory and International Migration.” International Migration Review 23:457-85.
Boyd, Monica. 1989. “Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New Agendas.” International Migration Review 23:638-70 . Castles, Stephen. 2003. “Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation.” Sociology 37:13-34.
Chiswick, Barry. 2000. “Are Immigrants Favorably Self-Selected?” American Economic Review 89:181-85.
Cornelius, Wayne A. and Marc R. Rosenblum. 2005. “Immigration and Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 8:99-119.
Duesenberry, James S. 1960. “Comment on Gary S. Becker’s ‘An Economic Analysis of Fertility.’” Pp. 231-34 in Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jennissen, Roel. 2007. “Causality Chains in the International Migration Systems Approach.” Population Research and Policy Review 26:411-36.
Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor. 1993. “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal.” Population and Development Review 19:431-66.
Sykes, Gresham M. and David Matza. 1957. “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency.” American Sociological Review 22:664-70.
Tyler, Tom R. and John M. Darley. 2000. “Building a Law-Abiding Society: Taking Public Views about Morality and Legitimacy of Legal Authorities into Account When Formulating Substantive Law.” Hofstra Law Review 28:707-39.
6 2. Making Sense of the U.S. Immigration System: Views from the Other Side
INTRODUCTION
Unauthorized migration is one of the most controversial and debated topics in public and political discourse in the United States. It has galvanized public opinion and attracted unending media scrutiny. Consequently, we know a great deal about how different segments of the U.S. population and policymakers think about U.S. immigration law, enforcement policy, and unauthorized migrants (e.g., Archibold and Thee-Brenan
2010; Berg 2009; Espenshade and Calhoun 1993; Gaffney 2010; Larsen et al. 2009). In contrast, we know very little about how the subjects of these laws and policies—current and prospective unauthorized migrants—think about the U.S. immigration system and their violation of the law.
Why is it important to examine the views and beliefs of unauthorized migrants? A well established body of research on legal noncompliance shows that people’s views about the law and legal authority are important determinants of their willingness to comply with the law (for a review, see Tyler and Darley 2000). Specifically, non- economic factors such as personal morality and perceptions about the legitimacy of legal authority have a significant influence on people’s decision to obey or not obey the law, all else being equal. This finding has an important implication for the study of unauthorized migration. Past research shows that increasing the cost of unauthorized migration through toughened enforcement has done little to deter unauthorized migration
(see, e.g., Cornelius and Salehyan 2007; Fuentes et al. 2007; Massey and Riosmena
7 2010). A more comprehensive understanding of unauthorized migration thus requires a serious consideration of factors beyond purely economic ones.
This paper begins to take up that task by examining how current and prospective unauthorized migrants make sense of the U.S. immigration system and their noncompliance with U.S. immigration law. The vast majority of unauthorized migrants are otherwise law-abiding individuals who, as I will discuss further below, neither view themselves as “law breakers” nor doubt the legitimacy of national borders. How, then, do the migrants reconcile these understandings with their current or intended violations of
U.S. immigration law? This paper addresses this question by drawing upon an original set of focus group data that I collected from unauthorized migrants at day labor centers in the United States and prospective unauthorized migrants at migrant centers along the
U.S.-Mexico border.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This study engages two sets of literature that, to date, have not been considered together—research on neutralization and research on legal consciousness. Neutralization research focuses on narratives that people use to justify a particular act of “deviance” or a violation of the law (Sykes and Matza 1957; for a review, see Maruna and Copes 2005).
Legal consciousness research, in contrast, is concerned more broadly with how people understand, make sense of, and negotiate the law and legal norms in their everyday lives
(see, e.g., Ewick and Silbey 1992; Ewick and Silbey 1998; Merry 1990; Nielsen 2000;
Sarat 1990; for a review, see Silbey 2005). Although these two traditions of scholarship have remained largely distinct, they both seek to understand how people view, experience, and internalize legal norms (Maruna and Copes 2005; Silbey 2005).
8 RESEARCH ON NEUTRALIZATION THEORY
Neutralization theory, one of the most widely known and frequently cited theories in criminology (Jacobs 2007), may be understood as one strand of research within a much broader research tradition associated with C. Wright Mills’ (1940) “vocabularies of motive” and the sociology of “accounts” (Scott and Lyman 1968).1 Nonetheless, neutralization theory has a distinct intellectual origin. Neutralization theory was originally developed by Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957) as a theory of juvenile delinquency. According to Sykes and Matza, juvenile delinquents maintain at least minimal commitments to the dominant social order and typically experience guilt or shame for violating social norms. In order to participate in deviant behavior, therefore, they must find ways to rationalize the action or neutralize the guilt associated with it, and insulate themselves from the blame of others. Sykes and Matza (1957: 666) called these rationalizations “neutralization techniques” and argued that they were “extensions of patterns of thought prevalent in society rather than something created de novo” (see also
Matza and Sykes 1961).
Sykes and Matza (1957) outlined five major techniques of neutralization:
(1) denial of responsibility, whereby one excuses his or her actions by claiming they were beyond one’s control; (2) denial of injury, whereby one downplays the seriousness of his or her actions by contending that no party suffered as a result; (3) denial of the victim, whereby one justifies his or her actions by assigning negative characteristics to the victim; (4) condemnation of condemners, whereby one deflects accusations of misconduct by pointing out the condemners are engaged in morally unworthy conduct
1 For a review of the literature on the sociology of accounts, see Orbuch (1997).
9 themselves; and (5) appeal to higher loyalties, whereby one claims he or she acted in the service of a higher-order ideal or cause.
Subsequent expansions of the theory to different types of offenders and offenses have led researches to uncover a wide range of other neutralization techniques (see, e.g.,
Schönbach 1990). In addition, the theory is no longer confined to the study of juvenile delinquents, or even adult offenders. Neutralization theory has been used to help explain a wide range of behaviors, including cheating behavior among students (LaBeff et al.
1990; Minor 1984), use of deadly force by police (Waegel 1984), deer poaching (Eliason and Dodder 2000), whistle-blowing (Pershing 2003), workplace misconduct such as cyber loafing and property theft (Hollinger 1991; Lim 2002), entering preteen daughters into beauty pageants (Heltsley and Calhoun 2003), contemporary German youths’ avoidance of the stigma of the Holocaust (Hazani 1991), and coping strategies of survivors of domestic violence (Ferraro and Johnson 1983).
It is important to stress that in applying this theoretical framework here, I do not mean to suggest that unauthorized migrants are “delinquents” or “deviants”—terms that are often invoked in the neutralization literature owing to the theory’s intellectual origins.
Certain behaviors that are declared illegal are not deviant by any definition except a legalistic one; the behavior that underlies unauthorized migration—movement across national boundaries—is a clear case in point. Nor in drawing from neutralization research do I mean to imply that unauthorized migrants are engaged in mere linguistic maneuvers performed for a specific audience. Rather, my approach here is to examine neutralizations as part of the narrative process through which individuals make meaning out of their actions and their lives (Ewick and Silbey 1995).
10 RESEARCH ON LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Trubek (1984:592) defines “legal consciousness” broadly as “all the ideas about the nature, function, and operation of law held by anyone in society at a given time.”
Equally importantly, “[l]egal consciousness also refers to how people do not think about
the law; that is to say, it is the body of assumptions people have about the law that are
simply taken for granted” (Nielsen 2000:1059 (emphasis in original)). At its core, legal
consciousness studies are concerned with how “ordinary” people—as opposed to legal
experts, professionals and “elites”—understand and make sense of the law and legal
institutions, as “they engage, avoid, or resist the law and legal meanings” (Silbey
2001:8626). Legal consciousness scholarship has its roots in the long-standing research
on power and inequality, the legal needs of the poor, and the ways in which the law in
action has failed to realize its aspirations of equality and justice (Engel 1998:121-24).
Consequently, past research on legal consciousness has focused primarily on the law’s
significance in the lives of marginalized and disadvantaged groups—especially the
working class, the poor, women, and people of color (McCann and March 1995:210).
A central framework that prior studies of legal consciousness have employed is
Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) tripartite typology of legal consciousness. In their work
exploring the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens, Ewick and Silbey (1998) contend
that legal consciousness manifests itself in three predominant types: “before the law,”
“with the law,” and “against the law.” Those “before the law” view or experience the law
as objective, autonomous, powerful, and sacred. Those who are “with the law” imagine
law as a game, a terrain of contestation, and a set of procedures and resources that can be
manipulated for personal advantage. Those who stand “against the law” feel trapped by
11 it and seek ways to manage its power through distancing or acts of resistance. These forms of legal consciousness, according to Ewick and Silbey (1998:50), are not static or mutually exclusive categories; rather, they are “plural and variable across contexts.”
Nevertheless, Ewick and Silbey (1998:235) contend that socially marginalized actors are most likely to express “against the law” legal consciousness.
Recent works in legal consciousness scholarship have applied interpretive methods to individual narratives to describe how various social actors experience and understand the law, including average citizens (Nielsen 2000; Yngvesson 1988), working-class Americans (Ewick and Silbey 1992; Hoffmann 2003; Merry 1990), welfare recipients (Cowan 2004; Sarat 1990), victims of sexual harassment (Marshall
2005; Uggen and Blackstone 2004), and social activists (McCann 1994). Given that the predominant focus of legal consciousness research has been the experiences of disenfranchised groups in society, and unauthorized migrants are a quintessential example of such a class, legal consciousness of unauthorized migrants would appear to be a natural candidate for scholarly attention. Yet, with the notable exception of two recent works by Abrego (2008, 2011), who examines the effect of unauthorized migrants’ self- understandings of their illegality on their daily lives and incorporation experiences, the legal consciousness of unauthorized migrants remains largely unexamined.
UNAUTHORIZED MIGRANTS: NEUTRALIZATIONS AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS
This study contributes to research on neutralization and on legal consciousness by showing how these two distinct theoretical frameworks can be brought together to better understand unauthorized migrants and their noncompliance with U.S. immigration law.
12 Specifically, I use the migrants’ use of neutralizations—the ways in which migrants
justify and make sense of their noncompliance with U.S. immigration law—as a lens
through which we can examine the nature of their legal consciousness.
I argue that there are two major ways in which neutralizations can help us
apprehend legal consciousness. First, neutralizations are not discrete, isolated thoughts,
but part of a larger system of sense-making that is based on particular understandings of
the self and dominant social order (Maruna and Copes 2005:252-53). These self- understandings and perceptions about social structure as they relate to law, legal systems, and legal actors, are the raw materials out of which legal consciousness is forged. Much of the past research on neutralizations has remained descriptive, rather than analytical, precisely because scholars have tended to overlook this larger function of neutralizations.
The second way in which the migrants’ neutralizations may deepen our understanding of their legal consciousness relates to the sociological, rather than the social-psychological, aspects of neutralization and legal consciousness. Neutralizations
“do not materialize out of thin air at the individual’s discretion” (Hamlin 1988:431); rather, they are drawn from “a repertoire of culturally acceptable legitimations” (Murphy
1999:205). Similarly, while legal consciousness develops out of individualized personal experiences, it is shaped by prevailing cultural forms that limit the “number of available interpretations for assigning meaning to things and events within any situation or setting”
(Silbey 1992:46). Therefore, to examine the neutralizations employed by unauthorized migrants to justify their legal noncompliance is to gain knowledge of the larger cultural contexts and social structures within which their legal consciousness is embedded.
13 DATA AND METHOD
My analysis draws upon focus group data that I collected in connection with a larger research project that investigates the role of economic and normative factors in people’s decision to migrate illegally from Mexico to the United States. Between
February and May of 2006, I organized ten focus groups with 64 current and prospective unauthorized migrants from Latin America. Aggregate and site-specific characteristics of the focus group participants are shown in Tables 1 and 2, respectively. The majority of the participants were male (81%) and from Mexico (61%). The rest of the participants were from Honduras (20%), Guatemala (9%), El Salvador (6%), and Peru (3%). Many participants had multiple border-crossing experiences and had never applied for a visa to enter the U.S.
Focus groups were chosen over individual interviews for a number of reasons.
First, a nondirective approach and framework afforded by the focus group format were critical in eliciting a wide range of ideas and unanticipated responses (Morgan 1997).
Second, as Merton (1956) discovered in his pioneering study of American men in the military during World War II, individuals are more likely to reveal and discuss sensitive information when they feel they are in a safe and comfortable environment with others who are like themselves or in similar situations. Third, views about the law and legal authorities are often latent and deeply embedded in people’s taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and their places in it (Ewick and Silbey 1998).
Accordingly, group interactions and dynamics were helpful in teasing out the law-related views of the migrants.
14 In recruiting participants for the focus groups, I targeted two subject populations:
unauthorized day laborers who were recruited from day-labor centers2 and hiring sites in
California (Mountain View, Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Monica); and individuals
staying at migrant centers located along the U.S.-Mexico border (El Paso, Texas; Ciudad
Juarez, Chihuahua; Agua Prieta and Altar, Sonora). Migrant centers are charitable organizations, often affiliated with Catholic churches, that provide food and lodging to individuals who (1) are about to cross the border illegally, (2) have recently been deported while attempting to cross the border illegally, or (3) have recently made a successful illegal entry into the United States and are contemplating how to proceed next.
All focus group participants were required to be 18 years of age or older, speak
Spanish, and be currently unauthorized or about to cross the border illegally. I recruited
both men and women. That male participants constituted the majority of my sample is a
reflection of the current gender imbalance found in the subject population, rather than a
function of my recruiting strategy. Although earlier in my project, I focused on recruiting
newcomers from Mexico in order to ensure some level of homogeneity, I found this
requirement to be too cumbersome and restrictive, and later expanded my recruitment to
all current and prospective unauthorized migrants from Latin America.
The focus groups were conducted in Spanish and moderated by two Mexican-
American community activists. Both moderators worked closely with unauthorized
migrants and were well known in and respected by the communities serving these
migrant populations. The experiences and connections the moderators had with the
unauthorized community were essential to establishing the necessary rapport with the
2 For helpful background information on day labor centers, see Fine (2006); Valenzuela (2003).
15 participants and in successfully carrying out the focus group sessions. Each of the focus group discussions was loosely organized around six distinct topics relating to unauthorized migration: (1) the decision-making process, (2) social norms about border crossing, (3) knowledge about the U.S. immigration law, (4) border crossing experience,
(5) current attitudes toward the U.S. government and Americans, and (6) current attitudes toward the U.S. immigration law.
Each focus group lasted one to two hours and took place either at day labor centers or migrant centers from where the migrants were recruited. The participants were served a meal or refreshments before or during the focus group session, and each participant received small non-cash compensation at the conclusion of the session. All focus group sessions were audio recorded and later transcribed and translated from
Spanish to English. As much as possible, I have tried to preserve the authentic voice and colloquialism of the participants in the translation process. For example, when the migrants used the phrase, “sin papeles” to describe their unauthorized status, it was translated as “without papers,” instead of “illegally.” The resulting manuscripts were analyzed with qualitative data analysis software, ATLAS.ti.
One important contextual factor that bears consideration is that these focus groups took place during spring of 2006, shortly after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a legislation known as H.R. 4437. This bill proposed to strengthen border enforcement, and to raise penalties for unauthorized migration, including criminalizing unauthorized presence in the United States. In response to this bill, thousands of people mobilized in well-publicized protests (Bloemraad and Trost 2008; Cordero-Guzmán et al. 2008;
Johnson and Hing 2007; Lazos Vargas 2007). For example, a major demonstration
16 involving over 100,000 people took place in Chicago on March 10, 2006. The largest single demonstration occurred in Los Angeles on March 25, 2006 with a march of more than 500,000 people. The largest nationwide day of protest occurred on April 10, 2006, in 102 cities across the country. Additional protests took place in May of 2006 when thousands of immigrants refused to go to work or school on May Day as part of what came to be known as the “Great American Boycott.” The findings of this study should be considered in the broader context of these political events.
RESULTS
SALIENCE OF THE LAW
Before proceeding with the analysis of the migrants’ neutralizations, I first consider whether the focus group process might have induced the migrants to think about issues that are not necessarily salient or problematic for them in real life. The nature of this problem is somewhat akin to the problem of “non-opinion” in survey research—i.e., the willingness of most respondents to offer an opinion on issues about which they know nothing when asked on a survey (Bishop 2005). This is also a problem that some scholars have noted in critiquing the “law-first” approach that characterizes much of the socio-legal scholarship. Levine and Mellema (2001), for example, cautions against privileging the role of law and assuming, rather than investigating, the law’s salience in studies of legal consciousness. Based on their case study of women in the street-level drug economy, Levine and Mellema (2001) conclude that the law may not be always salient, and indeed, much less important than other social and economic forces in the lives of extremely marginalized populations.
17 There are two main possible bases upon which one might question the salience of law among current and prospective unauthorized migrants. First, U.S. immigration law is frequently violated. As of March 2010, there were over 11 million unauthorized migrants in the United States, 80 percent of whom came from Mexico and countries in Latin
America (Passel and Cohn 2011). When a law is frequently violated, it presumably becomes less sacred over time, and accordingly people might become less inclined to be troubled by violations of it. Second, if everyone with whom one interacts is a “law- breaker” (i.e., an unauthorized migrant), that particular status is likely to lose salience, obviating the need for the individual to engage in any sort of significant moral or cognitive work to come to terms with the status. This argument applies with greater force among those individuals who come from communities in which unauthorized migration is extremely common, and those who, once they enter the United States, reside in ethnic niches with a high concentration of unauthorized population.
While these arguments may be plausible in theory, my analysis suggests that law is indeed salient among current and prospective unauthorized migrants, and that the justificatory narratives that I discuss below are not mere artifacts of the focus group process. First, the migrants were not directly asked to provide justifications for their violation of U.S. immigration law. Nor were the migrants confronted with the seeming contradiction between their beliefs and behavior. Rather, their neutralizations emerged naturally in the course of casual discussions that resembled “everyday conversations” about their experiences. Consequently, there is less reason to fear that the focus group participants were forced into a position in which they felt they had to defend themselves
18 and others like them—a situation that might give rise to accounts that are artificially
created for the interviewer (Maruna and Copes 2005:260-61).
Moreover, the moderators did not focus on the role of law to the relative
exclusion of other social and economic influences in discussions about the migrants’
decision-making process and their border crossing experiences. Instead, the discussions
touched on a broad range of topics that sought to capture the complexities and tensions
inherent in any decision-making process. Thus, I did not assume that the law is the only,
or even the most important, force shaping the migrants’ sense of selves or their
perceptions about their available choices.
Finally, my analysis of the focus group data shows that the justificatory narratives
in which the migrants engage are prevalent and easily accessible. If these narratives were
not at all salient in the minds of the migrants, they might have had trouble
comprehending the questions or answering them during the focus group discussions. On
the contrary, the migrants generally did not hesitate to offer their views, and often their
views were surprisingly “well rehearsed” in the sense of being articulate and coherent, as
I show below. The foregoing observations suggest that whether the migrants’
justificatory narratives were construed ex ante or post hoc in terms of their decision to cross the border illegally,3 these narratives are part of a broad repository of culturally
available stories that the migrants commonly share.
3 It is not possible to determine whether the migrants engaged in conscious moral deliberations before deciding to cross the border illegally, as they cannot reconstruct their past psychological states with any degree of validity. However, that these justificatory narratives might be post hoc rather than ex ante does not undermine their importance. Unauthorized migration is a continuing act in the sense that the migrant violates the law not only at the time of entry, but throughout his unauthorized presence in the United
19 VIEW OF LAW ABIDING SELVES AND RESPECT FOR NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
While the focus group participants were not directly asked whether and to what extent they viewed themselves as law abiding, it was clear from the discussions that the migrants viewed themselves as moral, law-abiding individuals who respected law and order. The migrants frequently referenced God, for example, in describing their decision to cross the border (e.g., “I prayed a lot to God”) and in reflecting upon their border crossing experiences (e.g., “Thanks to God I made it over here.”).4 The migrants also actively distinguished themselves from real and imagined “delinquents” and “criminals.”
This self image was often implicitly projected in the migrants’ talk, but it was also very explicitly invoked at times. Consider Fernando’s statement:
The new immigration law wants to treat us like criminals. The immigrants that are coming here aren’t delinquents. People think that we’re delinquents. But . . . we are not going to hurt anybody or anything.
Speaking also of the proposed immigration bill in U.S. Congress to criminalize unauthorized migration, José asserts that such a law would likely deter many migrants from crossing the border because the criminal label would fundamentally violate their self-image:
José: If we would have known that they [U.S. government] were going to treat us like criminals here, we wouldn’t come . . . .
Moderator: You wouldn’t come? Even if you have the necessity . . . .
States. At a minimum, then, justificatory narratives likely serve the important function of facilitating the migrant’s decision to continue to work and reside in the United States. 4 That faith and prayer play a prominent role in the lives of migrants is, of course, not surprising in and of itself, given that the vast majority of Latin Americans are Christians, mostly Roman Catholics (Schwaller 2011). It is also not surprising that religious references are common in the migrants’ recounting of difficult and stressful situations they have faced in their migratory journey (see Durand and Massey 1995).
20 José: Because over there [at home] at least you don’t have a bad record. We are honest.
Other migrants took pains to explain that when they were apprehended by U.S. border patrol, they were treated differently because they had a “clean record” that set them apart from others. Ponciano, for example, relates his experience of being apprehended in this way:
So then the law . . . it chased me. But when immigration [patrol] got me, three times they got me . . . they had to take pictures of me and fingerprints all over to see if they could find a crime that I might have committed. They searched, and searched, and searched. And those three times I came out with a clean record. . . . Yes, I came out clean. And others, their first or second time, they find crimes in the computer there. . . . It says, well, you did this crime. . . . You are going to be locked up and they are going to deport you. They investigate you well. And they investigated me, and since I haven’t done anything, he [the border patrol] says, “come back, if you want; if luck is on your side, come back.”
That the law enforcement officer whose job is to prevent Ponciano’s unlawful entry into the United States is encouraging—indeed, even urging—Ponciano to try again, is a poignant commentary on the gap between the “law on the books” and “law in action”
(see MacAulay, Friedman, and Mertz 2007). But for Ponciano, it is a simple affirmation of his good moral character.
In addition, the respondents were in general agreement about the purported sanctity of national borders and what they perceived as the fundamental prerogative of sovereign nations to control their borders. Many of the migrants framed the issue as a matter of protection for the citizens residing within the nation state—“countries have a right to defend their territories,” as one focus group participant put it. The migrants thus took it for granted that when it came to keeping out the “bad” people—criminals, gangsters, drug traffickers, terrorists, and the like—nation states had every right to use
21 whatever method available to prevent their entry. The following exchange between the focus group moderator and Rigo captures this widespread sentiment:
Moderator: Do you think that the country has a right to restrict immigration?
Rigo: Yes, I agree with that. It goes without saying (emphasis added).
Moderator: Why?
Rigo: To protect their citizens. Well, I see it that way—to protect their citizens, because other countries are more . . . more aggressive.
Moderator: How are they more aggressive?
Rigo: Well, there’s people that only come to, to . . . they don’t come to work; they come to commit crimes.
Another migrant, Saul, offers a prescription for how this self-protection could be achieved:
I think the government should classify. There should be an office that would classify people, and set in place very strict laws. For what? So that a person respects the rights of the country. For example, let’s use an example: I cross into the United States and I arrive at an office where they will examine me, they will evaluate me . . . to see if I am a good person, if my intentions for coming to the United States are to work legally or to be among gangs or things like that. Well then, that is what the United States should do, evaluate and restrict people who can come to the United States.
Saul’s view that the government ought to “classify” and “restrict” entrants into the country is in line with a recurring analogy—that of a house owner and guest—that the migrants invoked during these discussions about national sovereignty. This analogy is well illustrated here in Efrén’s observation about the border fence between United States and Mexico:
22 As far as I’m concerned it’s their house and they can do what they want. They want to put up a fence . . . well, if I had a house I’m going to put up a fence, and my neighbor can’t say anything because it’s my house.
In light of these representations of themselves as law-abiding individuals who
value legal order and respect national sovereignty, a natural question that arises is how
the migrants reconcile these views with their current or intended noncompliance with
U.S. immigration law. Below, I discuss and analyze several major types of neutralizations that emerged from the focus group discussions.
DENIAL OF RESPONSIBILITY AND APPEAL TO HIGHER LOYALTIES: FAMILY AND NECESSITY
For the migrants in this study, “denial of responsibility” and “appeal to higher
loyalties” were closely interwoven, if not inseparable. For that reason, I discuss them
together in this section. Denial of responsibility often involves individuals claiming that
their behaviors are accidental. The critical concept here is intentionality or volition.
Sykes and Matza (1957:667) offer the following explanation: “As Justice Holmes has
said, even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked, and
modern society is no less careful to draw a line between injuries that are unintentional,
i.e., where responsibility is lacking, and those that are intentional.” Denial of
responsibility also often involves individuals claiming that their actions are due to forces
beyond their control. In other words, the individual engaged in denial of responsibility
often views himself as being acted upon rather than acting.
In the second method of neutralization, appeal to higher loyalties, individuals
claim that their behaviors are consistent with the moral obligations of a smaller, specific
group to which they belong. The use of this neutralization does not imply that the
23 individual rejects the socially dominant normative system; rather, other norms are seen as more pressing or deserving of precedence. Here, the norm or rule violation is often a result of the individual choosing to meet particularistic (e.g., claims of friendship, familial responsibilities) rather than universalistic demands (e.g., general societal obligations, claims of law), when a conflict arises between the two.
In response to questions about why they had decided to cross the border, the migrants framed their decision as a direct response to structural forces that were beyond their individual control—i.e., the failure of their national and local economies, and the corresponding scarcity of jobs that paid living wages. Kevin describes the situation he faced back home in this way:
Well, because in our country, everything is expensive there. Wages are low. Everyone has children. You have to give them a chance because over there, one cannot expect to succeed.
Ana’s account strikes a similar chord:
When I came over, I made my decision because I have two sons and I am a single mother. The reason why I came over is because I was working in a factory but I was earning only $35 a week. It wasn’t enough for my children’s education. It wasn’t even enough to pay for bus fare. It was then that I made the decision to come over here, leaving my sons, and migrating here.
For those migrants who had been farmers in their home countries, the larger forces at work also involved natural calamities of some sort, which further accentuated the major underlying import of their stories—i.e., dire situations brought on by no faults of their own. The following story that Miguel relates is illustrative of this point:
Ok, so when I was in my country . . . I planted coffee. [But] an illness entered the plants as well as little bugs. . . . I had received a credit from a bank. . . . So I had a credit line of about 200 or 300 hundred thousand in my country’s currency. . . .
24 But it turns out that when I was going to turn in the harvest, when I took the coffee out of the ware house, the animal had eaten and ruined all of the coffee. And this happened to all of the other coffee growers as well. So then the bankers began to arrive and ask questions; they told us that if we can’t pay in coffee, we would have to pay with our property. We then began to fight the case and we got a lawyer. I fought my case and told them that I have credit based on coffee, not on my land. That’s what I said back then, credit for coffee. So then because of that, the bank got mad and found a way to fight the case and won. They put a big yellow X on my door that said that I couldn’t enter. I had to leave my home with my children and went to my mother’s. So then I told my mother that I was going to leave my children there so that they could go to school while I went in search of better work.
As highlighted in the accounts provided by Kevin, Ana, and Miguel above, the
“higher loyalties” to which the migrants adhered were loyalties to their families. These loyalties meant that unmet family needs in the midst of an economic crisis in their communities called for drastic action—even illegal action—on the part of the migrant.
Indeed, the words, “need” and “necessity” were two of the most commonly invoked words to explain the decision to cross the border, as highlighted in the excerpts below in which Rosa and Adolfo, respectively, explain their migration decision:
Our need is so big and you have to succeed for your family. That’s why it’s just like what I said, those of us here, we’re here out of necessity—to make it and to succeed for our families (Rosa, emphases added). Oh the necessity . . . not having money and seeing the family without money and . . . because of that one comes over here; because there’s less opportunities for work in Mexico than here. It’s really hard to make money in Mexico if you don’t have a base or a business (Adolfo, emphasis added).
In sum, as one migrant declared succinctly, “You don’t break the law because you want to; it’s a necessity.” It is important to note, however, the migrants did not view
“necessity” as carte blanche to violate any and all laws. When asked whether the
“necessity” that figured so prominently in their accounts would also justify noncompliance with other laws, the migrants were uniform and unequivocal in their
25 insistence that necessity could not be rightfully invoked to justify “criminal behavior.”
Noncompliance with immigration law is, then, of a different moral order than noncompliance with other laws in the minds of unauthorized migrants. It is to this moral logic that I turn next through an examination of another common type of neutralization in which the migrants engaged—“denial of injury.”
5 DENIAL OF INJURY : “WE ONLY COME TO WORK; WE DON’T COME TO HARM ANYONE”
“Denial of injury” is another classic neutralization technique delineated by Sykes and Matza (1957) and focuses on the extent of harm or injury caused by the act of noncompliance. In the focus group discussions, this form of “denial” emerged in response to two different sets of questions. The first line of inquiry was in the form of a follow-up question in response to the migrants’ repeated reference to “necessity” in explaining their migration decision, as discussed above. The second line of inquiry directly asked the migrants to share their views about the common critique marshaled by some observers that unauthorized migrants were hurting American workers by lowering wages and taking away their jobs.
When the migrants were asked whether their proffered reason for unauthorized migration, “necessity,” justified any and all forms of legal noncompliance, they were unwavering in their view that “crimes” and other types of violation, if they involved some form of injury to third parties, could not be justified even in situations of dire
5 Denial of victim is another common neutralization technique (Sykes and Matza 1957). Sometimes offenders admit that their actions cause harm but neutralize moral indignation by denying the victim—for instance, by claiming that the victim acted improperly and thus does not deserve the victim status. I characterize the migrants’ accounts here as denial of injury rather than denial of victim, because for the most part, their accounts do not acknowledge any harm to a third party resulting from their action.
26 poverty and familial need. Rosa’s declaration, “We only come to work; we don’t come
to harm anyone,” for example, was a common refrain among the migrants. There are two closely related ideas implicit in Rosa’s declaration that merit further discussion.
First, of paramount importance in the minds of the migrants is that the work in
which they engaged once they successfully entered the United States was “legal”
(disregarding that the mere act of working without authorization is considered “illegal”
under the law) and therefore, it was not to anyone’s detriment. In short, the migrants
assessed harm by the substantive nature of the work they performed once in the United
States. Rafael explains it this way:
It’s more or less about the work. Who’s going to fix the street? Make a house? Make a deck or do a good paint job? Always legally, you work legally, in an honorable way. I work legally and honorably. Yes.
Other migrants, like Fernando, emphasized that their work benefited, not harmed, the
United States on the whole:
We are not going to steal, or kill; instead it’s the Latino who has helped to make the United States, because the United States is now made up mainly of Latinos. Sixty to seventy percent, I believe are foreign Latinos; the Anglosaxons are few. It’s the Latinos who have helped develop the country.
The second important idea implicit in Rosa’s declaration above is that standing in
sharp contrast to immigration law are laws prohibiting behavior that is self-evidently
harmful or “criminal.” The distinction that the migrants make here is in line with the
long-standing distinction in Anglo-American law between actions that are deemed malum in se versus malum prohibitum. Some actions are malum in se—wrong in themselves, such as murder, rape, and theft. While these actions are formally prohibited by law, their wrongness exists independently of legislative prohibition. In contrast, acts considered
27 malum prohibitum are “wrong” merely because the government proclaims these actions to be wrong. This distinction is made evident in the following statements by Ruben and
Luis, respectively:
Immigration law is different from other laws. Immigrants who come to work should not be compared to those who kill or those who steal. It’s with those that sell drugs or who crash cars they have the right to punish them in jail. But they [the U.S. government] are catching those of us who only cross the border and they are jailing us (Ruben).
Some come to rape a woman or come to steal or others come to mess around. But I didn’t come with that idea, I come to work, I have my employers. I work and I send money back to my country like I’m telling you—to pay the debt I owe to the bank (Luis).
Given this distinction between violation of immigration law and other laws, one migrant explained that a more accurate way to describe border crossing, then, was to say that one was merely “tricking” the border patrol.
The second way in which the “denial of injury” neutralization emerged from the focus group discussions was in response to a line of questioning about whether unauthorized migrants were displacing native workers in the United States. When asked what they thought about the argument advanced by some observers that unauthorized migrants hurt American workers by taking away their jobs, the migrants painted a distinct, rather unflattering, portrait of American workers; to be more precise, working- class Americans who might compete for low-status jobs with unauthorized migrants. In
Luis’ words:
They [Americans] think that we are going to take their jobs. But they don’t like to work, they are perfectly lazy. They are only receiving money from the government. Blacks as well as Whites hardly work. You never see them washing dishes, or working in the yards. . . . I worked for a long time in the cleaning business; they [Americans] never work in cleaning. In the fields, I have never seen them working in the fields either. But, in maintenance, in store maintenance,
28 it’s always the Mexicans . . . cleaning bathrooms, washing windows, all of that, washing cars . . . the gringos never do that kind of work.
If American workers were “perfectly lazy,” unauthorized workers were hard-working by contrast, as Rigo makes plain:
White people feel displaced by us, but it’s not for something that we do wrong, it’s because we do things right and with effort.
Interestingly, the migrants’ talk betrayed a particular understanding and acceptance of racial hierarchy in the American labor market, with Whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom. For example, the migrants talked about their willingness to take on jobs that “not even Black people want to do.” Furthermore, Blacks were often singled out and stereotyped as welfare recipients, presumably waiting for handouts rather than seeking work. Such internalization of racial stereotypes and imagined racial hierarchy by newcomers who have yet to be assimilated into U.S. society is a testament to the continuing salience of race in American life, and to an understanding of the American racial hierarchy that is international in its reach. .
In summary, the migrants denied potential injury resulting from their presence in the United States by first, focusing on the “legal” and “honorable” nature of the work in which they engaged once they entered the United States; and second, by drawing a fundamental distinction between immigration law and other laws—particularly criminal law—that prohibited conduct for which victims clearly existed. As Rosa declared: “We know well and before hand that we are violating the law in crossing over here without papers. But in our conscience, it’s not bad because it’s not a crime that we are committing.” When confronted with the proposition that American workers were
29 possible “victims” of unauthorized migration, the migrants were emphatic that American
workers could not claim injury, as they did not want the low-wage, low-status jobs that
the migrants were willing to take on.
CONDEMNATION OF THE CONDEMNERS: TWO “CRITIQUES” OF THE U.S. IMMIGRATION SYSTEM
Another form of neutralization that Sykes and Matza delineate is referred to as
“condemnation of the condemners.” Instead of focusing on their own actions, individuals
engaged in this neutralization shift the focus of attention to the motivations or behaviors
of the people expressing disapproval. As it emerged in the focus group discussions,
“condemnation of the condemners” focused on what the migrants perceived as two
fundamentally unfair aspects of the U.S. immigration system: (1) privileging of the
wealthy and lighter-skinned migrants; and (2) hypocrisy and arbitrariness apparent in the system.
Class and Race Bias
One of the questions that was posed during the focus group interviews was whether the migrants had ever applied for a visa to enter the United States, and if not, why not. In response to this question, the migrants offered a strikingly uniform narrative that revealed a great deal about their understanding of the U.S. immigration system. In the view of the migrants, visas were reserved only for the rich, as Rigo learned by word of mouth:
In Mexico, I rented from a person who has a visa. The lady told me that it’s impossible that they will give me a visa because they will conduct an investigation of you. In Mexico, they investigate you to see what properties you own. And you have to own a lot of properties in Mexico, like a home or a business; you understand? And money, and accounts—good bank accounts; I’m
30 talking about 100,000 pesos. I guess a person . . . that rents in Mexico, who doesn’t have money, or properties, they don’t give them a visa.
Other migrants, such as Miguel, reached the same conclusion through personal experiences of their own:
Yes I tried. I found out that they were charging me a lot. They told me to present three forms of identification and 500 thousand lempiras. And we’re talking about a great deal of money that back in that time was hard to come by. And they asked me for 300 thousand lempiras on the side. With those two things they would give me the visa. And I didn’t even have food to eat. So then a man, an American, came out [of the consulate office] and asked, “Do you have everything you need here?” And I told him no. There was a long line of people. And he was asking, do you have what you need here? No. And you? No. And everyone that said no, he would give them a ticket. And that ticket was so that when you arrived at the door, they would say okay, you can’t get a visa. From that moment on was when I began to think of another way . . . of fixing my debt, the poverty, the wish to come. I wanted to work to make money.
For those who had applied for a visa and were denied, the common perception was that the government appeared to be collecting enormous fees for the application process and then inevitably denying them the visa. Manuel explains:
So . . . I was there [at the consulate office] and well, I had made some money for the [visa] application, but I didn’t get it. See, in Guatemala, you go and wait in line with maybe 1000 other people. Out of those 1000 people they give out maybe 20 visas. So, in reality how much money is immigration collecting from those people?
Furthermore, there was a prevailing sense that the U.S. immigration system was nothing more than a lucrative “business” enterprise, one in which the government profited off of the backs of poor people. In the words of Sigfredo:
Ok, well, I applied the first time in my country. And well, I was denied. . . . It’s a business to get here into the United States. Thousands and millions of people present themselves annually. And out of those, three or four are granted. But what happens? That amount you pay, they don’t give back to you. And it’s the
31 same case, when I presented my visa application, they collected 50 just to tell me no. It’s a business, that’s all. It’s a business. Because I applied and they charged me. There needs to be a rule for those that can’t pay—if you’re not accepted, your money gets returned.
Of note here is that the type of visa to which the migrants are referring—the only type that is potentially available to them under the circumstances—is a tourist visa.6
Tourist visas are valid only for a limited period of time, typically a few months, and it does not authorize the visa-holder to engage in work in the United States. Thus, from the standpoint of the migrants, attempting to obtain such a visa was not only futile, as it requires a showing of substantial assets on the part of the migrant, it was also foolish because even if one were granted such a visa, it would be only for a very short period of time for one to “spend money in the United States, not to work,” as one focus group participant put it. Yair explains it this way:
In my town many people go as undocumented immigrants because it’s too expensive [to get a visa]. For the visa you pay 10,000. You can spend that and you still have to come back, so most people think it’s better to pay a coyote to . . . well, to stay as long as you need.
Other migrants described the U.S. immigration system as akin to a “lottery,” something that only the lucky few “won”—assuming they even had the necessary resources to enter themselves into the game in the first place. As José notes:
6 Some migrants are eligible for a family-based immigrant visa if they have a relative residing in the United States who is a permanent resident or a U.S. citizen; however, even for those migrants who have such relatives, there are two hurdles they face that make this an impractical or unrealistic option for most migrants: (1) the law requires that the relative who is willing to sponsor the migrant demonstrate adequate income or assets to support the intending immigrant, and (2) the waiting period for the visa to become available may be extremely long, because family-preference immigrant visa cases are in numerically limited visa categories.
32 I knew that it was very hard to get a visa. But there must be people who won it, just like people win the lottery. And I heard that out of a hundred maybe one came out with a visa. It was a lie that the visa was given to those who needed it the most. The visa is for the rich, for the tourist; for poor people there’s no such thing.
Consistent with the view that the U.S. immigration system was a lottery, the word “luck”
featured prominently in the migrants’ discussions. Manuel, for example, declares:
In Guatemala you pay about 1,000 quetzales, about 200 dollars to apply for a visa . . . But they don’t give it to you, it’s all luck!
In short, the migrants lamented the futility, if not the absurdity, of applying for a
visa to enter the United States. In their minds, the reason that compelled them to seek
entry into the United States—lack of jobs and economic resources—is precisely the reason why they were not eligible for a visa. The perception that the system unfairly privileged the rich and operated as a business that practically extorted from those who could least afford to pay, speaks volumes about the ways in which the migrants view the legitimacy—or lack thereof—of the system. The view of the U.S. immigration system as a lottery in which the migrants’ fate is determined by “luck” rather than by a predictable and consistent set of rational rules, is also revealing in what it shows about the failure of the system to engender trust.
There is yet another way in which the migrants view the U.S. immigration system that suggests that from their standpoint, the system does not operate fairly and neutrally, as rational legal authority ought to. According to the migrants, not only did the U.S. immigration system favor the rich, it also discriminated based on skin color. On the one hand, many respondents had a relatively sanguine view of U.S. border patrol agents as individuals in terms of their treatment of unauthorized migrants. A common refrain in
33 describing U.S. border patrol was that there were “good” people and “bad” people. For
example, in response to the question whether U.S. border patrol treated all migrants the
same regardless of their sex, race, and country of origin, many migrants responded as
Rigo did:
It’s just like everything else. There’s good people . . . and there’s bad people. It’s like everything else. It all depends on the person you get. Because there’s some whites who are racist . . . completely racist and hates Mexicans. Then there are whites who are good. There are also racist Latinos, there’s all kinds. In immigration, you find one of everything. Like you can find a white guy who’s really nice and gives you water, something to eat . . . you can also find a white guy who is racist, treats you bad, pushes you, treats you bad. There’s everything at the border.
There was thus a concerted effort on the part of the migrants to resist stereotyping U.S.
border patrol agents, just as they did not wish to be stereotyped. Efrén’s talk is
illustrative of this point:
Yes, it also depends on the person. Not every person is the same. I mean not every Iraqi is a terrorist and not every Mexican is a drug dealer. Nor are all Whites racists, not all. There’s good and bad people.
On the other hand, there was a shared understanding that migrants from Latin
America were at a significant disadvantage within the system as a whole. Roberto
describes the nature of this disadvantage in terms of their inability to blend in with White
Americans at the border:
It has been shown that there are illegals from France or from other countries and immigration, they don’t check them; they only chase the Mexican and the blond is there, they don’t have papers. Even the Mexican, if he’s blond they won’t inspect him.
Many other migrants echoed this sentiment, claiming that their ability to live and
work without authorization in the United States depended heavily on being able to “mix”
34 with or “pass” as White Americans. Ricardo explains how Canadians, for example, face
a different set of opportunities in the United States:
Well, there is racism. . . . There are many Canadians that are working here illegally and nothing is ever said to them. I know Canadians who come here to work, they come to New York, Chicago, different places. But they [U.S. immigration] never say anything to them. . . . They can mix with Americans. A dark person will always be discriminated.
It is important to stress here that while there was a lot of talk about Europeans and
Canadians in these discussions, it is not necessarily the country or the region of origin, as
much as the skin color, that mattered. Rosario’s story makes clear the workings of race
in the United States:
I have an uncle who came to Las Vegas and has white skin. And at the time, he was working at a restaurant with my brother. It’s only the brown people that they were chasing, and my uncle remained because he says, “we’re all illegals and only because I have white skin,” and his wife has white skin, they didn’t detain him.
If White immigrants or White-looking immigrants were perceived as receiving preferential treatment, the group that was singled out as receiving the worst treatment were Latin Americans—Mexicans in particular. In addition to their skin color that made them easy targets of discrimination, there was a sense that migrants from Latin America were targeted also because of their large and growing presence in the U.S., which induced fears of “cultural invasion” among Americans. Ricardo puts it this way:
What happens is that the United States wants to have control over our race since we’re invading their soil. California is eighty percent Latino. Arizona is sixty- five percent. In Texas we’re talking about a population that is eighty percent Hispanic—they are now moving further north; they are leaving their lands more and more each day. The Anglosaxons, the whites, there are less of them every day and they’re worried because we’re becoming the majority. We are changing their culture. We speak Spanglish. We are influencing the entire system because
35 there are more of us. So now what they want to do is implement their laws on us. How can they do that? By making anti-immigrant laws that will reduce our population. That’s what I think.
In sum, according to the migrants, if wealth is a prerequisite to entering the
United States legally, skin color is critical, if not determinative, in being able to
successfully enter the United States without authorization and to evade enforcement once
inside the United States. These perceptions reveal a keen sense of understanding about
the continuing salience of race in American life and how racial categorization permeates
the migrants’ interactions and experiences within the U.S. immigration system.
Hypocritical and Arbitrary System
The final form of “condemnation of condemners” that emerged during the focus group discussions involved two recurring critiques of the U.S. immigration system. The first of these critiques charges that the U.S. immigration system operates in a way that is hypocritical, and the second claims that the system is arbitrary in how it grants admission and work opportunities to certain groups but not others. I take up each of these themes in turn below.
First, the migrants were well aware that immigration policy in the United States had become increasingly more exclusive and strict in recent years; yet, they believed that in reality, Americans actually needed and wanted a continuing flow of unauthorized migrants. In essence, what the migrants argued was that since unauthorized migrants formed the backbone of the American economy, the tougher laws were essentially a ruse.
We previously encountered a variant of this view in connection with the “denial of injury” neutralization, in which the migrants argued that they were not harming or displacing American workers because they performed essential work that native workers
36 were not willing to do. A similar argument emerged again, this time in the context of discussions about the U.S. government’s attempt to impose stricter laws to deter unauthorized migration. For example, Rubén and Rigo, respectively, offer the following argument:
Immigration will never end like that [by passing harsher laws]. . . . If they [U.S. government] wanted they would have already put every wall from corner to corner, but they don’t want to for this reason: that we are the cheap labor (Rubén).
The government will never do it [deport all unauthorized migrants] because of the economy . . . even if news came out saying that they are going to deport us, they’ll deport a few, but not all, because the U.S. economy would collapse then (Rigo).
When probed why, if the United States was in such need of unauthorized migrants, the government did not make it easier for them to work legally, the migrants observed that denying them legal status served the useful function of maintaining the existing power relations:
Oscar: They don’t give us papers because if they did give us papers . . . It’s wouldn’t be the same . . .
Moderator: It wouldn’t be the same because you wouldn’t work as hard?
Rigo: It’s wouldn’t be the same because we would crush the entire world.
Josué: We would want better jobs.
Oscar: Give us papers, we’re going to want to be even managers!
What is interesting here is that these migrants are, in effect, advancing a criticism that some of our own politicians have articulated about our immigration system. Ross
Romero, a senator from Utah, for example, recently described the two-mindedness of our system in this way: “On one hand this nation puts out a no trespassing sign, you are not
37 welcome and on the other hand, we put out a help wanted sign” (Pyrah 2008). The migrants’ talk showed that this apparent hypocrisy is not lost on them, and that they are well aware of the gap between tough political rhetoric and the reality of a U.S. economy that has come to depend so heavily on the cheap labor of unauthorized migrants.
Finally, there was a prevailing sense that U.S. immigration law was unfair because it arbitrarily granted greater opportunities for certain national-origin groups based on what the migrants perceived as constantly changing international politics that were capricious and difficult to comprehend. Rigo, for example, points out that
Salvadorans received exemption from deportation, purportedly because El Salvador had supported the United States during the U.S.-Iraq War:7
It’s unfair. I’m going to tell you why it’s unfair. I don’t know if you have seen the news that the President from El Salvador sided with the U.S. in the war against Iraq. He sent soldiers and said that . . . that there wasn’t going to be any deportations of Salvadorans from the U.S. . . . Mexico didn’t do that and there are no papers for us.
Rigo then proceeds to observe, “Bush leaves and another one comes in . . . then, another law.” The implication is that U.S. immigration law is at the mercy of political whim, implemented in accordance with political expediency of whichever party happens to be in power at a given point in time. Indeed, immigration scholars have made note of this very aspect of the U.S. immigration system. Mountz et al. (2002:336), for example, argues,
7 In 1990, the U.S. government enacted a statute that conferred on Salvadoran asylum applicants a temporary protective status (formally, TPS), which allowed them to reside and work in the country on a limited basis (see generally Coutin 1998; Weitzhandler 1993). Since then, the U.S. government has continued to extend TPS to additional Salvadorans entering the United States. El Salvador has maintained a troop presence in Iraq since 2003 in support of the United States. In February 2006, the Bush Administration rewarded that support for the war effort by extending the TPS of eligible Salvadoran migrants living in the United States (Ribando 2006:5).
38 “[t]hat the U.S. government treats immigrating groups differentially is apparent in even
the briefest sketch of some recent decisions,” from the treatment of Cubans during the
Mariel Boatlift to the granting of amnesty to Nicaraguans in 1997.
Finally, the other aspect of the U.S. immigration system that the migrants found
arbitrary related to how the U.S. granted asylum to certain groups based on distinctions
that did not seem valid in the migrants’ eyes. This may be surprising, given that asylum
is often considered to be one of the more liberal components of the American
immigration system. But from the migrants’ perspective, there was no material
difference between them and migrants from Cuba or China, for example, who were
fleeing political or religious persecution: Just as those migrants were victims of
circumstances not of their own making, they were also blameless victims of larger forces
at play in their home countries (e.g., poverty and lack of economic opportunities). As the
focus group participants noted, in both cases people were being forced to leave their
countries of origin out of “necessity,” a concept that I discussed in detail earlier in the
paper in the context of the migrants’ use of another neutralization technique, “denial of
responsibility.”
In brief, the migrants’ “condemnation of condemners” involved two trenchant
critiques of the U.S. immigration system: First, the migrants focused on what they
perceived as unfair class and race bias implicit in the system. Second, the migrants
characterized the workings of the system as hypocritical and arbitrary. It is not clear how
the migrants have come to develop these views, but what is somewhat surprising is that these views appear to echo, in great many ways, the criticisms that American liberal elites and pro-immigrant advocates have advanced against the U.S. immigration system.
39 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have analyzed several major types of neutralizations that current and prospective unauthorized migrants employ to justify their acts of legal noncompliance with U.S. immigration law. What do these migrants’ accounts tell us about their legal consciousness? It is tempting to conclude that above all else, their legal consciousness is characterized by what Ewick and Silbey (1998:48-49) call “against the law.” To be sure, in their “critique” of the U.S. immigration system (i.e., “condemnation of condemners”), the migrants question the legitimacy of the system by suggesting that
U.S. immigration law is rife with subjectivity and inequities that work to the advantage of those in power. This stance closely echoes what Ewick and Silbey (1998:28) describe when they write about individuals who stand “against the law”: “Rather than objective, legality is understood to be arbitrary and capricious. Unwilling to stand before the law and unable to play with the law, people act against the law . . . people talk about the ruses, tricks, and subterfuges they use to appropriate part of the law’s power.” To so conclude here, however, is to ignore the contradictions and complexities inherent in the migrants’ legal consciousness.
Certain aspects of the migrants’ narratives reveal perceptions about the law that are consistent with Ewick and Silbey’s conception of “before the law” consciousness, in which individuals are “awed by its majesty” and do not question its legitimacy. The migrants take for granted that nation states ought to be able to control their borders and to restrict migration as they see fit in order to protect their citizens. In line with this assumption, when the migrants were asked what they would want in an “ideal” alternative to the current system, their proposals were quite modest. For the most part,
40 the migrants simply wanted to be granted an opportunity to enter the United States temporarily as guest workers with legal work permits, and then to be allowed to return to their homes.8 The following proposal by Dany is representative of what many other migrants articulated:
A temporary visa . . . for a year and a half just to work. And then after that time they can deport you. When you go to the United States, you have a goal and those goals can be achieved in short time . . . . We don’t want a house with ten stories, limousines, cooks; we just want something little that would be sufficient enough to give back to our families. There should be temporary visas and the person that goes illegally should be sent to prison. Because the people who should go are the ones who go for necessity, and those who go for drugs and alcohol should stay in their countries.
In these discussions, many of the migrants also pointed out that the U.S. government ought to screen those seeking entry more carefully in order to admit only the
“good” people. This insistence is borne out of recognition that just a few “bad apples” could cause much ill will towards all migrants. Sigfredo suggests:
I think that . . . there needs to be a work permit. For a certain period of time. But every person that comes to this country needs to have documentation, a certificate of good conduct from their countries. . . . to prevent entry if he’s a criminal or a robber.
Ricardo offers a similar suggestion:
I would create a registry and record who comes here with intentions to work and who comes with the intention to cause the country harm. That way, there would be more control and in the end it would benefit the economy and the police in regards to all these people.
8 One migrant cleverly suggested that the exorbitant fees that they now pay the coyotes (human smugglers) to cross the border should be given to the U.S. government instead to process the issuance of these temporary work permits.
41 In short, the migrants did not call for a radical overthrow of the existing system.
On the contrary, they acknowledged that national borders were important and voiced desires to be fully included in the community governed by law. In this sense, the migrants’ legal consciousness betrays the far-reaching power of legality to shape and constrain people’s basic conception of what is possible and desirable, even as they challenge and question its perceived oppressive underpinnings. As Engel (1998:134) writes: “Even when relatively powerless persons adopt a counterhegemonic view of the world . . . they construct it around the cultural shapes and forms that law helps to create.”
At the same time, the migrants’ accounts also reflect a “with the law” consciousness. As Ewick and Silbey (1998:28) describe it, “with the law” consciousness views the law as a game or “a terrain for tactical encounters,” in which legal rules are perceived to be malleable. The legal system is considered “an arena of contest.” As discussed above, the migrants likened the U.S. immigration system to a “business” or a
“lottery” in the course of explaining why they did not apply for a visa to enter the United
States. As a “business,” the system is seen as devoid of a core organizational feature— neutrality—that legitimates legal institutions. As a “lottery,” the system is stripped of yet another important legitimating feature of legal institutions—rationality. In either case, legal encounters are experienced more as a “game,” and law is seen as “common rather than hallowed, vulgar rather than magisterial” (Ewick and Silbey 163). It is not surprising that the migrants articulate this view of the law given that their encounters with the U.S. border patrol are often of ritualized cooperation and routinization that give primacy to everyday realities of the border, rather than formal demands of the written law. For example, Ponciano explains:
42 They [U.S. border patrol] caught us three times. The first time they were deporting us, they didn’t take us back because there weren’t enough people to complete the plane flight. And they asked me, “Are you willing to return to your country?” I told them, “Umm, if you plan on taking me there, I can take myself . . . and later, they told me: “Work for it. Someday you’ll come to pass.” So I worked for it and we crossed over to here.
In summary, my analysis of the focus group data shows that first, justificatory narratives are prevalent, easily accessible, and not mere artifacts of the focus group process. Second, these justificatory narratives reveal a great deal about the tensions and complexities inherent in the migrants’ legal consciousness and their sense of agency.
Specifically, the findings suggest that the legal consciousness of current and prospective unauthorized migrants is at once one of conformity and acquiescence, as well as resistance and critical awareness.
The multi-faceted nature of the unauthorized migrants’ legal consciousness defies facile generalizations and leaves open a great deal of room for debate over when, how, and under what conditions unauthorized migrants’ “everyday resistance” in the form of border crossing might transform itself from “negative resistance” to “positive resistance.”9 According to McCann and March (1995:230), negative resistance involves
“an unwillingness to accept the terms of the dominant order; its manifestations are . . . refusals, evasions, dodges, and deceits.” Affirmative resistance, in contrast, “entails
9 Scott (1985:xvi), in his study of Malaysian peasants, describes “everyday resistance” as “ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.” While unauthorized migration is certainly not “everyday” in the sense of banal or trivial (migrants often undertake enormous risks and hardship in crossing the border), it is clearly a form of “self-help” among the poor that evades any direct or symbolic confrontation with authority.
43 efforts by subaltern groups either to renegotiate the terms of dominant power relations or to construct anew separate, alternative forms of practical activity.”
On the one hand, the 2006 protests that mobilized thousands of immigrants, including unauthorized migrants, in opposition to the proposed changes to immigration law attest to the possibility of mobilizing unauthorized migrants in the type of “positive resistance” for change that McCann and March (1995) envision. On the other hand, as
Abrego (2011) points out, first generation unauthorized migrants’ fear of deportation is a distinct and significant barrier to mobilization and claims-making; thus, “[m]obilizing them into collective claims-making activities such as protests, marches, and other public and visible actions is likely to require massive organizing campaigns that guarantee anonymity and safety from deportation.”
A successful mobilization of unauthorized migrants might also depend on the extent to which various forms of neutralizations that the migrants employ to justify their acts of legal noncompliance can be incorporated into the framing of collective action.
Framing refers to “meaning work—the struggle over the production of mobilizing and counter-mobilizing ideas and meaning” (Benford and Snow 2000:613). As I have argued, neutralizations are important “meaning work” for unauthorized migrants that allow them to legitimate their presence in the host society despite their violation of the law that excludes them from formal membership. Giving public voice to these privately- held self understandings may be a critical mobilizing tool, insofar as a sense of rightful belonging might be an important predicate for engagement in collective action.
One important line of inquiry for future research relates to how the various neutralizations that I have explored in this paper might inform the daily lives of
44 unauthorized migrants in the United States. While I have examined a particular facet of the migrants’ legal consciousness vis-à-vis the neutralizations they employ to justify their legal noncompliance, this study does not make any claims as to the significance of such neutralizations on the day-to-day experiences of the migrants. Addressing this topic might entail asking such questions as, how does the migrants’ view of “necessity” and familial need as they relate to the “denial of responsibility” and “appeal to higher loyalties” neutralization shape their decision to seek public services in the United States?
How does the migrants’ particular view of American workers latent in the “denial of injury” neutralization affect their workplace interactions? A systematic investigation of these and other related questions promise to deepen our understanding of how unauthorized migrants perceive themselves, their relationships to others, and their available options as unauthorized migrants in the United States.
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51 Table 2.1. Aggregate Characteristics of Focus Group Participants
Day Labor Migrant Center All Focus Characteristics Focus Groups Focus Groups Groups (Number of (Number of (Number of participants) participants) participants)
Gender Male 0.79 (27) 0.83 (25) 0.81 (52) Age (years) Mean 39.93 29.97 35.19 Marital Status Married 0.35 (12) 0.37 (11) 0.36 (23) Number of Children Mean 2.56 1.87 2.23 Education (years) Mean 6.11 7.69 6.86 Number of Family in U.S. Mean 3.24 6.11 4.53 Total number of crossings Mean 1.52 2.13 1.81 Length of stay in U.S.
(years) Mean 4.98 2.35 3.75 Ever applied for a visa Yes 0.15 (5) 0.13 (4) 0.14 (9) Plans to return home Yes 0.68 (23) 0.97 (29) 0.81 (52) Country of Origin El Salvador 0.00 0.13 (4) 0.06 (4) Guatemala 0.15 (5) 0.03 (1) 0.09 (6) Honduras 0.09 (3) 0.33 (10) 0.20 (13) Mexico 0.71 (24) 0.50 (15) 0.61 (39) Peru 0.06 (2) 0.00 0.03 (2) Total 34 30 64
52 Table 2.2. Characteristics of Focus Group Participants by Site
Day Labor Focus Groups Migrant Center Focus Groups (Number of participants) (Number of participants) Ciudad Agua Mountain San Mountain Santa Altar Oakland Juarez El Paso El Paso Prieta Characteristics View Francisco View Monica Sonora CA Chihuahua Texas Texas Sonora CA CA CA CA Mexico Mexico Mexico Gender Male 0.70 (7) 0.75 (3) 1.00 (9) 0.57 (4) 1.00 (4) 1.00 (8) 0.80 (8) 0.50 (3) 1.00 (3) 1.00 (3) Age (years) Mean 36.90 48.75 50.52 30.71 34.25 29.63 25.20 35.33 37.00 29.00 Marital Status Married 0.50 (5) 0.50 (2) 0.33 (3) 0.29 0.00 0.50 (4) 0.30 (3) 0.17 (1) 0.33 (1) 0.67 (2) Number of Children Mean 0.33 4.00 3.75 0.86 0.00 1.38 1.70 3.17 1.67 1.33 Education (years) Mean 5.39 2.50 4.88 7.43 11.00 6.63 8.60 6.20 7.33 10.33 Number of Family in U.S. Mean 5.30 1.00 2.11 3.14 2.50 4.00 3.88 4.83 16.67 9.00 Total number of crossings Mean 1.50 1.25 2.00 1.33 1.00 0.13 3.50 3.00 3.00 0.33 Length of stay in
U.S. (years) Mean 2.56 9.44 4.55 2.81 11.25 0.00 4.23 1.53 5.52 0.86 Ever applied for a visa Yes 0.00 0.00 0.33 (3) 0.14 (1) 0.25 (1) 0.13 (1) 0.10 (1) 0.33 (2) 0.00 0.00 Plans to return home Yes 0.80 (8) 0.50 (2) 0.78 (7) 0.57 (4) 0.50 (2) 1.00 (8) 0.90 (9) 1.00 (6) 1.00 (3) 1.00 (3) Country of Origin El Salvador 0.38 (3) 0.10 (1) Guatemala 0.10 (1) 0.50 (2) 0.11 (1) 0.25 (1) 0.10 (1) Honduras 0.33 (3) 0.63 (5) 0.30 (3) 0.67 (2) Mexico 0.90 (9) 0.50 (2) 0.44 (4) 0.86 (6) 0.75 (3) 0.50 (5) 1.00 (6) 1.00 (3) 0.33 (1) Peru 0.11 (1) 0.14 (1) Total 10 4 9 7 4 8 10 6 3 3
53 3. Moral Agency in Unauthorized Migration: An Analysis of Legal Values of Prospective Migrants
INTRODUCTION
To state the obvious, unauthorized migration is a violation of U.S. federal law. In public discourse and in political rhetoric, it is hardly possible to discuss unauthorized migration without being reminded of this fact. Surprisingly, however, existing theories of international migration are notable for their lack of explicit consideration of the legal context in which unauthorized migration takes place. For example, leading theories of international migration (for a recent review, see Jennissen 2007; Massey et al. 1993), such as neoclassical economic theory, dual labor market theory, new economics of labor theory, and world systems theory, generally do not make a distinction between authorized and unauthorized migration.1 In effect, what these theories of international migration address is the question of why people migrate, but they do not address the question of why people migrate despite legal prohibitions on their movement.2 Another way to pose the latter question that might bring sharper focus to this significant gap in research is to ask, why do millions of otherwise law-abiding people violate immigration law?
Framed this way, the question calls for a careful consideration of the theoretical approaches and empirical findings from research on legal noncompliance. As I discuss
1 In this paper, I use the terms “illegal” and “unauthorized” interchangeably to refer to international migration that is not permitted by the receiving country. I recognize, however, that there is an ongoing debate about the appropriateness of different terms to describe unauthorized migration and migrants (Anderson and Ruhs 2010; Paspalanova 2008). 2 Here, Denis Wrong’s (1961:183) observation, “answers are meaningless apart from questions,” serves as a useful reminder about the importance of pausing to ask what the questions are that any given social theory is seeking to address.
54 further below, the literature on legal noncompliance has shown that economic calculations are not the only, or even the most important, antecedents of people’s decisions to obey or disobey the law. Instead, research on noncompliance highlights the importance of non-instrumental, normative considerations, such as people’s moral values and beliefs about the legitimacy of legal authority, in decisions to obey or disobey the law
(for a helpful summary, see Tyler and Darley 2000:711-13). While these normative considerations have been examined in many different areas of law, they have not been adequately considered in analyses of unauthorized migration. This paper begins to take up that task by examining, for the first time, law-related attitudes and beliefs (“legal values”) of prospective migrants in Mexico.3
Specifically, this paper addresses the following questions that have been, to date, largely overlooked in research on international migration: (1) Are there differences in legal values between individuals who intend to migrate to the United States illegally versus those who do not intend to migrate? (2) Are these legal values equally salient across different sending communities? (3) Do these legal values, considered together, form distinct attitude classes into which prospective migrants may be classified? If so, what does such a typology reveal about the value systems of unauthorized migrants? I investigate these questions using a unique source of data from a two-wave survey that was administered in eight communities in Mexico in collaboration with the Mexican
Migration Project (MMP).
3 Although unauthorized migration from countries other than Mexico remains a critical yet neglected area of research, the focus on Mexican migration in this study is warranted by the fact that currently they comprise the largest segment—about 60 percent—of the unauthorized population in the United States (see Passel and Cohn 2010).
55 One note of clarification is in order before proceeding. Studies of legal noncompliance often analyze rational economic factors alongside social normative factors in a single model in order to adjudicate the relative influence of these two sets of factors on people’s willingness to obey or disobey the law. Elsewhere, I develop and analyze precisely such a model of unauthorized migration. The main goal of this study, in contrast, is to offer an in-depth analysis of prospective migrants’ legal values and to develop a typology of attitude classes based on those values that might serve as a basis for theory building.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This section begins with a brief review of the literature on legal noncompliance, followed by a discussion of studies in international migration that suggest that values and norms may be important to understanding unauthorized migration. These bodies of research, considered together, lead us to predict that there may be significant differences between the legal values of individuals intending to migrate to the United States illegally versus those who do not intend to migrate. One implication of the theory of culture of migration, however, is that these legal values may not be as salient in communities in which a culture of migration has taken root.
STUDIES OF LEGAL NONCOMPLIANCE
In the socio-legal literature, scholars have approached the question of why people obey or disobey the law primarily in two different ways. The first approach, often referred to as the “social control model” (Tyler and Darley 2000:712), focuses on the economic rationality of individuals by investigating whether and how people’s
56 perceptions about the anticipated gains and losses from legal noncompliance shape their
law-related behavior (see, e.g., Becker 1968; Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978;
Matsueda, Kreager, and Huizinga 2006; Piliavin et al. 1986). These studies generally
have found that classic deterrence factors, such as perceived certainty and severity of
legal sanctions have at best, only a minor influence on people’s decision to obey the law.
Consequently, a second approach to understanding law-abiding behavior has
developed, which focuses on broader, noneconomic determinants of legal
noncompliance. Empirical investigations in this line of research find that normative
considerations, such as threat of social disapproval, personal morality, and perceptions
about the legitimacy of legal authority, are important determinants of individual decisions
to comply with the law (for a review, see McAdams and Rasmusen 2007; Tyler and
Darley 2000:714-17). Importantly, these results are seen even in cases in which one
might expect pure economic cost-benefit calculations to prevail, given the direct and immediate monetary gains associated with noncompliance. In studies about tax noncompliance, for example, a large body of research demonstrates the importance of
personal and social norms in explaining taxpaying behavior (see, e.g., Casey and Scholz
1991; Smith 1992; Wenzel 2004). Likewise, studies of fisheries regulations find a strong
and consistent effect of moral values and social influence on willingness to comply with
quota restrictions (see, e,g., Gezelius 2002; Hatcher et al. 2000).
STUDIES OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
As noted earlier, the normative theory of legal noncompliance has never been applied to analyze unauthorized migration. This is not surprising, given that values and
57 norms have received only limited attention in research on international migration. There
are, however, two notable exceptions. First, in studies of migration intentions,4 a small number of researchers have considered the significance of certain normative factors in shaping people’s decisions to migrate. De Jong et al. (1983), for example, analyze various determinants of migration decisions among Filipinos, including their risk-taking orientation and sense of personal efficacy. Van Dalen, Groenewold, and Schoorl (2005) consider the significance of “modernity values” (as measured by the respondents’ attitude towards young unmarried women migrating abroad for work), as well as their sense of personal efficacy, in explaining emigration out of Africa. Finally, Papapanagos and
Sanfey (2001) find that individuals who support the introduction of a free market in
Albania are more likely to emigrate.
In sum, these studies on migration intentions suggest that a variety of different personal values may play an important role in migration decisions. These studies, however, do not distinguish between authorized and unauthorized migration. As a result, the significance of legal values of prospective migrants in the context of unauthorized migration remains unexplored. The normative theory of legal noncompliance as applied to unauthorized migration, however, would predict that there are significant differences in legal values of those who intend to migrate illegally versus who do not intend to migrate.
4 This line of research is grounded in value-expectancy theory, which originated from studies of internal migration (see De Jong and Fawcett 1981). Here, I do not consider studies of internal migration, as dynamics of internal migration often differ from those of international migration in important respects.
58 The second body of research on international migration that focuses on the role of
normative factors is research on the culture of migration. The basic argument underlying
the culture of migration theory is that in communities with a long history and high
prevalence of out-migration to the United States, international migration changes
individual values and community norms in ways that make such movement increasingly
attractive to an ever-widening circle of individuals within those communities (for a review, see Kandel and Massey 2002). Over time, international migration assumes a taken-for-granted quality, becoming “deeply ingrained into the repertoire of people’s behavior” (Massey et al. 1993:452-53).
Massey, Goldring, and Duran (1994:1500) explain the dynamics underlying culture of migration in this way:
Migrants evince a widely-admired lifestyle that others are drawn to emulate. Although some of its attractiveness is material—based on the ability to consume goods and purchase property—the lifestyle also acquires a strong normative component. In communities where foreign wage labor has become fully integrated into local values and expectations, people contemplating entry into the labor force literally do not consider other options: they expect to migrate frequently in the course of their lives and assume they can go whenever they wish (citations omitted).
Furthermore, according to Kandel and Massey (2002:982), “[f]or young men, especially, migration becomes a rite of passage, and those who do not attempt it are seen as lazy, unenterprising, and undesirable as potential mates.”
What makes migration cultural is that over time, “the aspiration to migrate is transmitted across generations and between people through social networks” (Kandel and
Massey 2002:981). For example, Kandel and Massey (2008) find that children from families in Mexico with a history of migration are often much more likely to aspire to
59 live and work in the United States. These aspirations, in turn, make them less likely to invest in resources for socioeconomic mobility in their own communities (e.g., education), substantially raising the odds that they will actually migrate when they get older. Once these children enter the international migration stream, they then ultimately pass onto their children what Kandel and Massey (2008:1002) call “pro-migration values.”
There are two aspects of the research on culture of migration that makes this literature relevant for this study. First, the culture of migration research shows that in some contexts, international migration may be initiated and perpetuated for reasons that are not purely economic (Massey, Goldring, and Durand 1994:1500). Second, one implication of the research on culture of migration is that when international migration becomes deeply ingrained into community life, individuals may no longer have to “think” deeply about whether to migrate. This is not to say that migration is a hard-wired or an automatic response to a specified set of conditions (Cohen 2004:5). Rather, I predict that in communities in which a culture of migration has taken hold, “pro-migration” values might attenuate the salience of individual legal values in decisions to migrate illegally.
TYPOLOGY
Values operate in concert with one another as part of a larger system of attitudes and beliefs that people possess (Musser and Orke 1992). It is, then, helpful to examine how a constellation of relevant legal values cohere together to produce groupings of individuals who share similar viewpoints. The typology I present below is based on
“empirically grounded types” rather than “ideal types” in the Weberian tradition (Clinard
60 and Quinney [1986] 1994:11).5 This typology will aid us in better understanding how, if at all, unauthorized migrants might differ from non-migrants in their attitudes toward the law and legal authority.
There are many type of legal values, but for purposes of this study, I focus on the following three that are particularly relevant for thinking about noncompliance with immigration law: (1) general attitude toward the law (any law, not just U.S. immigration law); (2) views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority to regulate international migration; and (3) sense of morality about violating U.S. immigration law. As shown in Table 3.1, individuals may be cross classified into one of eight attitude classes, each defined by different scores on variables measuring each of these concepts.
The first concept or latent variable shown in Table 3.1, Obey Rule of Law, captures the first legal value of interest in this study—general attitude toward the law.
Individuals vary in their respect for the rule of law and rigidity with which they believe the law ought to be followed (see Gibson and Caldera 1996). Some people believe that the law ought to prevail without regard to individual circumstances, while others believe that there may be higher moral imperatives that trump legal dictates, and thus violating the law can be justified in certain situations. Following Kohlberg (1973), I refer to the former type of orientation to the law as “conventional” and the latter, “postconventional.”
The second latent variable shown in Table 3.1, Legitimate Authority, relates to individuals’ views about the legitimacy of legal authority in the area of immigration law.
5 Clinard and Quinney ([1986] 1994:11) explain the difference between empirical types and ideal types this way: “Following the lead of Weber, an ideal type is an abstraction that does not necessarily describe concrete cases, but represents possible or even extreme cases. . . . The empirical typology, on the other hand, is composed of types that describe patterns that exist in the real world.”
61 Following Tyler and Huo (2002:xiv), I define perceived legitimacy of authority as “the belief that legal authorities are entitled to be obeyed and that the individual ought to defer to their judgment.” In the context of unauthorized migration, beliefs about whether a foreign nation may limit one’s movement constitute an important basis upon which people make evaluations about the legitimacy of U.S. authority. Some people may believe that governments have a fundamental right as sovereign nations to control and
restrict immigration, while others may believe that governments do not have such rights
to restrict the movement of people across national boundaries.
The third latent variable shown in Table 3.1, Broad Moral Basis, refers to
individuals’ sense of morality about violating immigration law. There are many bases
upon which individuals can make moral assessments about violating U.S. immigration
law. However, my pre-survey fieldwork showed that moral assessments in this context
most frequently turned on whether one believed in a narrowly or a broadly construed
moral exception to the legal injunction against border crossing. Those subscribing to the
narrow exception believe that unauthorized migration is justified only in the case of
family “necessity,” and not pursuit of economic advancement or opportunism generally.
Those subscribing to the broad exception believe that unauthorized migration is justified
not only in the case of family “necessity,” but also in situations in which one desires
economic advancement above and beyond basic survival needs.
Each of these three latent variables has two levels, and thus the resulting typology
contains eight attitude classes. The first four attitude classes are classified conventional,
while the latter four classes are classified postconventional. These two sets of four
classes are identical in nature, save for the general orientation toward the rule of law.
62 One implicit assumption here is that while one’s respect for the rule of law in abstract might generally structure or influence more specific attitudes towards any particular law or law violation, the general orientation is not completely determinative of the more specific attitudes. Thus, it is possible, as with individuals who espouse the conventional ideology, to declare that as a matter of principle, one ought to respect the rule of law, but when inquired about a concrete instance of noncompliance with a particular law, concede that noncompliance may be justified in certain instances.
Below, I briefly discuss four basic ideologies that make up the eight attitude classes. Figure 3.1 schematically illustrates how these four ideologies result from the cross classification of two latent variables, Legitimate Authority and Broad Moral Basis
(conventional-postconventional divide not shown).
FAMILY IDEOLOGY
Individuals in the family ideology class (see Panels A1 and B1, Table 3.1) believe that the U.S. government lacks legitimate authority to control their movement across national boundaries, and subscribe to the narrow moral justification for unauthorized migration (i.e., family necessity). Given that economic “necessity” (however defined) in context of supporting a family was a dominant motif in the current and intended unauthorized migrants’ narratives that emerged during the pre-survey field work of this study, I expect to find many individuals who intend to migrate illegally to subscribe to the postconventional family ideology.
63 POLITICIZED IDEOLOGY
The politicized ideology (see Panels A2 and B2, Table 3.1) differs from the family
ideology in that individuals who subscribe to this ideology believe that not only does the
U.S. government lack legitimate authority to regulate international migration, there exists
a broad moral basis, beyond family necessity, for noncompliance with immigration law.
This ideology, particularly in the postconventional category, can be understood as mapping onto a very liberal end of the spectrum in political attitudes, or perhaps more accurately, embracing the “open borders” position advocated by some liberal egalitarian political philosophers (e.g., Carens 1987, 2000). Given the non-mainstream nature of this ideology, this class is likely to be small, both among those who intend to migrate illegally and those who do not intend to migrate.
DISSONANT IDEOLOGY
The dissonant ideology (see Panels A3 and B3, Table 3.1) evinces a certain level
of dissonance in the sense that while individuals in this class believe in full legitimacy of
the U.S. government to control and restrict immigration, they also carve out a narrow
exception to the legal injunction against border crossing in the case of family necessity.
This ideology, particularly in the conventional category, may be understood as mapping
onto a moderately conservative end of the spectrum in political attitudes. I expect to find
many individuals who do not intend to migrate in the conventional dissonant class. This
is because this class, among all of the eight attitude classes, comes closest to being
characterized as espousing what one might call a “law-and-order” outlook.
64 DISORGANIZED IDEOLOGY
Finally, the disorganized ideology (see Panels D1 and D2, Table 3.1) is labeled so because one would be hard pressed to specify a sensible ideology that accepts full legitimacy of government authority to control and restrict immigration, yet at the same time endorses border crossing in largely unlimited terms. Insofar as legitimacy and morality are theoretically two distinct concepts, these two positions are not necessarily contradictory; however, it is likely that this combination of attitudes reflects a lack of organizing principle. Accordingly, I expect this class to be negligibly small, both among those who intend to migrate illegally and those who do not intend to migrate.
DATA AND METHOD
DATA
Data for this study come from the 2007 and 2008 MMP and Becoming Illegal
Surveys (BIS). I developed the BIS as part of a larger research project on unauthorized migration, and it was administered in collaboration with the MMP in four communities in
Morelos, Mexico, in 2007; and four additional communities in Jalisco and Michoacán,
Mexico, in 2008. Comprehensive documentation on the MMP Survey is available from the MMP website at http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/. The MMP is a bi-national household survey that collects data using a method known as ethnosurvey—a semi-structured interview technique that combines ethnographic and survey methods. Each year, a simple random sample of 150 to 200 households is drawn from a selected number of communities in Mexico (a total of two to five communities) and interviewed during the winter months when most seasonal migrants return from their trips to the United States.
65 Typically, one informant from each household is interviewed, and that informant
provides detailed social and economic information about the household heads, their
spouses, children, and other household members. The MMP also gathers detailed
historical, social, and demographic data on each Mexican community surveyed.
The BIS, unlike the MMP, is an individual survey. I developed the BIS through
two stages of fieldwork. During the first phase, I organized focus groups with two sets of
subject populations in the United States and in Mexico in the spring and summer of 2006.
The first subject group consisted of unauthorized migrants recruited from day-labor
centers and hiring sites in California; the second group consisted of individuals recruited
from migrant centers in the United States (El Paso, Texas) and in Mexico (Ciudad Juarez,
Chihuahua; Agua Prieta and Altar, Sonora). In total, sixty-four migrants from a number
of different countries in Latin America participated in ten focus group interviews.
Insights gained from these interviews guided the design and initial formulation of the survey questions. During the second phase of the pre-survey fieldwork, I pretested the survey instrument in a number of communities in Michoacán and Jalisco, Mexico, with the assistance of the MMP’s field coordinator. The survey was further revised to address the issues that arose during these pretests.
Because the MMP is a household survey and the BIS is an individual survey, I developed separate participation criteria and interview protocols for the BIS in order to administer that survey in an integrated fashion with the MMP Survey. The population of interest in this study consists of men in Mexico who were either in the labor market or were contemplating entering the labor market at the time of the survey. More specifically, in order to participate in the BIS, participants were required to be (1)
66 between 15 and 65 years of age, and (2) currently working in Mexico or intending to
work (either in Mexico or in the United States) within the next year. Because the great
majority of individuals who satisfied the latter criteria in past MMP Surveys were male, I
formally restricted my survey sample to men. Given the intensive time and resource
requirements of the survey process, this restriction was necessary in order to ensure a
sufficiently large number of cases that would be available for analysis.
Within each household, the MMP interviewer first administered the MMP Survey
with a household informant pursuant to the established MMP interview protocol. Upon
completion of the MMP Survey, individual household members who satisfied the
participation criteria for the BIS were then interviewed.6 In all, the 2007 and 2008 MMP
Surveys contain information relating to 8,247 household members from 1,524
households. The refusal rate, as has been the case with previous years of MMP data
collection, was very low in both years: the average refusal rates across the communities
surveyed in 2007 and 2008 were 6.80 percent and 12.88 percent, respectively. A total of
1,878 men from 1,336 households participated in the BIS. The effective sample size for
analysis in this study is 1,629 men. This effective sample size reflects deletion of
missing data and exclusion of the small number of respondents (N=62) who answered
that they intended to go to the United States legally (as legal residents, tourist visa
holders, U.S. citizens, etc.). The respondents intending to go to the United States legally
were excluded from analysis because this group is outside the main theoretical interest of
6 While no individually-identifying information was collected in order to protect the confidentiality of the respondents, each respondent was given a unique identification number that allowed the integration of data from the BIS and the MMP Survey.
67 this study given that unauthorized migration realistically is not within their realm of
possible choices.7
MEASURES
Table 3.2 provides details on the main variables used in my analyses, including
the survey items that measure each of the relevant concepts and the original response
categories that correspond to each survey item.
Intent to Migrate Illegally
The respondents were asked: “Do you intend to go to the U.S. during the next 12
months?”8 If they answered yes, a follow-up question was then asked about the type of documents they intended to use in making the trip. The Intent to Migrate variable was coded as 1 if the respondent intended to cross the border without documents, and 0 otherwise (i.e., do not intend to migrate). Given the relatively sensitive nature of the inquiry about the respondent’s intent to disobey the law, one might ask to what extent these questions may have yielded reliable answers. Based on my personal observations in the field and the past experience of the MMP in collecting similar data, there appears to be little reason to believe that the respondents were less than forthcoming in their
7 It is, of course, possible that some people who responded that they intended to enter the United States legally are potential “visa overstayers”—those who might have the means to obtain valid documents to enter the United States but who intend to overstay their authorized stay and become unauthorized eventually. The survey does not enable a specific identification of this group, but the maximum possible size of this group in the sample (i.e., people who were planning to enter the United States with valid documents, with the exception of U.S. permanent residents and U.S. citizens) is fairly small (N=43). 8 By focusing on the respondent’s intent within a specified time frame, this question seeks to elicit more than just an individual’s general desire for immigration. This question is also framed more concretely than similar questions posed in other surveys such as the Zogby Poll, which asks: “If at this moment, you had the means and opportunity to go live in the U.S., would you go?” (Camarota 2009).
68 answers. For over twenty years, the MMP has been collecting information about the past unauthorized border crossings of the household heads without much difficulty. The
MMP gathers highly detailed information about these crossings, such as the time and place of each crossing, whether a “coyote” (i.e., paid guide) was used and if so, how much was paid, by whom, and the number of apprehensions during each attempted crossing. As Massey (1987:1514) has observed, “[v]erification of these data with knowledgeable informants in the communities revealed practically no falsification of legal status.”9
Legal Values
General attitude. The following items in the BIS capture the respondents’ basic commitment toward the law and legal system generally: “Is it okay to disobey the law when you disagree with it?” and “Is disobeying the law sometimes justified?”
Legitimacy. The following items in the BIS capture the respondents’ views about the legitimacy of legal authority with respect to immigration law: “Should the U.S. government have the right to limit the number of immigrants who can enter the country?”
9 There are several reasons why respondents may not eschew questions about their past border crossing experience or future intentions to cross the border. First, the survey takes place in Mexico and is administered by native Mexican interviewers who are trained at establishing a strong rapport with respondents. Second, as the respondents appear to be well aware, crossing the U.S.-Mexican border without authorization is not a violation of Mexican law, and U.S. legal authorities do not have jurisdiction over Mexican citizens residing in Mexico. Third, the survey does not record any individually-identifying information, and the respondents are reassured that it is not possible to personally identify them through the survey. There is, therefore, little reason for the respondents to fear that they will face legal sanctions for answering the survey questions truthfully. Indeed, none of the MMP interviewers reported any difficulty administering and obtaining responses to questions about the respondents’ border crossing intentions.
69 and “Should Mexicans have the right to enter the U.S. without getting permission from the U.S. government?”
Morality. The following items in the BIS capture the respondents’ sense of morality about violating U.S. immigration law: “Is it okay to enter the U.S. without papers if you need money to support one’s family?” and “What if you have a good job in
Mexico but want to make more money in the U.S., is it okay for you to enter the U.S. without papers?”
Socio-demographic Measures
I consider a basic set of socio-demographic characteristics of respondents that have been shown to be important in predicting the probability of migration from Mexico to the United States in previous studies (see, e.g., Massey et al. 1987; Massey and
Espinosa 1997). These characteristics include: age, household membership status, marital status, education level, and whether the respondent has crossed the border illegally in the past.
METHOD
First, I examine the bivariate statistics to determine whether there are any significant differences in legal values between those individuals who intend to migrate illegally and those who do not intend to migrate. Next, I investigate whether these legal values are less salient in communities with a long history and high-rate of out-migration to the United States. For that analysis, I proceed by examining the migrant prevalence ratio (proportion of adults in the community with migration experience) of each of the eight communities surveyed, as shown in Figure 3.2. Based on this information, I
70 separately examine the bivariate statistics for the “Low-Prevalence Communities” and
“High-Prevalence Communities.”
Finally, I use latent class analysis (LCA) to examine the typology of attitude classes presented earlier. LCA is a statistical method for identifying subtypes of related cases (latent classes) within a population using a set of observed discrete variables
(manifest variables) (Clogg 1995; McCutcheon 1987). These manifest variables are assumed to be imperfect indicators of an underlying latent variable that cannot be directly observed. In short, LCA may be considered a variant of factor analysis for categorical variables.
LCA estimates two main types of parameters: (a) the probability that an individual belongs to a certain latent class, and (b) the conditional probability that an individual of a certain latent class will endorse a certain item as measured by one of the manifest variables used in the analysis. LCA defines latent classes by the criterion of
“conditional independence.” This means that within each latent class, each manifest variable is assumed to be statistically independent of every other variable. In other words, latent classes are defined such that if one removes the effect of latent class membership on the data, all that will remain is randomness (Lazarsfeld and Henry 1968).
Parameters of the LCA model are estimated by maximum likelihood criterion.10
10 Traditional LCA assumes that observations are independent of one another (Henry and Muthén 2010). However, this assumption is not fulfilled when observations are nested (e.g., individuals nested within households; households nested within communities), as is the case in the BIS. Such nested data structures require multilevel techniques (Asparouhov and Muthén 2008; Vermunt 2003, 2008). I explored multi-level LCA but found that these models did not result in improved model fit.
71 I carried out the LCA in this study by fitting the confirmatory model represented in Figure 3.3.11 Under this specification, each latent variable is indexed by two manifest variables, and the association between the manifest variables is presumed to be generated entirely by (a) the association between the latent variables; and (b) the association between each latent variable and its two indicators. The three latent variables in Figure
3.3, each of which has two levels, may be cross-classified to form a single eight-class latent variable (as represented in Table 3.1). I have provided supplementary results on the characteristics of the members of each of the latent classes in the Appendix (Tables
3.A1 and 3.A2).
Table 3.A1 presents the fit statistics for the three confirmatory latent-class models that I investigated. The first model in this table, the “heterogeneous” model, allows the parameters of the latent-class model to vary freely across the two groups, those who intend to migrate illegally and those who do not intend to migrate. This model is equivalent to estimating separate unrestricted latent structure models for each of the two groups. Thus, we cannot be certain that the classes of the first group are the same as those of the second group (McCutcheon 1987:71). In contrast, the second model, the
“partly homogeneous” model, constrains the conditional probabilities to be invariant across the two groups, forcing the eight latent classes to be defined identically across the two groups. In other words, this constraint ensures that the latent classes have the same meaning across the two groups. The last model, the “completely homogeneous” model,
11 Confirmatory LCA requires a priori knowledge on which items are related to which latent variables. In exploratory data analysis, on the other hand, one does not know beforehand which items load on the same latent variable (Magidson and Vermunt 2001).
72 imposes the additional constraint that the sizes of the latent classes be invariant across the two groups.
As shown in Table 3.A3, the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) prefers the partly homogeneous model.12 According to the Index of Dissimilarity (a measure indicating how much the observed and estimated cell frequencies differ), the partly homogeneous model would require nine percent of the sample to be reclassified in order to make the model fit the data perfectly (Vermunt and Magidson 2005). The discussion below is based on estimates from this partly homogenous model.
RESULTS
DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS
I begin by presenting the frequencies on the six survey items for those who intend to migrate illegally and those who do not intend to migrate. Table 3.3 shows that for both groups, the majority of the population view themselves as law-abiding, as evidenced by the respective groups’ answers to the DISOBEY item (0.21 for non-migrants and 0.38 for intended unauthorized migrants). Nonetheless, the difference between the two groups is significant with respect to the DISOBEY item. Likewise, the proportion of the population expressing the belief that “disobeying the law is sometimes justified” is significantly higher for those who intend to migrate illegally to the United States.
The respondents split sharply across the two groups when it came to the two survey items capturing their views about the legitimacy of legal authority. Those who do
12 BIC is based on model log likelihood with a penalty for the number of parameters estimated relative to the sample size. In terms of model comparison, the lowest BIC level indicates a preferred model (Schwarz 1978).
73 not intend to migrate are much more likely to believe that the “U.S. government should have the right to limit the number of immigrants who can enter the country,” and much less likely to believe that “Mexicans should have the right to enter the U.S. without getting permission from the U.S. government.”
Finally, the vast majority of the population in both groups appear to accept some level of justification for border crossing, as evidenced by the large proportion of respondents across both groups agreeing with the statement that “it is okay to enter the
U.S. without papers if you need money to support your family” (0.86 for non-migrants and 0.93 for intended unauthorized migrants). But those who intend to migrate illegally are significantly more likely to also agree with the statement that it is “okay to enter the
U.S. without papers to make more money in the U.S. even with a good job in Mexico.”
Next, in order to determine whether these legal values are less salient in communities with a history and high rate of out-migration to the United States, as the culture of migration theory might predict, I carried out the same set of chi-square tests separately for communities with a low rate of out-migration and communities with a high rate of out-migration. As discussed earlier, Figure 3.2 shows the migrant prevalence ratio of each of the eight communities surveyed. Kandel and Massey (2002: 988-89), in their quantitative study of culture of migration, treat communities with a migrant prevalence ratio in excess of 6 per 100 individuals as high- prevalence communities. For most of the period examined for which the data is available (1950 through 2000), Communities 3, 5, and 6 consistently stand out as having a higher rate of out-migration than the rest of the communities, with a migrant prevalence ratio of greater than 0.06. Following Kandel and
74 Massey (2002), I define Communities 3, 5, and 6 as “High-Prevalence Communities,”
and the rest as “Low-Prevalence Communities.”
As shown in Table 3.4, the chi-square test results for the Low-Prevalence
Communities closely parallel the results I examined earlier with respect to the pooled
sample in which all eight communities were combined. The only exception is the result
corresponding to the NEED item, which is now significant only at p < 0.10. On the
whole, the results for the Low-Prevalence Communities indicate that there are significant
differences in legal values between non-migrants and intended unauthorized migrants. In
contrast, the results for the High-Prevalence Communities show that there are no longer
significant differences between these two groups with respect to measures capturing
personal morality, NEED and MORE. In other words, in communities with a long
history and high rates of out-migration to the United States, respondents are equally
likely to agree—regardless of whether they intend to migrate to the United States illegally—that both family necessity as well as economic aspirations beyond survival needs justify unauthorized migration. In sum, I find partial support for the hypothesis that in communities in which culture of migration likely exists, individual legal values become relatively less salient as migration becomes taken for granted. In the discussion and conclusion section of this paper, I consider some of the theoretical and policy implications of this finding.
Thus far, I have examined the prospective migrants’ legal values separately. To begin to explore legal values as a system of attitudes and beliefs that typify sub-classes of individuals, I turn next to the results of the LCA.
75 LATENT CLASS ANALYSIS
I first consider the conditional probabilities associated with each of the eight latent classes. These are the probabilities that a member of a certain class will endorse a certain survey item. As shown in Table 3.5, the conditional probabilities of each latent class generally are consistent with what one might expect for each of the classes. For example, the model implies that subscribers of conventional family ideology will agree, with probability 0.06, that “it is okay to disobey the law when one disagrees with it”
(DISOBEY), with probability 0.06, that “the U.S. government should have the right to limit the number of immigrants who can enter the country” (LIMIT), and with probability
0.89, that it “it is okay to enter the U.S. without papers if you need money to support your family” (NEED). The remaining conditional probabilities are likewise in line with expectations.
The main parameter estimates of interest are the latent-class probabilities themselves. These estimates, which are reported in Table 3.6 and graphed in Figure 3.4, show which classes are dominant in each of the two groups, non-migrants and intended unauthorized migrants. I focus on three main findings of interest here.
First, individuals who subscribe to the postconventional family ideology make up the largest constituent class for both non-migrants and intended unauthorized migrants alike. Specifically, forty percent of those who do not intend to migrate belong to this latent class, and 71 percent of those who intend to migrate illegally belong to this latent class. That such a large proportion of respondents who do not intend to migrate belong to this latent class is surprising, at least to the extent that we might expect to find a greater
76 proportion of these individuals in the conventional, rather than the postconventional
category.
Second, it is noteworthy that conventional dissonant ideology constitutes the
second most popular ideology among those who do not intend to migrate (36 percent).
Dissonant ideology differs from family ideology in one important respect: those who
espouse dissonant ideology believe the U.S. government has legitimate authority to
control and restrict international migration, whereas those who espouse family ideology
reject this notion. This result suggests that the critical difference between non-migrants and intended unauthorized migrants may stem largely from individuals’ general attitudes towards the law in terms of their respect for the rule of law, and their views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority to control and restrict international migration.
Finally, as expected, those who subscribe to the politicized ideology are a small minority. Indeed, among conventionalists, there are very few to none who espouse the
politicized ideology. Among postconventionalists, only 7 percent and 15 percent of non-
migrants and intended unauthorized migrants, respectively, subscribe to the politicized ideology. An even smaller proportion of both groups subscribe to the disorganized ideology. What is interesting about these results is that in effect, the vast majority of would-be unauthorized migrants do not indiscriminately support all forms of unauthorized migration; rather, their moral support extends only to migration that arises out of “necessity” or the survival needs of one’s family.
77 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The main goals of this study were to examine the differences in legal values
among prospective migrants, and to develop a typology of attitude classes based on these
legal values. I find that individuals intending to migrate illegally are less likely to adhere
to an absolutist view of the rule of law, less likely to respect the legitimacy of U.S. legal
authority to regulate their behavior, and more likely to believe that violation of U.S.
immigration law is morally justified. Obviously, a cross-sectional correlation between
individuals’ legal values and their intent to engage in future border crossing does not
prove a causal relationship (though it is consistent with such a relationship). While I
cannot posit any causality, these findings represent an important first step towards
broadening our understanding of unauthorized migrants as not just economic agents, but
also moral agents.
The second important finding of this study is that consistent with the theory of
culture of migration, some of the legal values—specifically, views about the morality of
violating U.S. immigration law—are less salient in communities with a long history and high prevalence of out-migration to the United States. There are at least two important implications of this finding. First, U.S. immigration and enforcement policy that takes only economic factors into account is likely to be less efficacious than a policy that also takes into consideration legal values of would-be migrants. But even the latter type of policy may have its limits when it comes to migration originating from communities with a culture of migration, given the attenuating effects of “pro-migration values” on individual legal values. Second, it is tempting to take a deterministic view of culture and construe individuals embedded in the culture of migration as overly socialized beings
78 who do not have any choices to make. However, the results of my analysis show that
some legal values continue to be salient even in communities in which the culture of
migration may be pervasive.
Finally, the LCA contributes to the literature in international migration and to
research in legal noncompliance in two important ways. The most common immigrant
typologies found in the current literature on international migration are classifications based on the legal status of immigrants (see, e.g., Jasso and Rosenzweig 1990), their assimilation patterns (see, e.g., Waters 1994), their skill levels (Portes and Rumbaut
1996), or some combination thereof (see, e.g., Portes 1995, 2010). The typology I
present in this paper provides an entirely different, more nuanced approach to classifying
would-be migrants. This approach is valuable because it helps us to understand not
merely how the migrants fit into the existing socio-legal system from a structural vantage
point, but how the migrants themselves understand and make sense of the system and
their choices.
The LCA also extends the research on legal noncompliance in important ways.
Scholars of legal noncompliance have focused largely on individual variables
representing different types of normative values and their effects on people’s willingness
to obey or not obey the law (for a recent review of this research, see Tyler 2009). This
approach has generated significant knowledge about the relative salience of different
types of normative values on legal compliance, but it has also resulted in a too facile and
sometimes a false, dichotomy between those who comply with the law and those who do
not. A consideration of the constellation of legal values of individuals in an integrated
79 fashion allows us to better determine whether and how “law breakers” might or might not
differ from the “law-abiding” population in their overall value systems.
As highlighted above, both intended unauthorized migrants and non-migrants
subscribe most commonly to the postconventional family ideology. This result calls into
question the persistent assumption in our political and public discourse that unauthorized
migrants are more “criminal-minded” than legal immigrants and non-immigrants (see,
e.g., Fukuyama 2010). The assumption that unauthorized migrants are radically different
in their attitudes and beliefs about the law and legal authority has been partly responsible
for many of the anti-immigrant policies that have been enacted in the United States,
including Arizona S.B. 1070, one of the most recent and controversial anti-immigration
bills enacted by a state.13 Demarcating unauthorized migrants as different or “deviant”— as these laws do—serves an important social function of providing communities with an effective point of contrast that strengthens in-group solidarity and helps support existing inequalities (Durkheim [1893] 1982; Erikson [1966] 2005; Merton 1938). The legitimacy of these laws’ larger social function ought to receive greater scrutiny insofar as the fundamental assumption of these laws about unauthorized migrants lacks empirical basis.
While this study could serve as a starting point for many other useful points of
inquiry in future research, I highlight one particularly pressing question that warrants
13 S.B. 1070 was enacted by Arizona State Legislature in April of 2010. It made the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and gave the police broad powers to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. The immediate catalyst for this law was the unsolved murder of a prominent Arizona rancher, for which the community blamed an unauthorized migrant (see, e.g., Myers and Billeaud 2010; Thornburgh 2010; Wood 2010).
80 systematic investigation. Millions of unauthorized migrants find themselves “trapped” in the United States once they enter, despite their intentions and desires to work only temporarily in the United States. This is because first, tough enforcement policies make them loathe to repeat the harsh experience of border crossing by returning home and subsequently attempting another entry; and second, migrants are forced to stay and work longer in the United States in order to recoup the increased costs of border crossing that result from tough enforcement policies (Cornelius 2007:5-6). As Massey, Durand, and
Malone (2002:128-29) write: “A perverse consequence of draconian border enforcement is that it does not deter would-be migrants from trying to enter the country so much as it discourages those who are already here from returning home.” Furthermore, there is growing evidence that unauthorized migration is no longer a localized, but a national, phenomenon, as migrants increasingly settle into new destinations throughout the United
States, beyond traditional gateway cities (see, e.g., Massey 2008; Zúñiga and Hernández-
León 2005).
Given the unauthorized migrants’ increasingly permanent settlement and geographical diversity in the United States, an important question is how the experience of living in the United States might shape their views and attitudes toward the law and legal authority in the long-term and in areas other than immigration law. This is a question of considerable theoretical and practical importance because these views and attitudes are likely to have a significant influence on how unauthorized migrants interact with and navigate various social and economic institutions in the United States. These interactions and encounters, in turn, will play a significant role in not only shaping the life chances and opportunities for unauthorized migrants, but also a variety of social and
81 economic outcomes for their children, many of whom are U.S.-born and thus U.S. citizens (Yoshikawa 2011). At a more general level, an understanding of how the experiences of exclusion and marginalization might impact people’s willingness to defer to legal authority is a question of fundamental importance in understanding social order and governance in democratic societies.
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87
Moral Justification for Unauthorized Migration
Narrow Broad
Illegitimate Family Ideology Politicized Ideology Government
Regulation of
Migration Legitimate Dissonant Ideology Disorganized Ideology
Figure 3.1. Four Ideologies underlying the Eight Latent Classes
88
0.25
0.2 Community 1 Community 2 0.15 Community 3 Community 4
0.1 Community 5 Community 6 Community 7 0.05 Community 8
0 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Figure 3.2. Proportion of Adult Population with Migration Experience
89 Obey Rule of Law Legitimate Broad Moral Authority Basis
Xr Ys Zt
Di Jj Lk Rl Nm Mn
Figure 3.3. Confirmatory Model with Three Latent Variables
90
Not Migrate Migrate
Conventional Postconventional
0.8 0.71 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.36 0.4 0.4 0.3 Proportion 0.2 0.13 0.15 0.06 0.1 0.07 0.03 0.01 0 0.01 0 0.03 0.04 0 0.01 0 Family Politicized Dissonant Disorganized Family Politicized Dissonant Disorganized
Figure 3.4. Eight Latent Classes by Intent to Migrate and Not Migrate Illegally
91 Table 3.1. Typology of Attitude Classes
Two-Level Latent Variables
Obey Rule of Legitimate Broad Moral Law Authority Basis Eight Attitude Classes (X) 1 (Z) 2 (Y) 3
A. Conventional
1. Family Yes No No
2. Politicized Yes No Yes
3. Dissonant Yes Yes No
4. Disorganized Yes Yes Yes
B. Postconventional
1. Family No No No
2. Politicized No No Yes
3. Dissonant No Yes No
4. Disorganized No Yes Yes
Source: BIS 2007, 2008. 1 Notes: Yes = Respondent adheres strictly to the notion of rule of law. 2 Yes = Respondent believes in the legitimacy of U.S. government to restrict immigration. 3 Yes = Respondent believes that there is a broad moral basis for violating U.S. immigration law.
92 Table 3.2. Description of Variables and Corresponding Survey Items
Variable Survey Item Coding
Intent to Migrate Illegally Do you intend to go to the U.S. during 1 = yes, without the next 12 months? documents
If yes, what kind of document will you 0 = no, do not intend to migrate use to go the U.S.?
General Attitude towards Law DISOBEY Is it okay to disobey the law when you 1 = yes; 0 = no disagree with it? JUSTIFIED Is disobeying the law sometimes 1 = yes; 0 = no justified?
Legitimacy of Authority LIMIT Should the U.S. government have the 1 = yes; 0 = no right to limit the number of immigrants who can enter the country? RIGHT Should Mexicans have the right to enter 1 = yes; 0 = no the U.S. without getting permission from the U.S. government? Personal Morality NEED Is it okay to enter the U.S. without 1 = yes; 0 = no papers if you need money to support your family? MORE What if you have a good job in Mexico 1 = yes; 0 = no but want to make more money in the U.S., is it okay to enter the U.S. without papers? Socio-Demographic Variables AGE Respondent’s age Years HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD Respondent is a head of household 1 = yes; 0 = no NEVER MARRIED Respondent’s marital status 1 = never married; 0 = otherwise (married/consensual union/widowed/ divorced/separated) EDUCATION Number of school years completed by Years respondent HAVE BEEN TO THE U.S. Respondent has been to the U.S. 1 = yes; 0 = no ILLEGALLY without documents
Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008.
93 Table 3.3. Descriptive and Bivariate Statistics for Legal Values, Communities 1-8
Intend to Migrate Comparison Illegally of “No” vs No Yes “Yes” (N=1,493) (N=136) Populations Variables Mean Mean
General Attitude towards Law DISOBEY: 0.21 0.38 *** Okay to disobey the law when you disagree with it
JUSTIFIED: 0.52 0.79 *** Disobeying the law is sometimes justified
Legitimacy of Authority LIMIT: U.S. government should have the right to limit the number 0.36 0.16 *** of immigrants who can enter the country
RIGHT: Mexicans should have the right to enter the U.S. without 0.50 0.81 *** getting permission from the U.S. government
Personal Morality NEED: Okay to enter the U.S. without papers if need money to 0.86 0.93 * support family
MORE: Okay to enter the U.S. without papers to make more money 0.11 0.18 * in the U.S. even with a good job in Mexico
Source: BIS 2007, 2008. * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
94 Table 3.4. Descriptive and Bivariate Statistics for Legal Values, by Prevalence of U.S. Migration in the Community
Low-Prevalence Communities High-Prevalence Communities
Intend to Migrate Intend to Migrate Comparison Illegally Illegally Comparison of “No” vs of “No” vs No Yes “Yes” No Yes (N=947) (N=72) (N=546) (N=64) “Yes” Populations Populations Variables Mean Mean Mean Mean
General Attitude towards Law
DISOBEY: 0.22 0.36 ** 0.19 0.39 *** Okay to disobey the law when you disagree with it
JUSTIFIED: 0.52 0.79 *** 0.53 0.80 *** Disobeying the law is sometimes justified
Legitimacy of Authority
LIMIT: U.S. government should have the right to limit the 0.35 0.14 *** 0.37 0.19 ** number of immigrants who can enter the country
RIGHT: Mexicans should have the right to enter the U.S. 0.52 0.85 *** 0.47 0.77 *** without getting permission from the U.S. government
Personal Morality
NEED: Okay to enter the U.S. without papers if need money 0.84 0.92 + 0.90 0.95 to support family
MORE: Okay to enter the U.S. without papers to make more 0.12 0.25 ** 0.10 0.11 money in the U.S. even with a good job in Mexico
Source: BIS 2007, 2008. + p < .10; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
95
Table 3.5. Estimated Conditional Probabilities (Model 2, Table 3.A3)
General Attitude Legitimacy of Personal Morality towards Law Authority
Disobey Justified Limit Right Need More Latent classes (D) (J) (L) (R) (N) (M)
A. Conventional 1. Family 0.06 0.21 0.06 0.83 0.89 0.04
2. Politicized 0.06 0.21 0.06 0.83 0.61 0.93
3. Dissonant 0.06 0.21 0.81 0.04 0.89 0.04
4. Disorganized 0.06 0.21 0.81 0.04 0.61 0.93
B. Postconventional
1. Family 0.37 0.84 0.06 0.83 0.89 0.04
2. Politicized 0.37 0.84 0.06 0.83 0.61 0.93
3. Dissonant 0.37 0.84 0.81 0.04 0.89 0.04
4. Disorganized 0.37 0.84 0.81 0.04 0.61 0.93
Source: BIS 2007, 2008.
96 Table 3.6. Estimated Latent Class Probabilities (Model 2, Table 3.A3)
Intend to Migrate Illegally
Eight-Class Latent Variable No Yes
A. Conventional
1. Family 0.13 0.03
2. Politicized 0.01 0.00
3. Dissonant 0.36 0.06
4. Disorganized 0.01 0.00
B. Postconventional
1. Family 0.40 0.71
2. Politicized 0.07 0.15
3. Dissonant 0.03 0.04
4. Disorganized 0.00 0.01
Source: BIS 2007, 2008.
97 Table 3.A1. Latent Class Profiles, Do Not Intend to Migrate Illegally
Latent Classes
Conventional Postconventional
Characteristics Family Politicized Dissonant Disorganized Total Family Politicized Dissonant Disorganized Total
Age (years) 38.52 33.81 38.39 33.84 36.14 34.57 33.66 36.59 33.74 34.64 Mean
Household Status 0.65 0.51 0.63 0.49 0.57 0.54 0.54 0.60 0.53 0.55 Head of household
Marital Status 0.28 0.45 0.30 0.49 0.38 0.38 0.44 0.35 0.43 0.40 Never married
Education (years) 9.09 9.20 9.99 10.93 9.80 9.34 9.39 10.10 10.40 9.81 Mean
Have Been to the U.S. Illegally 0.10 0.05 0.06 0.04 0.06 0.13 0.07 0.14 0.08 0.11
Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008. Notes: N=1,493 (proportions were calculated after listwise deletion of missing data).
98 Table 3.A2. Latent Class Profiles, Intend to Migrate Illegally
Latent Classes
Conventional Postconventional
Characteristics Family Politicized Dissonant Disorganized Total Family Politicized Dissonant Disorganized Total
Age (years) 33.71 29.05 30.04 28.92 30.43 28.62 27.12 29.07 30.10 28.73 Mean
Household Status 0.62 0.69 0.53 0.27 0.53 0.32 0.20 0.46 0.10 0.27 Head of household
Marital Status 0.33 0.20 0.39 0.46 0.34 0.51 0.49 0.33 0.44 0.44 Never married
Education (years) 8.37 9.84 7.72 7.40 8.33 9.23 9.00 8.30 8.20 8.68 Mean
Have Been to the U.S. Illegally 0.45 0.06 0.42 0.25 0.29 0.26 0.12 0.45 0.26 0.27
Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008. Notes: N=136 (proportions were calculated after listwise deletion of missing data).
99 Table 3.A3. Fit Statistics for Confirmatory Latent-Class Models
Fit Statistics
Model L2 df BIC Index of Dissimilarity
1. Heterogeneous 142.52 90 -507.65 0.11
2. Partly Homogeneous 165.65 103 -596.11 0.09
3. Completely Homogeneous 229.60 104 -539.56 0.11
Source: BIS 2007, 2008.
100 4. Modeling Unauthorized Migration: Economics and Normative Values of Prospective Migrants
INTRODUCTION
According to recent estimates, there are currently eleven to twelve million
unauthorized migrants1 living in the United States (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2010;
Passel and Cohn 2011).2 This means that unauthorized migrants make up a large proportion—about 30 percent—of the nation’s foreign-born population. Until relatively recently, the annual arrival of unauthorized migrants to the United States exceeded the inflow of legal permanent residents (Passel and Cohn 2008).
Why are there so many unauthorized migrants in the United States? To many lay
observers, scholars, and policymakers alike, the answer may appear relatively simple: the
economic benefits of unauthorized migration outweigh the costs. One implication of this
oft-repeated statement is that unauthorized migrants are rational choice actors, to whom laws are nothing more than an economic cost. If this were true, however, we might expect to see these individuals remain in their home countries and engage in a variety of unlawful activities that satisfy similar cost-benefit calculations as unauthorized migration.
We might also expect that once these migrants enter the United States, they would engage in other unlawful activities that would maximize the economic returns to their
1 Following Bean and Stevens (2003:60), throughout this paper I generally use the term “unauthorized” to describe those migrants who enter the United States without the legal permission of the U.S. government. While “illegal” is a conventional term that is widely used in popular discourse on immigration, its use has been criticized by some scholars (see, e.g., Lee 2003:149-50; Ngai 2004:xix-xx). For a helpful summary of this critique, see Paspalanova (2008); Anderson and Ruhs (2010). 2 Estimates vary widely due to the difficulty of obtaining an accurate count of this population.
101 migration decision. Yet this does not appear to be the case, as millions of individuals
appear willing to violate immigration law, but not other laws, in pursuit of their goals.
As Rumbaut and Ewing (2007) show, for example, the incarceration rates for young men
in the United States are lowest for immigrants, especially for Mexicans, Salvadorans, and
Guatemalans—the groups that make up the bulk of the unauthorized population (see also
Butcher and Piehl 2008; Hagan and Palloni 1999; Rumbaut 2009).
The foregoing discussion illustrates a need for an explanatory model of unauthorized migration that considers not only the economic motivations of prospective migrants, but also their beliefs and attitudes (what I refer to as “normative values”)
towards immigration law and the legal authorities that regulate their behavior. Migrants
are not just embedded within a web of economic and social relations, they are also
embedded within a legal context that may impact how they make decisions about
migration. Yet, little is known about how would-be unauthorized migrants view the
morality of legal restrictions that prohibit their movement. Similarly, the literature is
silent on how would-be unauthorized migrants view the legitimacy of legal authorities
that establish and enforce these restrictions.
This study addresses these important gaps in existing research in two ways. First,
I develop a decision-making model of unauthorized labor migration that considers both
the economic motivations and normative values of prospective migrants. Second, I
provide a systematic and empirical test of this model using unique survey data that was
collected specifically for this study through the Mexican Migration Project (MMP).
These data are tailored to the specific research questions of interest and are of a type and
102 detail unavailable in existing surveys. These data thus allow us to address questions that would otherwise be foreclosed.
By problematizing and investigating issues of migration and legal noncompliance within this new framework, the present study seeks to contribute to a more complete and richer understanding of unauthorized migration—a phenomenon that has become one of the most controversial and politicized issues of our time (Donato and Armenta 2011).
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Unauthorized migration, by definition, entails a movement across international boundaries. Thus, theories of international migration are critical to understanding its causes and dynamics. Another basic fact of unauthorized migration is that it is an act of legal noncompliance. Accordingly, theories of legal noncompliance are also critical to the study of unauthorized migration. While both areas of research—research on international migration and research on legal noncompliance—are equally important to understanding unauthorized migration, each field has developed in relative isolation from the other with no attempts at integration of the two. This development is due in part to the continuing salience and rigidity of disciplinary boundaries, but it also stems from the relative scarcity of valid and reliable data that can address the concerns of both research traditions.
103 RESEARCH ON INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION
A number of theories have been developed to explain the causes of international
migration (for a helpful review, see Massey et al. 1993, 1998).3 These theories include
the neoclassical (micro and macro) economic theory, the new economics theory, the dual
labor market theory, and the world systems theory. In addition to theories that explain
why international migration occurs, there are also theories that seek to explain how
international migration is perpetuated or sustained once it has begun; the most prominent
of which are the network theory and the cumulative causation theory (see Massey et al.
1993, 1994).
In recent reviews of research on economic modeling of migration (see, e.g., Haug
2008; Radu 2008), many of the more “sociological” theories such as network theory are presented as efforts to bring more realistic assumptions of human behavior to the neoclassical economic theory. An important extension of the neoclassical economic theory is the value-expectancy model, originally developed by De Jong and Fawcett
(1981) to explain internal migration. Under this model, migration motivation is defined as a function of the value placed on certain goals—economic as well non-economic—
combined with the perceived likelihood of attaining those goals in alternative locations.
The natural starting point for assessing the significance of normative values of
migrants is the usual analytic foil—the standard neoclassical microeconomic model (the
3 The assumption in the literature is that these theories are capable of explaining both authorized and unauthorized migration (see Espenshade 1995:203). For example, restrictive immigration policies in destination countries and the attendant barriers to entry and work imposed by these policies (e.g., risk of apprehension and deportation, “illegality tax” employers impose on unauthorized workers in the form of lower wages, etc.) are viewed simply as additional economic costs of migration (see, e.g., Cobb-Clark 1998; Todaro and Maruszko 1987).
104 “neoclassical” or “rational choice” theory), which predicts individual behavior based upon the motivations and decision-making process of individuals at the micro level.4 As
I discuss below, the literature on legal noncompliance has long adopted this approach of evaluating the comparative efficacy of the neoclassical theory alongside the normative theory. Another reason that the neoclassical theory is a natural starting point for analysis here is that it has been dominant not only in academic research, but also in policymaking.
Much of the U.S. government’s efforts at deterring unauthorized migration—from erecting longer, higher fences along the U.S.-Mexican border, to increasing fines and raids of workplaces that hire unauthorized migrants—are built on basic assumptions of the neoclassical theory (see Massey and Espinosa 1997:940).
Under the standard neoclassical model, migrants are rational actors who choose to migrate because their cost-benefit calculations lead them to expect net positive returns from their migratory actions (Borjas 1989, 1994; Sjaastad 1962; Todaro 1976).5 More specifically, this theory posits that potential migrants calculate the expected net returns on migration and the total cost of their movement. Based on this calculation, the migrant is expected to move to wherever the expected net returns are greatest. More formally, the neoclassical decision-making process can be described using the following formula:
n -rt ER(0) = ∫ [P1 (t) P2 (t) Yd (t) – P3 (t) Y0 (t)] e dt – C(0) (1) 0
4 This focus of course is not meant to deny or minimize the significance of the other theories of international migration. On the contrary, I hasten to note that international migration is an extremely complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon, a study of which would benefit greatly from an integration of various perspectives and theories. The task of such comprehensive integration, however, is beyond the scope of this study. 5 For application of the neoclassical model to return migration, see Constant and Massey (2002); Dustmann (2003).
105 where ER(0) is the expected net return to migration calculated at time 0 just before departure; n is the individual’s time horizon; P1 (t) is the probability of avoiding deportation from the destination country (1.0 for legal migrants and < 1.0 for unauthorized migrants); P2 (t) is the probability of employment in the destination country;
Yd (t) is the expected earnings in the destination country; P3 (t) is the probability of employment in the origin country; Y0 (t) is the expected earnings in the origin country; r is the discount factor; and C(0) is the total cost of migrating (see Massey et al. 1993:435).
C(0) theoretically includes both monetary expenses and nonmonetary expenses (e.g.,
“psychic” costs) incurred by the migrant in the course of moving (Sjaastad 1962). In brief, the fundamental assumption of the neoclassical model is that international migration is a result of individual actors seeking to maximize their net expected lifetime earnings.
In empirical tests of the standard neoclassical theory, scholars have focused on macro-level measures such as wage differentials or unemployment ratios between the sending and receiving countries (see generally Massey et al. 1998). The outcome of interest in such studies is the aggregate flow of authorized or unauthorized migration between two countries. In addition to these aggregate-level studies, a smaller number of micro-level studies have evaluated the neoclassical theory at the individual level by examining the effects of expected income (which is generally estimated based on past earnings and human capital variables) associated with migrating (see Massey et al. 1998).
Conversely, others have examined the effect of migration decision on post-migration earnings (Tunali 2000) and other measures of economic well-being such as home
106 ownership (Lee et al. 2005), presumably under the assumption that positive ex post returns to migration would lend support for ex ante rationality.
These studies of neoclassical theory generally have found that international migration is sensitive to employment-related variables, and to a lesser extent, wage- related variables. However, given that the neoclassical model is a perceptual model (i.e., ostensibly based on individual perceptions of costs and benefits), and none of the existing studies that purport to evaluate the neoclassical theory treat the model as such, it is unclear whether and to what extent these studies represent a valid test of the neoclassical theory. Moreover, Massey et al. (1994:709, 1998:175) have concluded that even if these studies were evaluated on their own terms, on the whole, neoclassical theory does not provide an adequate explanation for the migration decision.
On a more conceptual level, the neoclassical theory begs the question of whether laws are rendered socially and morally irrelevant in the eyes of prospective migrants when economic incentives are at work. If so, the next logical question is why these particular laws are so widely disregarded while other laws that might pose comparable barriers to achieving the same economic goals are generally respected. Addressing these questions requires a broader consideration of individual motivations than the strictly utilitarian approach offered by the neoclassical theory.
RESEARCH ON LEGAL NONCOMPLIANCE
As with research on international migration, early studies of legal noncompliance were dominated by the deterrence model, which is grounded in rational choice theory
(Becker 1968; Polinsky and Shavell 2000). Under the basic deterrence model, legal noncompliance is likely if the rational actor’s estimate of the expected benefits of
107 committing an illegal act outweigh his estimate of the expected costs, which is assumed
to be a function of the perceived certainty of arrest and the perceived severity of punishment (Casey and Scholz 1991; Gibbs 1975; Grasmick and Bryjak 1980; Matsueda,
Kreager, and Huizinga 2006; Polinsky and Shavell 2000; Tittle 1969).
Empirical tests of the deterrence model generally demonstrate that perceived threats of legal sanction are significant and negatively associated with self-reports of offending or intentions to offend in a variety of legal contexts, ranging from
“instrumental” offenses such as theft and tax evasion, to more “expressive” offenses such as drug use (for reviews, see MacCoun 1993; Nagin 1998; Paternoster 1987). Empirical evidence also suggests, however, that the effects of the perceived threat of legal sanction on noncompliance are modest at best. As a result, a considerable body of research has developed to identify noneconomic determinants of legal noncompliance, such as social disapproval, ethical beliefs, trust in authority, and perceptions about fairness. In particular, much research on normative theory has focused on the importance of three social factors that I will refer to as morality, legitimacy, and social norms.6
Personal morality as a determinant of legal noncompliance has been
conceptualized in a variety of ways, including “moral beliefs,” “moral commitment,”
6 A few scholars have analyzed these normative factors within the rational choice paradigm by treating concepts such as shame and embarrassment as functionally similar to threats of legal sanction, in that “they reduce the expected utility of a contemplated behavior” (Grasmick and Bursik 1990; Grasmick, Bursik, and Arneklev 1993). However, the conventional approach has been to treat these factors as analytically distinct from utilitarian concerns that motivate cost-benefit calculations. For the purposes of this study, what is of importance is whether and to what extent analyzing these normative factors alongside the more traditional economic factors advance our understanding of unauthorized migration. Of less importance is resolving the definitional or boundary issue of whether an analysis of this sort falls within or outside the traditional rational choice framework.
108 “ethical beliefs,” and “conscience.” The basic idea underlying this line of research is that
people “generally see themselves as moral beings who want to do the right thing as they
perceive it” (Robinson and Darley 1987). Thus, people’s views about the morality of
engaging in acts proscribed by law are posited to have an effect on the likelihood of
noncompliance. For example, some observers attribute the mass violations of the
prohibition against alcohol in the 1920s and the current widespread use of illegal drugs to
people’s moral perceptions regarding such laws: some people simply do not view the use
of alcohol or drugs as immoral (Tyler and Darley 2000:719). The idea that morality is a
significant determinant of legal noncompliance is now supported by a substantial body of
empirical research (Grasmick and Green 1980; Meier and Johnson 1977; Paternoster and
Simpson 1996; Robinson and Darley 1995).
Legitimacy of authority is another concept that has drawn much attention in
research on legal noncompliance. Studies of legitimacy—usually defined as the
perceived obligation to obey a rule or a system of social order—has a long tradition
within social theory (for a review, see Zelditch 2001). One of the most widely-cited
studies that examined the relationship between perceptions about legitimacy of authority
and noncompliance is Tom Tyler’s Why People Obey the Law ([1990] 2006). Tyler
interviewed over 1,500 people about their views and interactions with the law and legal authorities in their everyday lives. Based on these interviews, Tyler found that people’s beliefs in the legitimacy of authority are significantly related to their self reports of such
noncompliance as littering, drunk driving, speeding, petty theft, and parking violations.7
7 Legitimacy was measured in terms of people’s perceived obligation to obey the authority (“people should obey the law even if it goes against what they think is right”)
109 Studies show that central to people’s evaluation of legitimacy, and thus their willingness to defer to legal authorities, is their perception of whether the authority is applying neutral and fair procedures—what scholars refer to as “procedural justice” (for a review, see Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006).8 The finding that belief in legitimacy of authority leads to greater deference to that authority has been replicated in a number of empirical studies across a variety of legal and organizational settings (see, e.g., Paternoster et al. 1997;
Smith 1992; Tyler 2006; Tyler and Huo 2002).
Finally, researchers have long been interested in the effects of social norms on legal compliance (for a review, see Ellickson 2001; Etzioni 2000; McAdams and
Rasmusen 2007). Social norms have been defined as “moral standards attributed to a social group or collective” (Wenzel 2004:551). Whether social norms are internally enforced by a sense of guilt or shame, or externally enforced through such informal sanctions as ridicule or loss of reputation, social norms may impose additional deterrence costs that make legal compliance more likely (Posner 1997). Alternatively, in cases where social norms prescribe conduct that is contrary to the law, violating the law may confer greater status on the individual (e.g., by signaling strength and courage) and thus result in greater legal noncompliance (Kahan 1998). In line with these predictions, empirical studies have found that social norms are a significant determinant of legal noncompliance in such diverse contexts as jaywalking, tax evasion, and illegal fishing and their level of “affective orientation” toward the authority (e.g., support, attachment, loyalty). 8 Existing research suggests that concerns about procedural fairness are distinct from judgments of outcome favorability (Tyler 1997, 2000). But as Tyler (2000:1000) points out, “[t]his does not mean that people are insensitive to the divergence of policies from their own sense of right and wrong. They are not. People recognize such discrepancies. However, they generally defer to authorities despite this recognition if the authorities are viewed as acting fairly when they make decisions.”
110 (see, e.g., Elliott, Armitage, and Baughan 2003; Gezelius 2002; Hatcher et al. 2000;
MacCoun 1993; Mullen, Copper, and Driskell 1990; Robinson and Darley 1997; Stalans,
Kinsey, and Smith 1991; Steenbergen, McGraw, and Scholz 1992).
Although noncompliance with immigration law has not been formally
investigated within the normative framework described above, there is some evidence in
the context of U.S.-Mexico migration that suggests that moral and social norms may play an important role in migration decisions. For example, in regions where international migration has deep historical roots, field investigators have noted the existence of a
“culture of migration,” in which certain social norms operate to encourage international
migration (see, e.g., Cohen 2004; Kandel and Massey 2002; Massey et al. 1987; Mines
1981; Reichert 1982). Kandel and Massey (2002:982), for example, note that in certain
communities, “[f]or young men, especially, migration becomes a rite of passage, and
those who do not attempt it are seen as lazy, unenterprising, and undesirable as potential
mates.”
There is also evidence that unauthorized migration and legal restrictions
underlying the phenomenon are viewed through a different moral lens in Mexico than in
the United States. The long history of conquest and domination and perceived continuing
inequalities that characterize U.S.-Mexico relations are powerful forces shaping contemporary Mexican images of the U.S., in which the United States is viewed as
“power-hungry, hypocritical, and anti-Mexican” (Morris 2000, 2005). It is not surprising then, a recent poll of Mexicans showed 46 percent of the sample citing racism as the chief reason for Americans’ opposition to unauthorized immigration (Iliff 2006). In the same poll, 76 percent of Mexicans expressed the belief that entering the United States
111 without authorization should not be a crime. In another poll conducted in Mexico in
2002, 58 percent agreed with the statement, “the territory of the United States’ Southwest
rightfully belongs to Mexico,” and 57 percent agreed that Mexicans “should have the
right to enter the U.S. without U.S. permission” (Zogby Poll 2002).
A NEW MODEL OF UNAUTHORIZED MIGRATION
This study builds upon prior studies of international migration and legal
noncompliance to propose an explanatory model of unauthorized labor migration that
conceptualizes the decision to engage in unauthorized migration as a function of rational
choice cost-benefit calculations and normative values of individuals. Figure 4.1 presents a simple schematic representation of this model.
The outcome of interest in the model is the individual’s present intent to engage in
unauthorized migration in the proximate future. At the macro-level, national,
community, and household contexts shape individuals’ cost-benefit analyses and their
normative values. At the micro-level, these individual-level factors in turn shape people’s decision to engage in unauthorized migration. Although both macro and micro processes are equally important, the theoretical focus and empirical analysis of this study are limited to the micro-level process. At the conclusion of this paper, I consider the
group or macro-level implications of this study, as well as the type of data that might
allow a systematic investigation of the macro-level process.
It is worth highlighting that the outcome of interest in the model is not the actual
instances of border crossing. Insofar as one is interested in the actual border crossing
behavior of migrants, their present intent to do so in the future must be taken as only a
112 rough proxy for the former.9 As Gardner et al. (1985:65) explain, unanticipated
constraints and facilitators, as well as changes in motivational factors may intervene
between migration intentions and actual behavior. Nonetheless, migration scholars have
argued that “intentions are an entirely appropriate concept for migration scholarship,
particularly for research on migration decision-making” (Gubhaju and De Jong 2009:2).
In addition, a review of the legal noncompliance literature shows why the
prevailing approach in that research is to model the individual’s stated intent to engage in
noncompliance, rather than the actual instances of noncompliance. Examining self
reports of past noncompliance as a function of current perceptions about its costs and
benefits confuses the causal connection between perceptions and behavior. As
Paternoster et al. (1983:458) explain, “low perceptions of punishment risk (or severity),”
for example, “may be a consequence rather than a cause of involvement in illegal
behavior” (emphases in original). The other alternative is to use a panel design in which
the effect of the individual’s perceptions at time 1 are examined in relation to their
subsequent behavior occurring between time 1 and time 2. But such a panel design
9 According to theories of reasoned action and planned behavior proposed by social psychologists (Ajzen 1985, [1988] 2005; Ajzen and Fishbein 1980), intentions are the single best predictor of behavior. Studies that have examined the relationship between migration intentions and migration behavior—and the extent to which intentions can serve as a proxy for behavior—offer mixed findings. Some studies show that intentions are not the only determinants of migration behavior (see generally De Jong et al. 1985:46), while others find that intentions to migrate are indeed strong predictors of subsequent migration behavior (see generally Gubhaju and De Jong 2009:3). Most of these studies on migration intentions focus on internal or regional migration, however, and little is known about the extent to which intentions to migrate internationally translate into actual migration (Van Dalen, Groenewold, and Schoorl 2005:747). The only study to date that specifically examined the intention-behavior linkage in international migration context is Van Dalen and Henkens (2008), and they find that intentions are a good predictor of future emigration among the Dutch.
113 untenably assumes that perceptions remain stable and do not change between time 1 and time 2 (for a review of this critique, see Grasmick and Bursik 1990:843-44).
Before proceeding with a discussion of the data that allows us to test the model proposed above, a few points of clarification are in order. First, I do not mean to suggest that moral and normative considerations, by themselves, can motivate unauthorized migration in the absence of economic need. To do so would be tantamount to viewing unauthorized migration as a purely expressive form of legal noncompliance—a violation of law that is driven largely, if not solely, by the imperative of expressing one’s moral commitment or ideology (e.g., civil disobedience). While such a form of legal noncompliance with U.S. immigration law is certainly possible, it is widely understood that this is generally not the case for contemporary unauthorized labor migration from
Mexico to the United States. Instead, what I propose is that normative values are important, though not sufficient, factors underlying the decision to migrate without authorization. Likewise, I argue that economic incentives alone typically do not induce otherwise law-abiding individuals to violate the law.
Second, the model proposed here does not require that prospective migrants engage in explicit and conscious deliberations about the normative considerations before deciding to engage in unauthorized migration. As Ewick and Silbey (1998:15) point out,
“[m]ost of the time . . . people don’t think about the law at all.” Instead, legality is often experienced as “an invisible constraint suffusing and saturating our everyday life” (Silbey
2005:331). Thus, all that the model posits is that people’s interpretations and understandings about the law and legal authorities—whether or not they are a product of
114 conscious and systematic reflection—play an important role in structuring their decisions and actions.
Third, the proposed model does not require that prospective migrants engage in rational choice analyses that result in objectively optimal solutions. While rational choice models envision individuals as purposive and intentional actors with a given set of preferences, values, or utilities, scholars have long recognized that most, if not all, real- life decisions are constrained by limits of time, ability, and the availability of relevant information. The notion that most actors lack the ability and resources to arrive at the perfectly optimal solution is the central tenet of the well-understood concept of bounded
rationality (see, e.g., Elster 2000; Kahneman 2003; Simon 1957). The decision to
migrate illegally, like most other decisions that people make, must be understood in the
context of these limitations.
Finally, the potential issue of “rationalization” requires a careful consideration. It
is possible for people to rationalize their decisions by adopting normative values that
“justify” their intended behavior. However, such instances of rationalization do not
necessarily negate the important causal role that normative values typically play in
significant decisions that people make about their lives. As Sykes and Matza (1957)
argued in their seminal article on techniques that juvenile delinquents employ to
neutralize the internal and external demands for conformity (“techniques of
neutralization”), such justifications precede, rather than follow, deviant behavior and
make such behavior possible (for a review of research on techniques of neutralization, see
Maruna and Copes 2005). In the framework of interactionist theory, “a rationalization is not an after-the-fact excuse that someone invents to justify his or her behavior but an
115 integral part of the actor’s motivation for the act” (Coleman 1987:411). This type of ex
ante rationalization does not pose problems of causality in the proposed model.
One might argue, however, it is also theoretically possible for people to change
their beliefs ex post to match their behavior. That is, people may make decisions that are
contrary to their normative values or without any reference to their normative values at
all, and once the decision is made, to adopt values that are in alignment with their
decision. In such a case, normative values are infinitely manipulable, playing no
independent role in the decision-making process. This view of normative values does not
comport well with the dominant socio-legal understanding of norms as “profoundly
influencing [people’s] identities, their worldviews, their views of themselves, the projects
they undertake, and thus the people they seek to become” (Etzioni 2000:163). Insofar as
normative values typically play such an integral part of people’s self-identity, it is
unlikely that they can function in such a strictly utilitarian fashion required by ex post
rationalization. Nonetheless, as discussed later in the paper, I address this potential issue
of ex post rationalization in a couple different ways in my empirical analysis.
DATA AND METHOD
DATA
I test the proposed model using data from the 2007 and 2008 MMP and Becoming
Illegal Surveys (BIS). In collaboration with the MMP, I designed the BIS specifically for the purposes of this study. Comprehensive documentation on the MMP Survey is available from the MMP website at http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/. Here, I highlight only
those aspects of the MMP that are particularly relevant to this study. The MMP is a bi-
national household survey that collects data using a method known as ethnosurvey—a
116 semi-structured interview technique that combines ethnographic and survey methods.10
Each year, a simple random sample of 150 to 200 households is drawn from a selected number of communities in Mexico (a total of two to five communities) and interviewed during the winter months when most seasonal migrants return from their trips to the
United States. Typically, one informant from each household is interviewed, and that informant provides detailed social and economic information about the household heads, their spouses, children, and other household members. The MMP also gathers detailed historical, social, and demographic data on each Mexican community surveyed.11
The BIS, unlike the MMP, is an individual survey. I developed the BIS through
two stages of fieldwork. During the first phase, I organized focus group interviews with
two sets of subject populations in the United States and in Mexico in the spring and
summer of 2006. The first subject group consisted of unauthorized day laborers recruited
from day-labor centers and hiring sites in California; the second group consisted of
individuals recruited from migrant centers in the United States (El Paso, Texas) and in
Mexico (Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua; Agua Prieta and Altar, Sonora). In total, sixty-four
migrants from a number of different countries in Latin America participated in ten focus
group interviews. Insights gained from these interviews guided the design and initial
formulation of the survey questions. During the second phase of the pre-survey
10 For discussions on the ethnosurvey method, see Massey (1987); Massey and Zenteno (2000); Massey and Capoferro (2004). 11 The MMP typically also draws a nonrandom sample of about 10 to 20 out-migrant households per community and interviews are conducted with these households in the United States during the summer months of July and August. The U.S. sample contains migrants who have established their households in the United States and no longer return home. The analysis in this study is restricted to the Mexican sample, as the U.S. sample’s small size and the focus on individuals who have already settled in the U.S. make this sample practically and theoretically less relevant for this study.
117 fieldwork, I pretested the survey instrument in a number of communities in Michoacán and Jalisco, Mexico, with the assistance of the MMP’s field coordinator. The survey was subsequently revised to address the issues that arose during these pretests.
Because the MMP is a household survey and the BIS is an individual survey, I developed separate participation criteria and interview protocols for the BIS in order to administer that survey in an integrated fashion with the MMP Survey. The population of interest in this study consists of men in Mexico who were either in the labor market or were contemplating entering the labor market at the time of the survey. More specifically, in order to participate in the BIS, participants were required to be (1) between 15 and 65 years of age, and (2) currently working in Mexico or intending to work (either in Mexico or in the United States) within the next year.12 Because the great majority of individuals who satisfied the latter criteria in past MMP Surveys were male, I formally restricted my survey sample to men. Given the intensive time and resource requirements of the survey process, this restriction was necessary in order to ensure a sufficiently large number of cases that would be available for analysis.
Within each household, the MMP interviewer first administered the MMP Survey with a household informant pursuant to the established MMP interview protocol. Upon completion of the MMP Survey, individual household members who satisfied the participation criteria for the BIS were then interviewed.13 More than one member of the same household was allowed to participate in the BIS, so long as each individual satisfied
12 The minimum age of fifteen is admittedly arbitrary in some sense, but the nature of the survey questions required individuals to possess sufficient moral development and maturity, and be of age to be “at risk” of entering the labor market. 13 While no individually-identifying information was collected in order to protect the confidentiality of the respondents, each respondent was given a unique identification number that allowed the integration of data from the BIS and the MMP Survey.
118 the participation criteria. The number of individuals who participated in the BIS from each household ranged from one to five. Forty-five percent of the respondents in the effective sample came from households in which they were the only members of their household who participated in the BIS. The rest of the respondents came from households in which more than one member of the same household participated in the
BIS. Specifically, 33 percent, 17 percent, 4 percent, and 1 percent of the respondents in the effective sample came from households in which two, three, four, and five members of the same household, respectively, participated in the BIS.
The 2007 MMP and BIS were administered in four communities in the state of
Morelos in January of 2007. The 2008 MMP and BIS were administered in four additional communities in the states of Jalisco and Michoacán in January of 2008. The
MMP chose these communities based on their socio-economic diversity.14 Basic information about the communities surveyed is shown in Table 4.A1 of the appendix.
As shown in Table 4.A1, the population sizes for the communities range from
2,000 (Community 3) to 1,646,000 (Community 7). The economic bases vary from community to community, with some communities largely focused on agriculture, as indicated by the high percentage of male labor force in agriculture (Communities 1, 3, 5,
6), and other communities focused on service or manufacturing (Communities 4, 7, 8).
There are also significant differences in stages of economic development across communities, as indicated by the varying levels of available infrastructure in the respective communities’ surrounding municipalities. Finally, the communities also differ
14 In selecting the communities to survey, the MMP does not set out to find international migrants; rather, it seeks to sample a wide range of different kinds of communities with contrasting patterns of social and economic organization (see Massey and Capoferro 2004:1090).
119 in terms of their migration profiles. In Community 8, for example, only 3.7 percent of adults have U.S. migration experience, whereas in Community 3, over 23 percent of adults have U.S. migration experience.
In all, the 2007 and 2008 MMP Surveys contain information relating to 8,247 household members from 1,524 households. The refusal rate, as has been the case with previous years of MMP data collection, was very low in both years: the average refusal rate across the communities surveyed in 2007 and 2008 were 6.80 percent and 12.88 percent, respectively. A total of 1,657 men participated in the BIS. The effective sample size for the primary analysis is 1,372 men. This effective sample size reflects deletion of missing data and exclusion of the small number of respondents (N=62) who answered that they intended to go to the United States legally (as legal residents, tourist visa holders, U.S. citizens, etc.). The respondents intending to go to the United States legally were excluded because this group is outside the main theoretical interest of this study given that unauthorized migration is not within their realm of possible choices.15 I do, however, carry out a supplemental analysis in which I compare this group against those respondents intending to migrate illegally, for the purposes of analyzing the potential issue of rationalization discussed earlier.
Strictly speaking, the MMP data is representative only of the selected Mexican communities, not of the entire Mexican population. However, systematic comparisons
15 It is, of course, possible that some people who responded that they intended to enter the United States legally are potential “visa overstayers”—those who might have the means to obtain valid documents to enter the United States but who intend to overstay their authorized stay and become unauthorized eventually. The survey does not enable a specific identification of this group, but the maximum possible size of this group in the sample (i.e., people who were planning to enter the United States with valid documents, with the exception of U.S. permanent residents and U.S. citizens) is fairly small (N=43).
120 between the MMP and nationally representative surveys such as Mexico’s National
Survey of Population Dynamics (ENADID in Spanish acronym) have found a very close match between the surveys in terms of the basic migrant characteristics (see, e.g., Massey and Capoferro 2004; Massey and Zenteno 2000). Thus, the MMP is a good source of reasonably representative data on Mexican migrants. The next question is how representative the BIS sample is of the MMP population. A comparison of the sample that participated in the BIS and the comparable population from the MMP Survey (e.g., male, between the ages 15 and 65) that did not participate in the BIS shows that the BIS sample is similar to the MMP population in terms of the respondent’s average age, education, and current employment status. On the other hand, the BIS sample contains a higher proportion of respondents who have never been married, who are heads of their households, and who do not have prior experience of migrating to the U.S. illegally. One should, therefore, proceed with some caution in generalizing the results of this study.
MEASURES
Table 4.A2 of the appendix provides details on the measures used in my analysis, including the survey items that measure each of the relevant concepts and the original response categories that correspond to each survey item. Where appropriate, I collapsed some of the categories in order to avoid problems arising from categories with too few cases, and to maximize the power and parsimony of the multivariate models. The decision as to which categories to collapse and how to collapse them was guided by theoretical considerations, as well as results from a series of Wald tests I performed on the equality of parameter estimates.
121 Dependent Variable
As shown in Figure 4.2, the outcome of interest in this study is the respondents’ intent at time t to engage in unauthorized migration at time t+1. Specifically, the respondents were asked: “Do you intend to go to the U.S. during the next 12 months?”16
If they answered yes, a follow-up question was then asked about the type of documents they intended to use in making the trip. The dependent variable was coded as 1 if the respondent intended to cross the border without documents, and 0 otherwise (i.e., do not intend to migrate). As explained above, the small number of respondents who intended to migrate legally was excluded from the main analysis.
Given the relatively sensitive nature of the inquiry about the respondent’s intent to disobey the law, one might ask to what extent these questions may have yielded reliable answers. Based on my personal observations in the field and the past experience of MMP in collecting similar data, there appears to be little reason to believe that the respondents were less than forthcoming in their answers. For over twenty years, the MMP has been collecting information about the past unauthorized border crossings of the household heads without much difficulty. The MMP gathers highly detailed information about these crossings, such as the time and place of each crossing, whether a “coyote” (i.e., paid guide) was used and if so, how much was paid, by whom, and the number of apprehensions during each attempted crossing. As Massey (1987:1514) has observed,
16 By focusing on the respondent’s intent within a specified time frame, this question seeks to elicit more than just an individual’s general desire for immigration. This question is also framed more concretely than similar questions posed in other surveys such as the Zogby Poll, which asks: “If at this moment, you had the means and opportunity to go live in the U.S., would you go?” (Camarota 2009).
122 “[v]erification of these data with knowledgeable informants in the communities revealed
practically no falsification of legal status.”17
Explanatory Variables
There are two categories of explanatory variables used in my analysis. The first category consists of what I refer to as economic variables. These variables pertain to rational cost-benefit calculations that prospective migrants are presumed to undertake under the neoclassical economic model. Note that, as discussed earlier, it is the subjective probabilities, rather than the objective probabilities, that are the key to understanding people’s behavior under the neoclassical model. The main components of the relevant cost-benefit calculations for this study are:
(a) expected probability of finding a job in the United States and in Mexico; (b) expected wages in the United States and in Mexico; (c) expected monetary costs of migrating; (d) expected degree of danger associated with crossing the border; (e) expected probability of apprehension at the border and while working illegally in the United States; and (f) expected severity of sanctions if apprehended at the border and while working illegally in the United States.
As shown in Table 4.A2 of the appendix, each of the survey items that
corresponds to an economic variable (except for the wage and cost-related items) elicited
17 There are several reasons why respondents may not eschew questions about their past border crossing experience or future intentions to cross the border. First, the survey takes place in Mexico and is administered by native Mexican interviewers who are trained at establishing a strong rapport with respondents. Second, as the respondents appear to be well aware, crossing the U.S.-Mexican border without authorization is not a violation of Mexican law, and U.S. legal authorities do not have jurisdiction over Mexican citizens residing in Mexico. Third, the survey does not record any individually-identifying information, and the respondents are reassured that it is not possible to personally identify them through the survey. There is, therefore, little reason for the respondents to fear that they will face legal sanctions for answering the survey questions truthfully. Indeed, none of the MMP interviewers reported any difficulty administering and obtaining responses to questions about the respondents’ border crossing intentions.
123 a categorical response. While eliciting a response in terms of precise numerical
probabilities (e.g., “What do you think is the percent chance that…”) may have yielded
greater information (see Manski 2004), this type of questioning was inappropriate for the
subject population given the respondents’ socio-demographic background and the survey
setting. Moreover, despite the recent increase in the use of probabilistic questions to
elicit expectations of future outcomes in survey research (see, e.g., Dominitz and Manski
1997; Fischhoff et al. 2000), most large-scale surveys continue to rely on items that elicit categorical responses.18
The second category of explanatory variables refers to what I call normative
variables. These variables relate to the underlying attitudes and social norms of
prospective migrants. Of particular interest to this study are:
(a) general attitude toward the law (any law, not just U.S. immigration law); (b) views about the morality of violating U.S. immigration law; (c) views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority to regulate international migration; and (d) social norms about border crossing.
General attitude. These items are designed to capture the respondent’s baseline
orientation and commitment toward the law and legal system generally. Individuals vary
in their respect for the rule of law and rigidity with which they believe the law ought to
be followed. The two attitudinal items designed to tap these basic attitudes toward the
18 The General Social Survey (GSS), for example, asks about individual expectations of future employment in this way: “About how easy would it be for you to find a job with another employer with approximately the same income and fringe benefits you now have? Would you say very easy, somewhat easy, or not easy at all?” (GSS 2007).
124 law that were included in the survey are: “Is it okay to disobey the law when you disagree with it?” and “Is disobeying the law sometimes justified?”19
Morality. Drawing on the work of Colby and Kohlberg, I define morality as an inner sense of commitment that involves “prescriptive valuing of the obligatory or right”
(Colby and Kohlberg 1987:9 (emphasis in original)). By “prescriptive,” Colby and
Kohlberg are referring to “judgments of ought, of rights and responsibilities, rather than value judgments of liking and preference.” Social scientists usually trace the origins and development of morality to an individual’s upbringing, family, culture, and peer or reference groups. Whatever the source, morality as used in this study refers to an internalized sense that certain acts and considerations are “sacred” and non-negotiable.
In this study, I focus on individuals’ views about the morality of violating U.S. immigration law. There are many bases upon which individuals can make moral assessments about violating U.S. immigration law. However, my pre-survey fieldwork showed that moral assessments in this context frequently turned on whether unauthorized migration was deemed a necessity, and whether an individual was entitled to pursue better opportunities for oneself or one’s family, above and beyond basic survival needs.
Thus, the respondents were asked on the survey: “Is it okay to enter the U.S. without papers if you need money to support one’s family?” and “What if you have a good job in
Mexico but want to make more money in the U.S., is it okay for you to enter the U.S. without papers?”
19 Given the possible perception among Mexicans regarding corruption in the Mexican legal system, it might be interesting in future surveys to solicit respondents’ comparative attitudes toward Mexican law versus U.S. law.
125 Legitimacy. Following Tyler and Huo (2002:xiv), I define perceived legitimacy
of authority as “the belief that legal authorities are entitled to be obeyed and that the
individual ought to defer to their judgment.” In the context of unauthorized migration,
beliefs about whether a foreign nation may limit one’s movement constitute an important
basis upon which people make evaluations about the legitimacy of U.S. authority.
Another important dimension of legitimacy involves perceptions about the extent to
which U.S. authority exercises its authority in a fair and neutral manner and treats those
subject to the law with dignity and respect—what Tyler ([1990] 2006) and other scholars
have referred to as “procedural justice.”
Thus, I investigate two dimensions of legitimacy in this study: (a) views about the legitimacy of legal authority to limit international migration; and (b) views about the legitimacy of legal authority vis-à-vis procedural fairness. With respect to legitimacy of
authority to limit international migration, the respondents were asked two questions:
“Should the U.S. government have the right to limit the number of immigrants who can
enter the country?” and “Should Mexicans have the right to enter the U.S. without getting
permission from the U.S. government?” With respect to legitimacy of authority vis-à-vis
procedural fairness, respondents were again asked two questions: “Do you think the U.S.
immigration service treats Mexicans fairly?” and “Do you think the U.S. immigration
service treats lighter-skinned immigrants better than darker-skinned immigrants?” As
with the other survey items, these questions were formulated based on discussions with
current and prospective unauthorized migrants during the pre-survey fieldwork.
Social Norms. I adopt a two-pronged definition of social norms that is based on
what Hechter and Opp (2001) identify as the “regularity norms” and the “oughtness
126 norms.” The regularity norms are “merely behavioral regularities that generate social
expectations without any moral obligations,” whereas oughtness norms entail a moral
imperative (a sense of ought) associated with a social group or collective (Hechter and
Opp 2001:xii-xiii). These definitions correspond to the following two dimensions of
social norms that I investigate in this study: (a) descriptive norms about illegal border
crossing, which refer to individuals’ perceptions of how reference groups themselves
actually behave; and (b) injunctive norms about illegal border crossing, which refer to individuals’ perceptions of how other people believe the individual should behave.20
To operationalize descriptive norms, the respondents were asked: “How many of your family members, relatives, and friends have tried to go to the U.S. without papers?”
Injunctive norms were measured by asking the question: “How many of your family members, relatives, and friends would approve if you wanted to go to the U.S. without papers?” Although it would have been advantageous to separately inquire about family/relatives versus friends to test possible differences in influence exerted by these two groups, efficiency needs and time constraints on the field dictated aggregating the groups.
To some degree, the descriptive norms variable might also be considered a
measure of “social networks.” The basic idea behind social network analysis in
migration research is that interpersonal ties based on kinship, friendship, and shared
community origin are important to migration decisions and outcomes, because potential
20 Injunctive norms, which are values attributed to a social group, and personal morality, which are ethical standards that individuals hold personally, are theoretically distinct concepts. However, to the extent that certain social norms are internalized, there will be some overlap between injunctive norms and personal morality. I tested for multicollinearity between the injunctive norm variable and personal morality variables but did not find significant collinearity problems.
127 migrants use these connections to obtain information and resources that lower their costs
and increase the expected net returns to migration (see generally Massey et al. 1998:42-
43). Thus, social network studies examine the effect of the size or the composition of
migrant networks on individuals’ propensity to migrate and a variety of other migration-
related outcomes (see, e.g., Mooney 2004). The difference between the social network
variables analyzed in such studies and the descriptive norms variable used in the present
study is that typically, social network variables are measured in terms of whether the
respondent’s family members are current or past migrants in the United States, and the
prevalence of U.S. migration in the community as a whole (see, e.g., Davis, Stecklov, and
Winters 2002; Palloni et al. 2001). In contrast, the descriptive norms variable I use in my
analysis is broader, as it captures the respondent’s subjective perception of how many
individuals in his social reference group have attempted to migrate illegally.
Control Variables
The control variables consist of a basic set of socio-demographic characteristics of respondents that have been shown to be important in predicting the probability of migration from Mexico to the United States in previous studies (see, e.g., Massey et al.
1987; Massey and Espinosa 1997). These characteristics include: age, education, marital status, household membership status, whether or not the respondent has crossed the border without documents in the past, 21 and community origin (not shown in Tables 4.1
and 4.2).
21 Whether or not the respondent entered the United States illegally in the past is coded as 1 if yes, and 0 otherwise. The latter coding includes those who have been to the United States legally, as well as those who have never been to the United States.
128 METHOD
First, I examine the bivariate statistics to determine whether there are any
significant differences in economic calculations and normative values between those
individuals who intend to migrate illegally and those who intend to stay in Mexico. Next,
I carry out binary logistic regression analyses that take the form:
(2) logit(Y) = log( /( ))1 +++=− βββαππ XXX 332211 , where log represents the natural logarithm; π is the probability that the dichotomous
outcome variable Y = 1 (i.e., respondent intends to cross the border illegally in the next
twelve months);α is the Y intercept; βs are regression coefficients; X1 is a vector of basic
individual characteristics; X 2 is a vector of economic variables; and X 3 is a vector of
normative variables.
I begin by fitting a basic model that includes only the control variables. To this
basic model, I add the economic variables, followed by the normative variables.22
Expected U.S. wages and Mexican wages are logged, based on post-estimation
diagnostics that showed that natural logs of these variables better satisfy the assumption
of linearity in the logit for the continuous covariates (see Hosmer and Lemeshow
2000:97-114).
Individuals who belong to a same household might be “clustered” in the sense
they are more likely to be similar to one another than individuals from another household.
The same might be true of individuals belonging to the same community. In such a case,
22 The same analyses were conducted using data that used multiple imputations for all missing data, and the results were generally comparable to the ones based on data generated by listwise deletion. The results presented below are based on data using listwise deletion.
129 the assumption that observations are independent and identically distributed is violated,
leading to standard errors that that might be downwardly biased (Williams 2000). To
account for the within-cluster correlation at the household level, I use the vce (cluster)
option in Stata to adjust the standard errors (Rogers 1993).23 For community-level
clustering, for which there are too few communities to implement the same robust-cluster
standard error correction procedure (Cameron and Trivedi 2009:83, 328), I include
dummy variables for the communities in each of the logistic regression models (not
shown in Table 4.2).
To address the theoretical issue of ex post rationalization discussed earlier, two versions of the BIS were administered. Substantively, each version contained the same battery of survey items, but they varied in terms of question ordering. In the first version, the respondents were asked the normative values questions first, followed by the intent to migrate question; in the second version, the intent to migrate question was asked first, followed by the normative values questions. The assumption is that those who were asked the intent to migrate question first are more likely to engage in rationalization because (a) they may feel the need to justify their stated intent to the survey interviewer by virtue of the question ordering; and (b) they have the opportunity to engage in such justification during the survey process. On the whole, however, there were no significant differences between those who took the first version and the second version of the survey in terms of their expressed normative values.
23 Although multi-level modeling is typically considered a better approach than adjusting the standard errors in dealing with clustered data (Gelman and Hill 2007:246), multi-level modeling is not appropriate here because the number of observations in the clusters (in the case of households) and the number of clusters (in the case of communities) in the data are relatively small (see Moineddin, Matheson, and Glazier 2007).
130 I also examined whether the respondents with prior illegal border crossing experience expressed significantly different normative values than those without such prior experience. A reasonable assumption is that those with prior illegal border crossing experience are more likely to engage in rationalization because (a) subsequent decisions to migrate illegally for this group might be more “automated” than for those who are making the decision for the first time; and (b) having crossed the border illegally in the past, these respondents may have in store a more readily available set of justifications that they can deploy. Indeed, for a number of the normative values variables, there was a significant difference between those with a prior history of illegal migration and those who had no such history. It is not possible to discern whether these group differences are a result of ex ante or ex post rationalization. Nonetheless, in my multivariate analysis I control for these differences by including a variable for whether or not the respondent engaged in illegal migration in the past.
Finally, another approach to examining the question of rationalization is to compare the respondents who intend to migrate illegally to those who intend to migrate legally. Insofar as individuals who intend to migrate legally do not have the same “need” to engage in moral justification of their decision in the same way that those who intend to migrate illegally might, there might be differences in the respondents’ expressed normative values across these two groups. The results of this supplemental analysis are shown in Table 4.A3 of the appendix and discussed later in the paper.
131 RESULTS
DESCRIPTIVE AND BIVARIATE PATTERNS
Table 4.1 presents means and standard deviations of variables used in the logistic regression analysis, first for the sample as a whole, and then separately for those who intend to migrate illegally and those who intend to stay in Mexico. As shown in Table
4.1, there are significant differences between those who intend to migrate illegally and those who do not. Those who intend to migrate illegally are slightly younger on average, are less likely to be head of their households, are more likely to have never been married, and much more likely to have crossed illegally in the past.
There are also significant bivariate differences across many of the economic variables. Those who intend to migrate illegally are much less likely to believe that finding a job in the United States is difficult, but they are much more likely to believe that finding a job in Mexico is difficult. While there is no significant difference between the two groups in terms of their expected U.S. wages, there is a significant difference in terms of expected Mexican wages (with those who intend to migrate illegally expecting less wages on average than those who intend to stay in Mexico). Interestingly, the expected cost of crossing is higher for those who intend to migrate illegally. Those who intend to migrate illegally are less likely to believe that crossing is dangerous, and their perceived possibility of getting apprehended while crossing, as well as while working in the United States, is lower than those who intend to stay in Mexico. Likewise, those who intend to migrate illegally view sanctions associated with apprehension at the border to be less severe than those who intend to stay in Mexico.
132 In terms of normative variables, the two groups also differ in significant ways.
Those who intend to migrate illegally are much more likely to believe that it is okay to disobey the law when one disagrees with it, and that disobeying the law is sometimes justified. Those who intend to migrate illegally are also more likely to believe that it is okay to cross the border illegally not only when one needs money to support one’s family, but also when one has a good job in Mexico yet wants to make more money in the United States. Moreover, those who intend to migrate illegally are less likely to believe that the U.S. government has the right to limit immigration and are more likely to believe that Mexicans have a right to be in the United States without permission from the
U.S. government. Finally, those who intend to migrate illegally are more likely to have family members and friends who have tried to cross the border illegally in the past and who would approve of the respondents’ crossing the border illegally.
These preliminary results point to interesting and significant differences across the two groups in terms of the respondents’ economic calculations, as well as their underlying attitudes and value systems. To further explore these relationships while controlling for other variables, I turn to multivariate analysis. But before doing so, I briefly discuss the results of a supplemental analysis that compares whether there are significant differences in normative values between those who intend to migrate illegally and those who intend to migrate legally. As discussed earlier, this analysis was carried out in order to examine whether and to what extent the would-be unauthorized migrants might be engaged in a moral justification or rationalization of their decision.
Table 4.A3 shows that there are, indeed, a number of significant differences among the two groups in terms of their expressed normative values. Specifically, those
133 intending to enter the United States legally are less likely to think that (a) disobeying the
law is justified; (b) it is okay to enter the United States illegally if one needs money; and
(c) Mexicans have a right to be in the United States without the permission of the U.S.
government. Conversely, the would-be legal migrants are more likely to believe that the
U.S. government has the right to limit migration. These results suggest that legal constraints may very well play an important role in determining whether or not individuals engage in moral justification or rationalization of their decisions.
Furthermore, as shown below, whether or not an individual successfully completes this task of moral justification appears to have significant implications for his decision to migrate illegally.
MULTIVARIATE ANALYSES
For the multivariate analysis, I employ a set of binomial logistic regressions, with
willingness to migrate illegally in the next 12 months as the dependent variable. All
results presented in Table 4.2 are in the form of unstandardized logistic regression
coefficients. The regression coefficients, βs, are estimators of the change in the logit(Y)
(i.e., log odds of Y) caused by a one-unit change in the independent variable. In
interpreting these coefficients, I discuss them in terms of changes in the odds by
exponentiating the regression coefficients (eβ), or in terms of percent increase or decrease
in odds ((eβ -1)*100) due to a one-unit change in the independent variable. Standard
errors in parentheses are cluster robust (i.e., they have been adjusted to account for
clustering at the household level), as discussed earlier.
Table 4.2 shows three nested models. Model 1 is a baseline model that focuses on
the effects of basic background factors on respondents’ willingness to migrate illegally to
134 the United States within the next 12 months. Model 2 adds the economic variables to
Model 1, and Model 3 adds the normative variables to Model 2. According to the Wald tests I performed, Model 2 fits the data significantly better than Model 1 (p < .001), and
Model 3 fits the data significantly better than Model 2 (p < .001).24
While most of the control variables were significant in Model 1, the only control variables that remain significant in Model 3 are age and education. According to Model
3, each additional year of age reduces the odds of intending to migrate illegally by 6 percent ((e-0.06-1)*100), holding all other variables constant. Each additional year of education reduces the odds of intending to migrate illegally by 8 percent ((e-0.08-1)*100), holding all other variables constant.
Next, I examine the economic variables in Model 3 of Table 4.2. The results show that one’s expectations about the availability of jobs in Mexico and in the United
States have a significant effect on the intent to migrate illegally. The odds of intending to migrate illegally are 43 percent ((e-0.57-1)*100) lower for those who believe that it is
“very difficult” to find a job in the United States than those who believe it is
“easy/somewhat difficult” to find a job in the United States. Conversely, the odds of intending to migrate illegally are almost three times higher ((e1.07 = 2.91) for those who believe that it is “very difficult” to find a job in Mexico than those who believe it is
“easy/somewhat difficult” to find a job in Mexico. These results are not surprising, given that much of unauthorized labor migration is indeed driven by supply and demand of labor between sending and receiving countries.
24 As estimates produced by logistic regression with the vce (cluster) option in Stata are not true maximum likelihood estimates, the likelihood ratio test is not appropriate for testing the nested models (see Cameron and Trivedi 2009:401-02).
135 What is somewhat surprising, however, is that of the two expected wage variables, only the expected U.S. wages has a significant effect on the intent to migrate illegally. Each additional (logged) peso in terms of expected Mexican wages decreases the odds of intending to migrate illegally by 28 percent ((e-0.33-1)*100), but this coefficient is not significant in Model 3 of Table 4.2. On the other hand, the odds of intending to migrate illegally increases by more than two times (e0.72 = 2.05) with each additional (logged) dollar in terms of expected U.S. wages, and this result is statistically significant at p < .05. Together, the results thus far suggest that the prospects of unemployment in Mexico weigh heavily in the decision-making process of would-be migrants; and so too, the amount of expected wages in the United States.
As shown in Model 3 of Table 4.2, with every thousand pesos of expected cost of migrating, the odds of intending to migrate illegally increases by about 3 percent
((e.03-1)*100). This is likely a reflection of the fact that those who are serious about migrating are more likely to think about and to engage in information gathering about the practicalities of migrating (such as paying a coyote) which lead them to higher, and perhaps more accurate, travel cost estimates. The odds of intending to migrate illegally are 55 percent lower ((e-0.79-1)*100 ) for those who believe that it is “very dangerous” to migrate illegally than those who believe it is “not/somewhat dangerous” to migrate illegally. This result is consistent with the fact that those who intend to migrate illegally often pay a “coyote” to guide them through the border crossing process, which likely reduces perceptions of danger associated with the journey.
Finally, none the four variables operationalizing the perceived certainty of apprehension and severity of punishment is statistically significant. This result is
136 consistent with previous research that found no association between apprehension
probabilities at the U.S.-Mexican border and the total volume of unauthorized migration
to the United States (see, e.g., Cornelius 1990; Espenshade 1994; Fuentes et al. 2007;
Reyes, Johnson, and Van Swearingen 2002), as well as research showing that perceptions
of the danger and difficulty involved in unauthorized border crossings have had little
influence on migration decisions (Cornelius and Salehyan 2007). That neither variable
operationalizing perceived severity of punishment is significant is also consistent with
previous research in legal noncompliance, which has generally shown that severity of
punishment is relatively less important than certainty of apprehension in terms of
deterring crime (for a review, see Nagin and Pogarsky 2001).
Next, I examine the results for the normative variables in Model 3 of Table 4.2.
Recall that in Table 4.1, those who believed that it is okay to disobey the law when one
disagreed with it were a minority in both groups. In Model 3 of Table 4.2, this variable is
not significant, suggesting that both groups are equally likely to perceive themselves as
generally law-abiding. On the other hand, the odds of intending to migrate illegally are
92 percent ((e0.65-1)*100) higher for those who believe that disobeying the law is sometimes justified.
The next two variables relate to views about the morality of violating U.S.
immigration law. Only one of these variables is statistically significant. The odds of
intending to migrate illegally are 2.5 times higher (e0.91 = 2.48) for those who believe that
it is okay to migrate illegally to the United States to make more money even if one has a
good job in Mexico. However, the variable based on the survey question, “Is it okay to
enter the U.S. without papers if you need money to support one’s family?” is not
137 significant. These results are interesting and suggest two possibilities. First, the idea of migrating in order to support one’s family is such a prevalent and widely accepted one
(see Table 4.1), that it is perhaps not surprising that this variable has no predictive power in the model. Second, the fact that those who intend to migrate illegally are much more likely to believe that migration is justified not only in instances of absolute need, but also in situations where one desires a better life for oneself, indicates that broader moral claims to migration than mere “necessity” may be at play in decisions about unauthorized migration. The sensibilities underlying this moral economy might be akin to what
Gezelius found in a Norwegian fishing community, in which a fisherman could break a law with little social risk, provided he was acting in accordance with his “moral right to secure for himself an income good enough to stay in the business and to make a reasonable living of it”—what Gezelius (2002:309) refers to as “the right to secure a satisfactory life.”
The next four variables relate to views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority.
The odds of intending to migrate illegally are almost 3 times higher (e1.06 = 2.89) for those who believe that Mexicans have a right to be in the United States than those who do not hold such a belief. The odds of intending to migrate illegally are also more than 4 times higher (e1.47 = 4.35) for those who believe that the U.S. immigration service treats
Mexicans fairly. This is a rather unexpected result, given that previous research on procedural justice has commonly found that perceptions of procedural fairness lead to increased, not reduced, legal compliance. Before considering why the result here might depart from this general finding, it may be helpful to consider why perceived procedural fairness of legal authorities is expected to lead to greater compliance with the law.
138 According to the group-value model (also known as the relational model) of procedural justice, legal authorities’ adherence to fair procedures cements individuals’ ties to the social order and their obedience to group norms and rules. This is because the fair treatment of individuals signals that they are full and valued members of the group
(Paternoster et al. 1997; Tyler [1990] 2006). Under this model, people’s procedural justice judgments are distinct from their instrumental concerns (i.e., whether or not they receive a favorable outcome). In addition, people are more likely to care about procedural justice when the authority is a member of a group to which people feel identified or emotionally connected (Tyler 2000; Tyler and Degoey 1995; Tyler and
Smith 1999).
One possible, and the most simple, explanation for the negative relationship found in this study between perceived procedural fairness and legal compliance might be that would-be migrants are evaluating procedural justice in more instrumental, rather than relational, terms. The fairer the expected treatment by the U.S. authorities, the lower the psychological and economic costs associated with possible apprehension and overall risks to undertaking illegal migration. This explanation is not inconsistent with the relational model of procedural justice discussed above. Unauthorized migrants are, by definition, outside the U.S. polity and their legal status makes them de jure and de facto “outsiders.”
Thus, whether or not the U.S. authority is utilizing fair decision-making procedures and showing respect for the individual might have less influence on the perceived obligation to obey the law for the would-be migrants than for members of the U.S. polity.
Interestingly, this explanation suggests an even greater challenge for U.S. policymakers than previously thought. Since group membership is a critical antecedent to the
139 evaluation of procedural fairness and in turn, deference to authorities, the more the U.S. policymakers try to delineate a firm line between authorized and unauthorized migrants and to marginalize unauthorized migrants, the more difficult it may be for the U.S. government to regulate the behavior of unauthorized migrants and to induce their voluntary compliance.
Another possible explanation for the negative relationship between perceived procedural fairness and legal noncompliance found in this study might be that most would-be migrants do not have any direct experience or concrete encounters with U.S. immigration service. Accordingly, we might expect procedural perceptions to have little effect on their willingness to comply with the law. Gibson’s study of U.S. Supreme
Court decisions, for example, found that citizen perceptions of procedural fairness by the
U.S. Supreme Court contributed little to the citizens’ willingness to comply with unpopular court decisions (Gibson 1989; see also Gibson and Caldeira 1995). As Gibson
(1991:634) has concluded, “[p]rocedural perceptions may matter in specific concrete contexts, even when they do not in more abstract and diffuse contexts” (see also Mondak
1993:608). Moreover, what might be more salient in the minds of the would-be migrants is a general comparison between the procedural fairness (or lack thereof) of Mexican authorities and U.S. authorities. Given that corruption and violence is known to be rampant among Mexican immigration authorities, it is not surprising if U.S. immigration authorities are viewed by Mexicans in a much more favorable light, particularly among those who are interested in learning about the U.S. system—i.e., those who intend to migrate to the United States.
140 In terms of variables relating to social norms, recall that two different kinds of
social norms were included in the model: (1) descriptive norms, which refer to
individuals’ perceptions of how reference groups themselves actually behave; and (2) prescriptive norms, which refer to individuals’ perceptions of how other people believe the individual should behave. Only the descriptive norms variable is statistically significant in Model 3 of Table 4.2. Specifically, the odds of intending to migrate illegally are 67 percent ((e-1.12-1)*100) lower for those who have no or only a few family
members and friends who have tried to migrate to the United States illegally (compared
to those who have some or many family members who have tried to migrate to the United
States illegally). That the prescriptive norms variable (i.e., how many family/friends
would approve of crossing illegally) is not significant in the model may be a reflection
that the dangers and risks associated with out-migration is a cause for profound anxiety
for most families across both groups.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The present study uses a unique dataset containing extensive demographic and
attitudinal data on individuals in Mexico to examine the relative salience of economic
factors and normative values on an individual’s decision to migrate illegally. On the
cost-benefit side, the following economic variables appear to play a relatively more
important role in the decision to migrate illegally: (1) perceived availability of jobs in
Mexico and the United States, (2) expected wages in the United States, and (3) perceived
costs and dangers of crossing the border. On the normative side, the variables that
proved to be significant are: (1) general attitude toward the law (i.e., belief that
disobeying the law is sometimes justified), (2) morality of violating U.S. immigration law
141 (i.e., whether it is okay to migrate illegally to make more money in the United States
even if one has a good job in Mexico), (3) views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority
(i.e., whether or not Mexicans have a right to be in the United States without permission
from the U.S. government, and whether the U.S. immigration service treats Mexicans
fairly), and (4) descriptive norms (i.e., how many family/friends have tried to cross
illegally in the past).
This study makes several important contributions to research on international
migration and legal noncompliance. First, this is the first study of its kind to empirically
test the neoclassical model as a subjective, micro-level model in the context of unauthorized migration. In the process, this study has identified specific components of the cost-benefit analysis that are significant determinants of individuals’ decisions to migrate illegally. This finding represents an important advance in understanding the decision-making process of would-be migrants. It is easy to set up an overly simplified version of the neoclassical model as a straw man and to knock it down on the basis that it lacks realism. Here, however, I have taken seriously the foundational premises of the neoclassical model on its own terms and tested them empirically with data that was collected specifically for this purpose. The results were surprising in that only a handful of the cost-benefit calculations expected to matter according to the theory actually proved to be significant. Remarkably, neither the perceived risks of apprehension nor the severity of sanctions upon apprehension was significantly related to people’s intent to cross the border illegally.
Second, the results of this study show that the neoclassical model, though useful, is insufficient in explaining noncompliance with immigration law. As discussed earlier, a
142 model that includes normative variables fits the data significantly better than a model containing only the economic variables. This suggests that the view of would-be migrants as atomistic, utility-maximizing opportunists does not fully capture the complex and wide-ranging moral system within which the prospective migrants are embedded.
Inasmuch as there is little to no research that treats unauthorized migrants as socialized actors with moral agency, this study fills critical gaps in the existing literature. The understanding of unauthorized migrants as moral agents capable of responding to and resisting perceived inequities underlying U.S. immigration policy may have significant implications for investigating not only migrants’ decisions to leave their homes, but also their behavior once they enter the United States. For example, instances of collective action such as recent large-scale rallies held by unauthorized migrants against immigration reform bills in Congress, and the increasing unionization of unauthorized workers in the United States are phenomena that cannot be fully understood without reference to their legal and class consciousness.
Third, this study makes important contributions to research on legal noncompliance. Although scholarship on legal noncompliance has become increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse in terms of its focus on different areas of law, it has yet to systematically consider the issue of how non-citizens might respond to legal rules of their adopted countries. The literature on immigration-crime nexus is certainly an important beginning, but to date, that literature has remained relatively narrow in focus and non- theoretical, according to some critics (Mears 2001). Given that immigration law occupies a unique position in our legal system as the only domestic law that is entirely directed toward regulating the behavior of non-citizens, this study opens up important new
143 inquiries about how, why, and under what circumstances cultural beliefs, nonmember status, and national identities may (or may not) have an effect on law-abiding behavior.
For a nation that is undergoing unprecedented levels of racial and ethnic transformation and diversification, these are questions that will likely assume paramount importance in the sociology of law.
Finally, this study extends the growing field of research known as behavioral economics. At the core of behavioral economics is the idea that the explanatory power of neoclassical economics can be increased by using insights from various subfields of psychology, particularly cognitive psychology. Beginning with seminal work by such scholars as Kahneman and Tversky (Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Tversky and
Kahneman 1974), behavioral economists have sought to explain the “anomalies” or deviations from the rational-choice model of behavior by relaxing or modifying the model’s assumption of coherent and stable preferences, and utility maximization (for a review, see Camerer and Loewenstein 2004).
Behavioral economics is now such a diverse and expanding field that it is difficult to define its precise boundaries (Tomer 2007). By and large, however, the core traditional concerns of behavioral economics have been investigations of heuristics or rules of thumb that people employ in their decision-making process, and biases involved in human judgments (for examples, see Jolls, Sunstein, and Thaler 1998). In recent years, there has been a growing call for a more systematic examination of emotions (e.g., envy, shame, guilt, etc.) and social norms (e.g., fairness, trust, reciprocity, etc.), and how they might combine with rational self-interest to produce economic behavior (for a review, see Elster 1998; Kaufman 2006; Loewenstein 2000). But even in this area, the
144 focus of behavioral economics has been on issues of cognition, rather than motivation
(Tyler and Cremer 2006). This study demonstrates how the moral economy literature
may be brought into a quantitative modeling framework that goes beyond merely
relegating normative values into simple cognitive mechanisms that merely enhance or
impair effective decision-making.
The contributions of this study are distinct from those resulting from research on
“culture of migration.” The basic argument underlying culture of migration is that in
communities with a long history and high prevalence of out-migration to the United
States, international migration changes people’s values and cultural perceptions in ways
that increase the future probability of migration. Non-migrants observing migrants
within their social networks come to acquire aspirations to live and to work in the United
States, viewing migration as a viable strategy for upward mobility (Kandel and Massey
2002:981-82). Scholars who have written about culture of migration emphasize that to
call migration “cultural” is not to say that it is a hard-wired or an automatic response to a specified set of conditions (Cohen 2004:5). Rather, what makes migration cultural is that over time, migration “becomes deeply ingrained into the repertoire of people’s behavior, and values associated with migration become part of the community’s values” (Massey et al. 1993:452-53).
The work on culture of migration is important to understanding how migratory behavior assumes a taken-for-granted status in communities of high out-migration rate,
and how international migration perpetuates itself. However, this theory, as with other
existing theories of international migration, does not address the legal context within
which the would-be migrants must make their decisions and how their normative
145 judgments about the law and legal authorities might bear on these decisions. While norms—in the sense of community traditions and cultural values—play a key role in the culture of migration theory, these are not the same “norms” that I examine in this study
(with the exception of “social norms”). Moreover, while culture of migration focuses on how international migration perpetuates itself in communities characterized by high rates of out-migration to the United States, the new model of unauthorized migration presented in this study applies generally and is not restricted to communities with a high prevalence of migration.
A number of questions remain that are beyond the scope of this paper, but they point to important new lines of inquiry for future research, both theoretical and empirical.
If migrants hold certain opinions, beliefs, and values that impact their behavioral patterns and decisions, we might ask how and why they have come to hold such beliefs. This question requires careful analyses of the history and institutions within and across communities, and a myriad of economic and political factors that shape private and public opinion in sending communities. Insofar as normative values are important determinants of people’s decisions to engage in unauthorized migration, understanding the origins and predictors of these values is a critical enterprise.
Another promising and related avenue of investigation is to focus on whether and to what extent normative values may be susceptible to policy changes. Research findings discussed earlier, which indicate that there is no significant relationship between apprehension probabilities at the U.S.-Mexican border and the total volume of illegal migration, suggest that it is extremely difficult to bring about radical changes or shifts in the economic cost-benefit calculations of prospective migrants that translate into changes
146 in behavior. No study to date, however, has systematically examined how norms and normative values might change in response to changes in immigration policy. Given that laws pertaining to immigration and immigrants tend to arouse extreme emotional and political reactions within and outside the United States that often invoke such notions as fairness and justice, we might find that normative judgments of prospective migrants are surprisingly more responsive to policy changes than their cost-benefit calculations.
The MMP and the BIS, taken together, offer extensive data that are uniquely suited for addressing the questions raised in this study. However, they are not without their limitations. Inclusion of women in future surveys may produce important insights into gender differences in decision-making processes of unauthorized migrants. For example, as Andrews et al. (2002) suggest in their qualitative study of unauthorized immigrant women, individual cost-benefit calculations and income maximization might play a less prominent role than other motivations such as family reunification in the initial migration decisions of women. Gender and marital status may interact to produce different migration intentions for men and women (De Jong 2000; Gubhaju and De Jong
2009; but see Van Dalen, Groenewold, and Schoorl 2005). Given the growing prevalence of female migration (see, e.g., Cerrutti and Massey 2001; Donato 2010;
Kanaiaupuni 2000; Parrado and Flippen 2005), this is an increasingly important area of research that merits further investigation.
Immigration law is in some ways the quintessential example of a morally ambiguous law. This is because noncompliance with immigration law is what some legal scholars refer to as a malum in se offense (an act that is prohibited because the law says so), rather than a malum prohibitum offense (an act that is prohibited because it is
147 morally wrong). Consequently, tension exists not only between would-be migrants and
U.S. citizens, but among various stakeholders within the United States, about what kind
of policy is appropriate when it comes to unauthorized migration. To many would-be
migrants, as well as Americans, there is a lack of moral credibility to a law that is
perceived as preventing individuals from working to support their families. For many,
there is also no moral credibility to a law that seemingly punishes individuals for
satisfying the demands of U.S. households and corporations for cheap foreign labor.
Ross Romero, a State Senator from Utah, for example, recently described the perceived
double standard inherent in our system in this way: “On one hand this nation puts out a
no trespassing sign, you are not welcome and on the other hand, we put out a help wanted
sign” (Pyrah 2008).
That immigration law is fraught with these and other moral tensions is significant
to understanding the widespread noncompliance with U.S. immigration law. As
Robinson and Darley (1997:482) argue, “[w]hen a society contains groups with a strong
and deeply felt moral disagreement . . . the situation is destructive of the law’s moral
credibility and thus its power to gain compliance.” The greatest challenge, then, from
both research and policy perspectives, may be to gain a better understanding of the
sources and dynamics of these tensions (both within and outside our borders) and what
these tensions might imply for the decision-making process and behavior of unauthorized migrants.
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160 National, Community & Macro Household Context Level
Rational Choice Normative Micro Cost-benefit Values Level Calculations
Decision to Migrate Illegally
Figure 4.1. Schematic Diagram of Decision-making in Unauthorized Migration
161 Do you intend to go to the U.S. during the next 12 months?
Yes No
What kind of documents will (Coded as 0) you use to go to the U.S.?
Undocumented • Legal resident – Green Card • Temporal – Tourist, no work permit (Coded as 1) • Citizen
(Excluded from the main analysis)
Figure 4.2. Dependent Variable for the Logistic Regression Analysis
162 Table 4.1. Descriptive and Bivariate Statistics for Variables Used in Analysis of Intent to Migrate Illegally
Intend to Migrate Comparison Illegally Total Sample of “No” vs No Yes (N=1,372) “Yes” (N=1,247) (N=125) Populations Variables Mean SD Mean Mean Demographic Variables: Age (years) 35.36 13.82 36.03 28.62 *** Head of household 0.55 -- 0.58 0.34 *** Never marrieda 0.37 -- 0.36 0.47 * Education (years) 9.52 3.96 9.56 9.09 Have been to the U.S. illegally 0.12 -- 0.10 0.27 ***
Economic Variables: Finding a job in the U.S. is very difficultb 0.30 -- 0.32 0.14 *** Finding a job in Mexico is very difficultb 0.28 -- 0.25 0.59 *** Ln expected hourly wages in the U.S. (US$) 2.30 0.38 2.30 2.27 Ln expected hourly wages in Mexico (pesos) 3.27 0.60 3.30 3.02 *** Expected cost of crossing illegally (pesos in 1000s) 24.80 9.87 24.27 29.96 *** Crossing illegally is very dangerousc 0.81 -- 0.84 0.57 *** Possibility of apprehension while crossing illegally is d 0.65 -- 0.67 0.46 *** a lot Possibility of apprehension while working illegally in d 0.22 -- 0.23 0.12 ** the U.S. is a lot Sanctions are very severe if caught while crossing e 0.17 -- 0.18 0.10 * illegally Sanctions are very severe if caught while working e 0.22 -- 0.22 0.20 illegally in the U.S.
Normative Variables: It’s OK to disobey the law when you disagree with it 0.22 -- 0.20 0.38 *** Disobeying the law is sometimes justified 0.55 -- 0.53 0.80 *** It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally if need money 0.88 -- 0.88 0.94 * It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally to make more 0.12 -- 0.12 0.19 * money even with a good job in Mexico U.S. government has the right to limit immigration 0.34 -- 0.36 0.14 *** Mexicans have a right to be in the U.S. 0.53 -- 0.50 0.82 *** U.S. immigration service treats Mexicans fairly 0.10 -- 0.10 0.14 U.S. immigration service treats lighter-colored 0.60 -- 0.60 0.65 immigrants better A few/none family & friends have tried to cross f 0.44 -- 0.47 0.12 *** illegally A few/none family & friends would approve of f 0.71 -- 0.73 0.42 *** crossing illegally Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008. Note: Reference categories are a “married/other”; b “easy/somewhat difficult”; c “not/somewhat dangerous”; d “little/some”; e “not/somewhat severe”; f “many/some.” * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
163 Table 4.2. Binary Logistic Regression Analysis of Intent to Migrate Illegally
Intend to Migrate Illegally in the Next 12 Months Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Demographic Variables: Age (years) -0.07*** (0.01) -0.06*** (0.01) -0.06*** (0.01) Head of household -0.83** (0.32) -0.28 (0.36) -0.33 (0.38) Never marrieda -0.64* (0.31) -0.45 (0.36) -0.43 (0.36) Education (years) -0.09** (0.03) -0.09* (0.04) -0.08* (0.04) Have been to the U.S. illegally 1.34*** (0.28) 0.80** (0.31) 0.51 (0.34)
Economic Variables: Finding a job in the U.S. is very difficultb -0.65* (0.32) -0.57+ (0.34) Finding a job in Mexico is very difficultb 1.21*** (0.23) 1.07*** (0.24) Ln expected hourly wages in the U.S. (US$) 0.44 (0.33) 0.72* (0.36) Ln expected hourly wages in Mexico (pesos) -0.24 (0.27) -0.33 (0.26) Expected cost of crossing illegally (pesos in 1000s) 0.05** (0.01) 0.03* (0.02) Crossing illegally is very dangerousc -1.02*** (0.28) -0.79** (0.28) Possibility of apprehension while crossing illegally is a lotd -0.42 (0.26) -0.09 (0.28) Possibility of apprehension while working illegally in the U.S. is a lotd -0.23 (0.35) -0.40 (0.37) Sanctions are very severe if caught while crossing e illegally -0.22 (0.40) -0.25 (0.39) Sanctions are very severe if caught while working e illegally in the U.S. -0.22 (0.31) -0.11 (0.32)
Normative Variables: It’s OK to disobey the law when you disagree with it 0.18 (0.25) Disobeying the law is sometimes justified 0.65* (0.31) It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally if need money 0.22 (0.49) It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally to make more money even with a good job in Mexico 0.91** (0.33) U.S. government has the right to limit immigration 0.09 (0.38) Mexicans have a right to be in the U.S. 1.06** (0.35) U.S. immigration service treats Mexicans fairly 1.47*** (0.38) U.S. immigration service treats lighter-colored immigrants better 0.22 (0.27) A few/none family & friends have tried to cross illegallyf -1.12*** (0.34) A few/none family & friends would approve of crossing illegallyf -0.32 (0.27) Constant 2.04** (0.68) 0.81 (1.11) -1.10 (1.45) Log pseudolikelihood -338.09 -294.74 -260.67 Wald Test χ 2(df) vs. preceding model 63.96 (10)*** 46.98 (10)*** Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008; N=1,372. Note: Coefficients are log-odds; standard errors are in parentheses. Reference categories are a “married/other”; b “easy/somewhat difficult”; c “not/somewhat dangerous”; d “little/some”; e “not/somewhat severe”; f “many/some.” + p < 0.1; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
164 Table 4.A1. Characteristics of the Surveyed Communities and Their Surrounding Municipalities
Community Community Community Community Community Community Community Community 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Basic Characteristics (Community): Metropolitan category Town Town Rancho Metro- Smaller Town Metro- Metro- politan urban area politan politan area area area
Population size 11,000 3,000 2,000 145,000 7,000 3,000 1,646,000 18,000
Infrastructure (Municipality): Percent homes with running water 71.98 38.20 82.03 92.34 98.72 98.01 99.73 88.99 Percent homes with electricity 98.44 98.77 97.79 98.75 99.32 96.80 99.84 99.29 Percent homes with no indoor plumbing 20.75 8.76 13.65 2.01 4.93 3.90 0.11 3.30
Socioeconomic Profile (Municipality): Percent population older than 12 with at 60.85 69.03 57.95 76.79 54.45 61.72 84.18 72.35 least 6 years of education Percent population older than 15 who 15.88 8.98 19.40 8.50 16.68 7.69 2.56 6.12 are illiterate Percent male labor force participation 67.39 62.88 70.77 72.55 60.64 71.84 74.25 75.98 Percent male labor force in agriculture 62.09 49.34 53.10 13.67 50.35 50.70 0.61 2.48 Percent male labor force in 17.80 24.92 22.74 29.99 24.72 25.74 36.48 60.41 manufacturing Percent male labor force in service 20.11 25.74 24.16 56.34 24.93 23.55 62.91 37.11 industry Percent population economically active 44.01 44.91 39.46 20.74 33.58 46.14 8.98 9.17 earning less than minimum wage Percent population economically active 18.73 20.45 23.28 42.64 34.37 22.23 64.78 57.23 earning at least twice minimum wage
Migration Profile (Community): Percent adults with migration 4.95 5.88 23.27 4.91 16.50 10.12 4.30 3.73 experience Percent male with migration experience 9.36 10.68 37.09 7.41 27.69 18.37 7.75 6.50 Percent female with migration 0.72 0.54 7.85 2.44 4.21 2.01 0.79 0.85 experience Source: MMP 2007, 2008.
165 Table 4.A2. Description of Measures Used in the Analyses of Intent to Migrate Illegally
Variable Survey Item Coding
Dependent Variable: Intend to migrate illegally in the Do you intend to go to the U.S. during the next 12 months? 1 = yes, without documents next 12 months If yes, what kind of document will you use to go the U.S.? 0 = no, do not intend to migrate Demographic Variables: Age Respondent’s age years Head of household Respondent is a head of household 1 = yes; 0 = no Never Married Respondent’s marital status 1 = never married; 0 = otherwise (married/consensual union/widowed/divorced/separated) Education Number of school years completed by respondent years Have been to the U.S. illegally Respondent has been to the U.S. without documents 1 = yes; 0 = no
Economic Variables: Finding a job in the U.S. is very difficult How easy or difficult do you think it is for you to find a job 1 = very difficult somewhere in the U.S.? 0 = otherwise (easy/somewhat difficult) Finding a job in Mexico is very difficult How easy or difficult do you think it is for you to find a job 1 = very difficult somewhere in Mexico? 0 = otherwise (easy/somewhat/difficult) Ln expected hourly wages in the U.S. If you were to go to the U.S. to work, based on your abilities and US$ your work experience, how much money do you think you can make per hour or per week in the U.S.? Ln expected hourly wages in Mexico How much money do you think you can make per hour, per pesos week, or per bi-weekly in Mexico? Expected cost of crossing illegally If you were to go to the U.S. to work, how much would it cost in pesos in 1000s total for you to go to the U.S.? Crossing illegally is very dangerousc How dangerous do you think it would be for you to cross the 1 = very dangerous border without papers? 0 = otherwise (not/somewhat dangerous) Possibility of apprehension while crossing What is the possibility you would get caught if you tried to cross 1 = a lot illegally is a lot the border without papers? 0 = otherwise (little/some) Possibility of apprehension while working And if you crossed the border and were working in the U.S., 1 = a lot illegally in the U.S. is a lot what is the possibility of getting caught? 0 = otherwise (a little/some) Sanctions are very severe if caught while How severe do you think the punishment would be if you got 1 = very severe crossing illegally caught trying to cross the border without papers? 0 = otherwise (not/somewhat severe) Sanctions are very severe if caught while How severe do you think the punishment would be if you got 1 = very severe working illegally in the U.S. caught while working in the U.S. without papers? 0 = otherwise (not/somewhat severe) (continued on next page)
166 Table 4.A2. Description of Measures Used in the Analyses of Intent to Migrate Illegally (continued)
Variable Survey Item Coding
Normative Variables: It’s OK to disobey the law when you Is it okay to disobey the law when you disagree with it? 1 = yes; 0 = no disagree with it Disobeying the law is sometimes justified Is disobeying the law sometimes justified? 1 = yes; 0 = no It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally if need Is it okay to enter the U.S. without papers if you need money to 1 = yes; 0 = no money support your family? It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally to make What if you have a good job in Mexico but want to make more 1 = yes; 0 = no more money even with a good job in money in the U.S., is it okay to enter the U.S. without papers? Mexico U.S. government has the right to limit Should the U.S. government have the right to limit the number of 1 = yes; 0 = no immigration immigrants who can enter the country? Mexicans have a right to be in the U.S. Should Mexicans have the right to enter the U.S. without getting 1 = yes; 0 = no permission from the U.S. government? U.S. immigration service treats Mexicans Do you think the U.S. immigration service treats Mexican 1 = yes; 0 = no fairly immigrants fairly? U.S. immigration service treats lighter- Do you think the U.S. immigration service treats lighter-skinned 1 = yes; 0 = no colored immigrants better immigrants better than darker-skinned immigrants? A few/none family & friends have tried to How many of your family members, relatives, and friends have 1 = a few/none cross illegally tried to go to the U.S. without papers? 0 = otherwise (many/some) A few/none family & friends would How many of your family members, relatives and friends would 1 = a few/none approve of crossing illegally approve if you wanted to go to the U.S. without papers? 0 = otherwise (many/some)
Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008.
167 Table 4.A3. Comparison of Respondents Intending to Migrate Legally vs. Illegally
Intending to Intending to Comparison Migrate Legally Migrate Illegally of “Legally” (N=47) (N=125) vs “Illegally” Variables Mean SD Mean SD Populations Demographic Variables: Age (years) 36.45 14.99 28.62 9.88 *** Head of household 0.55 -- 0.34 -- ** Never marrieda 0.36 -- 0.47 -- Education (years) 9.77 4.38 9.09 3.26 Have been to the U.S. illegally 0.28 -- 0.27 --
Economic Variables: Finding a job in the U.S. is very difficultb 0.21 -- 0.14 -- Finding a job in Mexico is very difficultb 0.47 -- 0.59 -- Ln expected hourly wages in the U.S. (US$) 2.36 0.69 2.27 0.31 Ln expected hourly wages in Mexico (pesos) 3.26 0.69 3.02 0.45 * Expected cost of crossing illegally (pesos in 1000s) 17.56 14.40 29.96 7.80 *** Crossing illegally is very dangerousc 0.79 -- 0.57 -- ** Possibility of apprehension while crossing illegally is d 0.66 -- 0.46 -- * a lot Possibility of apprehension while working illegally in d 0.38 -- 0.12 -- *** the U.S. is a lot Sanctions are very severe if caught while crossing e 0.26 -- 0.10 -- ** illegally Sanctions are very severe if caught while working e 0.19 -- 0.20 -- illegally in the U.S.
Normative Variables: It’s OK to disobey the law when you disagree with it 0.32 -- 0.38 -- Disobeying the law is sometimes justified 0.53 -- 0.80 -- *** It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally if need money 0.79 -- 0.94 -- ** It’s OK to enter the U.S. illegally to make more 0.13 -- 0.19 -- money even with a good job in Mexico U.S. government has the right to limit immigration 0.38 -- 0.14 -- ** Mexicans have a right to be in the U.S. 0.38 -- 0.82 -- *** U.S. immigration service treats Mexicans fairly 0.13 -- 0.14 -- U.S. immigration service treats lighter-colored 0.60 -- 0.65 -- immigrants better A few/none family & friends have tried to cross f 0.28 -- 0.12 -- * illegally A few/none family & friends would approve of f 0.60 -- 0.42 -- * crossing illegally Source: MMP 2007, 2008; BIS 2007, 2008. Note: Reference categories are a “married/other”; b “easy/somewhat difficult”; c “not/somewhat dangerous”; d “little/some”; e “not/somewhat severe”; f “many/some.” * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001 (two-tailed tests).
168