Acknowledgments

1. U.S. immigration policy and the wages of undocumented Mexican immigrants Peter B. Brownell — Departments of Sociology & Demography, University of California at Berkeley Introduction A number of theorists (Castells 1975, Burawoy 1976, Meillassoux 1981) have argued that immigrants amount to a subsidy to receiving countries in that the costs of “reproducing” immigrant workers are externalized. Here reproduction means actual reproduction, that is replacement, as well as the maintenance of the worker during times of unemployment. Such theories tend to focus on the differences between immigrants and native-born workers. A similar distinction might be drawn between temporary migrants (who pay replacement costs in their home country) and settled migrants (who pay such costs in the host country). In the case of Mexican immigrants to the U.S., the cost of living is higher in the receiving country than the sending country. This means that by paying part of their costs of reproduction in Mexico, temporary migrants pay less than their settled counterparts. Do these savings accrue to the temporary migrants, allowing them to purchase more than settled migrants? Or do their employers reap the savings because they can offer lower wages? Framed in economic language similar to Djajić’s (1989) model of guestworker migration decision making, migrants who expect to save or remit some of their earnings to spend in Mexico could support a given level of consumption at a lower nominal U.S. wage than migrants spending all their earnings in the U.S. Hence the nominal wage at which migrating makes economic sense is lower for temporary migrants than for those intending to settle permanently. Conclusions These finding support the theoretical conclusion that a migrant intending to spend at least part of his foreign earnings in his home country might be motivated to migrate to a country like the U.S. at a nominal wage lower than the wage which would be required to make permanent migration an economically rational thing to do. Although U.S. (and European) workers may find the concept of temporary migration somehow more palatable, there is little evidence that it affords any real protection from competition with migrants in general or from any deflation of wages in increasingly immigrant-concentrated sectors. On the contrary, this analysis finds that the employers of temporary migrants are the beneficiaries of a system such a system. U.S. workers can expect to benefit from programs which settle and integrate immigrants, rather than those which keep circulating between the U.S. and Mexico. Table 2: Regression of Wages on Selected Predictors make the survey representative of the return flow. Relative to the stock of undocumented migrants in the United States, those who cross frequently should be over-represented in the flows relative to those who return to Mexico less frequently. In an effort to make the data more closely represent the U.S. stocks of undocumented Mexican migrants, I have multiplied the survey weights by the duration spent by each migrant in the U.S. on this last trip. Following Chavez (1988), I use respondents’ self report of country of residence as my measure of temporariness or settlement. Temporary migrants (those reporting a Mexican residence) are assumed to spend some share of their earnings in Mexico. Summary statistics comparing the two groups are reported in Table 1. Table 2 shows the regression results using a Genralized Linear Model with a logarithmic link function and a Gamma family. Table 1: Summary Statistics Literature cited Burawoy, Michael (1976) "The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States," American Journal of Sociology 81(5): 1050-87. Castells, Manuel. (1975) "Immigrant Workers and Class Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: the Western European Experience," Politics and Society 5(1): 33-66. Chavez, Leo. (1988) “Settlers and Sojourners: The Case of Mexicans in the United States,” Human Organization 47(2): 95-108. Djajić, Slobodan (1989) "Migrants in a guest-worker system: a utility maximizing approach," Journal of Development Economics 31(2): 327-349. Meillassoux, Claude (1981) Maidens, Meals and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social (1999) Encuesta sobre Migración en la Frontera Norte de México 1996-1997. Mexico City: Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social. * p.05; † p<.10; Standard Errors are robust Huber/White/Sandwich. Cases are weighted by survey (flow) weights times U.S. Duration to better approximate stocks. N=1739 Mexican Immigrant Day Laborers and organizers in Los Angeles. Photo by David Bacon, www.igc.org/dbacon • Results • Without controlling for other factors, settled migrants' hourly wages were almost 37% higher than the wages of temporary migrants. • Controlling for age, marital status, and migrants’ human and social capital, settled migrants’ predicted wages were still 17.6% higher than those of temporary migrants. • Wage differences are not statistically significant when controls for occupation are added, suggesting that temporary migrants are selected into low-wage occupations. • Among married migrants the wage difference is only statistically significant with controls for occupation, predicting temporary married migrants wages are 11.6% lower than settled married migrants. Data and methods This paper draws on data from the Survey of Migration on the Northern Border of Mexico, known by its Spanish acronym, EMIF. The analysis here focuses on a sub-sample of migrants returning to Mexico from the U.S. of their own free will. The analysis is further limited to undocumented males born in Mexico who worked at least one week on their last trip to the United States. For more information on EMIF, see Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social (1999). The sample used is drawn from the flow of migrants returning to Mexico through border cities. The data include a set of weights based on the time and place of each case, designed to Acknowledgments I wish to thank Jorge Santibañánez for providing the EMIF data used here. This research was conducted with support from the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment and a traineeship funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Thanks also to Trond Petersen, Peter Evans, Michael Burawoy, David Fairris, and Ron Lee for their helpful comments. For further information Please e-mail brownell@demog.berkeley.edu. The full paper is available at demog.berkeley.edu/~brownell/docs/Brownell_MA.pdf .