Migrating women: Mexican women in the United States

"This analysis considers some aspects of the international migration of Mexican women, seen under the light of two recent statistical sources: the [U.S.] 1990 census and the 1993-1994... International Migration Survey at the Mexican Northern Border. The joint analysis of migrations and migrant inventories reveals the hidden scope of feminine exile, as well as some of its peculiarities, and offers numerical answers to two questions: How does sex differentiate Mexican immigrants in the United States? How does the migration affect work, marriage, child-bearing, etc. of Mexican women? The results suggest the need to address migration no longer as an action of individuals, but of families (most immigrants are married), and to place the mother or the wife at the gravity center of the household migratory space." (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

‘Domestic transnationalism’: legal advocacy for Mexican migrant workers' rights in Canada

Every year thousands of Mexicans travel to Canada to work in Canadian fields and greenhouses under the Mexico-Canada Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. While the programme is often praised, it has also been the subject of persistent criticism about its failure to meet certain human rights standards. In this article, we examine the legal strategies civil society advocates of migrant workers have adopted to promote migrant workers' rights in Canada. Specifically, we examine legal struggles undertaken by the United Food and Commercial Workers union to challenge Ontario government legislation that does not permit collective bargaining by farmworkers in the province. We argue that this case demonstrates that despite the fact that many of the workers involved are transnationalized, appeals to international bodies or to international human rights standards have been of limited utility in promoting their rights. Despite frequent arguments about the increased relevance of international human rights and citizenship norms and transnational human rights advocacy, in this case the national and sub-national scales remain predominant. The result, we argue, is a form of ‘domestic transnationalism’, in which domestic political actors engage in advocacy within domestic legal institutions to promote the rights of a transnational mobile labour force.     

Migration and Citizen Rights: The Mexican Case1

This article analyzes Mexican migration to the United States (US), as part of the South to North global migration, and focuses on the access of migrants to citizen rights from the perspective of the sending countries. Studies of citizenship and migration have mostly looked at receiving countries' policies; however, sending countries are also enacting laws that facilitate immigrants' access to rights. The study shows that the restriction of immigrant rights in the US has been paralleled by an extension of rights to emigrants by Mexico. These policies of the Mexican state include the rights to retain nationality when migrants nationalize overseas and the extension of citizen rights to the population abroad. The study describes the efforts on the part of the Mexican state to extend civic, political and social rights to non-resident nationals. It also reveals how the results of these efforts vary substantially, depending on the nature of each one of these types of rights.     

转型时期的农民工住房问题——一种政策过程的视角

从政策过程的视角论述农民工住房问题纳入国家政策层面的可行性,可为解决农民工住房问题提供政策方向。本文从杜布林冲突的系统分析模型出发,建构“黑匣子”公共政策过程分析模型,并运用成本-收益分析、政府分权理论等,从政策执行的角度来检验政策方案。通过政策输入过程分析,识别形成农民工住房问题的实质因素,并分析农民工住房问题转变为政策问题的实践约束条件。通过对政策执行约束条件的分析得出：农民工住房政策的逻辑起点不是农民工住房质量,而是附加在户籍制上的城乡二元体制结构。研究认为农民工住房问题本身无法作为良好的政策问题纳入中央政府决策范围。建立农民工住房保障体系并允许农民工有条件地享受城市住房保障政策,或直接取消城乡二元结构,都不是解决农民工住房问题的最优政策,但前者作为渐进的决策途径,还是有助于缓解社会转型矛盾的;政府应当制定改革户籍制的长远目标,并在此框架下坚持改革和创新,逐步实现住房保障的城乡一体化。     

The 1933 Los Angeles county farm workers strike

Abstract

Although many historical accounts touch briefly upon the ubiquitous Mexican consulates, none to date have delved beyond superficial details of that presence, preferring instead to reconstruct Chicano political history as if it were an experience shaped by factors within the United States. This study reveals that the Mexican governments in the post‐1910 Revolutionary era implemented a strategy to influence the political culture and actions of the emigrant community in the US. An important part of that strategy contained measures to influence and develop an ethnic Mexican unionization movement along conservative lines. The compiled evidence leads to the conclusion that the Mexican community forged their experiences not only in terms of the conditions extant within the US, but that their home government followed them across the border seeking to assimilate them into the social relations and political culture of the emerging Mexican state. Mexico aimed at nothing less than developing a loyal and politically dependent emigrant community, a strategy that replicated Mexico's domestic social policy and complemented Roosevelt's New Deal labor objectives, while corresponding to the labor demands of large‐scale agricultural interests.     

The Making of Mexican Illegality: Immigration Exclusions Based on Race,Class Status,and Gender

This article examines the history of US citizenship and deportation policies that have always been based on race, class status, and gender, as well as the effects of such policies on the making of Mexican illegality. Mexicans have been constructed as unassimilable and a threat to the US national polity. They are also viewed as working class likely to become a public charge. Mexican women have been imagined as extremely fertile and while their production has been desired, their reproduction has been feared. These social, political, and legal constructions resulted in the creation of Mexican illegality despite time of residence in the United States, ties to US citizens, or birthright citizenship. While scholars have documented immigration laws that have expatriated US citizen women (mainly of European racial backgrounds), policies that allowed for the deportation of “public charge” cases, and the racialization of Mexicans, who were once considered legally white for naturalization processes; the three identity-based exclusions have not been examined together to understand Mexican experiences in the United States. This article utilizes a racial, class, and gendered analysis to understand the making of Mexican illegality that began with the 1790 citizenship statue in which the United States Congress limited US citizenship rights to “free ‘white people’ and women’s citizenship was determined by their fathers or husbands.” The making of Mexican illegality continues with today’s immigration restrictions that perceive Mexicans as a threat to: national security, the white racial makeup of the country, and the stability of the economy.     

农民工城市融合概念及对城市感知关系的影响——基于上海农民工的调查研究

数以亿计的农民工和谐融入城市是当前以及未来中国社会发展中的重大问题。为了研究文化融合、经济融合、政治融合和社会融合等诸方面的因素是如何影响农民工对城市的感知关系水平的,基于2010年在沪农民工的问卷调查数据,考察了农民工城市融合诸因素对城市感知关系(生活满意度、认同度、未来发展意愿)的影响。发现:文化融合程度越高,农民工对上海的认同程度就越高,也会更愿意留在上海发展,但其生活满意度未必越高;经济融合程度越高,城市生活满意度、城市认同度和未来留在上海发展的意愿都越高;政治融合只对未来发展意愿有影响;社会融合越高,农民工对城市的认同度越高,对生活也越满意。研究为政府引导和促进农民工和谐融入城市提供了新的视角。     

Rights in Action: The Impact of Chinese Migrant Workers’ Resistances on Citizenship Rights

There have been some debates on Chinese migrant workers’ resistances and their rising rights consciousness in the academia. This paper aims to understand the debates and their problems. This paper investigates the extent to which the forms of Chinese migrant workers’ resistance have diverse impact on their citizenship rights. The conception of citizenship rights can be analytically understood in the individual/collective form and with the passive/active nature; such a dichotomy is also applicable for that of resistance according to the action theory. Both conceptualizations and their linkages constitute an analytical framework in this paper. Within it, the various cases of migrant workers’ resistances and their connections with attainment of rights are discussed comparatively. A main finding in this paper is that the individual resistance, whether passive or active, is almost independent of rights; individuals with the PC model only wait passively for the government’s help; and the AC model (e.g. strike) is much more prospective for the attainment of collective rights, which creates a new power to balance those of state and capital in China.     

Post‐national citizenship,social exclusion and migrants rights: Mexican seasonal workers in Canada

In the past few decades, migrants residing in many European and North American countries have benefited from nation‐states' extension of legal rights to non‐citizens. This development has prompted many scholars to reflect on the shift from a state‐based to a more individual‐based universal conception of rights and to suggest that national citizenship has been replaced by post‐national citizenship. However, in practice migrants are often deprived of some rights. The article suggests that the ability to claim rights denied to some groups of people depends on their knowledge of the legal framework, communications skills, and support from others. Some groups of migrants are deprived of the knowledge, skills, and support required to negotiate their rights effectively because of their social exclusion from local communities of citizens. The article draws attention to the contradiction in two citizenship principles—one linked to legal rights prescribed by international conventions and inscribed through international agreements and national laws and policies, and the other to membership in a community. Commitment to the second set of principles may negate any achievements made with respect to the first. The article uses Mexican migrants working in Canada as an illustration, arguing that even though certain legal rights have been granted to them, until recently they had been unable to claim them because they were denied social membership in local and national communities. Recent initiatives among local residents and union and human rights activists to include Mexican workers in their communities of citizens in Leamington, Ontario, Canada, are likely to enhance the Mexican workers' ability to claim their rights.     

From the Wagner Act to the Human Rights Watch Report: Labor and Freedom of Expression and Association, 1935-2000*

This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines the relationship between institutional structure and human agency to understand the strategic choices made by corporations, state actors, and the labor movement. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent calls for labor law reform as a strategy for reviving the labor movement.     

Institutionalizing precarious migratory status in Canada

This paper analyzes the institutionalized production of precarious migration status in Canada. Building on recent work on the legal production of illegality and non-dichotomous approaches to migratory status, we review Canadian immigration and refugee policy, and analyze pathways to loss of migratory status and the implications of less than full status for access to social services. In Canada, policies provide various avenues of authorized entry, but some entrants lose work and/or residence authorization and end up with variable forms of less-than-full immigration status. We argue that binary conceptions of migration status (legal/illegal) do not reflect this context, and advocate the use of ‘precarious status’ to capture variable forms of irregular status and illegality, including documented illegality. We find that elements of Canadian policy routinely generate pathways to multiple forms of precarious status, which is accompanied by precarious access to public services. Our analysis of the production of precarious status in Canada is consistent with approaches that frame citizenship and illegality as historically produced and changeable. Considering variable pathways to and forms of precarious status supports theorizing citizenship and illegality as having blurred rather than bright boundaries. Identifying differences between Canada and the US challenges binary and tripartite models of illegality, and supports conducting contextually specific and comparative work.     

USA,the West and the Rest after September 11/October 7, 2001+: A Midterm Report

This article argues that if the proponents of immigration reform have it their way, the proposed guest worker program will transform American citizenship from an institution based on civic membership to one based on residence rights and socio-economic status. American citizenship, now a relatively accessible option, will become a closed-off status, unattainable for the majority of temporary workers. With this policy, the United States will create a permanently disadvantaged category of guest workers and further reduce the competitiveness of low-skilled minimum wage American workers. The concept of immigration has begun to change from an inclusive notion granting equal rights to immigrants and citizens to a more ambivalent model emphasizing obligations and responsibilities of newcomers while withholding social, political, and legal rights. Guest worker programs with limited residence will accentuate for immigrants that they must pay taxes and benefit the American economy, obey US laws and otherwise contribute to the host society which, in turn, has no reciprocal obligations toward them. This will exacerbate the already existing two-tiered system of human and social rights, creating a new feudalism in America.     

农民工NGO建设的政策需求与生成路径

农民工的出现是中国社会转型的必然;农民工为社会的发展做出了重大贡献.但是,其合法权益却没有得到应有保护.而农民工仅凭个人的力量往往难以维护自身的合法权益,从而产生了对组织的需求.农民工非政府组织(NGO)为保护农民工合法权益提供了组织保障.然而,农民工NGO的建设是一个长期而复杂的工程,许多问题值得探讨.试图通过对实际情况的分析,对农民工NGO的建设目标、政策需求和生成路径进行探讨.通过文献研究法和个人观察归纳法,认为农民工NGO的建设依然面临着法律、经费、制度、人才等方面的困境.根据农民工的实际需求和组织的生存困境,得出:现阶段农民工NGO的建设目标应该是发展面向基层的能够解决实际问题的基层组织.政府应该给予农民工NGO提供政策支持,包括进入与退出政策、资金与资助政策、制度与技术政策和人才与人事政策,从而推动农民工NGO的内生路径和外生路径的协调发展.     

Shaping of the migratory process in northern Mexico, 1930-1990

"During the third decade of this century Mexican geographical structure began to change notoriously. Due to the strong influence of [the] North American economy, the north of Mexico became progressively one of the most important regions in the country, with the emergence of favorable perspectives of economic growth. Soon it became attractive to migration from the demographically pressed regions of Central Mexico. Thus, the north of Mexico was favored by the presence of qualified workers and a growing population. However, the region was not evenly populated, due to geographic, historic, and socio-economic factors that...[affect] the processes of migration and settlement. Some regions present important changes in their migratory flow, evidenced by the presence of new entities of origin and the disappearance of others." (SUMMARY IN ENG)     

The New Urban Governance: Processes for Engaging Citizens and Stakeholders

The new urban governance requires not only tools (like tax incentives and contracts for privatizing government functions), but also new processes to carry the tools into effect, including deliberation and dialogue for making policy and dispute resolution (like negotiation, mediation, and voluntary monitoring) for implementing and enforcing it. The processes vary with their application in the policy process, from upstream identification of policy preferences to downstream enforcement. These processes share certain characteristics. All empower citizens and stakeholders to exercise their voice and become more engaged in their communities. All can substitute for or supplement traditional governance processes such as rulemaking or adjudication. They make it possible for leaders to collaborate with community stakeholders, and together to consider a broader and perhaps different set of ideas and proposals. These processes may permit participants to develop a consensus on priorities based on community values and interests rather than simply legal rights.     

Demonising ‘the other’: British Government complicity in the exploitation,social exclusion and vilification of new migrant workers

This article demonstrates the close and complex connection between the demonisation, exploitation and exclusion of new migrant workers. In so doing, it testifies to the blurred boundaries between the categories of severe labour exploitation, forced labour and slavery. This study highlights the absence of citizenship rights as crucial to understanding the vulnerability to demonisation, exploitation and exclusion that characterises the embodied experience of such workers. It also highlights the key role of citizenship as a means for such workers to make rights claims. In the UK, new migrant workers, particularly those arriving from Eastern Europe since 2004, have been increasingly designated by government and media as interlopers in a tight labour marketplace. Whilst their collective economic contribution is sometimes welcomed, they are regarded as ‘external’ to UK society and citizenship, a potential threat to indigenous values and culture, and in competition with British workers. Rarely are migrants afforded the space in public and private spheres to express their individual needs, wants, cares or perspectives. UK migrants have variously been portrayed by the tabloid media and irresponsible politicians as rapacious opportunists, as benefit scroungers, criminals and potential terrorists. The predominant discourse around new migrant workers in the UK is that they are not citizens, but temporary residents who are expected to work industriously and to remain otherwise unseen and unheard until they return to their country of origin. No further contribution to social and political life is required or expected. It is within such an unsupportive environment that new migrant workers in general, and undocumented migrants in particular, have become highly susceptible to employer and gangmaster abuse and exploitation.     

Some empirical effects of U.S. immigration policies on the flow of Mexican immigrants

Changes in migration from Mexico to the US following anti-migrant measures in the US and devaluation of the peso in late 1994 were studied through interviews with Mexicans attempting to enter the US and with migrants returning to Mexico. The major control measures were Operation Gatekeeper, a federal program to reinforce border control around Tijuana-San Diego, and California's Proposition 187. Changes in the volume, sociodemographic profile, and family and social ties of migrants and in labor markets were studied between April 1993 and November 1995, with particular attention to California, the major destination and the focus of border control and anti-migration measures. Net Mexican immigration to the US was estimated at around 200,000, with 140,000 entering the US before the measures. For California, the net immigration was 49,000 before the measures and 69,000 after. The proportion going to California increased from 34% before the measures were enacted to 41.5% after. The short-term impact of the measures was reflected in a greater preponderance of males and a younger average age. Higher proportions of women returned to Mexico after the measures, the only sociodemographic effect observed in returning Mexicans. Neither migrant incomes nor remittances were affected by the US measures, at least in the short run. Migratory flows to the US are determined primarily by the structure of the Mexican and US labor markets, which were little affected by the measures.     

Do government sponsored marriage promotion policies place undue pressure on individual rights?

The dominance of social science research in the debate over the Bush Administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative may explain why questions regarding the proper role of government in regulating adult intimacy have received little attention. Social science research focuses on outcomes such as well-being and health. In contrast, rights-based legal theory considers whether state action undermines the rights of individuals. In this article, I intend to shift the debate over marriage promotion policy from questions of child well-being to questions of individual rights. I will ask the following questions: Do individuals have a liberty interest in making their own choices about intimate relationships, such as marriage? Do federally-financed (and frequently state-run) marriage programs compromise this liberty interest? Are there any constitutional grounds for objecting to marriage promotion policy?     

Making claims for migrant workers: human rights and citizenship

Migrant workers claims for greater protection in a globalized world are typically expressed either in the idiom of international human rights or citizenship. Instead of contrasting these two normative frames, the paper explores the extent to which human rights and citizenship discourses intersect when it comes to claims by migrant workers. An analysis of the international human and labour rights instruments that are specifically designed for migrant workers reveals how neither discourse questions the assumption of territorial state sovereignty. Drawing upon sociological and political approaches to human rights claims, I evaluate the Arendtian-inspired critique of international human rights, which is that they ignore the very basis ‘right to have rights’. In doing so, I discuss the different dimensions of citizenship and conclude that international rights can be used by migrant workers to assert right claims that reinforce a conception of citizenship that, although different from national citizenship, has the potential to address their distinctive social location.     

对农民工社会保障问题的思考

随着金融危机的结束,大批农民工再次涌入城市,伴随着新生代农民工群体的出现,农民工群体不断壮大,他们为城市建设作出了巨大贡献,但自身的生活、工作条件却极为艰苦。应当通过广泛的社会保障解决农民工在工作和生活中的困难,保障农民工的合法权益。