Abstract
The human traffic across the Mexico-U.S. border, no doubt the most analyzed international migration in the world, has been scrutinized so many times by social scientists of stature, such as Rafael Alarcon, Frank Bean, Jorge Durand, Jacqueline Hagan, and Douglas Massey, that one could easily presume that there is nothing significant left to find. But that presumption would be wrong. Filiz Garip’s On the Move is the proof.
On the Move is a major contribution, not just for its substantive findings, though they are important, but also for its methodological-epistemological innovation. Mexican-U.S. migration has been a testing ground for numerous theories, as Garip describes; these range from the neoclassical theory of economics to the new household economics to social network and world-systems approaches. The prior literature is a stew of these theories, with each receiving some support in specific analyses and confronting challenges in others.
Garip’s analysis brings a brilliant clarity to this murkiness, which she achieves with what initially seems a modest alteration in the focal length of the researcher’s lens. As she correctly observes early on, the accepted research strategy until now has treated these theories as competing rather than complementary; and it has been based ultimately on ideas of statistical prevalence, posing such questions as which explanatory variables account for the most variance. Garip’s strategy instead allows for the possibility that all of the theories are “true”—but that each applies under specific circumstances. The researcher’s task then is to “identify specific conditions that affect specific groups of individuals” (p. 18).
This she does with an artful combination of quantitative analysis, in-depth interviews, and attention to the economic and political contexts on both sides of the border. Garip constructs a truly engaging narrative, in which she demonstrates convincingly that several theories are relevant, but each for a particular time period and type of migrant. The methodological innovation that makes this possible is cluster analysis, applied to the much-analyzed data from the Mexican Migration Project. With these tools, she finds four different types of migrant, which she labels as “circular,” “crisis,” “family,” and “urban.” Each type has a specific temporal signature, dominant in a specific period—in each case, roughly a decade—and much less numerous at other times. And each type of migration is fostered by the political and economic circumstances that prevail shortly before or during its zenith.
Thus, during the 1970s, the modal immigrant is a circular migrant, an income maximizer who is typically a household head with very little education and comes from a poor rural community in one of the central-western Mexican states that had for decades served as the source of out-migration. These migrants make frequent trips of relatively short duration and send remittances home in order to accumulate the savings necessary for a house or business there. They are the sort of migrant posited byneoclassical theory. Garip puts human faces on this statistical and theoretical portrait through her qualitative interviews. Even more persuasively, she relates the volume of this migration over time to macro-economic indicators—in this case, the flows track quite precisely the fluctuations in the hourly wage for production workers in the United States.
In a more speculative way, Garip injects new ideas (developed with Paul DiMaggio) into our understanding of networks and migration by delineating several distinct generative mechanisms—social facilitation, normative influence, and network externalities. These, she argues, work in different ways for different types of migration. Social facilitation, for instance, holds an obvious importance for circular migrants, who rely more on word of mouth from acquaintances and neighbors to develop their migration strategies than do other migrant types. Andnormative forces are also important because in some rural communities migration at the time became defined as a rite of passage.
In the next period, the 1980s, the crisis migrant is the prevailing type. This migrant, most often a teenage son, reflects a risk-diversification strategy by a family in the middle or upper wealth stratum of a rural community. Crisis migration was spurred by economic problems in Mexico, including a prolonged recession, multiple peso devaluations, and high inflation. During this period, the economic position of the middle class in particular faced intense challenges, leading to diversification in income strategies, which included rising labor-market participation by women. Crisis migration is another strategy in a rural society with little access to credit or crop insurance, and the volume of this migration closely tracks the Mexican inflation rate. For its facilitation, crisis migration relies more than circular migration on network externalities, specifically, the development of migration institutions such as professionalized smuggling. In theoretical terms, this migration type conforms to the ideas of the new economics of labor migration.
A very different type of migration becomes prevalent during the 1990s. The so-called family migration is, unlike the other types, dominated by women, who are also older than the migrants of the other streams. The policy setting for this migration was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which led to a huge wave of legalizations in the early 1990s. Accordingly, many of the migrants possessed close family ties to individuals who had already migrated; this migration was the quintessential network-driven process. In terms of its temporal signature, the rise of this migration maps closely on the annual number of permanent resident visas granted by the United States to Mexicans.
The urban migration came close on the heels of family migration, though the type of migrant is quite different; and this migration is continuing. Urban migrants are the most educated, and they are mostly men from non-traditional sending areas. They are more likely than other migrants to work outside of agriculture and to settle in urban locations in new destination regions of theUnited States. Their migration appears to be a response to changes in Mexico unleashed by its integration into the global economy, as signaled by NAFTA; and in the United States, these migrants take advantage of the demand for low-skilled labor, which can no longer be fully met by native workers because the supply of natives with limited education has been dwindling.
Garip’s analysis is elegant, powerful, and convincing. The book will become, I believe, an indispensable reference on the Mexican-U.S. migration, the world’s most important instance of South-North movement; it will sit on every immigration scholar’s shelf beside Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, by Douglas Massey and colleagues (Russell Sage Foundation 2002), the authoritative volume on Mexican-U.S. migration until now.
The analysis is undergirded by Garip’s quantitative and conceptual sophistication. Her main analytic tool, cluster analysis, is well suited to the heterogeneity that she reveals as reigning in such a massive and long-standing migration. Her use of this tool is bolstered by an impressive rigor, exemplified in her meticulous work to validate the clustering outcomes (this is described in one of several useful appendices in the book). Allied to this rigor is a sophistication that appears in her theoretical and empirical clarification of the social mechanisms involved in different types of migration. Here, Garip makes fine use of both qualitative and quantitative materials: namely, a concise characterization of the economic, political, and familial context on both sides of the border, along with stories about migration that come out of in-depth interviews. Her explanatory logic is unusually precise, and she deploys an array of macro-level indicators for both sides of the border (specified in another appendix) to tease out the conditions under which different migration types flourish.
Of the manifold contributions of the book, the one that could have the deepest and most enduring impact can be characterized as “epistemological.” The analysis of the book is founded on a premise that could be salutary for the discipline, not just the field of migration studies, should it be taken up by more sociologists. The premise concerns the heterogeneity involved in many phenomena, which requires that we move beyond our conventional approach to research—setting up a competition between different theories to be resolved by empirical methods based ultimately on mean behavior. As we can observe many times in the sociological literature, this approach leads to contradiction across multiple researchers, who vary in the support they find for different theories; and the competing adherents frequently butt heads as each side in the dispute attempts to marshal the preponderance of the evidence for its ideas. The approach Garip takes instead is to dissect an empirical domain into different “patterns” (my word), each involving a distinct set of mechanisms consistent with a particular theory. Thus, no theory emerges as a victor in a competition of all against all, but each achieves validity under a specific set of conditions.
I cannot help imagining the fruitfulness ofapplying this approach to the field of immigrant-group integration, where I focus my efforts. Currently, research is dominated by two types of theories, which, stated broadly, can be characterized as racialization and assimilation. The research conducted under either of these theoretical banners does not engage to any substantial extent that conducted under the other. Yet Garip’s book suggests another way is possible if we view racialization and assimilation as each true under specific conditions, which it is the task of research to identify and measure.
On the Move gives us a compelling model for this approach. The book shows that, when it is rigorously applied, the results can be bracing in their lucidity.