Do Mexican Immigrants Come to the U.S. For a Better Life? Not Exactly.
One of the most interesting and overlooked aspects of Mexican immigration to the U.S. is that it is meant to be temporary. The prevailing narrative for a long time has been that Mexicans come to the United States in search of a better life. While that may be true in specific examples, history and research tell us that most immigrants from Mexico come to the U.S. to have a better life back in Mexico.
This may come as a surprise, especially since we think of immigrants as fleeing from dire economic conditions. And while the first people to leave Mexico come from the impoverished countryside, the fact is an improving Mexican economy encourages people like my parents to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Writing in Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, author and Princeton Professor Douglas Massey notes, “… contrary to common perceptions, international migration does not stem from lack of economic development, but from development itself.”
He points to examples in Europe and Asia, noting that as industrialization spread across regions, migration numbers skyrocketed. He continues, “at present the poorest and least developed nations do not send out the most international migrants. If that were true, international migration would be dominated by sub-Saharan Africa.”
As a country experiences an economic boom or development, fresh opportunities open up. And some of those opportunities lay in other countries. In my family’s case, they bypassed working in Mexican farms for working similar jobs in the U.S. at much higher wages.
My family’s journey from rural Mexico to California’s Central Valley is but one example. My father first came to the U.S. in 1973. He was 16 years old and had just finished the Mexican equivalent of high-school. For him, the trip to California and the Central Valley was a vacation, a way to make some pocket money and pass the time before starting college back in his home state of Michoacan, Mexico,
My grandfather had been working seasonally in California for several years, starting in the 1950s. Papa Peyo, as his grandchildren know him, would work the harvest season in various farms throughout Texas and California. But he would return to Mexico for the winter and spring. My father was supposed to work with my grandfather for a few months. But as the summer of 1973 turned into the fall, my father didn’t go back. He stayed in Ripon, California, and continued working as a farm laborer throughout 1974, foregoing college entirely.
The first time my mom set foot in the United States was in 1987, a few months after she married my father. For both my parents — and millions of Mexican immigrants — the United States was a short-term solution to the long-term problem of how to raise a family in Mexico. They never intended to stay in the United States. Instead, they intended to take the money they were making in the U.S. and use it to buy or develop a plot of land back in Michoacan. But fast forward 33 years later, and my parents, aunts, uncles, and Papa Peyo are still in the U.S., with many as U.S. Citizens.
My family’s story is typical of Mexican immigrants. They intend to only stay in the U.S. for a brief period until they have enough resources to build a future back in the familial village. But two factors contribute to the change of plans that lead to long-term residency and even citizenship in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, the first factor is family. The first wave of immigrants from Mexico is usually men. They typically come to the U.S. with other male relatives and leave girlfriends, wives, mothers, and sisters behind in Mexico. But as these men save money and establish social connections, they send back for their relatives, including women and younger male family members. My dad had been in the U.S. for more than a decade when he got married, while my mother had never set foot on U.S. soil until mid-1987, months after my parent’s marriage.
As these men and women settle down and have families, they transplant their primary relationships and communities from Mexican villages to cities across the United States. Even today, if you were to ride around my childhood neighborhood in Riverbank, California, you would think you were in “Little Michoacan,” where residents shop at Garcia’s Market, dine at El Ranchito, and gather on weekends for carne asadas.
I was born in California in November 1987. A few months later, we were back in Mexico, where I would spend the bulk of the first four years of my life. We returned to California for a few months in 1989, so my mother could give birth to my brother. We repeated the trek two years later when my sister was born. But we didn’t return to Mexico at the end of 1991. I was about to start kindergarten, and that forced my parents to decide and commit.
They could no longer split their time between two countries and two cultures. The little money my father had (he made $10,000 in 1991, roughly $19,000 in today’s value) couldn’t get him a new car in the U.S. In Mexico, it could help him get a piece of land, something he could own and work to raise a family. As for my mother, she didn’t know English and was having a hard time adjusting to a new culture. For both my parents, moving back to El Rancho to raise a family made sense.
Yet they stayed in California for their children.
“What opportunities would you kids have had in el Rancho?” My mother told me. “I thought of you having to work in the fields like your father, and then I said, ‘we can’t do that, we can’t go back.’”
Over time, the familial bonds — and opportunities — become stronger in the U.S. than in Mexico.
The second factor is legislation. Ironically, most U.S. legislation meant to curb and discourage Mexican immigration has had the opposite effect. For example, increased funding to the Border Patrol meant that undocumented immigrants who would otherwise return to Mexico would wind up staying in the United States, as any subsequent reentry into America would be more difficult.
Reinforced crossing points like in San Diego and Texas means that undocumented workers went around into new crossing points. Rather than deter, the border reinforcement spread Mexican immigration into new American states and cities. Whereas California, Texas, and Illinois were the primary destinations in the 1970s and 1980, states like Georgia and the Carolinas are becoming more popular for newer generations of immigrants.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 — which increased the resources given to the Border Patrol — also gave states the authority to limit public assistance to legal and illegal aliens. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 went a step further and barred illegal immigrants from most benefits. It even enacted stricter requirements for legal aliens to access the same rights.
But in the long term, both acts pushed Mexicans towards U.S. citizenship. If you are living in the U.S. as a legal alien but are seeing your benefits cut off, then you work towards citizenship to recoup those benefits. Another unintended consequence is that since U.S. immigration law says that citizens can sponsor the legal immigration of spouses, minor children, and parents, both acts created a new cohort of people ready and willing to sponsor the entry of immediate relatives from Mexico.
The ironic part is if legislators understood that immigration is temporary and circular, then they wouldn’t need to do anything to “curb” or prevent immigration. People would follow the pattern unperturbed and in time move back to Mexico with more resources. It’s this fundamental misunderstanding of immigration that has led to a waste of taxpayer dollars and resources.
Even I misunderstood the cyclical nature of immigration. When I was younger, I often wondered about the land ownership disparity in California. Driving through Modesto, Turlock, Stockton, and other cities in Central Valley, one passes through many farms, orchards, dairies, and farm stands. With names like DePalma, Sousa, Gallo (yes, Gallo Winery is in Modesto), and Borges, it’s clear we can trace the lineage of these places to Western Europe with Portugal and Italy in particular.
There are about 17 million Mexican-Americans in California, far outnumbering the 1.8 million Californians of either Portuguese or Italian ancestry. So it begs the question of why the largest minority group in California owns few of the hundreds of farms they toil and till.
The answer, I thought, seemed obvious. It was because of systemic racism that people like my father and grandfather did not own land. But the reality is the mindset and intention of the Mexican immigrant kept them as workers and not owners. This land ownership disparity helps us understand that for many Mexican immigrants, they hoped to own land in Mexico and not in California or anywhere else in the United States.
The DePalma Family employed my father for over 20 years. The family patriarchs had immigrated from Bari, Italy, around the same time my grandfather first came to the U.S. But unlike my grandfather or one of the millions of other Mexicans working in the U.S., Pasquale DePalma could not return home after the harvest and split his time between two countries. It was not economically sound or logistically feasible.
If you had a visa or a long-term residency card, then even in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, getting from Mexico to the U.S. was relatively easy and inexpensive. My father would tell me stories of relatives who would enter illegally, get deported, and return to the U.S. later that week.
If you came to California from Italy or Portugal, you would not sail back after the harvest season. You came to the U.S. to stay and build a future. The long-distance from Europe prohibited short term planning. Immigrants from the Azores or the south of Italy did not have the resources to go back and forth as their Mexican cousins could.
The DePalmas purchased more land, planted more almond orchards, peach trees, and grape vineyards. While their family business grew, my grandfather and father were coming to the U.S. but thinking about Mexico. Interestingly, my life today is somewhat a consequence of geography.
It’s essential to understand the motivations and incentives of the largest minority group in the U.S. Thinking they all come for a “better life” is too simple, it paints the U.S. as good and Mexico as bad (I love America, but immigration patterns are intricate.)
Mexican immigrants have agency. They make decisions, plan for a future, and then adjust as new variables enter the equation. This means that for the left, immigrants are not victims of oppression. And for the right, this means that Mexicans are not here to just take jobs and take advantage of public benefits (research from the Cato Institute shows that immigrants consume far fewer benefits relative to those born in the U.S.).
Ideally, they are here to work for a brief time before returning to Mexico. As noted earlier, it’s legislation enacted by Republicans that increase immigration, decrease return migration, and contribute to the rising number of naturalized U.S. citizens.
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If you’re interested in more information on this topic, I highly suggest Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, by Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan Malone. It is a deep dive into the history of Mexican immigration into the U.S. I am fortunate to have stumbled upon their work.
