Mexican labor at the center of North American economic integration

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Summer 2000 by Spener, David

Bean, Frank D., Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Bryan R. Roberts, and Sidney Weintraub, eds. At the Crossroads: Mexico and U.S. Immigration Policy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Tables, index, 322 pp.; hardcover $66, paperback $25.95.

Cravey, Altha J. Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. Maps, tables, index, 176 pp.; hardcover $52, paperback $19.95.

De la Garza, Rodolfo O., and Jesus Velasco, eds. Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-U.S. Relations. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Tables, index, 208 pp.; hardcover $68.50, paperback $26.95.

Hart, John Mason, ed. Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American Workers. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998. Notes, index, 243 pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $18.95.

Staudt, Kathleen. Free Trade? Informal Economies at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Photographs, maps, tables, index, 256 pp.; hardcover $59.95, paperback $19.95.

Mexican labor is the linchpin of U.S.-Mexico economic integration. Today, more than one million Mexican workers labor in some three thousand maquiladora plants that manufacture auto parts, electrical appliances, televisions, computer equipment, furniture, and garments for sale in the U.S. market. Most of these workers are employed directly by U.S. companies or indirectly by firms contracted to U.S. companies. By 1997, maquiladora exports totaled $53 billion and accounted for over half the value of U.S. imports from Mexico.

Although maquiladoras have been around since the late 1960s, their expansion in the 1990s was nothing short of phenomenal. In 1990, annual maquiladora production stood at just $14 billion and employed less than half as many workers as it does today (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica 1990, 1998). As Martin (1995) has noted, under NAFTA Mexico is rapidly becoming "the low-cost manufacturing center for North America." In addition, Mexico's approximately 7 million farm laborers produced around $5 billion worth of agricultural exports to the United States.

Mexican immigrant workers play an important economic role inside the United States as well. They constitute a significant portion (8 percent) of the total U.S. manufacturing work force; their presence is much greater in certain large industries, such as garments (19 percent), food and kindred products (15 percent), and furniture and fixtures (12 percent) (Spener and Capps 2000). Outside of manufacturing, Mexican immigrants dominate in a variety of occupations that have traditionally received them. In California in 1996, for example, 91 percent of farm workers, 76 percent of maids, 64 percent of construction workers, and 58 percent of nannies were immigrants, the bulk of them from Mexico (Cornelius 1998, 127).

As immigration to the United States accelerated in the last decade-- by 1996 about 7 million Mexican immigrants resided in the United States, up from just over 4 million in 1990--Mexicans have become a newly significant presence in states beyond California, including Kansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Iowa, the Carolinas, and Georgia. There they have found employment not only in agriculture but also in construction, poultry processing, meatpacking, carpet production, and personal services.

The simultaneous trends of the maquiladora boom in Mexico and the flow of Mexican immigrant workers to the United States at the end of the twentieth century reflect the surplus labor pool that has been building up in Mexico since the 1970s. As Enrique Dussel Peters reports, between 1980 and 1996 the economically active population in Mexico grew by 17 million workers, from 22 million to 39 million. During this same period, only about 2 million formal jobs were added to the nation's economy, nearly half in maquiladora expansion. This left 15 million new workers to find employment either in the burgeoning informal economy or north of the border in the United States (Dussel Peters 1998,66). In another article (1996), Dussel Peters estimates that the Mexican economy would have to grow at an impossibly high 10 percent annually to absorb new labor force entrants in the coming years. Thus, Mexico's labor surplus seems destined to last well into the new century.

This demographic reality, coupled with the declining fertility and advancing age of the U.S. population, will therefore continue to drive the U.S.-Mexican economic relationship as more U.S. manufacturers avail themselves of abundant, low-wage labor south of the border and more Mexican laborers attempt to cross north of the border in search of jobs. The status of Mexican labor, then, stands at the very center of U.S.-Mexico relations. The five scholarly works reviewed here address this question in varying degrees.

HISTORICAL PATTERNS CONTEMPORARY CHANGES

The contributors to Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American Workers remind us that U.S. capitalists and consumers have relied extensively on Mexican labor to meet their needs for more than a century. Seen in historical perspective, today's intensification of labor and product market integration represents a change in degree, perhaps, but not in kind. As John Mason Hart notes in his introduction, Border Crossings attempts to explain the historical "continuities" between the Mexican and Mexican American working classes. (As used in this collection, the category "Mexican American" includes all persons of Mexican ancestry living and working in the United States-immigrants as well as U.S.-born persons of Mexican background.) Of particular interest are four chapters on Mexican American workers in Texas, Arizona, Chicago, and California in the first half of the twentieth century.