Unofficial sister cities: Meatpacking labor migration between Villachuato, Mexico, and Marshalltown, Iowa

Human Organization, Winter 2002 by Grey, Mark A, Woodrick, Anne C

The migration literature has emphasized historic, economic, and social conditions that have promoted the northerly flow of migration from Mexico to the United States. Social scientists have assembled a rich body of research on these conditions in both rural and urban Mexican settings. They have also articulated many of the economic and labor market conditions in the United States that have encouraged the arrival of Mexican workers. Beyond describing these conditions, there are various theoretical approaches that attempt to explain how the contrasting conditions in Mexico and the United States promote migration to and settlement in el norte, as well as the social networks necessary to start and sustain these migration patterns (Wilson 1993; Massey et al. 1998).

Three theoretical approaches help explain the start of migration flows: The "push-pull" theory, segmented labormarket theory, and world-systems theory. The push-pull approach articulates the contrasting economic and political conditions between sending and receiving regions. In the Mexican case, several factors work to "push" migrants out of Mexico, including unemployment, underemployment, lack of educational opportunities, landlessness, unprofitability of small-scale commercial farming, and lack of political power. "Pulling" migrants to the United States are jobs, higher incomes, schooling for children, and health care. Given these contrasting conditions, migrants will flow from the relative poverty of Mexico to the relative wealth of the United States (Wilson 1993). This theoretical approach is helpful in terms of explaining migration to lay audiences in Iowa communities like Marshalltown, particularly as we attempt to explain the development of the one-to-one migration patterns between Iowa towns and sending communities in Mexico. But pushpull theory has its shortcomings. For example, it emphasizes migration between two supposedly autonomous places, without taking into account the complexities of regional or national economic structures. It is static and fails to explain movement between multiple sending communities with similar economic conditions and multiple destinations. Further, the push-pull approach fails to explain how similar contrasting conditions between sending and receiving places may prompt migration in some cases but fail to do so in others. In other words, push-pull perspectives often fail to predict migration flows (Portes and Borocz 1989:607-608).

Neoclassic economic theories suggest that people migrate from relatively poor to relatively wealthy areas to raise their total income. Yet, as Massey et al. (1998:82) have noted, "households migrate not only to improve absolute income, but also to increase their incomes relative to others in the community. Through international migration, in other words, households attempt to ameliorate their sense of relative deprivation" (emphasis in original). The decision to migrate remains a rational, strategic calculation by household members as they respond to market forces. If absolute gains in income were the primary motivation for migration, then migration would be a one-way process. Not only would migrants stay in receiving areas, they would not remit money to sending communities. Yet remittances to sending communities not only relieve the relative deprivation of relatives left behind, they also raise household incomes by increasing the productivity of land and machines and allow the acquisition of assets that produce income (Taylor and Wyatt 1996). In sending communities like Villachuato, remittances also pay for infrastructure, like water systems and paved streets, that otherwise might not be built (cf. Goldring 1996:72).