Moving Beyond the Policy of No Policy: Emigration from Mexico and Central America

Latin American Politics and Society, Winter 2004 by Rosenblum, Marc R

If specialists in regional relations are pessimistic about intermestic migration politics, the literature on U.S. migration policy is only slightly less so. Indeed, many analysts are skeptical that policymakers at any level can compete with the structural tensions and social networks that influence migration flows (Castles and Miller 1998; Cornelius 1998; Massey et al. 1998). Some analysts therefore dismiss U.S. policy as essentially symbolic (Andreas 1998; Moehring 1988). Structural models, however, cannot explain cross-national variation in flows. U.S. policies implemented during the 1980s and 1990s have undoubtedly made it costlier for migrants to enter the United States, less attractive for them to remain there, and more likely that they will be deported (Lowenthal 1999, 128; also see Castro 1999a; Cornelius 2001). As a result, while U.S. policies have failed to reduce undocumented immigration, growth of migration lags far behind other transborder flows, suggesting that control efforts have had some success (Freeman 1998).3

The combination of moderate migration increases and strong restrictionist sentiment nonetheless highlights the "gap" between popular opinion and policy outcomes (Cornelius et al. 1994; Hoskin 1991; Simon and Lynch 1999), and has focused attention on migration policy-making (Castro 1999a). The vast majority of this literature focuses on the U.S. Congress (for example, Calavita 1994; Gimpel and Edwards 1999; Haus 2002; Leiden 1995; Martin 1994). In broad outline, the standard analysis is that owners of land and capital derive concentrated benefits (low wages) from immigration, and therefore are a privileged group that effectively lobbies legislators (Freeman 1995; Joppke 1998), while unions and migration opponents are weak and divided on this issue (Haus 2002; Watts 2000). With ethnic groups also supporting more inflows (Fuchs 1990; Gimpel and Edwards 1999), policy is "captured" by promigration groups. Thus, by assertion or assumption, most analysts of U.S. migration policymaking ignore migrant-sending states.

A second, smaller school of thought, however, focuses specifically on the relationship between migration and U.S. foreign policy. This literature makes three assertions. First, U.S. policymakers have viewed humanitarian migration through a national security lens. In particular, the United States readily admitted refugees from communism during the Cold War to acknowledge human rights violations in those states, while U.S. allies were "rewarded" with low humanitarian admissions regardless of actual human rights conditions (Bach 1992; Domínguez 1992; Loescher and Scanlan 1986; Rosenblum and Salehyan 2004; Teitelbaum 1984; Weiner 1993; Zolberg 1990).

Other foreign policy arguments regard migration as a threat to "cultural security" or a source of social instability (Rudolph 2003; Teitelbaum 1984; Weiner 1992-3). security concerns have influenced U.S. migration policy dating back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (Fuchs 1990), and have been especially important in U.S. Caribbean Basin policy since the 1980 Mariel boatlift (Domínguez 1990; Jonas 1999; Schoultz 1992; Stepick 1992). Not only has the U.S.-Mexican border thus become increasingly militarized (Dunn 1996), but the United States actually invaded Haiti in 1994 in large part to prevent mass migration from that country (Newland 1995).