Evolution of the Mexico-U.S. Migration System: Insights from the Mexican Migration Project

• Author: Jorge Durand,Douglas S. Massey
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716219857667
• Date: 01 July 2019

ANNALS, AAPSS, 684, July 2019 21

DOI: 10.1177/0002716219857667

Evolution of the

Mexico-U.S.

Migration

System: Insights

from the

Mexican

Migration

Project

By

JORGE DURAND

and

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY

857667ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYEvolution of the Mexico–U.S. Migration System

research-article2019

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has

collected and disseminated representative survey data

on documented and undocumented migration to the

United States. The MMP currently includes surveys of

161 communities, which together contain data on

27,113 households and 169,945 individuals, 26,446 of

whom have U.S. migratory experience. These data are

used here to trace the evolution of the Mexico-U.S.

migration system from the late nineteenth to the early

twenty-first century, revealing how shifts in U.S. immi-

gration and border policies have been critical to the

formation of different eras of migration characterized

by distinctive patterns of migration, settlement, and

return in different legal statuses. The current era is

characterized by the repression of the large population

of undocumented migrants and their U.S. citizen chil-

dren by an ongoing regime of mass detention and

deportation and the simultaneous recruitment of

Mexican workers for exploitation on short-term tempo-

rary visas. As the dynamics of Mexican migration to the

United States continue to change, they will be moni-

tored and analyzed in subsequent waves of data collec-

tion by the MMP.

Keywords: migration; undocumented migration;

immigration policy; border enforcement;

deportations; Mexican Migration Project

In 1982, we did not know we were laying the

foundations for what would become the

Mexican Migration Project (MMP). We were

simply launching a pilot study to test a new

approach for gathering data on Mexico-U.S.

migration. Movement between the two coun-

tries was nothing new, of course. It had been

going on for most of the twentieth century.

After 1965, however, migration from Mexico

increasingly occurred outside of legal channels,

and thus was not captured by the usual statisti-

cal systems. Although legal immigrants are

recorded by immigration authorities whenever

Correspondence: dmassey@princeton.edu

22 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

anyone arrives for the first time with a permanent resident visa, unauthorized

arrivals obviously are not recorded except when they are apprehended at the

border. Most undocumented migrants are not apprehended on their first crossing

attempt, however, and those who are caught generally try again until entry is

achieved. Thus there is no direct correspondence between the number of appre-

hensions and the number of undocumented entries, whereas return migration by

unauthorized migrants is completely unrecorded. Although undocumented

migrants are captured in the U.S. Census and government surveys, they are

underrecorded and cannot be directly identified separately from other immi-

grants. The lack of information on Mexican migration had become a serious

problem, given that “illegal migration” was a topic of keen interest to scholars,

policy-makers, and the public.

The pilot ultimately proved to be successful, yielding a series of refereed jour-

nal articles and a 1987 book describing in some detail the history, patterns, and

processes of U.S. migration from four communities in west-central Mexico. This

success provided a proof-of-concept for the new data collection approach we

advocated, and, in 1987, we sought and received additional funding to apply the

approach more broadly. Our plan was to gather data in four to six Mexican com-

munities each year over a period of five years to begin building a database suffi-

cient to study the evolution of the Mexico-U.S. migration system as it unfolded

in real time. Thus was born the MMP, which has been funded continuously and

has collected new data each year since the first award in 1987.

The MMP database has always been publicly available. At first, the data were

disseminated to users on floppy disks, then on diskettes, then using email attach-

ments, and finally via the project’s webpage, which currently has 5,012 registered

data users. Over the years, the database has provided the foundation for some

forty-six books, ninety articles and book chapters, and seventy-four doctoral dis-

sertations, though of course these counts are always changing. We ourselves have

authored or coauthored many of these publications. Although our success in

research and publication has been rewarding, it has also been painful as it has

Jorge Durand is a professor-investigator in the Department of Social Movement Studies at the

University of Guadalajara and codirector, with Douglas S. Massey, of the Mexican Migration

Project (since 1987) and the Latin American Migration Project (since 1996), cosponsored by

the University of Guadalajara and Princeton University. He is a lifetime member of Mexico’s

National Investigator System and an elected member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences,

the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the

American Philosophical Society. In 2018 the University of Guadalajara inaugurated the Jorge

Durand Chair in Migration Studies in his honor.

Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at

Princeton University, where he also directs the Office of Population Research. He is codirector,

with Jorge Durand, of the Mexican Migration Project (since 1987) and the Latin American

Migration Project (since 1996), cosponsored by the University of Guadalajara and Princeton

University. He is past-president of the American Sociological Association, the Population

Association of America, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and an

elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and

Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and Academia Europaea.