Temporary Workers in the United States and Canada: Migrant Flows and Labor Outcomes

• Author: Karen A. Pren,Luis Enrique González-Araiza
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716219857700

857700ANN
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYTemporary Workers in the United States and Canada
research-article2019
This article analyzes migratory flows and labor out-
comes for temporary migrants from Mexico who par-
ticipate in the H-2A visa program in the United States
and the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in
Canada. Using data from the Mexican Migration
Project, we analyze the determinants of taking a first
trip to each country with temporary work documents,
the financial and labor circumstances that migrants
experience while working abroad, and the factors that
Temporary
determine the likelihood and amount of money sent
home to Mexico as remittances or held onto and
Workers in the brought home to Mexico as savings. We find that tem-
porary agricultural workers migrating to both countries
come from rural backgrounds, but those working in the
United States United States earn higher wages and experience shorter
workdays than those in Canada. Nevertheless, total
and Canada: annual work hours and earnings are quite similar for
both groups of migrants. We observe few differences
between the two groups in remittance amounts sent
Migrant Flows home, but find that temporary workers in the United
States return home with more savings than do those
and Labor
working in Canada.
Outcomes
Keywords: temporary migration; labor migration;
Canada; United States; Mexico; farm-
workers
Understanding the history of Mexican
migration requires an appreciation of the
By
fundamental role of seasonal wage labor in
KAREN A. PREN
spreading Mexicans throughout the North
and
American landscape. Particularly in the case of
LUIS ENRIqUE GONzáLEz- migration between Mexico and the United
ARAIzA
Karen A. Pren is the manager for the Mexican Migration
Project (MMP) and is the author of numerous papers
based on MMP data. In addition to her work for the
MMP, she also serves as manager of the Latin American
Migration Project.
Luis Enrique González-Araiza is a former fieldwork
coordinator for the Mexican Migration Project. He is
currently a doctoral student in Political Science at the
University of Guadalajara.
Correspondence: kapren@princeton.edu
DOI: 10.1177/0002716219857700
ANNALS, AAPSS, 684, July 2019 255

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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
States, a long tradition of circular movement is grounded in three fundamental
factors—the “history, size, and proximity” of the two countries involved (Durand
and Massey 2003, 45). Given their intertwined histories, large populations, and
common border, the development of a migratory flow between Mexico and the
United States was perhaps foreordained. In practice, however, movement
between the two countries began with deliberate recruitment efforts realized
through a variety of labor contracting models.
The first of these models emerged during the regime of Mexican President
Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). During the Porfiriato, rural peasants (campesinos)
found themselves trapped in a cruel system of debt peonage that bound them as
indentured workers on large estates (haciendas) owned by a small but wealthy
elite. Renting land and buying supplies from the landowners (hacendados) but
receiving little income in return, these campesinos were “hooked” into a system
of quasi-slavery. In the early twentieth century, U.S. employers developed a par-
allel practice of labor contracting known as the enganche (the hook). In this sys-
tem, U.S. employers lured unsuspecting campesinos northward with promises of
high wages and prepaid transportation. Upon arrival, however, they discovered
that the wages were actually quite low and that they were expected to reimburse
the travel while paying for their food and lodging, creating a debt payable only by
wage labor, thus rendering them “hooked” into another arrangement of inden-
tured servitude (Durand 1994, 1996).
Although these coercive labor recruitment efforts initially occurred under
private auspices, in 1909 Porfirio Díaz and U.S. President William Howard Taft
negotiated a formal agreement, the Labor Accord of 1909, which was only
slightly less exploitive than the private enganche arrangements already in place
(Casarrubias Ocamp 2007, 300). A short time later, when the United States
entered the First World War in 1917, U.S. officials took additional steps to secure
access to Mexican labor by creating a large federally managed system to make up
for the loss of native workers to the military draft (Alanís Enciso 1999; Durand
2006). U.S. officials originally viewed the new labor agreement, known as the
First Bracero Accord, as a temporary wartime measure. In the end, however,
they extended it into the boom years of the 1920s, and from 1917 through 1929,
some 188,000 Braceros entered the United States for short periods of manual
labor, mostly in agriculture, in addition to some 551,000 Mexicans who entered
as legal immigrants.
U.S. labor recruitment efforts ended abruptly with the onset of the Great
Depression, which gave way to a new era of mass deportations that forcibly
removed some 450,000 Mexicans from the country between 1929 and 1936,
along with many U.S.-born citizen children (Hoffman 1974). The number of
Mexicans living in the United States plummeted, and migration between the two
countries ceased for the remainder of the decade. Once the United States
entered the Second World War in late 1941, however, the U.S. government
turned once again to Mexico for workers to replace natives who were either going
into the military or taking industrial jobs in wartime factories.

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TEMPORARY WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
257
In early 1942, Mexico and the United States signed a new, expanded binational
agreement known as the Second Bracero Accord. Unlike the first accord, how-
ever, this one carried more egalitarian terms, spelling out reciprocal rights and
obligations for both growers and workers while committing each government to
their proper enforcement (Durand 2006). From 1942 through 1945, temporary
Mexican migrants once again streamed northward to fill job vacancies created by
war mobilization (García 2014). Although the Second Bracero Accord, like the
first, began as a temporary wartime provision, it also continued into the postwar
period to satisfy employer demands for access to Mexican workers. At its peak in
the late 1950s, some 450,000 Braceros seasonally entered the United States for
short periods of annual labor (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002).
During the early 1960s, however, the Bracero Program came to be seen as an
exploitive labor program that was rife with farm labor abuses, and, in the context
of a burgeoning civil rights movement, the U.S. Congress terminated the agree-
ment at the end of 1964 (Massey and Pren 2012; García 2014; Durand 2016).
Despite the program’s cancellation, however, seasonal migration to the United
States did not cease. By 1965, Mexican workers knew the way northward and well
understood the workings of the U.S. seasonal labor system. Moreover, over the
Bracero Program’s 22 years of operation the migrants had established close rela-
tionships with U.S. employers who had also come to know them.
When the program finally ended, therefore, these interpersonal connections
provided the foundation for a new labor regime based on the regular cross-
border movement of undocumented migrants (Massey and Pren 2012). Although
in 1952 Congress had created an entirely separate temporary worker program to
address farm labor shortages along the east coast of the United States, this pro-
gram focused not on Mexican workers but on those from the Caribbean (Durand
2006; Chisthti, Hipsman, and Pierce 2015; Root 2017). Congress did not grant
Mexicans access to this labor program until 1986, long after the Bracero Program
had ended (Durand 2006).
Like the United States, Canada also came to arrange a temporary labor agree-
ment with Mexico, though much later and involving many fewer workers. Its
labor recruitment efforts date to 1966, when the Canadian government launched
the Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, which, as its name sug-
gests, sought to recruit seasonal workers from the Caribbean basin. As in the
United States, the Canadian program later expanded to incorporate workers from
Mexico and was renamed the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, or SAWP
(Durand 2006; Basok 2007; Carvajal Gutiérrez and Elizalde Sánchez 2009).
Mexican participation in the SAWP began modestly with a mere 203 workers in
1974, and the Mexican portion of the workforce remained small through 1985
before expanding after 2000 into the tens of thousands (Secretaría de Relaciones
Exteriores 2017). By 2018, SAWP had been providing Mexican workers to
Canada for more than four decades, whereas America’s H-2 program had sent
Mexican workers to the United States for only three decades.
Figure 1 depicts the number of Mexican entries into Canada and the United
States using SAWP and H-2 visas from 1974 through 2016. Mexican participation

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258
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
FIGURE 1
Mexican Entries to Canada on SAWP Visas and to the
United States on H-2 Visas
450000
SAWP
NAFTA starts
H-2
400000
Recession
350000
U.S. Economic
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
0
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