A Better Way to End Unauthorized Immigration

By Douglas Massey, Miller-McCune.com. Posted January 8, 2009.

Mexico’s economy nonetheless behaved in a manner that was remarkably similar to what was observed in Spain. With its entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Mexico’s economy began to open, slowly at first but then at an increasing pace after the enactment of NAFTA in 1994. By 2002, Mexico’s openness index was at about the same level as Spain’s, and total trade between Mexico and the U.S. stood at around eight times its 1986 level.

These huge increases offer unambiguous evidence of integration in North American markets -- except for one. Under NAFTA, the U.S. categorically rejected the idea of integrating labor markets. To finesse the obvious contradiction in policy -- geographical shifts in production and commerce, after all, strongly imply shifts in labor to service them -- the U.S. embarked on a unilateral militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border. Rather than transferring resources to Mexico to assist its structural transformation, as in the EU model, under NAFTA the U.S. transferred resources to its southern border to block the inflow of migrant workers.

After Mexico’s entry into GATT, expenditures for border enforcement increased noticeably. But the rise is nothing compared with what happened after Mexico’s entry into NAFTA eight years later. The Border Patrol mushroomed from around 4,200 officers in 1994 to more than 11,000 in 2002, and the INS budget grew from $1.6 billion to $6.2 billion. Whereas the wealthier nations of the EU transferred $20 billion in structural adjustment subsidies to Spain during the first decade after market unification, the U.S. spent $32 billion to harden the border with its newest trading partner.

In the absence of any efforts toward structural integration or political harmonization, NAFTA has not been successful in reducing either the absolute or the relative gap in GDP per capita between Mexico and its neighbors to the north. On the contrary, the north-south income gap grew at an increasing pace after 1994. Whereas the north-south gap stood at $17,700 in 1986, by 2004 it had reached $24,100 -- a larger income gap in both relative and absolute terms than had existed pre-NAFTA.

Given the increasing Mexico-U.S. income divide and the lack of institutional harmonization, it is unsurprising that migration between Mexico and the U.S. has not diminished. Before 1994, legal immigration to Mexico fluctuated without any consistent trend; after Mexico joined NAFTA in 1994, the trend has been unambiguously upward, albeit with sizeable oscillations.

Undocumented migration is more difficult to assess. But analyses of data from the Mexican Migration Project -- a binational study directed by me and Jorge Durand of the University of Guadalajara that since 1982 has conducted yearly surveys among documented and undocumented migrants on both sides of the border -- suggest that the U.S. strategy of partial economic integration with no structural assistance and massive amounts spent on border enforcement has not only failed but backfired. By concentrating enforcement resources in particular sectors along the border, U.S. policies diverted immigration flows to more remote crossing sites, where the odds of apprehension were lower but the risks of death and injury were higher, researcher Pia Orrenius at the Dallas Federal Reserve has shown.

Despite the new risks and costs, Mexicans have not stopped coming to the U.S.; they simply curtailed circular movement, lengthening stays north of the border and settling down in growing numbers. The effect of U.S. policies has thus been to increase the net rate of undocumented migration to the U.S. Rather than falling rates of emigration and declining relative income gaps -- the outcomes observed following Spain’s accession to the EU -- in the wake of NAFTA, North America has witnessed a widening of the north-south economic gap and an acceleration of both legal and illegal immigration.

Some might argue that Mexico’s entry into NAFTA is not comparable to Spain’s entry into the EU. After all, despite the parallels noted above, the gap in living standards between Spain and its northern neighbors was not as great as that between Mexico and the U.S. and Canada.

Even so, a natural experiment is under way, with cases that more closely approximate the Mexican example. In 2004, 10 relatively poor states from Eastern Europe entered the EU, joined by two more in 2007. The new states enter under terms similar to those enjoyed by Greece, Portugal and Spain. They are eligible for structural adjustment subsidies from the Cohesion, Regional Development and Social funds, and residents of all nations will enjoy free labor mobility by 2014.

The largest of the new EU members is Poland. Although its population is roughly the same size as Spain’s was upon its accession, after more than 40 years of communism its productive infrastructure is less advanced than was Spain’s, and its current per capita GDP is much closer to that of Mexico. Indeed, the trajectories of national income in Poland and Mexico are similar. The two countries also experienced very similar transitions to the market, at least when measured by the openness index.

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Douglas Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

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