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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Choices: The Importance of Mexican Migrant Labor
 cattlenetwork.com
| | Migrants to U.S. farms come overwhelmingly from rural areas, where poverty is concentrated in Mexico. |
Nowhere are the U.S. and Mexican economies and societies more closely interwoven than through migration. The 2000 U.S. Census found that 9.2 million, or 1 out of every 12, Mexican-born persons were living in the United States. Analysis of the March 2005 Current Population Survey found that 30% of the foreign-born population was unauthorized, and 56% of the unauthorized migrant population, or 6.2 million, were from Mexico (Passel, 2006).
These migrants are employed primarily in agricultural and low-skilled manufacturing and service jobs. While migration draws human resources out of households and communities throughout Mexico, it also generates a major source of income for the Mexican economy. The Banco de Mexico (2006) estimates that Mexican migrants sent home, or remitted, $20 billion in 2005.
Migrants, the "people export," thus generated four times more revenue for the Mexican economy than agricultural exports and only slightly less than oil exports. Migrants to U.S. farms come overwhelmingly from rural areas, where poverty is concentrated in Mexico. Remittances from farm workers represent a de facto poverty alleviation policy, providing injections of capital into areas cut off from credit markets and that have been more spectators than participants in Mexico’s recent growth. Understanding the dynamics of U.S. agricultural labor migration and the potential impacts of policies on these dynamics, thus, is a research priority from the viewpoint of policymakers and farmers in Mexico.
This is also a priority for policy makers and farmers in the United States. Labor constitutes approximately one-third of total costs of fruit, vegetable, and horticultural production in the United States. Most new entrants into the farm workforce are unauthorized immigrants from rural Mexico. California highlights the importance of Mexican migration in U.S. agriculture. It is the largest agricultural producer in the United States. Nearly all its seasonal agricultural workforce comes from households in rural Mexico. NAWS data reveal that more than 90% of California’s 1996 seasonal workforce was foreign-born, and 90% of these foreign-born workers were from Mexico. |
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