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Manuel Garcia y Griego
The Mexican Case
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Manuel Garcia y Griego
- Illegal entry, as a "preeminent mode of arrival," is perhaps a "defining characteristic" of Mexican immigration to the United States. "Even most legal immigrants from Mexico first came illegally," Garcia y Griego said. "The only way many Mexican immigrants could obtain legal admission [early in the 20th century] was to first enter illegally, acquire a job, and then petition for legal status."
- Mexican legal immigration "has come to be equated with a labor migration... with a flow of workers, of unskilled workers, into a particular set of industries and particular kinds of occupations farm work, sweatshops, entry-level service jobs." Earlier immigrants from Europe also entered into low-paying jobs, he noted, but in relation to today's American economy, the discrepancy in Mexicans wages and conditions is significant.
- There has been and remains a sense that Mexican migration into the U.S. is temporary, rather than a resettlement. Much of this is a result of the fact that so many of the immigrants are illegal. A low-skilled, low-educated migration widely thought to locate in the U.S. only temporarily understandably retards assimilation, Garcia y Griego said.
- Second- and third-generation Mexican-American organizations "have adopted as their principal goal the successful incorporation or re-assimilation of their population in the United States."
- Mexicans are among both the oldest and the newest of immigrant flows into the U.S. "Large-scale, illegal immigration to the United States from Mexico is recorded in the 1940s and early 1950s," he pointed out. The formation of the Border Patrol in the 1920s also reflects this fact.
- Garcia y Griego reminded participants that Mexicans are "to a great extent, like other non-Europeans, only more so." The post-1965 immigrant flow, most of it originating in Latin America and Asia, he said, "has come in both at the top and at the bottom of the socioeconomic status scale."
The Mexican Case
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