An important class of active labor market policy has received little rigorous impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to improve the terms of employment for domestic workers by deliberately shrinking the workforce Recent advances in the theory of endogenous technical change suggest that such policies could have limited or even perverse labor market effects, but empirical tests are scarce We study a natural experiment that excluded almost half a million Mexican bracero seasonal agricultural workers from the United States, with the stated goal of raising wages and employment for domestic farm workers We build a simple model to clarify how the labor market effects of bracero exclusion depend on assumptions about production technology, and test it by collecting novel archival data on the bracero program that allow us to measure state-level exposure to exclusion for the first time We reject the wage effect of bracero exclusion required by the model in the absence of induced technical change, and fail to reject the hypothesis that exclusion had no eect on US agricultural wages or employment Important mechanisms for this result include both adoption of less labor-intensive technologies and shifts in crop mix

Mexican labor in the United States

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion - Working Paper 451

/pdf/mexican-migration-to-the-united-states-1882-1992-a-long-gvg0e8p08g.pdf

Mexican Migration to the United States, 1882-1992: A Long Twentieth Century of Coyotaje

The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream

/pdf/mexican-americans-in-the-midwest-an-annotated-bibliography-psgmlznyld.pdf

Mexican-Americans in the Midwest: An Annotated Bibliography.

Nearly a century ago, Mexican migrant laborers, some escaping revolutionary conflict, others lured by employers responding to worker shortages, began heading to jobs in regions of the northern US. Many came from the interior states of Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán, and some were brought north under a “temporary admissions” policy enacted to ease labor shortages during World War I (Reisler 17, 27). For example, from 1917 to 1919, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company transported Mexicans from a staging area in Fort Worth, Texas, to work on tracks in Pennsylvania and surrounding regions (Vargas 60-61). A few years later, corporate executives with the Bethlehem Steel Company, again in Pennsylvania, responded to their own labor needs by hiring Mexican workers mainly from Michoacán (Taylor 3). In cooperation with both national governments, the steel producer transported several hundred Mexicans from a staging point in San Antonio, Texas, beginning in April 1923 (3). These Pennsylvania enganches, or work contracts, are in many ways unremarkable, except for how both seem to have become intertwined as the sources for a key Mexican American corrido, El Corrido de Pensilvania (also known as El Pensilvanio or La Pensilvania), about a hopeful migration to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Although its exact origin is unclear, this Texas-Mexican corrido was probably first recorded in 1929 by well-known San Antonio area musicians Pedro Rocha and Lupe Martinez. The tune and its variants have attracted academic interest from various scholars, including Américo Paredes, who in his study of border folksongs stresses that none of the corrido’s variants “have replaced ‘La Pensilvania’ in Texas-Mexican tradition as the song epitomizing Mexican migrant labor” (Texas-Mexican 26). However, its political and economic context has been most sharply brought to light by Dan Dickey, who has placed it within a larger study of early twentieth-century corridos de las pizcas, or corridos of the cotton harvest. The cotton harvest background remains crucial and indeed plays a role later in this essay, but my principle aim here is to move beyond a historical

Mexican labor in the United States

Citations

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion - Working Paper 451

Mexican Migration to the United States, 1882-1992: A Long Twentieth Century of Coyotaje

The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream

Mexican-Americans in the Midwest: An Annotated Bibliography.

El “Adiós Tejas” in El Corrido Pensilvanio: Migration, Place, and Politics in South Texas

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