Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Politics at Home and Abroad: Mexican Migrants as Transnational Actors in Their Home Towns

American University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

What impact does migration have on the internal political structure of sending communities? Does the migration experience serve as a pathway to hometown influence and political power? What factors explain the formation of migrant-based organizations (MBOs) in the United States? This dissertation explores these three questions by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to gather and analyze data from migrant-sending communities in four Mexican states and migrant-receiving communities in four US states. Remittances from migration are a vital source of income for many communities, but the political impacts of these resource flows are not fully understood. This dissertation refocuses the questions of migrant impact back on the municipalities of origin in four Mexican states, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Chiapas and in the US locales where their migrants are concentrated. Prior to the NSF-funded research, the investigator has conducted field work to gather qualitative data and oversee a survey of municipal authorities in four Mexican states. Funds from the NSF will support five field research trips within the United States and two trips to the Mexico research sites. Data gathered from interviews with migrant leaders in the US will make possible a much more complete understanding of the transnational reality of the Mexican communities in the study--an understanding that would remain incomplete without taking into account the US dimension. Extant research has shed much light on the economic, social and cultural impacts of migration on sending-communities, but much less is understood about changes in the power structure of sending communities or the political biographies of those who hold local power. The bulk of research that has explicitly focused on the impacts of MBOs on hometown politics has consisted of "thick descriptions" of a limited number of cases. This dissertation aims to move beyond these descriptive analyses to select systematically cases that vary on the dependent variables and test a series of causal hypotheses about the research questions. To achieve these goals, it will be necessary to draw the connections between the migrant-sending communities in Mexico and their members in US receiving-communities. Finally, this dissertation will contribute a new quantitative analysis of a database of hometown associations (HTAs) in the US, maintained by the Mexican government, to establish the correlates of HTA formation. To date no such analysis has been published. Beyond its expected scholarly contribution, this dissertation will provide insights for policymaking in the US and Mexico. Immigration is among our most important bilateral issues with Mexico, but very little policy-relevant research has focused on migrant-sending communities there. Systematic and data-driven research that attempts to study simultaneously Mexican communities and their migrant members in the US is even less common. The failure of major US policy efforts to curb the flow of undocumented immigration into the United States, most prominently through NAFTA and the border enforcement build-ups that began in the mid-1990s such as "Operation Gatekeeper," may in part be attributable to an insufficient understanding among policymakers of the complex social, economic and political dynamics of transnational migration. The findings from this research will be shared with scholars and practitioners during sessions in a planned summer seminar on immigration and border security, sponsored by the new American University Center on Latino and Latin American Studies.