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.
The fieldwork made possible by this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant was designed to gather qualitative and quantitative data to investigate the transnational dynamics of local politics in migrant-sending communities in Mexico. This contributes to the broader dissertation project, Politics At Home Abroad: Mexican Migrants as Transnational Actors in their Home Towns, which promises to make an important contribution to the incipient but growing literature on the local political impacts of migration in sending-communities. Specifically, the dissertation examines the variety of impacts that migration has on the political dynamics of sending communities. The project explores the different ways in which migrants have become influential political actors in their home towns after leaving and improves our understanding of the conditions under which this influence has a democratizing impact on local political institutions. The first major empirical contribution of this project has been the collection of the "2010 Survey of Oaxaca, Mexico Party-System Municipalities." The data collected in this survey of municipal authorities in the Southern Mexico state of Oaxaca covers a range of topics related to the municipal governance and the political and professional biographies of key members of municipal and agrarian authorities. Importantly, the latter series of questions makes possible a new understanding of the prevalence of municipal authority figures with migration experience. This survey was designed to complement a nearly identical survey of municipal authorities in Oaxaca's 418 indigenous customary law-governed municipalities, making it possible to test a number of hypotheses about how Oaxaca's different local institutional structures affect the political engagement and power of migrants. The second quantitative contribution of the dissertation is through the construction and analysis of a database which combines administrative data from the Mexican government with political, economic and social data from electoral authorities and Mexican and US census surveys, providing a unique general picture of the landscape of Mexican migrant civil society and the characteristics of Mexican sending-communities and US receiving-communities where migrant civil society is concentrated. To our knowledge, nobody has conducted systematic statistical analysis of the Foreign Ministry's HTA data to determine the sending- and receiving-community correlates of migrant hometown engagement. In addition to the original collection and assembly of two quantitative databases outlined above, the qualitative field research conducted for this dissertation has included the political ethnography of 12 high-migration communities in the states of Oaxaca, Guanajuato and Zacatecas, Mexico, complemented by four research trips to interview Mexican migrant leaders where they reside in the United States. The ethnographic research and elite interviews have generated important original new data on the particular municipal cases (in Mexico) being studied and insights into the nature of migrant civil society organizing as well as about local politics in high-migration locales. Furthermore, interviews of key migrant civil society and political leaders in the US provides an essential complement not only to the Mexico-based ethnographic research, but also the the large-N quantitative analysis of migrant civil society. Theoretically, the principal contributions of the dissertation are twofold. First, the dissertation develops a process model of migrant political empowerment that considers the interactions between migrant and non-migrant political actors. Building off of Albert O. Hirschmann's classic theory of Exit, Voice and Loyalty (1970), the model considers the indirect impacts of outward, circular, and return migration as well as the direct impacts of migrant political participation. Within this framework, the model considers how non-migrant political actors choose to mobilize, repress, coopt or represent the interests of empowered migrants and migrant based organizations. The typology developed shows that there are a range of possible relationships between migrants and home-town and home-state authorities, and develops theoretical explanations for these differences (based on the qualitative research) and will test the hypothesized implications of these theories once the quantitative databases are complete. Second, the project weighs in on the debate in the literature on migrant political impacts between those who view migrant participation as democracy-enhancing and those who view it as democracy-weakening. The analysis conducted thus far, with some caveats, finds weak support for the thesis that migrant political actors have a democratizing impact on the politics of their municipalities of origin. Although migrant empowerment has led to increases in political competition, the weakness of political institutions, including local party systems, often means that this competition leads to factionalism and conflict rather than the emergence of more robust local democratic political structures.
