Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Immigration is the driving force behind a significant social transformation taking place in American society at the end of our millennium.
- Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Harvard Graduate School of Education

In the United States, family histories are shaped by stories of immigration. These stories also proliferate in film, literature, television and other cultural media, together comprising a national legacy. Immigration in the U.S. is both history and destiny. With an average of one million new legal immigrants entering the country each year since 1990, we are now experiencing the fourth and largest wave of immigration in this century. While earlier waves of immigrants originated in Europe, nearly one third of the immigrants residing in the U.S. today--or some seven million--have come from Mexico.

In Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspectives (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and Harvard University Press), Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco brings together the work of distinguished Mexican and U.S. social scientists to explore the economic, social, and psychocultural outgrowths of this new wave of immigration.

While immigration affects nearly every aspect of American society, public debate has concentrated narrowly on a handful of economic and policy controversies:

• Do the new immigrants help or hurt the U.S. economy?
• Do they carry their own weight or do they represent a burden to citizens and other established residents?
• Can illegal immigration be stopped?

Representing the fields of anthropology, demography, economics, education, health science, history, political science, psychoanalysis and sociology, the scholars in Crossings move beyond the economic arguments that have dominated public debate in the past, to ask such questions as:

• How is the current wave of immigration both like and unlike the large-scale immigration of a century ago?
• Are today's immigrants simply replicating the immigrant narrative of a century ago or do their experiences represent an entirely different phenomenon, requiring new categories of understanding and new policy responses?
• How is Mexican immigration changing American public space, culture, and social institutions, including schools, jobs, and businesses?

In Crossings, major new findings suggest:

• The deep economic and sociocultural changes taking place on both sides of the border virtually ensure that Mexican immigration to the U.S. will be a long-term phenomenon.
• Politically, immigrants are emerging as increasingly relevant actors with influence in political processes in both their new and old lands. Culturally, immigrants not only significantly reshape the ethos of their new communities but are also responsible for significant social transformations "back home."
• Immigrant children are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. child population. Roughly one in five children comes from an immigrant-headed household. In New York City public schools, nearly half the children come from immigrant households. In California schools, 1.3 million children are classified as Limited English Proficient. For Latino immigrant children segregation by race and poverty has intensified over the last three decades.
• There is a growing generational inequity among immigrants. Even though young immigrants from Mexico are achieving higher levels of education than their parents, they are not attaining incomes that are greater than their parents.
• The extraordinary immigration-control buildup at the Southern border has generated substantial "collateral damage." There is more organized smuggling, more corruption, and more border deaths. There are no independent data to suggest that the new border control initiatives have actually reversed undocumented flows.

Crossings includes essays by Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Enrique Dussel Peters, Susan González Baker, Wayne A. Cornelius, Dowell Myers, Jorge Durand, E. Richard Brown, Enrique T. Trueba, Ricardo C. Ainslie, David G. Gutiérrez, Peter Andreas, and Thomas J. Espenshade.

About the Editor

Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of the Harvard Immigration Project, which was recently awarded the largest National Science Foundation research grant in the history of anthropology. The project will lead the first long-term, cross-cultural study of immigrant adolescent adaptation by tracking the school and family experiences of 400 first-generation immigrants between the ages of ten and fourteen, for a period of five years. In addition to editing Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Suárez-Orozco is co-author of Status Inequality (with G. De Vos, 1990) and Transformations: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents (with Carola Suárez-Orozco, 1995) and co-editor of The Making of Psychological Anthropology II (1994).

For More Information

Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco is available for interview. Please call Christine Sanni at 617-496-5873 for scheduling information and with review copy requests.