Making Fathers Exploitable at the U.S.-Mexico Border: State Violence, Family Separation, and the Deportee Labor Market

• In Event: 1256 - The Impact of Immigration Policy on Immigrant Families and Communities

Abstract

This paper examines how deported Mexican migrants get channeled into call centers and similar low-wage jobs in Tijuana, Mexico. Drawing on interviews with NGOs, state agents, employers, deportees, and their US-based family members, we reconsider how family separation, state violence, and Mexican civil society push deported men to work in jobs that utilize skills they acquired in the US (such as English), but pay as little as 1/16 of the wages they earned north of the border. Based on preliminary evidence collected in Fall 2017, to be supplemented by interviews conducted in January-May 2018, we argue that two mechanisms make deported men vulnerable to exploitation. First, the US has increasingly deported long-term undocumented residents with established families in the US, driving family separation. Of those deported, more than 90% are men. These men – 60% of whom are fathers – end up emasculated by the loss of their previous provider role. Many also want to live near the border, where they may be symbolically and practically close to their US-based families. In the border region, a context where deportees have few family ties, Mexican civil society provides one of their few institutional supports. But it also acts a labor broker, filtering and conditioning deportees for employers. Thus, whereas US immigration control historically kept migrants exploitable by separating “productive” male migrants (fathers) from “reproductive” female labor (mothers) in the homeland, contemporary US enforcement creates a new gendered geography of family separation, exclusion, and exploitation.

Authors

• Abigail L. Andrews, University of California-San Diego

• Fatima Khayar, University of California-San Diego