When Crops are Dumped and People Move: Trade Liberalization and Mexican Migration

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 2: Migration, Dispossession, and Transnational Labor Regimes

Abstract

Why did NAFTA’s agricultural liberalization intensify emigration from southern Mexican states while leaving migration from established sending regions relatively stable? Existing migration theory cannot fully answer this question. Prior scholarship has examined external trade pressure and domestic agrarian reform in isolation, analyzing outcomes at the national, household, and individual level, and has not fully accounted for how their convergence produced geographically different outcomes across sending regions. This article addresses that gap by introducing the concept of dual dispossession: the convergence of external trade liberalization and internal agrarian reform that jointly dismantled the conditions supporting subsistence livelihoods across ejido regions of southern Mexico. Drawing on IPUMS Mexico Census microdata, CONAPO migration intensity indices, and USDA trade statistics across the 1990, 2000, and 2010 census periods, I argue that it was the interaction of external dispossession (NAFTA’s agricultural provisions, World Bank structural adjustment pressures) with internal dispossession (ejido privatization, withdrawal of rural support programs) that explains the geographic divergence in post-NAFTA migration. States like Zacatecas, Durango, and Sinaloa, with commercialized agricultural economies and established migration networks, experienced stable or declining emigration even with agricultural disruption. Southern states like Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero, characterized by subsistence farming, communal land tenure, and limited migration infrastructure, saw increases. Their vulnerability was structural, not incidental. Dual dispossession fills a critical gap in migration theory by connecting macro-level trade policy through meso-level state institutions to the community-level outcomes that compelled rural families into wage labor and emigration. The framework contributes to theoretical discussions about how states across the Global South deploy dispossession to restructure rural life and produce migrant labor in the interest of capitalist expansion.

Author

• Adrian E Leal, The University of Texas at Austin