Labor Migration US- Mexico Twenty Years after the North American Free Trade Agreement

Abstract

International migration of workers is closely related to inequalities and asymmetries of the capitalist system and also involves the transfer of surplus value from less developed to industrialized or developed poles. Migrant-sending countries have been characterized by implementing economic policies that have increased levels of unemployment, impoverished working conditions, devoid agriculture of support, and increased informality. Meanwhile, in the receiving countries, migrants are functional, as expressed in the difference of the individual cost of labor between migrants and native workers. In this context, the conditions signed under the North American Free Trade Agreement have produced greater economic subordination to the United States, and an extraordinary increase in migration flows, especially of the so-called undocumented migrants, with no legal protection or coverage.