CAPITAL ACCUMULATION AND MEXICAN IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES: A COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL STUDY OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INTERNATIONAL LABOR MIGRATIONS

Analysis of the political economy of Mexican and contemporary Latin American immigration to the United States. A theoretical framework is developed from Political Economy to interpret this immigration in the context of international migrations and U.S. immigration history. Classical Marxist theory of the development of the capitalist mode of production is examined to study the consequences of the general law of capitalist accumulation on population movements through three stages: the birth of capitalism; industrial competitive capitalism; and monopoly capitalism.; Upon this basis, the politics and economics of U.S.-Mexico relations and of European and Asian immigration to the United States are studied with the objective of discovering the pre-conditions for Mexican immigration. In this context, the interpretation of the historical process and main forms of Mexican immigration (legal, contract labor, undocumented) concentrates on an analysis of the role of culture, family labor, and reproduction of labor-power in the system of U.S. monopoly capital accumulation within the U.S. and in Mexico; and on domestic and international developments affecting Mexican and Latin American immigration.; The principal theses that emerge from this analysis are: (1) That the operation of the general law of capitalist accumulation is the fundamental underlying law shaping the experience of Mexican immigrants and the Mexican-origins population in the United States as a reserve army of labor. (2) That the transformation of competetive capitalism, on the basis of the operation of the general law of capitalist accumulation, into monopoly capitalism or imperialism, transforms the processes surrounding Mexican immigration into historically retrogressive processes unlike the processes behind the earlier migration movements in the era of competetive capitalism. (3) That U.S. monopoly domination of the Mexican economy leads to the preservation of semi-feudal backwardness in the Mexican countryside and the inhibition of full national economic development. This creates huge reserves of pauperized peasants and laborers and creates the conditions for the greatly cheapened reproduction of migrant labor-power via the intensive manual labor of women and the family working under backward, pre-industrial and rural conditions. This in turn allows for the super-exploitation of immigrant labor-power within U.S. industrial and agricultural production, which begins to rely increasingly on variable capital under conditions resembling pre-industrial production: dispersion of production, intensive hand labor, sweatshops, etc. (4) That the growing power of the State and the rise of State-monopoly-capitalism in the age of imperialism introduces a trend towards antidemocracy in political life and introduces State manipulation of the economy in the interests of monopoly capitalism. This is reflected in a strict regulation over immigration and emigration and in an increasing reliance on the importation of Third World immigrant labor reserves and on the creation of disenfranchized Third World-origins national minorities within the United States of sustain monopoly capitalist accumulation. (5) That the contemporary process of mass migrations has acquired a new dimension with the rise of Soviet Union contention as rival super-power to U.S. world domination, a consequence of which is the generation of a new form of "refugee" migrations arising from Soviet and Soviety-ally interventions in Third World countries, a situation which aggravates the crisis surrounding the current mass migrations from Latin America.