Circa 1973-4, Mr. Nelson, a polyester-clad social science teacher in middle (then junior) high school, would tell us how Mexicans crossed to the USA without papers and took jobs from Americans, creating unemployment. It was also during this time, that I recall a fellow student named Shawn, an anglo boy, who said his older brother was in jail for smuggling Mexicans across the border. Only a few years later, economist Michael J. Piore would write one of the first important studies on immigration, for until about 1978, they had been few and far between, even among Latino scholars in the U.S.
BIRDS OF PASSAGE is well written and not difficult to understand for the general reader. Only a few times does the MIT economist in Mr. Priore surface and one wishes for an editor. Most of the book is very informative and covers not only Mexican immigration to the US (both legal and not), but immigration in general, mostly pertaining to Europe, such as Turkish immigrants in West Germany, for example. (Here I recall the 1978 Italian comedy movie, BREAD AND CHOCOLATE, about a southern Italian restaurant worker who migrates to Switzerland. See, many of the dynamics are still the same, whether it be a Mexican crossing to the U.S. or a Turk migrating to West Germany.
However, Mr. Piore does get into specifics. Specifically, he points out that jobs taken by immigrants, legal or not, are for the greater part, jobs that natives do not want or prefer not to have. After all, for these migrants, a job is merely a means to an end. The other fact he points out, time and time again, is that the majority of the migrants are temporary, the undocumented included. This salient point was to be supported thirty years later by the research of Douglas Massey, Ph D, of Princeton University. Of course, all this research flies in the face of Nativist claims about "invasions" and latinizing the dominant culture.
I strongly recommend this book as one of the first to read on the subject, prior to reading more recent books on immigration. It sets a solid foundation.
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