The 0.5 Generation: Children Moving from the United States to Mexico, Víctor Zúñiga and Silvia E Giorguli, 2024, University of California Press
In 2005 something remarkable began to happen in the established relationship between Mexico and the United States as traditional patterns of migration changed for the first time in memory. Since that time Mexico has been transformed into a net migrant-receiving country after generations of being a migrant-sending country—from a land of emigration into one of immigration—and by 2010 the net migration flow from Mexico to the US had fallen to zero and may have even gone into reverse in subsequent years. There are many complex and interrelated explanations for this reverse in patterns of migration, not least growing policy hostility in the US to migrants, but also demographic, economic and political changes. Regardless of the causes, however, what it has meant is that a growing number of children have found themselves heading to Mexico from the US where they were either born or had grown up after originally being taken by their parents north across the border to settle. As of 2015, one million US-born individuals of all ages were residing in Mexico—most of them children, adolescents and youths. This book is dedicated to the study of these individuals—designated the “0.5 generation” to account for their unique experience and distinguish them, for example, from second-generation Mexicans, the offspring of immigrants, who have remained in the US. In particular, it is an effort to examine their experiences in Mexico and the extent to which they have been able to integrate, reintegrate, or otherwise. As Víctor Zúñiga and Silvia Giorguli point out, this is an area that has received very little attention in the scholarship on migration, which has inevitably been dominated by the concerns of destination countries such as the US and hence framed by its own form of “methodological nationalism”. Nonetheless, as the authors note, this invisibility is surprising, because scholarship has always been aware of the fact that international migration has included return and circular flows. As a result, such methodological nationalism has shaped in particular the study of social integration, one outcome of which has been a policy environment in Mexico ill-equipped for dealing with the many social issues posed by migration of this kind. International migrants are vulnerable and often find themselves in situations that exacerbate their vulnerability, and the authors note how many arrive in Mexico with little foresight or planning. They have limited options and their extended stay in the US has inevitably entailed the weaking or even loss of the familial or community relationships that are so important to survival. Relationships, support systems and the reciprocity they expected from others has disappeared. The scholars’ data suggest, moreover, that many migrants who return to Mexico do not necessarily return to their places of origin, and frequently they migrate internally within the country or even back to the US. Mexico is not prepared for these momentous changes, and the authors note that the social institutions encountered by international migrants such as healthcare, education, certification of job skills and civil registration were never designed to facilitate reintegration. This novel and groundbreaking study by Zúñiga and Giorguli does, as a result, offer policy recommendations alongside a plea for Mexico to adopt a new political vision for these young people, but also for migrants in general, that brings it in line with its new status as a migrant-receiving country. The return of Mexicans has hitherto been seen as a problem, they note, when it should be seen as an opportunity, not only for Mexican society but also in terms of what it can do for the relationship between Mexico and the US. They write: “Forward-looking leaders in the United States may agree that this generation of children could become a bridge that brings Mexico and the United States closer together in a much more effective and enduring way than the well-intended rhetoric of the past, which has sought only to establish good neighbourly relations between both countries and societies.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America, United States