Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Politics at Home and Abroad: Mexican Migrants as Transnational Actors in Their Home Towns

政治学博士论文研究：国内外政治：墨西哥移民在家乡作为跨国行为者

• 批准号: 1024245
• 负责人: Todd Eisenstadt
• 金额: $ 1.19万
• 依托单位: American University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-08-15 至 2011-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1024245&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

What impact does migration have on the internal political structure of sending communities? Does the migration experience serve as a pathway to hometown influence and political power? What factors explain the formation of migrant-based organizations (MBOs) in the United States? This dissertation explores these three questions by using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods to gather and analyze data from migrant-sending communities in four Mexican states and migrant-receiving communities in four US states. Remittances from migration are a vital source of income for many communities, but the political impacts of these resource flows are not fully understood. This dissertation refocuses the questions of migrant impact back on the municipalities of origin in four Mexican states, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Chiapas and in the US locales where their migrants are concentrated.Prior to the NSF-funded research, the investigator has conducted field work to gather qualitative data and oversee a survey of municipal authorities in four Mexican states. Funds from the NSF will support five field research trips within the United States and two trips to the Mexico research sites. Data gathered from interviews with migrant leaders in the US will make possible a much more complete understanding of the transnational reality of the Mexican communities in the study--an understanding that would remain incomplete without taking into account the US dimension.Extant research has shed much light on the economic, social and cultural impacts of migration on sending-communities, but much less is understood about changes in the power structure of sending communities or the political biographies of those who hold local power. The bulk of research that has explicitly focused on the impacts of MBOs on hometown politics has consisted of "thick descriptions" of a limited number of cases. This dissertation aims to move beyond these descriptive analyses to select systematically cases that vary on the dependent variables and test a series of causal hypotheses about the research questions. To achieve these goals, it will be necessary to draw the connections between the migrant-sending communities in Mexico and their members in US receiving-communities. Finally, this dissertation will contribute a new quantitative analysis of a database of hometown associations (HTAs) in the US, maintained by the Mexican government, to establish the correlates of HTA formation. To date no such analysis has been published.Beyond its expected scholarly contribution, this dissertation will provide insights for policymaking in the US and Mexico. Immigration is among our most important bilateral issues with Mexico, but very little policy-relevant research has focused on migrant-sending communities there. Systematic and data-driven research that attempts to study simultaneously Mexican communities and their migrant members in the US is even less common. The failure of major US policy efforts to curb the flow of undocumented immigration into the United States, most prominently through NAFTA and the border enforcement build-ups that began in the mid-1990s such as "Operation Gatekeeper," may in part be attributable to an insufficient understanding among policymakers of the complex social, economic and political dynamics of transnational migration. The findings from this research will be shared with scholars and practitioners during sessions in a planned summer seminar on immigration and border security, sponsored by the new American University Center on Latino and Latin American Studies.

移徙对派遣社区的内部政治结构有什么影响？移民经历是否会成为一条通往家乡影响力和政治权力的途径？什么因素可以解释美国移民组织(MBO)的形成？本文采用定性和定量相结合的方法，收集和分析了墨西哥四个州的移民派遣社区和美国四个州的移民接收社区的数据，对这三个问题进行了探讨。移民汇款是许多社区的重要收入来源，但这些资源流动的政治影响尚未得到充分了解。本文将移民影响的问题重新聚焦于墨西哥瓦哈卡州、瓜纳华托州、萨卡特卡斯州和恰帕斯州这四个州的原籍城市及其移民集中的美国地区。在NSF资助的研究之前，调查者进行了实地工作，收集了定性数据，并监督了对墨西哥四个州市政当局的调查。来自NSF的资金将支持在美国境内的五次实地研究旅行和两次前往墨西哥研究地点的旅行。从对美国移民领袖的采访中收集的数据将使我们有可能在研究中更全面地了解墨西哥社区的跨国现实--如果不考虑美国的维度，这种理解将仍然是不完整的。现有的研究已经揭示了移民对派遣社区的经济、社会和文化影响，但对派遣社区权力结构的变化或当地掌权者的政治传记的了解要少得多。大多数明确关注管理层收购对家乡政治影响的研究，都是对有限数量的案例进行了“厚重的描述”。本论文的目的是超越这些描述性分析，系统地选择因变量不同的案例，并检验关于研究问题的一系列因果假设。为了实现这些目标，有必要在墨西哥的移民派遣社区和他们在美国接收社区的成员之间建立联系。最后，本文将对墨西哥政府维护的美国家乡协会(HTA)数据库进行新的量化分析，以建立HTA形成的关联。到目前为止，还没有发表过这样的分析。除了预期的学术贡献之外，这篇论文还将为美国和墨西哥的政策制定提供见解。移民是我们与墨西哥最重要的双边问题之一，但与政策相关的研究很少集中在那里的移民社区。试图同时研究墨西哥社区及其在美国的移民成员的系统性和数据驱动型研究就更不常见了。美国遏制非法移民流入美国的重大政策努力失败，最突出的是通过北美自由贸易协定和始于20世纪90年代中期的边境执法集结，如“守门人行动”，部分原因可能是政策制定者对跨国移民的复杂社会、经济和政治动态缺乏了解。这项研究的结果将在计划中的夏季移民和边境安全研讨会上与学者和从业者分享，该研讨会由新成立的美国大学拉美和拉丁美洲研究中心赞助。