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

移民对输出社区的内部政治结构有什么影响？ 移民经历是否成为获得家乡影响力和政治权力的途径？ 什么因素解释了美国移民组织（MBO）的形成？ 本文探讨了这三个问题，通过使用定性和定量的方法来收集和分析数据，从移民发送社区在墨西哥四个州和移民接收社区在美国四个州。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。本论文重新聚焦移民影响的问题回到在墨西哥的四个州，瓦哈卡，瓜纳华托，萨卡特卡斯和恰帕斯州和美国的地方，他们的移民是concentrated. Before NSF资助的研究，调查员进行了实地工作，收集定性数据，并监督在墨西哥四个州的市政当局的调查。 来自NSF的资金将支持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。 从对美国移民领导人的采访中收集的数据将使研究中对墨西哥社区的跨国现实有更全面的了解成为可能-如果不考虑美国的因素，这种了解仍然是不完整的。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掌握地方权力的人的政治传记了解得少得多。 大部分明确关注MBO对家乡政治影响的研究都是对有限数量案例的“粗略描述”。 本论文旨在超越这些描述性分析，系统地选择因变量不同的案例，并测试一系列关于研究问题的因果假设。 为了实现这些目标，有必要在墨西哥的移民输出社区和美国接收社区的成员之间建立联系。 最后，本文将贡献一个新的定量分析的数据库的家乡协会（HTA）在美国，由墨西哥政府维护，以建立相关的HTA的形成。 除了预期的学术贡献外，本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，但很少有政策相关的研究集中在那里的移民输出社区。 试图同时研究墨西哥社区及其在美国的移民成员的系统和数据驱动的研究更不常见。 美国遏制无证移民流入美国的主要政策努力-主要是通过《北美自由贸易协定》和1990年代中期开始的加强边境执法，如“守门人行动”-失败，部分原因可能是决策者对跨国移徙的复杂社会、经济和政治动态认识不足。 这项研究的结果将与学者和从业人员在会议期间分享在计划的夏季研讨会上移民和边境安全，由新的美国大学拉丁美洲和拉丁美洲研究中心赞助。

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.