ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses this widely accepted misconception and argues for an alternative explanatory approach—namely, that Mexican migration, along with its causes and general features. It examines salient factors shared by Mexican, Indian, and Algerian migrations, in all of which foreign domination is fundamental. The chapter explains Mexican migration places economic domination by the United States since the late nineteenth century, a domination tantamount to colonization, at the center of that migration. It contends that imperial domination served as the fundamental condition for labor migrations from India and Algeria, and that this condition continues to apply in the case of Mexico as it proceeds under the cloud of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The chapter examines the assault on peasant subsistence economies in each of the cases under analysis and the coerced internal and cross-border labor migrations. It analyzes the distinctive parallels of the emigrant worker experiences within the confines of the foreign power.
