ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an economic perspective on the US-Mexican labor market. It provides a historical perspective of Mexican emigration to the United States. The chapter examines a model of joint determination of endogenous immigration and trade policies. In the US-Mexican case, most of the illegal aliens have come to the United States seeking temporary or permanent employment and real wage rates that are much higher than they can obtain in Mexico. During the post-1965 period, only a few Mexican workers have qualified for entry into the US labor market under legal temporary worker programs. The survey of return migrants illustrates that the important secondary occupations of employment for temporary Mexican migrants in 1978 were, for males, craft work, nonfarm labor, and public service work, and for females, operators of various processes and equipment, exclusive of transportation. Although migration or immigration is frequently analyzed in a partial-equilibrium framework, the equilibrium approach ignores important interrelationships between input and output markets.
