Mexican Immigration: The Road to Exploitation

This paper examines the trials and tribulations faced by Mexican immigrants in American society. My paper argues that Mexican immigrants constitute a social class of individuals who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The paper attributes this to the fact that they are subjected to racism and exploitation when they cross the border and come to the United States. Information from my paper comes from secondary sources, including but not limited to the Internet and interviews.

Almost 80,000 new immigrants - about 85 percent of them Hispanic - now arrive each month in the United States. They come here mainly for economic reasons. According to Gabriela D. Lemus (2000) "the combination of global economic processes where fewer and fewer large corporations own more of the world's productive resources has created a concentration of power in the hands of a few. Dramatic surges in violence in areas of Latin America, combined with the disparities between the haves and the have-nots, and United States economic prosperity and labor shortages have contributed to a new wave of immigration in the United States."

Many immigrants risk their lives to cross over the Texas border in search of better opportunities only to be faced with discrimination and exploitation. Many of them are forced to live in shanties and work for less than minimum wage, and are forced out of their homes for missing a single payment. When they do cross the border they are labeled as mojados or "wetbacks". Name-calling is one way that border crossers are identified and sanctioned. In fact, Mexican Americans sanction Mexican immigrants in the way Waters (1994) discusses the sanctioning that goes on between some black West Indian immigrants and African Americans.

In order to survive in the United States, Mexican immigrants are forced to choose an identity. They must either be Mexicans, Americans, or Mexican Americans. This is very similar to Waters (1990) argument about how white Americans make choices about which ethnic identity to use based on the situation they are in. However, while white Americans can accept or reject different parts of their ethnic identities, Mexicans are forced to make a more or less fixed choice about their identity. In the class system being classified as white is valued differently than being classified as Mexican. Therefore, Mexicans have less flexibility when deciding their identity, so they are often forced into assimilation.

This author would like to present the argument that some members of the dominant group endeavor to stabilize their monopoly on economic and social advantages through mechanisms that reserve the best social and economic positions for their members, while preserving the worst for minorities and immigrants (Portes and Bach, 1985). Most Mexican immigrants, upon entering the United States, will take whatever work is available. For the most part, the jobs available to them are migrant work, public works (i.e. sanitation, road crews), and wait staff positions in local restaurants. This places them automatically in the lower class.

In conclusion, this author would like to state that when immigrants come to the United States, they come to join us. In leaving their ancestral lands, they pay us the highest compliment: they want to spend the rest of